Isegoria

Tom O’Neill explores (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) the curious case of Jimmy Shaver:

After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.

His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10: 30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.

Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.” West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.

Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.

Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”

“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.

The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”

West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.

For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.

“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.

He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”

West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

The story of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic is a confusing story to tell, because it involves two Smiths who ran in the same circles, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, and David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the clinic:

David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield, California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town, and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers, always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never get an A if he didn’t go.

Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of 1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol. By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same substance.”

He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them. The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.

When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.

As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long, beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.

In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.

[…]

Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.

David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”

When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they obeyed him unquestioningly.

Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought. Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.

Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me, when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a paranoid speed delusion.”

[…]

Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years, a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a 2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too, took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there, and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his delusions.

Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there, thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever insights about Manson. (“ He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.) “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote. “He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”

[…]

But his remark about Manson’s hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.

In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator, but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”

Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the “messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter whites.

Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”

Roger Smith, the academic who became Charles Manson’s parole officer, may have had ulterior motives, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury:

As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[ I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”

There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.

[…]

To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.

Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.

Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.

Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses.

From the late spring of 1967 to June 1968, Manson lived in Haight-Ashbury, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), the hotbed of the counterculture:

Given how often Manson is characterized as a curdled hippie—a perversion of the principles of free love—you’d think his year in the Haight would attract more attention. It was the crucible in which his identity was forged. He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader. It was in the Haight that he began to use LSD. He learned how to attract weak, susceptible people, and how to use drugs to keep them under his thumb. And he internalized the psychological methods that would make his followers do anything for him. This would’ve been all but impossible without Roger Smith.

The two came together in a roundabout way. Manson had been released from Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles County on March 21, 1967. He’d served seven and a half years for forging a government check. When he stepped out that day, he was thirty-two, and he’d spent nearly half his life in prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Bugliosi would marvel in Helter Skelter, prison supervisors had largely assessed Manson as nonviolent. Though he’d faced juvenile convictions of armed robbery and homosexual rape, and had beaten his wife, these didn’t add up, in the eyes of the state, to a “sustained history of violence.” Nor, as Bugliosi noted, did they fit the profile of a mass murderer in 1969.

Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level. Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than five years, versus seventeen.

Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California.

Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.

[…]

The Haight had introduced him to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein’s provocative 1961 sci-fi novel. Manson was obsessed with the book. He carried a worn copy with him at all times, and though he was barely literate, he seemed to grasp the nuances of its dense narrative and its invented language.

There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so that he named his first child after him. Roger Smith got a nickname from Manson, too: “Jubal Harshaw,” the most important character in the hero’s life, his lawyer, teacher, protector, and spiritual guide on Earth.

The plot of Stranger in a Strange Land has eerie parallels to Manson’s rise, so much so that, after the murders, fans of the novel went out of their way to disavow Manson’s connection to it. Valentine Michael, a human raised on Mars, is endowed with hypnotic powers. He descends to Earth to foster a new and perfect race. Guarded by Jubal, he assembles a “nest” with about twenty others, almost all women, whom he initiates through sex. He demands that his followers surrender their egos to him in a spirit of total submission. They worship the innocence of children and yearn to exist in a state of such pure consciousness that they can communicate telepathically. The group sleeps and eats together; one of their most sacred rituals is the act of “sharing water,” which takes on vaguely druggy undertones. In Valentine Michael’s philosophy, there is no death, only “discorporation”; killing people saves their souls, giving them a second chance through reincarnation. The group begins to discorporate their enemies with impunity. In time, Valentine Michael draws strength from the “nest” and, like Christ, saves the world.

After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”

[…]

Manson had been assigned to him as a part of the so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons. When Manson arrived in the Bay Area in March 1967, he was attached to the program—and to Roger Smith.

Manson’s participation in the San Francisco Project has never been reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful bond—because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average parole officer would. The project studied the relationship between federal parolees and their supervisors; researchers wanted to know how varying degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates. The six participating parole officers, all of whom had advanced degrees in criminology, were assigned one of three caseloads: “normal,” averaging about one hundred clients; “ideal,” numbering forty clients; or “intensive,” twenty clients.

Roger Smith fell into the middle group. He met with his clients once a week, per project guidelines. But at some point, his “ideal” caseload became even more intense than his colleagues’ “intensives.” By the end of ’67, he’d winnowed his set of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.

I was shocked that Manson had become Smith’s one and only client, but I could never figure out why. Hoping to learn more, I interviewed Smith’s research assistant from that time, Gail Sadalla. Although Smith had assured me that he’d never met Manson before becoming his parole officer, Sadalla had a different recollection. Smith told her in 1968 that Manson became his charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was stunned.

“He didn’t remember that?” she asked. “I’m surprised… It was always my understanding. That’s why there was this connection.”

[…]

As a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, Roger Smith studied the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang members. In April 1967, the study had seen enough success to merit a press conference. As the New York Times reported, Smith and his colleagues had found that a gang’s drug use, rather than “mellowing them out,” more often triggered violent behavior. The students wanted to distinguish between gang members who fell into violence because of inherent sociopathic tendencies and those who became sociopathic because of drugs.

Smith conducted research through his own “immersion.” He and the other researchers created “outposts” in the Oakland slums, hanging around at community centers and churches, befriending gang members under less-than-transparent circumstances. They embraced a “participant-observer” approach to social research, which Smith would further incorporate into his methods in the years to come.

By 1967, Smith was regarded as an expert on gangs, collective behavior, violence, and drugs. Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs.

Smith described himself to me as a “rock-ribbed Republican”—he never struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture. And yet it was his idea, he admitted, to send Manson to live in the Haight. He hoped that Manson could “soak up” some of the “vibes” of the peace and love movement exploding in the district that summer. Maybe it would allay some of Manson’s hostility.

[…]

It was a concerted, grassroots effort to reject middle-class morality. But where some saw earthshaking radicalism, others saw only Dionysian excess. George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. A press release for the Human Be-In, a sprawling gathering a few months before Manson came to town, gives a sense of the era’s transformative rhetoric: “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old… Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”

When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting the folkways and postures of the flower children. Once he landed in the Haight, he dropped acid on a daily basis. It took just one trip to foment the most abrupt change that Roger Smith had ever witnessed in one of his charges. Manson “seemed to accept the world” after LSD, Smith wrote. Seemingly overnight, he transformed himself into an archetypal hippie, his worldview suddenly inflected with spiritualism. He grew out his hair and played guitar in the street, panhandling and scrounging for food. Although only in his early thirties, he presented himself as a father figure, attracting young, down-and-out men and women as they embarked on the spiritual quest that had led them to the Haight.

[…]

It would be surprising if Smith didn’t know that his ward was breaking the law—a lot. But he had only praise for his sole client. “Mr. Manson has made excellent progress,” he wrote in one of several reports he made to the head parole office in Washington, D.C. “He appears to be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.”

Smith wrote those words on July 31, 1967. At the time, Manson was sitting in a jail cell. A few days earlier, in Ukiah, he’d been convicted of interfering with a police officer in the line of duty—a felony. He’d been trying to prevent the arrest of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, one of his newly recruited underage girls. Though the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, Manson was given a thirty-day suspended sentence and three years’ probation.

]…]

Instead of being sent back to prison, Manson, who’d been out for only four months then, was back on the streets again in a few days.

That incident continued the distressing pattern of amnesty that Roger Smith could never explain. In part, Smith benefited, and continues to benefit, from a veil of secrecy. Manson’s complete parole file has never been released. It wasn’t even permitted into evidence during the trial. During the death-penalty phase, the defense’s Irving Kanarek had subpoenaed the file, hoping he could use some part of it to argue for his client’s life. Not only did the United States Attorney General, John Mitchell, refuse to release it, he dispatched David Anderson, an official from the Justice Department, to aid Bugliosi in his effort to quash the subpoena.

[…]

The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after exhaustive FOIA appeals) by the federal Parole Commission represent only a sliver of Manson’s total file, which was described as “four inches thick” at his trial. Still, those pages have enough raw data to show that during Manson’s first fourteen months of freedom in San Francisco—months during which he attracted the followers that became the Family—he was given virtual immunity from parole revocation by Roger Smith. Under Smith’s supervision, Manson was repeatedly arrested and even convicted without ever being sent back to prison. It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his client’s violations to his supervisors.

In interviews with me, Smith claimed not to have known about Manson’s conviction in Ukiah, even though it had occurred under his watch. In fact, in the same July 1967 letter that should have mentioned Manson’s conviction—the letter that lauded his “excellent progress”—Smith requested permission for Manson to travel to Mexico, where he would’ve been totally unsupervised, for a gig with a hotel band. (Smith failed to note the fact that Manson had been arrested in Mexico in 1959, resulting in his deportation to the United States and the revocation of his federal probation.)

“Manson is not to leave the Northern District of California,” the parole board responded, noting that Manson’s “history does not mention any employment as musician,” and that his record was “lengthy and serious.”

And yet, two weeks later, Smith tried again—he really wanted to send Manson to Mexico. He told the parole board that Manson had been offered a second job there by “a general distributor for the Perma-Guard Corporation of Phoenix Arizona named Mr. Dean Moorehouse,” who wanted Manson to survey “the market for insecticides, soil additives and mineral food supplements.” Smith neglected to mention that Moorehouse was on probation—regulations barred associations between parolees and probationers—and one of Manson’s newest recruits, the father of the fifteen-year-old whose arrest Manson had tried to prevent three weeks earlier.

The parole board rejected this second request, too. Interestingly, at the same time Smith made these requests, he’d launched a criminological study of Mexican drug trafficking for the federal government. He’d attempted to send Manson to Mazatlán, which was the main port city of Sinaloa, the drug trafficking capital of Central America in the 1960s.

[…]

After those two Mexico requests, Smith generated only two more documents regarding Manson for another five months. Both were simple form letters authorizing Manson to travel to Florida to meet with “recording agents.”

Those interested me for several reasons. First, they violated Smith’s orders from Washington—he was to forbid Manson from leaving the Northern District of California under any circumstances. Second, Smith had postdated them, suggesting that he wrote them after Manson had already left town, safeguarding him from another potential violation. And third, there’s no sign that Manson and the Family ever actually went to Florida. If they went anywhere, the only available evidence suggests, it was to Mexico.

Smith’s letters are from November 1967. On the very day that Susan Atkins’s probation officers were frantically trying to prevent her from traveling, she, Manson, and the others were pulling out of San Francisco in their big yellow bus with permission from Roger Smith.

Manson was required to send postcards to Smith; there’s no record that he did. Later, probation reports noted that Atkins and Mary Brunner had said they spent quite a bit of time in Mexico with Manson that winter. Otherwise, their whereabouts for November and December 1967 are entirely unaccounted for.

[…]

I knew there had to be more papers from Smith’s time as Manson’s parole officer. Remember, under oath at the trial, Barrett had described Manson’s parole file as “about four inches thick.” I asked the Parole Commission spokesperson, Pamela A. Posch, how it could have been reduced to what I’d been told was only 138 pages, and why I could see only 69 of these, extensively redacted. The Bureau of Prisons “apparently did not retain all of the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson,” Posch wrote, conceding that this was unusual. The bureau had a policy to preserve the files of “notorious felons” for history’s sake. Manson was about as notorious as a felon could be.

[…]

In April 1968, Smith’s carelessness blew up in his face when, yet again, Manson was arrested. And there was no covering it up this time—too many papers had gotten the story. When Smith’s colleagues at the parole office read about it, they flipped out and tried to do what Smith hadn’t: send Manson back to prison.

The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Other papers picked up the news, too. Their articles were the first to describe what the world would soon know as the Manson Family.

The Times staff writer Charles Hillinger described an Oxnard deputy on a late-night patrol who stumbled on a broken-down bus in a ditch by the Pacific Coast Highway. When he saw the bodies scattered in the weeds—nine women, five men—he thought they were dead. Then he realized they were only sleeping. After running a check on the bus’s tags, he learned it had been reported stolen from Haight-Ashbury. Waking the group, he told them to get dressed and wait for the county bus he’d ordered, which would take them all to jail. Before they left, one of the women (later identified as Mary Brunner) said, “Wait, my baby’s on the bus.” She went back to pick up her child, then only a week old. He was sick, with grime and open sores all over his body.

The article identified the “self-proclaimed leader of the band of wanderers” as Charles Manson, adding that he was booked on suspicion of grand theft. Brunner was charged with endangering the life of a child. She was later convicted and received two years’ probation.

Within several days, the chief of the San Francisco probation office, Albert Wahl, was alerted to an article about the arrest in the Oakland Tribune: “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside Wayward Bus.” Of course, one of those hippies was a parolee under his office’s supervision.

Before her murder trial, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Susan Atkins somehow ended up telling her story to reporters:

Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk to me, either, and Jerry Cohen had died by his own hand, in 1993. Looking into those two men, I found that throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements. In ’67, Schiller had published the first book to attack the conspiracy theorists around John F. Kennedy’s assassination, staunchly supporting the official explanation for JFK’s death. That same year, foreshadowing his feat at Sybil Brand, Schiller wormed his way into the Dallas hospital room of Jack Ruby, who’d killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The reporter emerged with the only recording ever made of Ruby’s confessing to the murder. Schiller released it on vinyl that year. Notably, he’d taped Ruby saying that he hadn’t killed Oswald as part of a conspiracy, thus shoring up the government’s official line.

During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed. Mark Lane, who’d written the first book questioning the findings of the Warren Commission—the investigative committee appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin—believed Schiller was one of those assets, and Jerry Cohen, too. Lane believed they’d been tasked with disrupting investigations of the Kennedy assassination. In testimony before Congress, Lane charged that the CIA had paid Cohen to “smear” him in the press.

I could never prove that, but I did find a trove of documents in the National Archives showing that Schiller had been acting as an informant for the FBI in 1967 and 1968, sharing confidential information with the Bureau about Mark Lane’s sources. His work as an informant continued under the cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977 Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees with cover. Schiller tracked down authorities who were investigating potential malfeasance in the Kennedy assassination, using his press credentials to obtain interviews and then sharing his findings with the FBI. He’d written to J. Edgar Hoover to say that he was “in possession of the names and whereabouts of [the] confidential informant whom Mr. [Mark] Lane refused to identify” in his testimony to the Warren Commission. Schiller dug up information about officials looking into the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. According to memos, the FBI eagerly awaited Schiller’s information. Others had made similar claims about Cohen and Schiller. Pete Noyes, a TV investigative reporter who’d written a book on the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, said that Cohen, a friend, had pressured him to abandon the project. If Noyes dropped the publication of the book, Cohen promised him a plum job at the Los Angeles Times. Noyes declined the offer, but he was disturbed by how much Cohen knew about his unpublished work. A few weeks later, he was fired from his job at CBS News. Cohen was “a strange little guy,” Noyes told me. He wondered why his onetime friend tried to quash his book, and he suspected that Cohen had played a role in his firing, too. Although he could never prove it, Noyes was fairly certain that Cohen was a CIA asset.

Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, was just back from vacation, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in early September, 1969:

The horrors of the Tate–LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to,” he said.

[…]

In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies [from the Manson “family”] sat in the cramped county jail [for auto theft]. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the Hinman murder.

[…]

Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, in downtown Los Angeles.

Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and sticky and nice.”

The most promising but frustrating of his inquiries, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), concerned an LAPD officer named William W. Herrmann:

Herrmann’s story hints at how intelligence agencies may have collaborated with police in Los Angeles.

A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,” praising his technical aptitude in particular.

[…]

Concurrent with his time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Most of his work for these groups remains classified.

You’d think these projects wouldn’t have left much free time, but Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the LAPD to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic names like Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp., and Control Data Corp. This last, a supercomputer development firm in Minneapolis with military contracts, relied on Herrmann’s services for ten years, from 1961 to ’71—or so Herrmann told the FBI. When the Bureau went to Control Data Corp. for a background check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for them.

[…]

Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history.

Lyndon Johnson had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71.

[…]

During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion.

[…]

In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.

According to Seymour Hersh’s 1972 book, Cover-Up, Phoenix had “committees” set up across all forty-four provinces in South Vietnam. They kept blacklists of Viet Cong fighters and had strict orders to meet weekly or monthly quotas of “neutralizations.” The whole operation relied on computerized indexes. The identity of its CIA leader never came to light—but whoever he was, he was there ostensibly as part of the Agency for International Development (AID), later revealed as a CIA front.

[…]

Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.—his work in California bore disturbing resemblances to the techniques he’d honed as part of the Phoenix project.

[…]

Herrmann didn’t give many interviews, but when he spoke to the London Observer’s Charles Foley in May 1970, he was apparently in a voluble mood. Discussing his work for the task force, he described a program of spying and infiltration far exceeding the “studies” that the group was committed to—his words sounded as if they’d been lifted from COINTELPRO and CHAOS manuals. (Both of those operations, of course, were well under way in Los Angeles.)

Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply, “Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ ing] as students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”

[…]

I found a letter that Compton wrote to Herrmann on March 14, 1969, five months before the Tate–LaBianca murders, thanking him for “obtaining good advance intelligence… on subversives and militants.” The two had served together on the LAPD in the fifties, so I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other. I was surprised that Compton had written a note that all but proved that he and Herrmann were operating beyond their remit for the State of California. Neither man had any business gathering “advance intelligence” on “subversives and militants”—or on anyone else, for that matter. The DA’s office was supposed to prosecute crimes, not prevent them. And Herrmann, in his strenuous correction to the London Observer article, had stressed that his role was “nonoperational.”

Tyler Cowen cites “the new and interesting” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, by Jens Ludwig:

An estimated 80 percent [of U.S.gun shootings] seem to instead be crimes of passion — including rage.  They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t, then end in tragedy because someone has a gun.  Most violent crimes are the result of human behavior gone temporarily haywire, not premeditated acts for financial benefit.

I can’t be sure if his surprise is feigned or sincere.