Chaos, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring
June, 2019 Little, Brown and Company
I thought I was done with Manson Family books, but the other week I was asking Gemini to seek out books that were written by former Rolling Stone reporters, particularly books that hewed to the old New Journalism style, and Gemini included Chaos in its list, saying that even though it was recent it came off like a lost piece of 1970s Rolling Stone journalism.
Well, it sort of does. I guess Chaos is “New Journalism,” or perhaps “Gonzo” in the Hunter Thompson sense in that author Tom O’Neill inserts himself into the narrative. But otherwise we do not get the excessive word painting that most draws me to vintage New Journalism; interestingly, this is how Chaos pales in comparison to the book it is trying to attack, Vincent Bugliosi’s major bestseller Helter Skelter.
While O’Neill spends 500+ pages excessively detailing how Bugliosi hid evidence, prodded witnesses to lie on the stand, and also beat his mistress half to death(!?), never once does he achieve the mise en scene that Bugliosi and co-writer Curt Gentry brought to Helter Skelter. O’Neill even seems to be aware of this, directly quoting the effective opening line of Helter Skelter; there are no equally-quotable lines in Chaos. And I doubt it will still be in print 50 years from now, like Helter Skelter still is.
Granted, the difference between the two books is that Bugliosi and Gentry were writing back then, back in the era where it was all happening – when the Family was still out there, with the dangling threat that more murders might ensue, a la the plot of Manson cash-in novel The Cult Of Killers. O’Neill is writing decades later, after Manson himself is dead, not to mention Bugliosi, Gentry, Susan “Sadie Glutz” Atkins, Linda Kasabian, etc, etc. Thus his book is more of a history piece, about picking up the pieces of a puzzle many decades later.
But then Chaos isn’t as much about the Manson mystery as it is about how hard it was for Tom O’Neill to write the book. Folks, I kid you not. A large majority of the text is comrpised of O’Neill telling us of his many and futile attempts to write about his findings over the course of twenty years. Yes, twenty years: Chaos started life as a magazine article O’Neill was assigned to write for Premiere magazine in 1999, but he kept jumping from one new revelation to the next...so many revelations that he couldn’t figure out how to write the article, which was so big it eventually had to be a book.
And friends the funniest part is…he never does figure out how to write the book! You patitently read Chaos, pondering over the glaring inconsistencies O’Neill reveals about the entire “Helter Skelter” case and Vincent Bugliosi’s methods to prosecute Manson et al, and you keep waiting for this big moment where O’Neill ties it all togeter. That moment never comes. That moment never comes! O’Neill refuses to tie his many loose ends together, refuses to make a daring claim – instead, he presents his findings, and then at great length tells us it’s all supposition on his part, given the glut of circumstantial evidence, and ends the book by telling us he’s “still looking.” Twenty years on the job, and he’s still looking.
Back when I was really into this Manson stuff I recall reading a lot of theories online, many of them more compellingly-presented than O’Neill’s own; for example, there is zero here about a compelling theory that the murders were really masterminded by Family members Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian, as revenge on a drug burn…O’Neill does not mention this theory, nor does he talk about the character Paul Krassner claimed without question was behind the murders in a 1975 Rolling Stone article (Charles Winans), after which Rolling Stone was sued and Krassner was forbidden from writing more about the subject. This is especially curious because Krassner’s suspect Charles Winans was a former military man who got involved with the counterculture movement, which aligns exactly with the theory O’Neill concocts in Chaos.
I’ve even come across a theory that Winans was the “Candyman” Tex Watkins mentioned in his testimony.
But you will find nothing like this in Chaos. Tom O’Neill has spent so long researching his book that anonymous blog runners and site runners have beaten him to the punch – and have given us more juicy storylines in the process. But what’s crazy is that O’Neill actually meets with Paul Krassner in the course of his research, but the Winans theory is never mentioned; instead, Krassner merely warns O’Neill that the Manson thing can “take over your life.”
And yeah, chasing one red herring after another for twenty years would certainly constitute taking over one’s life. Now, I don’t want to say that Tom O’Neill has wasted his life on a twenty-year quest that brought up no concrete evidence; I mean, surely it wouldn’t be much more of a waste than being married to one’s worst enemy for twenty-plus years. (Just speaking theoretically, of course!) Still though, the helluva it is that many others have trod the same twisted path as O’Neill, but many of them have come up with more believable theories.
For you win a no-prize if you guessed that O’Neill brings in that hoariest of hoary conspiracy theories: MK-Ultra. To his credit, he doesn’t jump right into it, and builds his case…but then it took him ten years of real-time research to get there. It was only after he hit one brick wall after another with the LAPD and the LASO (sheriff’s office). And the threads connecting are tenuous at best; there were shady individuals hanging around at the time, in particular one guy who claimed to be at the Tate house the night of the murders and might have been an undercover CIA agent (or, just as likely, he might have been a bullshit artist), and O’Neill follows the trail to Dr. Jolly, a CIA-funded shrink who was doing LSD research for the Agency in the Haight just when Manson happened to be there, in 1967.
The only problem is, O’Neill can never find anything that ties all of these people together…as if the Agency has a book somewhere titled “How We Used LSD To Brainwash a Group of Hippies Into Killers.” Which, of course, would be placed right next to their book “How We Killed The Kennedys.”
The thing about these alternate Manson theories is that they are no less believable than the Helter Skelter theory. I mean, you can’t claim that it’s unbelievable that Manson’s drug-fueled cult would kill innocents as a way to start a race war, all of it inspired by a Beatles tune…and then come up with an alternate theory involving government spooks and mind control and say that’s more believable.
This is why I say Bugliosi ensured in Helter Skelter that all challengers would immediately be deposed, with the statement that Manson had claimed “No sense makes sense.” Like Frank Barone said on Everybody Loves Raymond, “You can’t argue with a crazy person.” And, to build on that, you can’t expect a crazy person to make sense. This is the problem with O’Neill and the other “myth-busters” of today…they are looking for an explanation for why lunatics hopped up on LSD and God knows what else would randomly butcher people. I mean, it’s kind of like when a Muslim guy runs his truck into people while yelling about “Allah” and the media wonders what his “motive” was.
Then again, that’s the difference between Bugliosi’s day and our modern day. We’re a lot dumber now.
O’Neill does keep the reader’s interest for the majority of the text, in particular in the first half, before Chaos deep dives into arbitrary digressions on MK-Ultra, LSD research, and Federal anti-leftism initiatives (we need to bring those back!!). Just as Bugliosi documented in his own book, there were many mistakes on the part of law enforcement…but O’Neill expands on this by focusing on Bugliosi’s mistakes, many of which appeared to be intentional.
Getting access to police documents that had not been seen since Bugliosi’s day, O’Neill discovers discrepencies thatwould have undermined the entire “Helter Skelter” conceit. Chief among them would be a note in Bugliosi’s own hand from a deposition with biker Danny DeCarlo, who claimed that producer Terry Melcher – the guy who once lived in the Tate home, and thus per the Helter Skelter theory was the guy Manson was trying to send a message to with the Tate killings – visited Manson in the desert after the killings. And indeed even fell to his knees and begged forgiveness. This, clearly, would disprove the Helter Skelter theory…why would Melcher still be visiting (and begging) Manson if the Tate murders had really been meant as a message to him? What makes it all the more curious to O’Neill was that Bugliosi scratched out this statement of DeCarlo’s in his notepad…and never spoke about it with his co-prosecutor, or with the defense team, or indeed ever mentioned it at all.
But here’s the thing…what if DeCarlo was wrong?? I mean folks, we’re talking about a drug-taking biker who hung out with a friggin’ cult, and we’re expecting him to know the exact dates things happened. Hell, we’re expecting him to even be believable! Never once does it occur to O’Neill that DeCarlo might’ve walked back his own statement, realizing he had his dates wrong or hell even had the wrong guy and that it wasn’t even Melcher he saw – hence Bugliosi scratching out the statement.
No, O’Neill at this point has heard that Bugliosi is a “bad guy” and he immediately jumps to the conclusion that the DeCarlo statement is totally valid and Bugliosi didn’t introduce it to the court due to bad intentions. To make it all the more insane, only late in the book does O’Neill have another face-to-face with his “enemy,” Bugliosi…and is deflated when Bugliosi claims he does not even remember this statement, and certainly would have shared it. Again, the impression is he discarded the statement back in the early ‘70s, at the time DeCarlo was giving the statement, and scratched it out in real-time as DeCarlo realized his own story was wrong. “Sorry, man, I think I got the people and the dates wrong, you can scratch that. Hey, you got anymore beer around here?”
O’Neill mainly takes issue with how Charles Manson, a convict with a federal rap, was able to get by with so many crimes – up to and including threatening cops with violence and being caught with underaged girls – but was let go time after time. O’Neill presses the surviving cops and deputies on this (many of whom have died in the time it took O’Neill to write the book), and none of them can give a valid reason…then also there’s Manson’s parole officer, a guy who studied drugs and whatnot and who gave Manson much freer rein than one might expect.
Then there’s the big question, always brushed over in most Manson Family books, of how exactly Charles Manson was able to “brainwash” a group of drug-using losers into murderous psychos. We’re told that the CIA was not able to use LSD to brainwash people, but thanks to his industrious research, O’Neill discovers in the papers of dead Agency contractor Dr. Jolly that the good doctor did indeed succeed in implanting a false memory in someone with LSD and other head-shrink tactics.
But the thing is…O’Neil’s never able to connect all the dots, because he wants concrete evidence. So the reader must infer from the incessant lead-chasing that the government, in order to quash the leftist counterculture movement, implanted CIA-trained doctors in the Haight and other counterculture areas, studied the effects of drugs on people, figured out via field testing how to brainwash them (ie, MK-Ultra), and then used Manson’s groups as guinea pigs, which explains why Manson was able to evade arrest for so long: higher-ups were telling law enforcement that Manson was untouchable. As one of O’Neill’s interviewees states, the Manson scenario was a case of “MK-Ultra gone right.”
All of which, of course, is much more believable than some story about a madman going even more mad after too much LSD and binging the White Album and then sending his loyal followers out to kill randomly, so as to start a race war.
Like so many others have written, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of answering all the mysteries as any other theory does. And as for the leniency Manson was given; the parole office himself states that it was “a different time” in the ‘60s, with a lot more leeway than situations would be given today. Indeed, one might suspect that it was due to Manson himself that such safeguards were even put in place.
Perhaps Paul Krassner should’ve been more direct with Tom O’Neill. It isn’t that the Manson thing can take over your life, it’s more so that you have to keep your common sense about you. If you go around with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My contention is that it isn’t so much “vast conspiracy” as it is people who did a lot of drugs and thus did not operate in what the rest of us construe as “reality.” I mean, go live in the desert for several months and do a bunch of Orange Sunshine every day and you too will probably start to believe that the song “Helter Skelter” is commanding you to start a race war. No sense makes sense.
As for the cops and their various mistakes? Again, read Helter Skelter. Bugliosi makes the law enforcement agencies look like fools, complaining about the very mistakes O’Neill writes about here…but in O’Neill’s opinion, Bugliosi is just as guilty, and we’re often told how the cops disliked him so much. Gee, I wonder why?
Speaking of cops, O’Neill often reminds us that none of the cops who worked on the Tate-LaBianca killings believed in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory. Tellingly, O’Neill never states that any of these cops believe the CIA was behind it, either!
The fact is, we never are given a theory on why the murders happened. This truly is the most frustrating thing about reading Chaos. As mentioned, we make our way through the book waiting for a big revelation, or an explanation of why it all happened…and nothing ever comes of it. We’re even told of a guy who might have been a later victim of the Family, but even that is inconclusive.
To quote a certain failed presidential candidate, “What, at this point, does it even matter?” This is how I felt as I read Chaos, and it’s the same thing Bugliosi even asks O’Neill toward the end of the book. Does it matter if the Family butchered people because they were brainwashed by Manson, or because they were brainwashed by CIA spooks? Did it matter to the victims? Which, by the way, Bugliosi shows much more compassion for; O’Neill even informs us that he “made a mistake” when interviewing a reticent Paul Tate, and in desperation to get the man to speak, O’Neill said, “Think of the victims!” To the father of one of the victims!
I had a similar experience when I read Sticky Fingers; I started to sympathize with the person the author was attacking. In the case of that book it was Jann Werner; here it’s Vincent Bugliosi…that is, until the end of the book, when O’Neill reveals all the many skeletons in Bugliosi’s closet, from stalking a man he suspected of having an affair with his wife to beating up a woman Bugliosi was having an affair with. Certainly not an indication of the man’s quality as a human being, but not really relevant to his abilities as a prosecutor. I mean it’s like saying that just because a guy once made a demeaning, off-hand remark about women, he couldn’t go on to become the greatest president in US history. Right, friends?!
But on that note, O’Neill also catches Bugliosi on another blunder; there’s a confrontation between the two at the start of the book, where Bugliosi slips on something…and by the time (years later) that O’Neill realizes this, he and Bugliosi are enemies and thus he can’t just ask him about the slip. But basically, Bugliosi makes a casual statement about having knowledge of the Manson Family activities at a certain point before they were even arrested, but O’Neill later realizes that Bugliosi is admitting to being aware of Manson et al before he was assigned the prosecution case, which goes against what Bugliosi wrote in Helter Skelter.
And since O’Neill never strings together his unified theory, it goes like this: the CIA used LSD to brainwash people and implant false memories, a project called MK-Ultra; Manson was one of the test subjects, likely being practiced on by Dr. Jolly in the Haight in 1967; the cops were told by the Feds to look the other way; Bugliosi contrived and suppressed evidence to create the hoax “Helter Skelter” storyline to dissuade people from finding out the truth.
And yet these shadowy spooks are the same ones who couldn’t even keep the Iran-Contra deal a secret ten years later. And also, the MK-Ultra angle still doesn’t explain why Sharon Tate and friends, why Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca. O’Neill successfully argues that the Tate hit wasn’t to send a message to Terry Melcher, as Bugliosi claimed, given the wealth of evidence that Manson was well aware that Melcher no longer lived in that house. So then, why? Again, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of explaining why. Even better, in fact!
The major undoing of Chaos is that Tom O’Neill took so long to write it, the book seems behind the times. Given his relentless investigative work, O’Neill tells us, the original 1999 magazine article was dropped, with a book planned for 2009…but he missed that deadline, too. If it had actually come out in 2009 it might have seemed more relevant. As it is, there are a wealth of blogs and sites and Reddit threads about Manson these days that are much more interesting than anything here – the link I gave above, for example, about The Candyman, is more interesting than the entirety of Chaos. But then, those blog runners don’t have to worry about a legal team clearing everything for publication, something which Tom O’Neill definitely had to endure…hence the lack of mention of Charles Winans, I’d imagine.
Speaking of lawsuits, the cynic in me suspects that O’Neill waited twenty years to publish the book because he’s was waiting the clock until many of these people died, and could no longer sue him. I know this sounds callous, but I think it’s very plausible, especially given that Bugliosi straight-up promises O’Neill that he will sue him if he (O’Neill) publishes any of his “lies” about Bugliosi. Well, Bugliosi is gone, now, as are Terry Melcher, Rudy Altobelli, and many of the cops and other figures O’Neill interviewed over the years. No worries about lawsuits now.
O’Neill seems aware that his book has arrived late; he tells us his frustation at seeing many documentaries and books that came out over the years, many of them featuring Bugliosi or even former Family members. This to me was one of the biggest “WTF?” moments in Chaos; given the comprehensive nature of O’Neill’s interviews, tracking down practically everyone he could…it never seems to occur to him to contact the Family members in prison! “Say, Tex, do you remember when Charlie started using MK-Ultra tactics on you in the desert? You don’t?”
But then, shockingly enough, we are told (in the epilogue!!) that O’Neill interviewed Manson himself, I mean the main guy behind it all, but we’re only told in passing at the very end of the book that the interview, conducted long-distance by prison phone, went nowhere due to Manson’s ramblings. And the fact that someone later told O’Neill that Manson didn’t trust him, and would no longer speak to him. But wow…I mean this is how far into the weeds O’Neill got, folks. He didn’t even think to tell us about the whole Manson interview until the book was nearly over.
Well, speaking of “over,” I’ve gone on way too long. Hell, my review is probably the length of the article O’Neill was originally supposed to write for Premiere! And I wrote mine in a few hours, never mind twenty years!! Man, I got the impression from this book that a reporter job must be the next easiest thing to a government job. (Pre-DOGE, of course!)
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