Down the Manson Rabbit Hole

Abby Aguirre considers Errol Morris’s new documentary “CHAOS: The Manson Murders.”

By Abby AguirreMarch 16, 2025

• Film

• Television

IN THE SPRING of 2020, as the pandemic lockdown was taking hold, I read CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by the journalist Tom O’Neill, a massive doorstop of a book published nine months earlier. At the time, the media was still marking the 50th anniversary of the Manson Family murders. An avalanche of stories had gained momentum with the 2019 release of Quentin Tarantino’s latest revenge fantasy, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, and it continued into 2020 with a six-part docuseries from Epix, Helter Skelter: An American Myth, and another documentary, Jay Sebring....Cutting to the Truth, about the Hollywood hairstylist who was killed at the Cielo Drive house alongside Sharon Tate and three others. In the midst of this media extravaganza, O’Neill’s book, co-written with Dan Piepenbring, slowly and meticulously dismantled everything I thought I knew about the Manson story.

As O’Neill explains in the book, he started looking into the case in 1999, when Premiere magazine assigned him a feature for the 30th anniversary of the murders. He never filed that piece because, as soon as he started sniffing around for a new angle, the official narrative came apart. America’s favorite horror story, authored by the lead prosecutor in the case, Vincent Bugliosi, in court and in his 1974 bestseller, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, was full of holes. To a journalist, CHAOS reads like a horror story on an additional level. A healthy dose of obsession is necessary. To stumble into an unresolvable story that grips you for 20 years? There but for the grace of God go I. In O’Neill’s position, many journalists would abandon their reporting or, worse, phone in a hack job. I respected his persistence.

At some point in the course of reading the book, I realized that the first known murder, of a music teacher named Gary Hinman, took place on the very street in Topanga Canyon where I was living, less than a mile from my house. I think this is what did it—what caused me to fall down a rabbit hole of my own. I pored over CHAOS and Helter Skelter, comparing O’Neill’s findings to Bugliosi’s version. I then moved on to The Family by Ed Sanders, the first big book about Manson and his disciples, published in 1971. Next, I read another 1971 title, Love Needs Care by David E. Smith and John Luce, about the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, a facility in San Francisco where, for the latter half of 1967 and the early months of 1968, Manson went for his weekly parole meetings and his girls sought treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. Because O’Neill ends up speculating that Manson might have been an informant of some kind for one or more covert federal programs active at the time, most pointedly MKULTRA, I also read The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” by John Marks, the first book about the CIA’s notorious research program on mind control, published in 1979, and the more recent Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019) by Stephen Kinzer, about the chemist and “black sorcerer” who oversaw the program.

What interested me most in the end was not the question of government involvement but rather Bugliosi’s role in shaping our understanding of the murders, as well as the legacy of his bestseller—which, five decades after it came out, is still the number one true crime book of all time. Once I’d thought about it, it wasn’t surprising that a trial lawyer would omit evidence, skew facts, manipulate witnesses, and bend everyone and everything to fit his courtroom argument. What did seem weird and fascinating, in retrospect, was that a prosecutor’s case became the official narrative at all—that Americans took it as gospel. (You can read my primer on the holes in Helter Skelter here.)

I mention all this as background to explain why I have been eagerly anticipating Errol Morris’s film adaptation of O’Neill’s book, CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which was released by Netflix on March 7. In the years since it was published, the book version has found a wide audience; in 2024, out of the blue, it landed on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction and stayed there for five months (it’s back on the list this month). Tarantino got ahold of it, calling CHAOS the best book ever written on the subject. But O’Neill tells a sprawling story with many threads, none of which get resolved by the end. The book did not seem to lend itself easily to visual storytelling—a dense, 500-page work of investigative reporting about decades-old events isn’t exactly filmic, and especially not in a conventional 90-minute time frame. In my estimation, it could take that long just to lay out the many ways O’Neill discredits Bugliosi’s narrative, to say nothing of the wilder theories he floats. Whatever angle Morris went with, he was going to have to make tough choices. I couldn’t wait to see which chunks he would bite off and chew, and which he would discard.

The first surprise comes around minute 13, when Morris introduces Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a prominent psychiatrist and expert on dissociative states, hypnosis, brainwashing, cults, and LSD. West, who died in 1999, was chair of UCLA’s psychiatry department and director of its Neuropsychiatric Institute for two decades, from 1969 to 1989. (An auditorium at UCLA is named after him.) Although he denied it for decades, West was long suspected to be involved in MKULTRA, one objective of which was to create programmed assassins out of unwitting subjects. West was named as a possible MKULTRA researcher in a New York Times front-page story in 1977.

In his book, O’Neill presents evidence he found in West’s papers at the UCLA Library not only that West was a longtime contractor for MKULTRA but also that he had worked with Gottlieb, the so-called black sorcerer, to devise the blueprint for the program in the early 1950s. O’Neill also reports that, in 1967, West was doing undercover research on LSD in San Francisco, where he recruited subjects at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. West kept an office at this small clinic in the Haight the same year that Manson and his girls were going there on a regular basis.

O’Neill never found proof that West and Manson had dealings. He includes his reporting on West as circumstantial evidence that it’s a possibility. As O’Neill repeatedly points out, in the book and in the film, one of the most persistent mysteries surrounding the Manson story, a question even Bugliosi said he couldn’t answer, is how a barely literate ex-convict acquired the ability to strip people of their personalities and program them into submissives who would kill on command. West, who walked the same halls as Manson in a small Victorian in the Haight in 1967, two years before the murders, was an elite scientist who had done extensive research for a CIA program whose aim was exactly that. (Put on your tinfoil hat: West also performed a psychiatric evaluation of Jack Ruby about a year after Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, then emerged alone from Ruby’s jail cell in Dallas to report that the man had just suffered an “acute psychotic break.”)

I didn’t find it surprising that Morris would highlight O’Neill’s reporting on West. It’s one of the most bizarre sections of the book. But it is strange that Morris brings up West so early while conveying so little of what led O’Neill to look into West in the first place.

One of many significant findings in the first half of O’Neill’s long book is a puzzling pattern of leniency toward Manson by law enforcement across California during the two and a half years leading up to the murders and his final arrest. When he was released from Terminal Island prison in San Pedro in 1967, after serving seven and a half years for forging a government check, Manson violated his parole immediately, yet faced no consequences.

By the summer of 1968, Manson had been arrested at least four times. The first two incidents went unreported to the San Francisco probation office but the third made news: Manson and 13 of his followers were taken into custody after police came upon their broken-down school bus in a ditch by the Pacific Coast Highway. (“Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds,” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times that April.) Manson was booked on suspicion of grand theft auto. He turned out to be the legal owner of the bus and was released after a day in jail. But the episode angered the chief of the San Francisco probation office, who was not happy to learn that Manson, a parolee under his office’s supervision, had been traveling freely between San Francisco and Los Angeles for months. The chief of the L.A. probation office was riled too. Nevertheless, when Manson was arrested in Los Angeles again the following month, on a drug offense, the district attorney declined to file charges. Again, Manson was released.

The San Francisco parole office soon demanded that Manson return to San Francisco. Instead, he moved to the Spahn Movie Ranch near Chatsworth, where he continued to grow the Family and enjoy virtual immunity from parole revocation. According to O’Neill’s reporting, Manson was arrested at least six more times in 1969 before his final apprehension at Barker Ranch in Death Valley. He was arrested for rape and assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles that March. In June, he was arrested in the San Fernando Valley for driving under the influence and operating a vehicle without a license. Though he informed his booking officers that he was on federal parole, Manson was released within 24 hours with no charges. Three days after he was arrested again that August, in an infamous raid on Spahn Ranch (he was found with stolen cars, narcotics, underage girls, and an arsenal of weapons), Manson, identified as a federal parolee in the search warrant for the raid, was released. Ten days after the raid, Manson was arrested again—for felony possession of marijuana and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Again, he was released.

Some 175 pages into the book, O’Neill presents his evidence regarding this pattern of leniency to a former deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick. By now, one of O’Neill’s sheriff’s department sources had wondered aloud if Manson “had his finger in a bigger pie.” Reviewing O’Neill’s documents, Watnick seemed sure of it. “Manson was an informant,” Watnick reportedly said. This amnesty toward Manson becomes more curious, some 100 pages later, when O’Neill demonstrates that Manson’s parole file—much of which remains redacted or classified today—was never allowed into evidence in court. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, refused to release it. The defense did subpoena the file, but Mitchell dispatched a Justice Department official to Los Angeles to help Bugliosi quash the subpoena.

When O’Neill introduces Jolly West, 342 pages into his book, the reader is grounded in an understanding of why his reporting has led the author there. By contrast, Morris presents the West stuff right out of the gate, almost in a vacuum. We’ve heard O’Neill say that Manson violated his parole when he was first released from Terminal Island, but the bulk of his far more consequential reporting has been left out, reduced to a sound bite.

We do learn a few minutes later that Manson was arrested half a dozen times while under the supervision of his unusually lenient parole officer in San Francisco, Roger Smith. But here again, Morris leaves out significant information. We never learn that Smith was a graduate student studying links between drug use and collective violence; that when Smith suggested Manson move to the Haight from Berkeley and directed him to report to the medical clinic, Smith began running a study on amphetamines and violent behavior there; that the two were so unusually close that Smith was at one point granted temporary custody of one of Manson’s children; or that, even after Smith stopped being Manson’s parole officer, one of Smith’s research assistants, Alan Rose, followed the Family to Los Angeles and stayed at Spahn Ranch for four months.

This is an unfortunate pattern throughout the film. For instance, Morris relies quite a bit on phone interviews he did with Bobby Beausoleil, the onetime Manson follower who killed Gary Hinman in Topanga two weeks before the Tate-LaBianca murders. (Beausoleil is still in prison, at Vacaville. Although a California parole board recommended in January that he be released, Governor Gavin Newsom is expected to block his parole.) Morris appears to be stuck on the fact that Beausoleil was arrested for the Hinman killing a few days before the murders at the house on Cielo Drive. He asks Beausoleil about it two different times, seeming to float the copycat theory of the murders. In this scenario, the Tate murders were the Family’s strategy for getting Beausoleil out of jail—if the killer was still out there, the logic ran, then Beausoleil must not have killed Hinman. Morris never explains why he keeps coming back to the timing of Beausoleil’s arrest, but this appears to be the implication.

So it’s all the more bizarre that Morris does not raise with Beausoleil what O’Neill learned from the two L.A. County Sheriff’s Department detectives who investigated the Hinman murder, Charles Guenther and Paul Whiteley. Guenther told O’Neill that, on the night before the Cielo Drive murders, Beausoleil called Spahn Ranch from jail and instructed a woman on the other end of the line to tell Manson to do something and “leave a sign”—in other words, Guenther said, commit a similar crime to make it appear as though Hinman’s killer was still on the loose. Guenther said he knew about Beausoleil’s call because it had been illegally recorded. Whiteley confirmed Guenther’s account.

If Guenther’s story about the taped call is true, by the way, he and his partner would have connected the murders to the hippie cult at Spahn Ranch right away. Also, Guenther told O’Neill that he and Whiteley went to the Tate autopsies to tell investigators about similarities between the Hinman and Cielo Drive murders. When they got there, the longtime L.A. coroner, Thomas Noguchi, had already reached the conclusion that the murders were connected, according to Guenther. These are just a few of O’Neill’s findings that call into question the notion that it took authorities two months to figure out who committed the crimes.

Guenther and Whiteley were seasoned cops. Guenther in particular was legendary. He had investigated the 1958 killing of James Ellroy’s mother; in his 1996 book My Dark Places, Ellroy hails him as one of the best detectives to ever work in Los Angeles. To believe that it took the Sheriff’s Department two months to figure out that Manson and his followers were involved in the murders, you would have to believe that two of its best homicide detectives failed to relay what they knew to their superiors and that no one else at the department knew about Beausoleil’s taped call. You would also have to believe that Guenther and Whiteley did not realize that one of the biggest police raids in California history was taking place at the same ranch their murder suspect had phoned from jail. (You will learn almost none of this from Morris’s film.)

Although Morris uses archival material artfully to narrate events, he often does so in a way that’s devoid of important context. About 25 minutes in, we reach the part of the story where Terry Melcher, producer for the Beach Boys and son of Doris Day, spurns Manson by declining to offer him a recording contract. (In Bugliosi’s telling, this is a key moment: months later, Manson will send his followers to kill everyone at the Cielo Drive house where Melcher had been a tenant, in order to scare Melcher.) We hear audio—presumably from O’Neill’s 2000 interview with Melcher, who died in 2004—of Melcher explaining why he visited Manson at Spahn Ranch. “There’s a potential here for a very interesting musical documentary on the hippie subculture in America,” Melcher recalls being told by a friend he employed as a talent scout.

Nowhere do we learn that O’Neill found evidence that Melcher was a lot more involved with the Manson Family than he let on, or that he appears to have lied about this repeatedly on the stand, seemingly with Bugliosi’s knowledge. O’Neill reports in the book that when he showed this evidence to Stephen Kay, Bugliosi’s co-prosecutor, Kay was “shocked” and said it could overturn all the verdicts against Manson and his followers. Morris interviews Kay throughout the film but never asks him about any of this.

Morris uses archival footage and audio so well, in fact, that it took me some time to realize that, aside from O’Neill, he has only three interviewees of his own—Beausoleil, Kay, and Melcher’s talent scout colleague, Gregg Jakobson, a musician and onetime friend of the Beach Boys who spent a lot of time around the Manson Family and testified at the trial. As with the Melcher audio, the Jakobson segments are weaved in for exposition and atmospherics.

Jakobson recalls how, in the spring of 1968, Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two Manson girls hitchhiking and brought them back to his house, a former hunting lodge on Sunset Boulevard once owned by Will Rogers. Two days later, Manson turned up at the house and ingratiated himself with Wilson. Wilson “loved” Manson’s girls, Jakobson says, as the headline of an old interview with Wilson—“I Live With 17 Girls”—flashes across the screen. When Morris asks him to describe the scene at the lodge, Jakobson paints a dark picture: one of the girls, bouncing on Wilson’s diving board, exclaims “Fuck me, feed me, and keep me high!” before vaulting into the swimming pool. (According to O’Neill’s book, this pool was built in the shape of California.)

I get why Morris harps on this—it’s good color. But it’s weird to watch Jakobson recount this history and never learn that he, Wilson, and Melcher formed a group they called the “Golden Penetrators,” with the goal of sleeping with as many women as possible. Or that, according to O’Neill’s book, Jakobson tried to charge him 100 dollars an hour for an interview.

Jakobson and Kay establish that Wilson recorded one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” for a Beach Boys album, and that Wilson paid Manson outright instead of giving him a songwriting credit—something Manson took personally. When Melcher then rejected Manson after several auditions at Spahn Ranch, things went south fast. “That was probably the beginning of the end,” Jakobson says in the film.

By July 1969, a dark, speed-addled mood has settled over Spahn Ranch. On the first of that month, Manson shot Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, a drug dealer in Hollywood whom he mistakenly believed to be a Black Panther. In Beausoleil’s telling, the Crowe shooting was a dumb drug deal gone bad—and the key event from which all the others follow. Manson believed he had killed Crowe, Beausoleil says, and he became paranoid that members of his group would snitch on him. (Crowe actually survived.)

This is the real reason Manson sent four of his followers—Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel—to kill everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive the next month, Beausoleil says. And it’s why Manson took the same foursome and two others, Leslie Van Houten and Steven “Clem” Grogan, out driving the following night and had three of them kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca at their home in Los Feliz. He wanted to make his followers complicit in heinous crimes, as a form of insurance against snitching. (For reasons unclear, Beausoleil does not ascribe this motive to his own murder of Hinman, even though Manson cut Hinman’s ear with a sword and left Beausoleil to finish the job.)

From a storytelling point of view, the strongest section of the film is the narration of the murders because Morris manages to evoke a visceral sense of descent. Accounts from Beausoleil and Kay are weaved together with chilling archival footage of interviews with Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten. The sequence is unnerving and appropriately chaotic, if a bit goofy in places. (To understand how gruesome the crime scene in Topanga must have been when Hinman’s decomposing body was discovered after six days, I personally did not need a close-up shot of maggots.) But there’s something insidious about the way Morris cedes so much of the microphone to Beausoleil: we begin to understand the events through his reasoning alone. Even when Morris returns to the part of the chronology he is stuck on for reasons he never explains, he effectively leaves Beausoleil unchallenged. “I don’t know if he knew that I was in jail,” Beausoleil says about Manson at one point. “There’s no evidence of that.” Actually, there is evidence of that—in the book Morris is ostensibly adapting.

The segment on the trial is similarly vivid and uneven. Morris does include one of O’Neill’s biggest findings—that Bugliosi planted a former prosecutor on the defense team, Richard Caballero, who arranged for Bugliosi’s version of events to get aired early and at great length in the Los Angeles Times. But again, there are significant holes. Given how much his film relies on Beausoleil, it’s strange that Morris never mentions that the Hinman murder was tried separately or attempts to explain why. In his book, O’Neill makes the case that Bugliosi’s office kept the Hinman trial separate because if it were lumped together with the Tate-LaBianca trial, the resulting testimony would reveal that the sheriff’s office knew as early as August that the Manson Family was responsible for all three murders.

Kay provides a graphic explanation of the “helter skelter” motive—Manson wanted to incite an apocalyptic race war, which he named after the Beatles song, by framing the Black Panthers for murder. But neither he nor any of the other talking heads explains that because Manson hadn’t killed any of the victims himself, Bugliosi could convict him of murder only through a charge of conspiracy, and that the helter skelter motive helped make this possible. (Nor do we learn about some truly unsavory skeletons in Bugliosi’s closet, a saga too lengthy to go into here.) Jakobson’s total absence from the trial section is conspicuous, since he both testified in court and, given how much time he spent with Melcher and the Family, presumably has some sense of whether Melcher lied on the stand. It’s also never made clear why Beausoleil is the only key Manson follower Morris interviewed when at least four others—Watson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, and Grogan—are still alive.

Toward the end of the film, Morris returns to the question of government involvement. We get a brief overview of two other covert programs, both of which began in 1967: COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence campaign, and Operation CHAOS, the CIA’s domestic spying effort. We hear O’Neill explain that Jolly West reported in his correspondence with the CIA that he had figured out how to replace true memories with false ones, using hypnosis, LSD, and other drugs. We learn from Kay that Manson was indeed interested in mind control. We see a brief clip from The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film in which an American POW, played by Laurence Harvey, is brainwashed into becoming an unwitting assassin. But as in the rest of the film, Morris seems to be skating around on top of O’Neill’s reporting without grappling with the substance of it.

One hole is particularly glaring. Over the two decades during which O’Neill researched his book, a certain name kept popping up, one that appeared nowhere in Bugliosi’s volume. O’Neill first heard the name from a close friend of Sharon Tate’s, the photographer Shahrokh Hatami. Hatami told O’Neill that there was one detail he could never make sense of: he learned of Tate’s murder when he received a frantic phone call from a friend at seven o’clock on the morning after the killings—90 minutes before Tate’s housekeeper discovered the bodies at Cielo Drive. The friend: Reeve Whitson.

Whitson turns out to be a mysterious Zelig of the Manson saga. He was heavily involved in an undercover investigation of the murders conducted by Sharon Tate’s father, Paul, a former US Army intelligence officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel shortly after his daughter’s death. Perhaps because Tate’s father’s inquiry effectively merged with the LAPD investigation, Whitson also worked with police detectives, investigators, and agents assigned to the official Tate case. Whitson knew Bugliosi too—Bugliosi said as much under oath—and he was friends with both Sebring and Tate’s husband, film director Roman Polanski. When Lieutenant Robert Helder, head of the LAPD’s Tate investigation, first arrived at the Paramount lot to interview Polanski, Whitson was already there, “lurking in the shadows.” According to Whitson’s friend Richard Edlund, the Oscar-winning special effects artist, Whitson was also close with Dennis Wilson and, through Wilson, knew Manson.

In O’Neill’s book, nearly everyone who knew Whitson seemed sure of one thing—that he was an undercover agent. The majority believed he worked for the CIA. (His ex-wife and daughter, whom he sent to Sweden in the 1960s and would have nothing to do with until he retired, were certain of it.) And while Whitson’s close friends knew he was involved in the Manson case, his most trusted confidants were told something more—that Whitson had had advance knowledge of the murders, and that it was his “biggest regret” in life that he hadn’t prevented them. Did Morris, who appears to frame his film around the CIA question, not find any of this relevant?

There’s a moment in the film’s final minutes when Morris seems to put his thumb on the scale. He doesn’t know what to make of MKULTRA, he tells O’Neill. The CIA may have wanted to create a Manchurian Candidate, but did it ever come close to doing so? “I somehow don’t think so,” Morris says.

This is not an unreasonable position to take, obviously, and Morris certainly knows his stuff—in 2017, he made a six-part docudrama, Wormwood, about the death of Frank Olson, the American scientist who was unknowingly dosed with LSD by colleagues involved in the CIA program. But if this is what Morris believes, it’s even more odd that he doesn’t spend time exploring alternative explanations for the many questions raised by O’Neill’s reporting, especially the bizarre handling of Manson’s parole. Morris may have interviewed almost no one, but he does have Bugliosi’s co-prosecutor on camera, so why not ask Kay about this? Instead, Morris raises the question of CIA involvement early on only to casually dismiss it himself at the end.

Viewers who haven’t read O’Neill’s book will find the film interesting enough. To me, it felt like reading the abstract of a white paper that’s locked behind a paywall, and a lopsided abstract at that. It’s not unwatchable. The archival footage of Manson and his followers is sadly gripping. I’m just not sure what book Morris thought he was adapting.