Few incidents in American history have been as meticulously analyzed as the 1969 Manson murders, also known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. And few people know that better than journalist Tom O’Neill, who spent two decades obsessing over the details of Charles Manson and his infamous group of followers known as The Family in hopes of unearthing the true motivations behind the slayings of actress Sharon Tate and others.
In 2019 – the 50th anniversary of the murders – O’Neill published “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties,” an enthralling read that seeks to poke holes in the official narrative of the murders as outlined in the book “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.”
When O’Neill started the project in 1999, his assignment was admittedly less ambitious than a 500-page investigation into one of the country’s most notorious cult leaders and the cultural context that fueled him. At the time, O’Neill was writing for Premiere magazine, which tasked him with reporting a 30th anniversary retrospective looking at the Manson murders’ lingering impact on Hollywood.
American actress Sharon Tate (1943 – 1969), second wife of film director Roman Polanski, in London. She was murdered by followers of Charles Manson the notorious serial killer. (Keystone/Getty Images)
Journalist Tom O’Neill published “Chaos” in 2019, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders. He was only 20 years late on his original deadline. (Provided by William Scalia)
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However, after doing some digging, O’Neill couldn’t help but feel that the story in “Helter Skelter,” published in 1974 by the prosecutor in the Manson trials, Vincent Bugliosi, didn’t add up. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one.
O’Neill details discussions with many people close to the case who agreed that Bugliosi’s telling of the events leading up to the murders in August 1969 – that Manson, high on LSD and inspired by The Beatles’ “White Album,” was anticipating a race war and seeking to move his commune underground in the California desert to wait it out in hopes of later repopulating the planet – seemed inconceivable.
But the information O’Neill uncovered from dozens of interviews, documents and Freedom of Information Act requests doesn’t always appear any more believable.
“It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it?” O’Neill writes.
Part of what makes “Chaos” so compelling is how O’Neill weaves his painstaking journey to report this story into the narrative, allowing readers to follow him to prisons, basement libraries, police stations, the doorsteps of former Family members, and his own robust archive of documents.
Where O’Neill is able to follow a paper trail to back up his claims is equally as intriguing as where he finds an egregious lack of one. By the end of the book, missing files related to Manson or people in his orbit prove par for the course.
Still, O’Neill manages to dig up never-before-reported details about Manson and The Family. As a journalist, it never failed to excite me every time he noted that in the book. Internal musing about the reporting process – how O’Neill prepared for interviews, where he messed up and the doubts he struggled with – also proved cathartic.
But you don’t need to be a career journalist to enjoy “Chaos.” The story will entertain anyone with an interest in true crime, pop culture, music, 1960s psychedelia, the most secret levels of the American government and, yes, conspiracy theories – including a connection to the JFK assassination.
Even an officer within the CIA admitted “O’Neill’s narrative is never uninteresting,” in a review of the book, though the reviewer contested that he revealed anything secret about the 1960s. For the layman, “Chaos” is an informative and breezy page-turner — one I’m already looking forward to reading again.
