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[intriguing music playing]
[Errol] So, the original assignment is…
[man] "It's the 30th anniversary of the… Manson murders, Tom."
"We'd love you to write a story about it."
It was a very vague assignment.
It's one of the scariest true stories out there
about an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant, beautiful woman getting stabbed to death
while she pleads for the life of her baby.
Her last breath, she's calling out for her mother.
And that's separate from what happened to the other victims that night
and the next night.
Pretty brutal murders.
Massacre.
[music intensifies]
One of the biggest mysteries about this case
is how Manson was able to gain control of his followers
to the degree that he could get them to go out and kill on command,
without remorse, without hesitation, complete strangers.
[Errol] Don't you think you could do that?
[chuckles] I couldn't. Could you?
Shoot Bobby, Raymond. Through the forehead.
Yes, ma'am.
[music continues]
-[gunshot] -[music ends]
[Errol] So, a mystery.
A mystery, yeah.
[dog panting]
[radio static]
[Manson] ♪ I am a mechanical man ♪
♪ A mechanical man And I do the best I can ♪
♪ Because I have my family ♪ˆ
♪ I hope you… ♪
♪ I am a mechanical boy ♪
♪ I am my mother's toy ♪
♪ And I play in the backyard sometimes ♪
♪ I am a mechanical boy ♪
[music ends]
[record scratches]
[interviewer] What's the magnetism of you?
[banging on wood]
Music. Motion.
Um…
Generating, uh…
-[banging on wood] -…attention.
Reality.
I know.
[chuckles]
When you know…
[chuckles] …you just simply know.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Errol] As one of the prosecutors of Charles Manson,
why do you think that this case never dies?
Why are people still totally obsessed with it?
[radio static]
People in the United States like to be scared sometimes.
They like horror movies.
When Life magazine put Charles Manson on the cover,
he was a real-life Svengali.
The fact that he could get other people to do his bidding,
to kill innocent people, to start a race war,
I mean, what more base motive could you have?
[unsettling music playing]
[man 1] Are you rolling?
-[man 2] Rolling. -[woman] Go ahead.
At 8:30 this morning, an employee came to work at 10050 Cielo…
and found several bodies in the house, and immediately the police were notified.
[helicopter blades whirring]
The tentative identification of the persons are as follows.
Sharon Polanski…
Jay Sebring…
Abigail Folger…
Wojciech Frykowski…
and another man who is unknown.
[electronic warble]
[reporter 1] Is there anything scrawled on the front door of that house in blood?
[man 1] I can't answer that question.
[electronic warble]
[reporter 2] Where were the bodies found? All in one room?
[man 1] No. Two of the bodies were found inside the house,
one in the vehicle,
and two on the front lawn.
[reporter 3] Wasn't there a body covered by a hood with a rope around its neck?
[man 1] These are things that I can't give you too much information on at this time.
[reporter 4] Is this case more complicated than other cases you can't comment on?
Well, how many cases and how many times do you have
five persons found murdered at the same time?
[ominous music continues]
[birds chirping]
[newsreader] Los Angeles police are saying little at this time
about possible progress in solving the murders of actress Sharon Tate
and four others.
The bodies were removed from the home of Ms. Tate and her husband,
screen director Roman Polanski,
under several blankets and a veil of mystery.
[ominous music continues]
Ms. Tate, who starred in Valley of the Dolls,
was eight months pregnant and was found in a bikini-type nightgown
with a rope around her neck attached to the body of a man.
When police arrived, they found the telephones and electricity lines cut.
The bodies had been dead about 12 hours.
One officer summed up the murders when he said,
"In all my years, I have never seen anything like this before."
[music builds, fades]
While the police admitted they had no suspects in the Bel Air massacre,
there were two more murders 15 miles away in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles.
[birds chirping]
Market owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary,
were found by their children stabbed and mutilated.
[tense music playing]
There were parallels between this and the Bel Air murders.
The word "war" was carved into LaBianca's chest,
and "death to pigs" was smeared on a refrigerator door
in the blood of one of the victims.
The word "pig" had been scrawled in blood on the door of the Bel Air mansion
where actress Sharon Tate and four others were slain.
But police said, despite the similarities, they do not believe the crimes are linked.
[music fades]
[unsettling music playing]
You can bust your ass forever as I've been doing
and really chase this stuff.
It's like right there, like the carrot at the end of the stick in front of me
and I'm getting close, but you could do it forever.
[radio static]
[clock ticking]
Frankly, I still don't know what happened.
But I know that what we were told isn't what happened.
[suspenseful music continues]
I'm not copping out here.
This is the hardest thing to do without giving the background.
Because then I sound crazy if I say,
"Well, there were these research scientists
who were working secretly for the government
who were trying to do exactly what Manson did with the girls,
create people who would kill without regret or remorse on command
and not really recalling how or why they did it.
And these research scientists came into contact with him
during this pivotal time that he was turning into Charles Manson,
guru, cult leader of these obedient slaves who would do whatever he said.
[Manson] Give your evil soul… [laughs]
…to yourself. [laughs]
And open your eyes and be rather than seem to be.
[intriguing music playing]
[Tom] So, I did a FOIA to the Bureau of Prisons
to get his federal parole file.
Manson gets out of Terminal Island two years before the Tate murders.
[pen scratching]
He begged not to be released.
He said, "This is my home. I want to stay here."
They wouldn't let him. He's released to Los Angeles for his parole.
But he immediately violates his parole
and goes to the Northern District, San Francisco, and shows up there.
[boat horn honking]
He doesn't have permission.
Officers up there are stupefied. "Who does he think he is?"
He's been in prison for seven or eight years.
[pen scratching]
[Tom] Most of 1967, he was in San Francisco
at the height of the explosion of the Summer of Love.
[reporter] In the Haight-Ashbury District, the heartland of hippie country,
they predict an influx of 100,000 young people this summer,
all eager to try the hippie way of life.
[music fades]
[Tom] And all of a sudden, his group grew,
and they became known as Charlie and his girls.
By the end of the year, he had six or seven women
who would follow him through the streets of the Haight,
not say a word unless he spoke to them.
They were completely subservient.
He'd order them around, and he was screwing them all.
They were his wives.
I play music.
I get out of jail, and these kids come around me.
Yeah.
They say, "You have the voice of God."
And I say… [chuckles]
…"There's a whole penitentiary of guys like me."
You know, I'm nothing. I'm just a messenger.
I'm a witness, that's all.
I'm just a poop butt that dropped out of the penitentiary.
And they seen something in me I didn't see in me.
-What'd they see? -They seen a nice guy.
And I'm not a nice guy, but they seen that.
So I said, "Well, as long as they seen a nice guy,
I'll reflect a nice guy. I'll be the nice guy to them."
[intriguing music playing]
And I looked out for everybody, and I gave them places to stay,
and I kept all the other not-so-nice guys off of them.
Because I liked the kids, because I can identify with the kids,
because they didn't have nobody like I didn't have nobody.
[distorted chatter]
[intriguing music continues]
[Tom] The Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was opening
in June of '67.
Manson became a character at the clinic.
He was bringing the girls there for medical treatment
because they had all kinds of venereal diseases,
and they were getting pregnant.
[indistinct background chatter]
Everybody at that clinic was fascinated by the Manson group.
They all had stories to tell.
He was a huge presence.
He'd been out of jail for approximately a year at that time.
-Had a school bus, a big black school bus. -[alarm blares]
He had, oh, at least a dozen girls around him.
He had a number of guys.
Just had a way with people. He was a very charismatic individual.
I guess some people would call it magnetic,
and some people said that they were hypnotized.
[intriguing music playing]
In one of my first interviews with doctors who worked at the clinic,
he said, "Do you know Jolly West?"
He was a famous expert on hypnosis and brainwashing.
He was a scientist who was using the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic
to recruit subjects for his study of LSD in youth.
Jolly called it a laboratory disguised as "a hippie crash pad."
He got six or seven graduate students to grow their hair long, dress as hippies,
spend the summer trying to lure youth in there to be studied.
That was his project, and then he wrote a few papers about it after
and lectured about it.
When I realized how many runaway kids were coming to the Haight-Ashbury
and how rapidly the attitudes that were being promulgated there
were spreading to other parts of the country,
I finally decided that really the only way to tell
what was going on in the Haight-Ashbury would be to live there oneself.
I have a pad in the Haight-Ashbury now.
It has been occupied all summer long by a team of people.
Now, I can't, today, go into all the findings of our group.
All I can tell you is that we have learned so much.
West came into the picture more than a year after I'd begun the research
when I started suspecting there was a possibility of
MKUltra involvement in this case.
When I found out that he'd been at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic
working with these people who had contact with Manson
during the time Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create,
programmed assassins.
[intriguing music playing]
[newsreader 1] Super-secret project MKUltra
was carried out by the CIA from 1953 to 1964.
It proved to be one of the most bizarre episodes in CIA history.
[newsreader 2] A 20-year, $15 million project on mind control
that involved experiments at some of America's
most distinguished universities and research centers,
some of which had no idea they were working for the CIA.
[newsreader 3] Investigators found the CIA had been testing the drug LSD
on unsuspecting humans.
One man given the drug committed suicide.
The committee was never able to determine the full scope of the program
since the program's records were destroyed in 1973 to avoid embarrassment.
[intriguing music builds]
[Tom] These are all the documents showing that Jolly worked for the CIA
for about 15 years and lied about it.
Describing not only how they're gonna conduct these experiments
but how they're gonna hide them.
And they described pretty horrific experiments.
[pen scratching]
Until his death, Jolly repeatedly said he hadn't done any of that stuff.
And he got very upset when people accused him of it.
[unsettling music playing]
[Errol] How exactly do you imagine that this mind control worked
in that clinic in Haight-Ashbury?
[ominous music playing]
[man talking indistinctly in slow motion]
[woman screaming]
[Tom] I don't want to say that I know that it happened in that clinic.
I can only say that that was not only where Manson went
to get his medical treatment,
but when Roger Smith, his parole officer, opened an office there,
he directed Manson to come to the clinic for his parole meetings once a week.
And for one year, while he was Manson's parole officer,
Manson was arrested a half dozen times, and every time he was arrested,
instead of revoking his parole,
Smith would write him a letter saying
he was behaving well, he was doing great, he's fine.
-[pen scratching] -[intriguing music playing]
[pen scratching]
[Errol] And Roger Smith is someone you interviewed?
[Tom] Yeah, I interviewed just about everybody.
[radio static]
[Roger] I met Charlie in Berkeley.
Basically, when he was in the Bay Area, he was in my office every… every week.
-[Tom] Mm-hmm. -[Roger] I saw him a lot.
Because he came in with his girls.
[intriguing music continues]
He was very odd. He was a hippie.
-He was very manipulative. -[Tom] Mm-hmm.
But was he highly dangerous?
Didn't see it.
I remember really wanting him to find something.
-He was a songwriter. -[Tom] Mm-hmm.
[Roger] It seems to me like the only thing he could have done
was to play music.
[whistle blowing faintly]
At some point, I had requested
that supervision officially be transferred.
[Tom] To LA?
[Roger] I don't know that a parole officer even picked him up in LA.
-[music fades] -[car engine revving]
[unsettling music playing]
[radio static]
[telephone ringing]
[female voice] Global Tel Link, you have a prepaid call from…
[Bobby over phone] Bobby.
…an inmate at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville, California.
This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.
[Bobby] You wanted to know how I met Charlie.
[Errol] I did, yes.
[Bobby] There's not really much to tell. I played music with Charlie.
Tried to help him get a recording contract…
[suspenseful music continues]
…by helping him to record some good quality demos.
Uh, I was in that music community in Los Angeles.
I was friends with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Charlie had some talent.
[car honking]
People thought that he should be able to
get his songs out there in the world.
-[Manson] Let's see. -[man] Do what you feel like.
[Manson] Yeah.
[man] Just groove.
Tell us when you wanna start. We'll turn the machine on.
[Manson] Okay. Can't you just turn it on and let it go?
[Bobby] Gregg Jakobson, Dennis Wilson, and I…
were interested in getting Charlie to settle down,
come into a studio, just him and his guitar,
play and sing his songs.
And let's see if we can get a decent recording to use as a demo.
[Manson] ♪ There's a time for living ♪
♪ The time keeps on flying ♪
♪ Think you're loving, baby And all you do is crying ♪
♪ Can you feel? Are those feelings real? ♪
♪ Look at your game, girl ♪
-♪ Look at your game, girl ♪ -[inaudible]
♪ What a mad delusion Living in that confusion ♪
-♪ Frustration and doubt ♪ -[inaudible]
♪ Can you ever live without the game? ♪
♪ The sad, sad game ♪
[Gregg] Dennis, the drummer in the Beach Boys,
had rented a hunting lodge.
If you could make a mansion out of a log cabin, this was it.
[radio static]
Dennis is driving, there's a couple girls hitchhiking,
and of course Dennis slams on his brakes, and they jump in.
Dennis drives the girls into the big driveway at the old log cabin.
They're both two of Charlie's girls.
[women] ♪ Always is always forever… ♪
[Gregg] An arrangement made in heaven, right?
[women] ♪ Inside yourself For your father… ♪
Two days later, Dennis came home, got out of his car
and was walking down the walkway, and the door flew open.
This little guy came running out, and he introduced himself, "I'm Charlie."
"These are my girls."
[man nervously laughing]
[man] You should get a job making people nervous. [laughs]
-[camera shutter clicks] -[Gregg] Dennis loved his girls.
[chuckling] He thought this was the greatest thing in the world.
Unlimited girls.
-[camera shutter clicks] -Dennis was in heaven.
[intriguing music playing]
[pen scratching]
[intriguing music subsides]
[Errol] Can you tell me what the scene was like at this house?
Oh man. Really? You want to… You really want to know that?
I won't say the person's name because she's a real person.
She's on the diving board, going up and down, and she said,
"Fuck me, feed me, and keep me high."
And she dove in the pool. That was what was going on there.
[Stephen] The women were told that any male
that wants to have sex with you, you have sex with them.
I can't imagine the diseases that those women have.
I know that the Beach Boys were very upset
about all the money
that Dennis Wilson was spending on venereal disease treatment.
[Manson] ♪ Pretty, pretty girl… ♪
[Stephen] The Beach Boys actually recorded one of Manson's songs.
[Manson] ♪ Cease to exist Just come and say you love me ♪
[Stephen] Even though it was Manson's song,
it's credited to Dennis Wilson.
[Dennis] ♪ Cease to resist Come on, say you love me ♪
♪ Give up your world Come on and be with me ♪
♪ I'm your kind I'm your kind, and I see ♪
[pen scratching]
[Gregg] Dennis paid him outright, probably 300 bucks or something.
Dennis should know better because that isn't the way things work.
Things get published, then you have lifetime rights.
That's one of the things, probably, that made Dennis
finally close down the hunting lodge.
Charlie took it really personally.
When Brother Recording Company from The Beach Boys
was taking music that was coming out of the penitentiary and singing…
♪ In my room ♪
♪ I'm putting on good vibrations ♪
…then you come up on the set and say, "Where's my money?"
They say, "Oh, you don't have any money coming."
I said, "What do you mean, I don't have any money coming?"
"You'll pay me. Give me what I got coming."
"Don't give me no more of what I got coming, but pay me what I got due."
They won't give me my dues.
I say, "Okay, you don't give me my due, I'll call New York."
"I'll call New York."
Because I'm ice picking New York.
[ominous music playing]
[Gregg] They still had their main camp at the Spahn Ranch.
[pen scratching]
[somber music playing]
You know, I wanted to film out at the Spahn Ranch.
The girls and the horses.
God, if you scripted it, nobody would believe it.
It'd be science fiction.
These girls were sleeping on the floor in the old movie sets.
It wasn't a real building.
It might not have had a roof on it and stuff.
[somber music continues]
That's why I went to Melcher.
Terry Melcher was capable of putting that together.
I said, "Terry, we gotta film this guy."
[unsettling music playing]
[Terry] I had a friend who I employed as a talent scout
who called me, and he said,
"There's a potential here for a very interesting musical documentary
on the hippie subculture in America."
And he said, "It's this Manson Family."
"They live out in an old Western dude ranch."
"And they live there, and it's a real commune,
and everyone shares everything."
"And it would be a great musical documentary."
And I was in the TV business at the time with CBS
and in the record business with Columbia Records.
[Errol] Terry Melcher is who?
[Tom] He's Doris Day's son.
He was a very successful, very young record producer.
He was a big deal.
Terry lived in the house that Roman and Sharon lived in before they did.
[eerie music playing]
[Errol] Presumably, Charlie wanted Melcher to sign him.
[Gregg] That would be a gift from heaven to Charlie.
Manson was sharp enough to know
that Terry Melcher was way a cut above Dennis
when it came to making a deal with the label.
[eerie music playing]
Dennis was a rock and roll star,
but that's not the same as being a successful producer.
He'd finally gotten Terry Melcher to come out to the Spahn Ranch.
And now you have to convince him that he should sign you.
That's a tough one.
[eerie music continues]
[Terry] I arrived, and they played,
I don't know, a dozen songs. It was a big campfire.
Manson played the guitar,
and all the girls sang parts and harmonies.
Who knew that half of them were wanted by some law enforcement agency?
The last thing that would've ever occurred to me as I was sitting out there
with one other guy in the middle of these 30 or 40 people
who were about to commit some of the most heinous crimes
in our part of the world.
They looked like everyone on Sunset Boulevard.
[music fades]
[Gregg] Terry did the classic music producer speech.
"You really got talent. You're good. I… I like you a lot, Charlie."
"But I'm a producer, and I have to know what to do in the studio."
"That's my job."
And he said, "I don't know what to do with you."
In Charlie's mind, I think that was his biggest shot.
Finally, he… he was really close. He was close.
And that's as close as he got, you know.
[inhales]
[Errol] He was really close?
He was close.
[intriguing music playing]
That was probably the beginning of the end.
It was getting more and more heavier out there,
all the drug dealing going on.
I think there was a lot of money starting to change hands too.
Drugs are expensive.
[indistinct background chatter]
Drugs was a big part of the… the monetary balance out there,
keeping things going and keeping everybody happy.
That's big business, big business.
Drugs is big business, and they're very involved in that… that aspect of it.
Everybody knows that. I mean, it's on television.
[unsettling music playing]
[woman] This call and your telephone number
will be monitored and recorded.
[Bobby] I showed up at Spahn Ranch just for a visit.
Charlie pulled me aside, and he told me that he had killed a Black Panther.
His name is Bernard Crowe. He was a low-rent drug dealer in Los Angeles.
He was not a Black Panther.
He looked the part
because it was fashionable in those days to be that.
Charlie assumed, wrongly, that he had killed the guy.
He thought that he had killed a Black Panther.
He said that he was expecting a retaliation from the Black Panthers.
He asked me if I would stay and help
because there were not enough men at the ranch.
That was part of my downfall.
[reporter] I've been told that Charlie Manson shot you.
Is that true?
[Bernard] Mmm.
Could be.
[reporter] Well, let's not kid each other around now.
It's either true or it isn't true.
Did he shoot you, and if so, when and where?
Uh, yes, he shot me, yes.
[intriguing music continues]
[Bobby] Everybody was on the lookout for a carload of Black Panthers.
Every car that came up was being examined.
Meanwhile, there just wasn't much going on,
and there were bikers hanging out there.
I was building a motorcycle at that time, so I sort of idolized these bikers.
[motorcycle engines revving]
And I got involved in a drug deal with them.
I had a friend in Topanga Canyon, Gary Hinman,
who had a batch of encapsulated mescaline that he was selling.
[music builds]
The next day, the bikers came back and wanted their money back.
The reason was that they said they all got sick on it,
and they probably didn't like the hallucinations.
They threatened me and held a knife to my throat.
[music fades]
[birds chirping]
[tense music playing]
The only option
was to see if Gary would give me the money back.
I pulled the gun on him.
[gun cocks]
And he said, "I don't have it anymore."
I said, "Look, Gary, I just need something to get the bikers off my back."
He said, "You can have my cars."
[electronic warble]
Suddenly, Manson shows up at the door.
-[camera shutter clicks] -Gary says, "Hi, Charlie!"
Charlie steps in and slashes him across the face.
[Errol] Why did he do that?
[Bobby] My exact words. "Charlie, why did you do that?"
I cut the dude's ear off because he was fucking over Bobby.
And Bobby was a youngster and didn't know what he was doing.
And he was a kid,
and he never had no man show him nothing, see?
[tense music continues]
[Bobby] Realizing his mistake, Manson left me with the problem.
So I sat with Gary for a day,
trying to smooth everything over.
I used dental floss and a needle to sew up his ear.
But it should have been stitched. There's no question.
But if I took him to an emergency room,
I knew that he was gonna tell what happened.
It was gonna bring the whole world down on top of me.
I called Charlie.
[telephone ringing]
I said, "This is your problem."
"You need to come and take care of what you created."
His response was I knew what to do as well as he did.
And hung up the phone.
[telephone hangs up]
And I made this decision.
I had to kill him and get out of there.
I just ran at him, stabbed him twice.
[knife stabbing]
He went down, and he died.
[eerie music playing]
[Errol] Why did you think you had to kill him?
That's what puzzles me.
[Bobby] Because he would tell on me.
[eerie music continues]
I don't remember who put the paw print "political piggy" on the wall.
I remember that everybody had it in their minds about the Black Panthers.
We'd been kind of absorbed in that for a couple of weeks
since the Bernard Crowe shooting,
and what Charlie had said, that the Black Panthers were the enemies.
There was an idea
to make it seem that the Black Panthers were responsible for killing Gary.
[men chanting]
Hence, the panther paw on the wall.
[eerie music builds]
[Stephen] Hinman's body was discovered about a week later.
It was really pretty terrible. Bloated, insect-infested.
[Errol] I read somewhere that they could hear the maggots eating him.
[Stephen] I told my wife, "When I go,
please just cremate me and scatter my ashes in the forest."
[Tom] Bobby left in one of Gary's cars and went up north.
He pulled over on the side of the road.
There was a warrant out for his car, so the state police spotted it
and woke him up and arrested him.
[somber music playing]
He had the murder weapon in his trunk.
He was brought back to Los Angeles.
The next day, the Tate murders occurred.
[unsettling music playing]
[Errol] One thing that always has puzzled me
is this chronology.
You get arrested, you're booked,
and then the next day is the Tate murders.
[Bobby] Was it the next day?
I don't really think that had a lot to do with what happened.
To understand what happened,
you have to go back to the Bernard Crowe shooting.
Remember, Charlie thought he had killed him.
He was afraid somebody was going to snitch on him.
The person that he was afraid of the most was Tex Watson.
He was part of Charlie's Family living at Spahn Ranch.
[indistinct background chatter]
Tex Watson was a disciple of Charlie.
He was worshipful.
Watson had orchestrated the drug deal with Bernard Crowe that backfired
and put Charlie in the position of having to kill Crowe.
He really didn't know the guy.
He just decided he was going to save the day,
get in the middle of something that Tex Watson had created.
So Tex has a little problem. He has a little problem, gives me a gun.
He can't deal with it. I have to go deal with his problem.
[interviewer] Which is?
I have to go shoot somebody for him because he's too much of a coward,
and he's laying up underneath the bed with it.
-[interviewer] Who'd you shoot? -[Manson] Lotsapoppa.
-[interviewer] Who? -[Manson] Some guy down in the drug world.
I had to go down and take care of some business that was not my business.
[Bobby] Charlie's way of protecting himself from Watson
was the typical convict way of insurance.
If someone is a potential snitch,
then you make that person complicit in illegal activity.
You have something on them just as they have something on you.
So Tex owed me one.
So when I come back and I say, "See? You got me in trouble."
Every time I stand up for you, brother, I got to face your life and your death.
You dig? I'm tired of carrying you on my back.
And I threw the gun. I said, "Now, you owe me one."
And if you don't pay me when you owe me, then I'm going to pay you what you owe me.
[tense music playing]
[Errol] Manson had known you had killed Hinman and was in jail.
[Bobby] I don't know if he knew that I was in jail.
There's no evidence of that.
[Manson] So then when my brother gets busted and my brother's in jail,
then I tell Tex, "Pay him what you owe me."
I said, "Don't tell me nothing. I don't want to hear nothing."
"I'm not part of no conspiracy. I'm not breaking no laws."
You dig what I'm saying? "I'm not getting involved in nothing."
-"However you do it, you do it." -[interviewer] That's not what they say.
-Who's "they"? -[interviewer] Susie Atkins.
No, Susan Atkins never said I'd said do anything
except do what Tex said.
And I did say that.
I said, "Susie, you owe me?" She said, "Yeah."
"Remember that other dude I cut his ears off for you?"
She said, "Yeah." I said, "Pay that to Tex. Don't bother me with it."
[unsettling music playing]
[interviewer] What happened that night you all went to Sharon Tate's house?
What really happened?
Tex and I had our own special little stash of cocaine.
I mean, I think it was cocaine or methedrine. I'm not sure which.
We both snorted some speed and got in the car.
We were very, very wired.
[exhales] Hmm.
[somber music playing]
And we drove to the house with instructions
to kill everyone in the house.
-[interviewer] From Charlie? -[Susan] Yeah.
[unsettling music playing]
[Stephen] Watson was driving.
Kasabian was in the car.
Atkins and Krenwinkel were in the back seat.
-They had three knives and a gun. -[gunshot]
When they got there, they saw some headlights coming towards them.
Parent had met the caretaker for the property.
And Parent had come to visit him to supposedly sell him a clock radio.
On the way out, Watson came up, pointed the gun at him.
Parent begged for his life.
He said, "I'm just leaving. I won't tell anybody."
Watson fired four times at point-blank range…
[gunshots]
…killing him.
Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[unsettling music continues]
Watson climbed through the window
and opened the front door for Atkins and Krenwinkel.
He told Kasabian to stay outside.
Wojciech Frykowski was asleep on the sofa.
Watson woke him up at gunpoint… [inhales]
…and told Frykowski that he, Watson,
was the devil there to do the devil's work.
[Errol] Who do we know this from?
[Stephen] Watson.
He's admitted that that's what he said.
The people at the time of the crimes were just wobs.
They weren't individuals.
They meant nothing to me. I didn't know the people.
I was so high on speed that
I understood what I was doing,
but… it just didn't make any difference.
[Stephen] Atkins and Krenwinkel went through the house.
I guess there were so many visitors to the house,
Abigail Folger waved at them.
[unsettling music continues]
Sharon Tate, she was in bed,
and Jay Sebring was sitting on the foot of her bed.
Krenwinkel and Atkins had knives.
They got Sharon Tate out of bed,
and they got Sebring and brought him to the front of the house.
Wojciech Frykowski, I believe is his name.
I had tied his hands with a towel
and then was instructed to kill him.
And I raised the knife that I had in my hand,
and I couldn't put the knife down.
I couldn't…. I couldn't bring it down.
It was just as though there was a force there that held my wrist.
I couldn't move.
[Stephen] Watson told Sharon Tate to sit down.
Sebring said, "She's eight-and-a-half-months pregnant."
-Watson shot him. -[gunshot]
Then… panic was rampant.
Frykowski tried to run.
He got out to the front.
Watson followed and pounced on him.
[camera shutter clicks]
Abigail Folger
ran out of the back of the house.
Krenwinkel followed her.
I ran after her with an upraised knife,
and we went out through a back door.
I ran her down, and I began to stab her.
[knife stabbing]
I remember her saying, "I'm already dead."
And I was left sitting with Sharon Tate, and she was talking to me and…
I remember that I… I felt nothing.
I felt absolutely nothing for her
um, as she begged…
for her life and for the life of her baby.
[clicks tongue]
And, uh…
Jesus.
Susan Atkins said to her,
"Look, bitch, I don't care about you or your baby."
"You're gonna die, and I don't feel a thing about it."
Atkins proceeded to stab her a number of times.
[knife stabbing]
Watson came in, also stabbed her.
If you can imagine that,
stabbing an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant woman.
On the way out, Susan Atkins wrote the word "pig"
with a towel dipped in Sharon Tate's blood.
[Patricia] When I got back to the ranch,
I got out of the car.
Charlie came up and asked everybody how it went.
But that was the first time I looked at him,
and I said, "Charlie, they were so young."
Yet the next night you were there again.
Yeah, Charlie definitely had me go the second night.
[interviewer] And you knew what was coming again?
Yes.
You didn't say "no"?
No. And at that point,
I felt so dead inside, it really didn't matter.
[unsettling music playing]
[cars honking]
[Stephen] On the evening of the LaBianca murders,
Manson gathered some of his followers at Spahn Ranch.
He told them that last night had been too messy.
"I'm going to go along tonight and show you how to do it."
Kasabian was driving.
Manson was in between Kasabian and Steve Grogan.
And in the back were Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.
He asked me, "Do you believe enough in what I say
to know that this is something that has to be done?"
Or something to that effect. And I said, "Yes, I do."
I didn't walk right up and say, "May I go?"
But I think everything on my face said that.
[unsettling music playing]
[Stephen] They drove around for about four and a half hours
looking for people to kill.
But then, Manson gave specific instructions,
and they ended up at Leno and Rosemary LaBianca's house.
[unsettling music continues]
Manson got in, and he got the drop on them.
He assured them that it was just a robbery,
that he wasn't gonna hurt them.
He tied their hands behind their backs with rawhide.
[camera shutter clicks]
Then he said, "If you don't move, you'll be okay."
"If you move, you're gonna be in trouble."
And so the LaBiancas stayed there.
Manson then went out to the car.
He got Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten out of the car.
Manson, Kasabian, Grogan, and Atkins left.
[suspenseful music playing]
Watson went in.
He had a knife.
Krenwinkel immediately went to the kitchen and got a knife for herself
and a knife for Van Houten.
[camera shutter clicks]
Watson asked the LaBiancas if they had any money.
Rosemary said she had a box with some change in it.
Turned out that it had eight dollars in change.
He told Van Houten and Krenwinkel to go to the back bedroom with Rosemary.
They got into the back bedroom.
Van Houten pushed Rosemary down on the bed.
At this point, Rosemary could hear Leno
getting stabbed to death in the living room.
[Leslie] The sounds of Mr. LaBianca dying came into the bedroom.
Horrible, guttural sounds.
She started calling out to him and yelling for him.
And, um… at that moment,
for a brief moment…
I… I realized, you know…
these are people that love each other.
Rosemary had this sudden surge of energy and bolted up.
She swung the lamp in Van Houten's direction.
Van Houten knocked the lamp out of her hands
and wrestled her down to the bed.
Krenwinkel, with a knife, stabbed her as hard as she could
but hit her shoulder blade, and the knife bent.
[hesitating]
Tex came in and…
[hesitates] …killed her.
And then Tex turned me around
and handed me the knife, and he said, "Do something,"
because Manson had told him to make sure that all of us got our hands dirty.
[inhales]
And, um,
I stabbed Mrs. LaBianca in the lower back
about 16 times.
[knife stabbing, slashing]
[interviewer] And there was no pity?
No mercy, no. No.
[Patricia] It had been said by Charlie
to make sure that there was all these witchy signs.
I went, and Mr. LaBianca was already dead.
And I had gotten a fork,
and I stabbed him with a fork repeatedly
and eventually left the fork in him.
[Stephen] Krenwinkel went into the living room,
and in Leno's blood wrote "death to pigs" on the living room wall,
"rise" above the front door,
and the words "helter skelter" on the refrigerator door.
[suspenseful music continues]
[newsreader 1] It's been 72 hours now since actress Sharon Tate
and her four friends were murdered in a rented home near Bel-Air,
and many questions still remain unanswered.
[newsreader 2] Tonight, the city of Los Angeles is uneasy
after two strange murders have left seven dead
and no clues to the killers.
[Tom] I felt that the police knew who did the murders really quickly,
but they didn't pursue them for two months.
The Family left a trail of evidence everywhere,
but the cops don't do anything.
The cops say that the LaBianca and Tate murders aren't connected.
They knew they were connected.
The next day, these two sheriffs go into the autopsy
and say, "We have a similar murder, Gary Hinman,
same mode of killing, same blood writing on the wall."
"We know it's these people at the Spahn Ranch who did these murders."
[unsettling music playing]
The LAPD says, "No, no, we're on to another lead, narcotics traffickers."
How did he know they weren't part of the narcotics traffickers?
Nobody went to the Spahn Ranch to interview anyone
except there was this huge raid…
where they're all picked up on a bunch of other charges.
They had stolen guns,
stolen vehicles…
[camera shutter clicks]
…underage runaway girls.
Charlie had stolen credit cards in his pocket.
They were all released three days later.
And Manson's parole wasn't violated.
Somebody wanted this group out there.
[camera shutter clicks]
Every single probation and parole person I talked to,
they all said the same thing.
Not all of them went as far as saying they were informants,
but they said there's something missing.
[unsettling music playing]
So I was looking into the possibility of MKUltra
and Jolly West being involved in these murders.
[Errol] Where else does Jolly West's name show up?
[Tom] Most famous is the Kennedy assassination.
[newsreader] Madness and hate erupt anew in Dallas
as President Kennedy's accused assassin is shot down himself
during a jail transfer.
[reporter] There is Lee Oswald.
He's been shot.
[music stops]
[Errol] Jack Ruby was the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.
[Tom] Jolly went to examine Ruby
a few weeks before Ruby was gonna testify as to why he shot Oswald.
He didn't testify at his own trial.
He never spoke publicly,
so he was going to testify to the Warren Commission.
Jolly West flies into Dallas,
goes to the county jail, spends a couple hours talking to Jack Ruby,
and he comes out after his examination
and says, in the preceding 24 hours, Jack Ruby has had a break with reality.
It's that I find him to be
uh, mentally ill at this time,
and I think a mentally ill person should be in a hospital.
Just as simple as that.
Any possibility that he might have just been faking?
Not in my opinion.
[unsettling music playing]
[Tom] So in other words, in the day of that meeting,
Jack Ruby lost his mind.
[man laughing maniacally]
Well, this is what Jolly West had been doing for ten years.
Learning how to induce insanity with someone without their knowledge.
It was the CIA objective of MKUltra.
[discordant music playing]
One of the biggest problems is I've never been able to put
West and Manson in the same room.
I don't have one person that can say they ever saw them together.
I mean, Manson emerged from the Haight at the end of 1967,
the same time that West left,
as exactly what they were trying to create.
Well, it was his girls.
You know, people who would kill, on command, without remorse,
who would do whatever they were told to do.
That group left and went down to LA, and then a year later
committed these horrific crimes.
[unsettling music playing]
[newsreader] A wandering band of members of a so-called "religious cult"
with a leader they call Jesus
has had three of its followers arrested
in the investigation of the murder of Sharon Tate and six others.
[Tom] The first information they had that pointed towards the Manson Family
came from Susan Atkins.
[suspenseful music playing]
She met Charlie in the Haight.
By the mid to end of '67, she was a hardcore follower.
[newsreader] The Family left the caves
they'd been living in on the Spahn Movie Ranch
in the early fall, after the Tate murders.
The Family set up another camp in the desert, near Death Valley.
Five members are now in jail on other charges
in the desert town of Independence.
The Family's leader, Charles Manson, is jailed here.
It is expected that he will be charged in the Tate murders.
[Tom] So Susan Atkins got picked up with a group at Barker Ranch.
She was brought back to LA.
They only had her on the Gary Hinman murder
'cause she had participated with Bobby Beausoleil in that.
They hadn't connected her yet to Tate, LaBianca, although they had.
They just weren't saying it.
They took Susan out of custody in Death Valley,
brought her to Sybil Brand, and then in the course of a week…
[Errol] Starts blabbing away to her cellmate.
[Tom] Two cellmates, Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard.
Who I believe were planted in her cell.
They were both married to the same man.
They both had been semi-prostitutes. Virginia Graham's a friend of mine.
I really like her. She's never admitted this to me, but…
[Errol] How can you be a semi-prostitute?
I don't even know what that is.
Well, I mean, because Virginia Graham resents it when I call her a prostitute.
She said, "No, no, no, I just enjoyed the generosity of the men I dated."
[unsettling music playing]
They were also writing bad checks,
false prescriptions for drugs,
and they were in and out of jail, but they were both picked up the same week
and put into jail.
And that's when they solicited Atkins's story.
[newsreader] He calls himself Jesus sometimes, Satan others.
"Charles Manson" is his real name.
Manson was the leader of the hippie cult, or Family,
accused of killing Sharon Tate and perhaps 12 others.
Manson reportedly was miffed at Terry Melcher,
son of singer Doris Day,
for refusing to help Manson get a recording contract.
Melcher was a former tenant of the Tate house.
The house apparently became a symbol of rejection to Manson,
and, according to a cult member,
the leader ordered all in the house killed.
Manson is said to have a hypnotic effect over his cult.
[Tom] They needed Atkins to testify
to indict Manson, Watson,
Van Houten, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian.
So they got Atkins away from her lawyer,
who had been court appointed and who would have defended her properly,
and get a new attorney.
And I have the memos. They had a meeting, and they said,
"Who do we have… that would have more control over her
and get from her what we need?"
[suspenseful music playing]
[pen scratching]
So they get her Dick Caballero,
immediately make a deal for her to testify at the grand jury
for limited immunity, which is she won't get the death penalty.
But she also has to testify at the trial, and she can't go back to Charles Manson.
She can't recant, or she loses her deal.
They all knew that she was gonna recant.
They were basically all working for the prosecution.
[suspenseful music playing]
The grand jury hearing,
Atkins testified under the influence of the people who were prosecuting her,
not with the defense attorney protecting her.
[reporter] Susan. Susan, how have you been treated since your arrest?
Same way as all other inmates are treated.
[newsreader] It took the grand jury just 20 minutes
to agree that six members of the hippie tribe
should be indicted in the Sharon Tate murders
and those of a supermarket owner and his wife.
[Errol] When a story did start to emerge, it was managed very carefully.
It was managed and manipulated.
[Errol] And what was the story?
[Tom] Exactly what we think of now when we think of the Manson murders,
that these kids went out and became corrupted
by the freedoms of the '60s movement and turned into monsters.
So in other words, don't let your kids do drugs,
don't let them join communes, don't let them march against the war
because they're all gonna turn into these crazed killers
who have no respect for life.
[intriguing music playing]
If you want to get into COINTELPRO and CHAOS,
it served their purposes to have the world finally turn against
this… left-wing anti-war movement,
which a lot of people conflated with hippies.
[newsreader] Secret FBI memos made public today
show that the late J. Edgar Hoover
ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left.
He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups
but to take action against them to neutralize them.
[Tom] COINTELPRO was started in 1967 by the FBI.
CHAOS was started in 1967 by the CIA.
Those two programs were designed to infiltrate left-wing groups,
especially the Panthers, and neutralize them.
That's what their own documents say.
Do whatever it took to basically
make them ineffective, wipe them out.
[crowd chanting]
[Tom] The powers that be in 1969,
they all believed that there was going to be a civil war
because of this left-wing movement.
[crowd chanting]
[Tom] There's celebrities that were supporting the Panthers,
having fundraisers for them.
There's a memo from November of '68,
so that's less than a year before the Tate-LaBianca murders.
The COINTELPRO memo said,
"When the revolution finally happens,
we have to make the celebrities understand
that they're gonna be lined up against the wall with everyone else."
And what happens? Eight or nine months later,
Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring,
two of the biggest jet-setters in that world,
are slaughtered at the Cielo house,
a house with a very high profile.
[intriguing music subsides]
[Errol] It's hard for me to believe that this is being orchestrated
by the federal government.
I would never go that far to say it was orchestrated.
Orchestrated sounds like it's planned in advance,
executed, and then covered up.
It could've been just that Manson had, you know,
leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years.
Maybe that was all it was.
Kind of ironic, if nothing else, that before we knew about COINTELPRO
and the FBI setting up the Panthers,
Manson's plan was to pin these murders on the Panthers.
[unsettling music playing]
[Errol] Well, the things that just keep coming back to me
that I wonder about,
one was, of course, that close chronological connection
between the time of your arrest and the murders.
And the other is the writing on the wall in blood,
how it got repeated three times.
First with Hinman, and then again, Cielo Drive,
and then with the LaBiancas.
[Bobby] I can see where you would have
thoughts about the correlations of those things.
I think it's important
that the story be stripped down to the bare bones.
The bare bones of the thing.
There's no doubt in my mind what the motivation was. None. Zero.
Charlie had gotten paranoid of his own people.
He wanted to bind them to him through their committing bad crimes.
That was the true motive.
So he sent Tex Watson
to kill Terry.
Terry lived at Cielo Drive.
All the time that Charlie knew him, he lived at Cielo Drive.
He didn't know that Terry had moved.
Watson asked, "What if there's somebody else there?"
Charlie just told him to kill whoever's there.
The ignorance of not knowing that Terry had left that residence
meant that five other people got murdered.
[unsettling music playing]
[newsreader] The trial of Charles Manson and three young women
charged with the murder of Sharon Tate and six other persons last summer
finally began today in Los Angeles.
[Stephen] I can't emphasize enough
the importance of what happened in the courtroom.
If there was any doubt in a juror's mind
about whether or not Manson was the Svengali leader over these women,
that was dispelled in the courtroom…
because every time he did something,
like he jumped up and would yell at the judge,
the three women would do the same thing.
He came in one day with an X on his forehead
that he'd cut in with razor blades,
and the next day, the three women carved X's into their foreheads.
It was just clear to everybody in the courtroom
that Manson was calling the shots
and had these women completely under his control.
[newsreader] The case has since become a bizarre national
and international sensation,
attracting the attention of everyone from President Nixon
to the curious people who sit in the courtroom
where the case is being heard.
It's all a play, isn't it?
[women singing]
[newsreader] Something else this trial has done is gather together again
those members of Manson's Family who are not in jail.
News accounts depicted them as living a life filled with drugs and sex
and a kind of religion preached by one man who ruled this Family
with an unusual power of persuasion.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Tom] The only reason that there's still a cultural obsession with this case
isn't because a famous director's actress wife
was murdered in such a horrific way.
It wasn't that so many people were killed.
People are fascinated
by the fact that this little ex-convict
had so mesmerized these people.
[suspenseful music continues]
He took all their possessions. He changed their names.
There were no clocks allowed on the ranch, no newspapers,
no contact with the outside world.
And then he would give them LSD.
They would take LSD for days and nights at a time
during which he would preach to them and induct them into his philosophies.
-Morning. Sun's shining this morning. -[reporter] Morning.
-[reporter] It is. -Yes.
[reporter] What do you expect to do in there today?
-Uh, they won't let me do anything. -[reporter] I see.
-They're doing it all. -[reporter] What are your plans?
I have none.
-I'm going to the desert. Yeah. -[reporter] The desert?
He had a very magnetic personality.
When he walked in a room,
you could almost feel the electricity pouring off of him.
He was a very bright guy.
He could quote the Bible almost verbatim.
He could twist it into what he wanted it to mean, like the murders.
Revelation 9 of the Bible, Manson said
the locusts that were gonna fly out of the bottomless pit
weren't really locusts. They were The Beatles.
And they had breastplates of armor. Well, that was their musical instruments.
[Errol] This is The "Beatles" Beatles?
[Stephen] Yes, The "Beatles" Beatles.
When they flew out of the bottomless pit, they were gonna start Armageddon.
The Family members would listen to The White Album on LSD.
Manson said, "Well, the song 'Blackbird,' the blackbirds were the Black men."
[The Beatles] ♪ Blackbird fly… ♪
[Stephen] They'd been waiting for this moment to arise.
In the LaBianca house, above the front door on the inside
was written the word "rise."
[The Beatles] ♪ You were only waiting For this moment to arise ♪
[Stephen] There was a song called "Piggies."
[The Beatles] ♪ Have you seen The little piggies crawling in the dirt? ♪
[Stephen] Pigs for Manson and the Family,
they were upper-class, upper-middle-class whites.
[The Beatles] ♪ In their eyes There's something lacking ♪
♪ What they need's a damn good whacking ♪
[Stephen] There was another song in the album called "Helter Skelter."
That's where Manson got the name for the revolution.
[The Beatles] ♪ Look out, helter skelter ♪
♪ She's coming down fast ♪
♪ Yes ♪
[Stephen] I know Tom O'Neill has a different take.
I firmly believe that Manson wanted to start a race war.
That was the… the motive for the murders.
He was just obsessed with this race war idea.
And Helter Skelter.
[newsreader] Well, the headlines are reading now
Manson wanted to start a race war.
Do you want to put that a little more in perspective?
Well, I guess you could capsulize it by saying that
in Manson's mind, the term Helter Skelter meant
the Black man rising up against the white establishment
and murdering the entire white race
with the exception of, uh… of him and his followers
who intended to escape from Helter Skelter
by going to the desert and living in the bottomless pit.
At least that's what he told his… his Family.
Uh, he got much of this from Revelation 9,
which is the last book in the New Testament.
He got some of his other philosophies from The Beatles.
Uh, he was an avid follower of The Beatles.
Now, admittedly, this is far-out and bizarre,
but these murders were exceptionally strange
and exceptionally bizarre also.
You're not likely to find a garden-variety type of motive
for murders as strange and bizarre as these.
You have to realize that.
[Errol] Are you saying that the whole Helter Skelter narrative
from Vince Bugliosi is false?
How can you make that argument?
Oh, just 'cause I don't believe it.
-[unsettling music playing] -In the beginning, I believed it.
I read Helter Skelter for the first time after it was a magazine assignment.
[newsreader] The best-selling book
that revealed every true and bloody detail.
[Tom] I couldn't wait to meet Bugliosi.
I couldn't believe he was giving me so much of his time.
Our first meeting was about six hours.
[camera shutter clicks]
It wasn't until weeks and months later
that I started finding holes in his narrative,
and I'd go back to him and say, "Vince, I don't understand this
or that or the other thing."
He knew that the more sensational a case he presented,
the better sales the book would have.
[Errol] Why couldn't they believe this nonsense?
[chuckles]
[Tom] I think the girls might have believed in Helter Skelter.
They might've been doing it because that's what Charlie told them.
If that's the case,
then he successfully brainwashed them into believing it.
[somber music playing]
But I don't believe that's why Charlie did it.
I believe there was another motive, another reason,
and I was trying to find out why.
[somber music fades]
[unsettling music playing]
[Bobby] Bugliosi knew what the truth was but didn't reveal it.
It was not to start a race war, which was Bugliosi's theory.
He knew what the truth was.
He knew that Manson talked about that kind of shit.
Stories told around the campfire that really were just that.
But it had nothing to do with the murders.
His intention from the get-go
was to do exactly what he did.
Write a book, make a bazillion dollars on that book,
and live on it for the rest of his life
and sell the movie rights,
which is what he did.
His writer was sitting in the courtroom
taking notes for the book that they were already writing
while he was trying Charlie and those three girls.
He had to get a conviction.
He wanted to portray himself in this book
as the white knight protecting all the people of America.
"Helter Skelter" simply means confusion.
All we wanted to do to start with was tell the truth,
but the lawyers wouldn't let us because they wanted to sell it.
We just wanted to tell the truth, but they didn't want the truth to come out
because you couldn't write books with the truth.
Couldn't make big money. Couldn't sell all this madness,
all the fear and the vicarious thrill for somebody.
["My World" by Charles Manson playing]
[Manson] ♪ My world is a sad world ♪
♪ Often wonder if there's blame ♪
♪ Such a fool in a mad, mad world ♪
♪ With no picture in my frame ♪
♪ Everyone says crazy fool ♪
♪ You're always gazing at the night ♪
♪ With my arms around a tree ♪
[Stephen] Manson and the three women didn't put on a defense at the trial.
Manson testified for an hour out of the presence of the jury.
The judge asked him, "Do you wanna testify in front of the jury?"
And Manson said, "No, I've said what I have to say."
[unsettling music playing]
[newsreader] It took 42 and one-half hours of deliberating
before the jury sent out word that it had indeed reached a verdict.
The three girls on trial, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel,
and Leslie Van Houten, grinned and talked among themselves.
Charles Manson smiled and stroked his beard.
Then the verdicts were read.
For the murders of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring,
the accused were all found guilty in the first degree.
For the murders of Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski,
guilty in the first degree.
For the murder of Steven Parent, guilty in the first degree.
The clerk continued.
For the murders of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca,
guilty in the first degree.
Manson shouted at the jurors, "You're all guilty."
"We are still not allowed to put on a defense."
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter] Would you like to go through this kind of a trial again?
[chuckles]
Well, I'm kind of a courtroom battler.
I, uh… I like a trial.
I like the excitement, the drama.
Uh, I was very honored that my office selected me
to handle a trial of this magnitude.
I think, in retrospect, I would have accepted again,
although the trial did create problems that I never anticipated.
[woman] Well, that was a trial.
Eight months of prosecution testimony.
Uh, they've convicted these people, and you are next.
-All of you. Listen. -[reporter] What are you gonna do?
There's a revolution coming very soon.
What would you do next now? What are you gonna do right now?
We're gonna stay here until Charlie's out.
-Looks like that will be never. -He'll be out. All the people will be out.
There's a revolution coming. You've all judged yourselves.
[unsettling music playing]
[Tom] How did he learn how to brainwash those kids?
Really in under a year.
Yeah, he was a con artist, but everybody who knew him in prison
and everybody who knew him prior to becoming Charlie Manson
said he was a joke to everybody. Nobody took him seriously.
He somehow got help.
Where'd that come from?
[Errol] Well, you're suggesting Manson was a puppet.
[Tom] I'm suggesting that's a possibility, yeah.
He was being used by the state.
And then you have that whole COINTELPRO, CHAOS,
MKUltra angle to it.
Ironically, Vince was the one who put me on that path.
He actually writes, "Was it something he learned in prison?"
"Was it something he picked up outside of prison?"
"What intangible quality did he find
to take control of the minds of these people
and turn them into monsters?"
He had at least 30 people who would do anything he said.
He also learned how to find
some trigger in their unconscious that made them capable of murdering.
"They might never have killed," he said, "if they had never met Manson."
♪ …is one is one ♪
♪ In this valley you'll find me ♪
♪ Only perfection you'll bring ♪
[Errol] So do you have your own theories of how Manson got Tex Watson
and these women to commit these crimes?
Manson was really into mind control.
He was fascinated with Scientology.
He wanted to learn how to
not only control his own mind but control others.
Drugs played the biggest part.
Opening up their mind to suggestion.
Manson just… preaching all the time.
After dinner every night, he would give these sermons
about race wars.
Helter Skelter.
Murder was okay.
These people were isolated.
They didn't have, like, normal people to talk to
to tell them that this was crazy. [chuckles]
[indistinct preaching]
[Errol] Now, correct me if I'm wrong,
but suddenly, LSD becomes a possible way of explaining
really bizarre behavior.
For me, it's even less the behavior.
It's the change of thought, of personality,
how the people in the group that we're talking about didn't just act weird.
They completely shifted in the way they looked at the world
and they viewed the world.
Manson got these girls to completely abandon their sense of morality
and their code of ethics and to believe that there was no such thing as evil.
[women laughing]
It stuck. It became fixed for years.
Once they were out of Manson's sphere and in prison,
the ones that were convicted and served prison terms,
it took them years to be de-patterned or deprogrammed and to renounce Manson.
[somber music playing]
Susan Atkins, she said, "I still can't get him out of my head."
"I can't get him out of my head."
"His thoughts are my thoughts."
"I try so hard, and I can't get Charlie out of my head."
It's so alive in me, even just recalling it,
I remember that I had gone so far, and there was no turning back.
Even if I had wanted to run, even if I had wanted to leave, I couldn't.
It was like I was caught in something that I had no control over.
I had absolutely no say-so as to what was happening there.
I was just like a tool in the hands of the devil
is the only way I can put it.
Manson used LSD to create personality change and make it fixed,
make it last after the LSD trips had ended,
which is in all of the LSD research objectives
for the MKUltra scientists.
-Hey, Sarge, cut it out. What…? -Tut-tut. Quiet, Ed, please.
Now, you just sit there quietly and cooperate.
Yes, ma'am.
[Errol] MKUltra, I don't even know what to make of it.
It seems to me that they wanted to achieve certain objectives,
the idea of creating a Manchurian candidate is this dream.
Mm-hmm.
But were they ever able to come even close to creating that?
I somehow don't think so.
[Tom] I have Jolly West's report to the CIA
that he had successfully learned how to replace
true memories with false memories.
-[pen scratching] -[somber music continues]
And he used LSD, hypnosis, and other unnamed drugs,
so that's a success.
[Errol] If true.
It's important enough a document
that when the CIA was forced to turn over what little they had,
they summarized it and they took out
that he had successfully, um, planted false memories in people
without their awareness.
So, if they took that stuff out,
a very important milestone for the MKUltra objectives,
replacing true memories with false memories,
then what else did they withhold from us? We'll never know.
He could have been lying,
but he kept getting financed by the CIA through at least the early '60s.
What does it all mean? I'm very honest about not knowing.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Manson] How can I control your mind? Can I make a robot out of you?
Can you control mine or make a robot out of me?
People had Leslie Van Houten long before I had her.
Her mother had her first.
Her dad had her. Her parents had her. Her school had her.
The TV had her. The movies had her.
And then you come up and say, "Well, you had influence over her."
Certainly I had influence over her. I have influence over everybody I meet.
But that doesn't mean that I directed her to be herself.
I didn't set your house on fire.
Don't blame me for your children.
You raised your children, you programmed your children,
and you made your children.
[Tom] The reason people watch drama,
they want to find the truth behind the surface.
Otherwise, they're bored out of their mind.
You know, what secret has that protagonist got,
or what really happened?
[Errol] But in fiction you can always jigger it
in such a way that there is a resolution,
whereas in real life…
Yeah, no.
[chuckles]
[Errol] …you can't.
That's why the book's called Chaos, kind of.
-[Errol] Yes. -It's chaotic.
There's so much, you know, so many threads.
[Bobby] The problem with this story in particular
is that people are very fond of their…
fantasy.
They don't want to hear how mundane the story actually is,
how not a mastermind Charlie actually was.
In his paranoid delusions,
in his miscalculations…
it was just
blunder after blunder after blunder.
If you only knew what I know now in terms of
the criminal mindset.
[Errol] People love conspiracies.
[Bobby] Yeah, they do.
They want it to be more complicated than it is,
and it's so hard to disabuse people from those fantasies.
Now.
Is there any decency in you at all?
-[man] Charlie, there's a lot of decency. -Okay, is there any respect in you at all?
[man] For you, Charlie?
-You can't ask me to respect you. -I just made a nice film for you, man.
-And what does that do to you? Does that-- -[man] It lets people see you.
So you still don't see me as anybody
but what you need me to be in your mind as a what?
-[man] When you kill nine people-- -When I kill nine people?
[man] You can't come back.
I was never convicted for killing nine people.
[man] Would they be dead if it wasn't for you?
What do you mean? The world wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me.
If it wasn't for me, you'd all be gone.
["People Say I'm No Good" by Charles Manson playing]
♪ People say I'm no good ♪
♪ But they never, never do they say ♪
[static fizzles]
♪ Why their world is so mixed up ♪
♪ Or how it got that way ♪
♪ They all look at me and they frown ♪
♪ Do I really look so strange? ♪
♪ If they really dug themselves ♪
♪ I know they'd want to change ♪
♪ Everybody says you're no good ♪
♪ 'Cause you don't do Like they think you should ♪
♪ Do you expect them ♪
♪ An' do you expect you to act like them ♪
♪ Look at them, man ♪
♪ Look at the fix they're in ♪
♪ I don't care I don't care what they say ♪
♪ Just let 'em sit there and burn ♪
♪ The young might not be So dumb after all ♪
♪ An' from the young You might even learn ♪
♪ Everybody says you're no good ♪
♪ 'Cause, Charles, you don't do You don't do like they think you should ♪
♪ Do you expect them to act like you? ♪
♪ Do you expect them To expect you to act like them? ♪
♪ Do you expect to see ♪
♪ Do you expect the fool To see what a fix he's in? ♪
♪ In your cardboard houses ♪
♪ An' your tin-can cars ♪
♪ You sit there and you wonder ♪
♪ You wonder where you are ♪
♪ Those diamond rings ♪
♪ They're obscene ♪
♪ You sit there and you wonder ♪
♪ And you say who's to blame ♪
♪ Take a look at yourself ♪
♪ Take yourself off the shelf ♪
♪ You can't belong to nobody ♪
♪ With your can't-cough medicine ♪
♪ And your wonder drug ♪
♪ You got more sickness ♪
♪ Than you got cures of ♪