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The Manson murders, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), were not the first Manson murders:

The Tate–LaBianca murders are etched into the public imagination. They are, in casual conversation, what people mean when they say “the Manson murders”: two nights of unhinged bloodshed that came out of nowhere.

It’s too often forgotten that the Family had taken another life by then. Gary Hinman, thirty-four, lived in a secluded house in Topanga Canyon, a hippie community about fifteen miles south of the Spahn Ranch. A soft-spoken Buddhist and music teacher, Hinman had treated Manson and his followers with a dignity that few afforded them. He hosted members of the Family for long stays in his home, and he was generous when they needed food or money.

In July 1969, the increasingly agitated Manson was convinced that Hinman had just come into an inheritance of some twenty thousand dollars. Seeing green, he ordered three of his followers—Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins, the last of whom would later participate in the Tate–LaBianca murders—to seize Hinman’s money by any means necessary.

The three showed up at Hinman’s on July 25. Manson was wrong, he said, there was no inheritance, but they refused to take him at his word. They tied him up and ransacked the place, but there was no cash to be found. Manson decided to see for himself, coming over with Bruce Davis, another Family member. But even Manson couldn’t extract anything from Hinman. Finally, incensed, Manson drew a saber from a sheath on his belt and cut Hinman’s ear in half. He and Davis left the house, but he told Beausoleil and the girls to stay until they found the money.

For two days, they battered and tortured Hinman, who insisted he had no inheritance. (They also sewed up his severed ear using dental floss.) By day three, Manson had had enough—he wanted Hinman dead. Over the phone, he ordered his followers to take care of it. Beausoleil tied Hinman up and stabbed him at least four times. As Hinman incanted a Buddhist prayer, Atkins and Brunner took turns holding a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing. Just as Manson would do in the Tate–LaBianca murders, he told his followers to leave signs implicating the Black Panthers. They dipped a rag in Hinman’s blood and smeared the words “political piggy” on the living room wall, surrounding it with bloody paw prints.

[…]

Although no one had seen or spoken to Hinman in the days before his body was discovered, it seemed that a woman had been in his house answering the phone during his captivity. At one point, when a friend of Hinman stopped by, she’d even answered his front door, holding a candle and explaining in a flimsy British accent that Hinman had gone to Colorado to see his parents.

The detectives issued an all-points bulletin for two vehicles missing from Hinman’s driveway: a Fiat station wagon and a VW microbus. Seven days after the body was discovered, the Fiat turned up on the side of a highway in San Luis Obispo, 189 miles north of L.A. Inside was Bobby Beausoleil, fast asleep. A state trooper took him into custody, and Guenther and Whiteley hurried to question him.

Beausoleil had concocted a story that blamed the Black Panthers for the murder, but he kept muddling the details. First he said that he hadn’t known Hinman at all; he’d bought the Fiat from a Black Panther a few days earlier. When the police told him they’d found the murder weapon in the Fiat’s tire well, he half-confessed: sure, he’d been in Hinman’s home, but he hadn’t killed the man. He and two women, neither of whom he would identify, had arrived at the house to find Hinman bloodied and beaten, complaining that a group of Black Panthers had robbed him. They’d stayed and nursed Hinman back to health. As a sign of gratitude, Hinman gave them the Fiat. The murder, Beausoleil speculated, must have occurred after he and the girls left the house—maybe the Panthers had returned seeking more money. So why was the knife in his car? He couldn’t explain. Nor could he say why he’d suddenly changed his story.

[…]

Anyone might wonder: How could the police fail to connect Hinman’s murder to the Tate–LaBianca killings, given their macabre similarities?

[…]

On August 16, 1969, LASO descended on the Spahn Ranch en masse. Just past six in the morning, as the sun was creeping up and most everyone was still asleep, more than one hundred officers swarmed the property, led by the organization’s elite SWAT team. Armed with handguns, AR-15 rifles, and tear gas, they were assisted by two helicopters, numerous ATVs, and a fleet of some thirty-five squad cars. Surrounding the ranch’s two hundred acres, they descended from five prearranged outposts with a show of force the likes of which no one in LASO had ever seen before. They arrested everyone in the Family—twenty-seven adults and seven juveniles. They confiscated seven stolen cars and a vast cache of weapons, including an automatic pistol and a submachine gun. One officer praised the raid’s military precision, telling me, “It was the most flawlessly executed operation I’d ever been involved in.”

The raid had nothing to do with the murders. In the preceding weeks, deputies had been keeping the ranch under close surveillance, perhaps even sending undercover agents to investigate. They suspected that Manson was running an auto-theft ring out of Spahn, stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies.

[…]

But the Family wasn’t charged. Despite the preponderance of evidence—the cars, the guns, the numerous sightings of Manson and his followers with stolen vehicles—the entire group was released three days after the raid, no questions asked. Bugliosi explained it in Helter Skelter: “They had been arrested on a misdated warrant.”

[…]

Guillory’s thesis was this: Manson had gotten away with far too much at the Spahn Ranch in the months before the murders. Even though he was a federal parolee, Manson had no job; he had ready access to drugs, alcohol, and underage girls; he had a cache of firearms. And LASO officers knew all about it. At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said. Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”

And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the Family were committing, they were never apprehended, and Manson never had his parole revoked. There was even an occasion where Manson was picked up by LASO police for statutory rape, but they ended up cutting him loose.

Even as the station instituted this hands-off policy, they kept a close watch over Manson. Guillory was sure that LASO’s intelligence unit, or some other intelligence unit, was running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch. He alluded to memos about Manson—with cover sheets to protect against prying eyes—that went straight to the station captain, and who knows where after that. Guillory didn’t think the surveillance “was just a local thing.”

Then came the murder of Gary Hinman, and soon after it the Tate–LaBianca murders. How had LASO failed to see this coming? They’d been monitoring Manson constantly. Guillory theorized that the massive August 16 raid on the Spahn Ranch was LASO’s effort to cover its tracks after the murders. Calling it “the biggest circus I’ve ever been involved in,” he marveled at the fact that all the charges had been dropped seventy-two hours later. Something didn’t add up about the raid—all that force, all those arrests, for nothing? It was “like we were doing something perhaps a week late to show that we had really been watching,” he said on the radio.

But that raised a bunch of problems. If the sheriff’s office was surveilling Manson before the raid, it would’ve known enough to bring him in for the murders. If it wasn’t watching him, then how had it amassed enough evidence to get the search warrant authorizing the raid?

When the LAPD held a self-congratulatory press conference to announce that Manson and his group were suspects in the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory decided to become a whistle-blower. He went to a news station, KCAL, and told them everything he knew, thinking the press would be all over this story. They hardly touched it. Worse, the leak cost him his job: LASO’s internal affairs department got wind of his remarks and sent him packing.

After his departure, LASO did all it could to discredit him. An internal memo said that no one should discuss his previous employment there. It implied that he was a drug addict and an unrepentant leftist bent on smearing the office’s reputation.

[…]

“We were told not to bother these people,” he told me, referring to the Family. The order came in a memo from his captain. “Tell him whatever we saw or heard, that was one of the first things that I was told when I got to Malibu.” Peter Pitchess, the sheriff of Los Angeles County at the time, was “memo-minded,” Guillory explained. He exerted immense authority—and that authority extended to his officers’ conduct with Manson. “We were asked to generate memos every time we had contact with any member of the Family,” Guillory said.

Despite this intense period of information gathering, Manson was never charged when he was arrested. Why was a law-breaking parolee allowed to go free? “A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets. My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason—I don’t know.” It was “very unusual” that someone with a record like Manson’s would be left on the streets.

The shock of the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory thought, forced the sheriff’s office to hide its own intelligence-gathering efforts. If Manson were guilty of homicide, “How could anybody possibly say we let him on the streets?” There would’ve been civil liability issues. Careers would have been destroyed. And, of course, it would’ve cost Pitchess the next election.

But that didn’t explain why the police allowed Manson to go free for another three months after the Tate murders, knowing he could have killed more people. Why not just arrest him right away, and keep their surveillance program quiet?

Guillory had no idea—he’d been asking himself the same question. All he knew was “that Manson was under some kind of loose surveillance by our department or somebody else. We know he’s being watched by somebody, but we don’t know who. The thing is this—if he was under surveillance, those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven homicides… why was there no intervention?” He added that there was no legal obligation for LASO to intervene; they could’ve chosen to let the murders pass without action, if Manson were so important that they didn’t want to risk interrupting their surveillance.

Guillory was fairly confident that someone from LASO knew right away that the Family had committed those murders. “Probably someone saw them come and go and there’s a log entry someplace and then, of course, later they found where they went and all hell would’ve broken loose.”

Plus, he reiterated, LASO never could have launched such an extraordinary raid without sound intelligence—enough to persuade a judge to grant a search warrant. “You don’t mount a raid without surveillance like this!” he said. More infuriating still: none of it stuck. The sheriff’s office went to all that effort for nothing. And it didn’t have to be that way, Guillory was sure. “We did find evidence of enough criminal activity—stolen property, narcotics—to violate [Manson’s] parole in the first place. It was astounding! I never could figure out why he was released.” Guillory had been part of the operation that day, and he remembered finding stolen purses, wallets, and pocketbooks with IDs—all damning evidence, and all seemingly ignored. After the raid, he said, the surveillance ended, as mysteriously as it had started.

In another interview, with the writer Paul Krassner, Guillory explained, “It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought… There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary.” He speculated that Manson was never arrested “because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers.” Their intelligence had revealed that Manson had shot Bernard Crowe, whom he mistakenly believed to be a Black Panther, in July, and this apparently convinced LASO that Manson “was going to launch an attack” on the whole organization.

Of Guillory’s many outrageous claims, this one was maybe the hardest to swallow—but, again, he stuck by it when I asked him. “I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on,” he said. “Cause a stir, blame it on the Panthers… I’ve got to believe he was involved, based on all info we have. Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.”

When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone, disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost him his job.

[…]

And the police had already shown a willingness to look the other way. The search warrant related an incident from an Officer Williams of the LAPD. He told Deputy Gleason that

within the last two weeks he and his partner were on duty at the Spahn Ranch… Mr. Manson was bragging to the officers about the weapons available to him and his friends at the Ranch. Mr. Manson told the officers that while he was talking to the officers that his friends had rifles trained on the officers… this is standard procedure whenever officers approach the Ranch.

Manson had flouted the law and bragged about it to LAPD officers as he had his followers train rifles on them—something else, incidentally, not reported in Helter Skelter.

Manson’s cavalier, taunting behavior continued. Elsewhere in the warrant, the LAPD’s Ted Leigh said he had found three loaded ammunition clips for a carbine that “fell from a dune buggy while on the highway” sometime on or around July 29. Leigh soon heard from Manson himself, who said the ammunition was his and that he would stop by and pick it up.

So Manson, a paroled ex-con with a known history of violence, had simply called up the cops and asked them if he could come collect the ammunition he’d lost? And he’d done this a little more than a week before the Tate–LaBianca murders. Manson, the warrant noted, had been “mentioned in prior memos,” which fit with Guillory’s insistence that police knew how dangerous he was.

Whether that awareness was the result of surveillance was an open question. The warrant explained that LASO deputies had cultivated an informant at the ranch, someone who “has seen guns in practically every building on the property. The informant was also threatened by Charles Manson.” And there was extensive reconnaissance by the same Officer Leigh, who “flew over the Spahn Movie Ranch approximately August 1, 1969, and… observed a 1969 Volkswagen laying [sic] in a ditch.” How often did the LAPD use planes to investigate car theft? Why were they flying over the ranch, which was out of their jurisdiction?

[…]

I found a one-page arrest report for Manson dated August 16, the day of the raid. In addition to the stolen cars and weapons, the arresting officer wrote that Manson had four stolen credit cards in his possession that day: they “fell out of his shirt pocket” when he was taken into custody. This had never been reported before.

In summary: Manson, the known federal parolee, walked away from an arrest that caught him with stolen cars and credit cards, an arsenal of weapons, and underage runaways. And meanwhile, two of the LASO’s best homicide detectives failed to realize that the biggest raid in California history was going down at the very same ranch that their murder suspect had called.

Bugliosi, you may recall, had chalked up the failure to a simple mistake—the search warrant was “misdated.” But now that I had it in my hands, I saw no evidence of any misdating. The warrant was clearly dated August 13, 1969. According to the California penal code, a warrant is good for ten days after its date. The raid was completely legal on August 16, a fact I verified with many police and attorneys.

[…]

[Lewis Watnick, the former head deputy DA of Van Nuys] spent a while reading my documents in silence, and then he sighed. “Chicken shit!” he croaked. “This is all a bunch of chicken shit.” The size of the raid; the fact that the DA’s office kept releasing Manson when they had enough evidence to charge him, or at least violate his parole… “It dovetails right in,” he said. “Manson was an informant.”

It was only a guess, he conceded, but an educated one, based on his thirty years in the job. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the theory. One of my LASO sources had wondered if Manson “had his finger in a bigger pie.” Having been in the office’s intelligence division, he’d seen stuff like this before. “What happens in those situations is either he’s giving up somebody bigger than himself or he’s on somebody else’s list as far as a snitch, or he’s ratting out other people.” And if he were informing for someone else, the DEA or the feds, no one in the LASO would know about it, necessarily. Robert Schirn, the DA who authorized the raid only to dismiss the charges, had made the same suggestion: “Another possibility, sheer speculation, is that [Manson] may have been an informant for somebody.” But LASO deputies had all denied it.

“Of course,” Watnick said when I told him that. “Confidential informant means they’re confidential.”

On March 23, 1969, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), a desperate Charles Manson went searching for Terry Melcher, thinking he’d goad the producer into a record deal:

He found his way back to the house at Cielo Drive, having remembered that Melcher lived there. Instead, Sharon Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami, intercepted him. Hatami had never heard of a Terry Melcher. He told Manson to go to the guesthouse and ask the owner of the property, Rudolph Altobelli, who explained curtly that Melcher no longer lived there and hadn’t left a forwarding address.

Manson prevailed on Gregg Jakobson — still a friend, and still a fan of the girls — to book another session with Melcher. This time, it worked. That May, Melcher made the winding drive to the Spahn Ranch and auditioned Manson in person, visiting twice over four days.

Manson had rounded out a dozen or so of his best songs with backup singing from the girls. Performing in a gully in the woods, the girls sprawled on the ground and gazed up at their leader, who sat astride a rock with his guitar. “I wasn’t too impressed by the songs,” Melcher would later testify. “I was impressed by the whole scene… by Charlie’s strength, and his obvious leadership.” As a courtesy, the producer complimented Manson, saying that one or two of his songs were “nice.” He had no intention of offering a recording contract, but he saw how the Family’s rustic, cultish lifestyle would lend itself to a TV documentary. Melcher suggested that his friend Mike Deasy, whose van was outfitted to make field recordings, could come out to the ranch and capture another performance.

Before Melcher could get out of there, a foreman at the ranch came stumbling out of a pickup truck. Drunk and belligerent, he was dressed like a cowboy, fingering a holstered gun—the same one that would later be used at the Tate murders. Manson stepped up to him and shouted, “Don’t draw on me, motherfucker!” socking him in the gut, taking his gun, and continuing to pummel him.

It spooked Melcher. Here was a peace-and-love cult with naked girls roaming the old Western sets, and yet the constant threat of violence loomed over the place. It needed to be documented in all its oddity. A few days later, Melcher returned with Deasy and Jakobson, and the Family repeated their audition. But what had seemed spontaneous now felt rehearsed. Deasy returned a few more times, until he had a frightening LSD trip with Manson and vowed never to go back.

[…]

Bob April, a retired carpenter who’d been a fringe member of the Family, told me with confidence that Manson “would supply girls” for “executive parties” that Melcher threw, giving well-heeled business types unfettered access to Manson’s girls. But what would Manson get in return?

“That’s why everyone got killed,” April said. “He didn’t get what he wanted.” Melcher had promised Manson a record deal “on Day Labels,” his mother’s imprint. But Doris Day took one look at Manson “and laughed at him and said, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to produce a fucking record for you.’ Said it to Charlie’s face.” Melcher and Manson “knew each other very well,” April said. “I’ve tried to get this out for years.”

The “overwintering” team of nine people at the South African National Antarctic Programme base is ten months from rescue and 2,500 miles from home:

Members of the team, a researcher wrote, were living in fear not because of the hostile conditions, but because one of their number had attacked them. This person, the author added, was a threat to the entire team.

The message, shared with South Africa’s Sunday Times, pleaded for rescue. It said: “Regrettably, [his] behaviour has escalated to a point that is deeply disturbing. Specifically, he physically assaulted [name withheld], which is a grave violation of personal safety and workplace norms.”

Neither the author nor the person accused of wrongdoing have been named. The letter added: “Furthermore, he threatened to kill [name withheld], creating an environment of fear and intimidation. I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim.”

The team member was also accused of sexually assaulting another researcher. “His behaviour has become increasingly egregious, and I am experiencing significant difficulty in feeling secure in his presence,” the letter said. “It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees.”

[…]

The first Sanae base was established in 1959. South Africa also formally administers two islands between the country and Antarctica, Prince Edward and Marion, where it has a research station. In 2017, an “unstable” team member on Marion Island was reported to have attacked a colleague in the kitchen with a frying pan and destroyed his room with an axe.

Without Terry Melcher, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), there would have been no murders at 10050 Cielo Drive:

He was the clearest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. A music-industry bigwig, he’d promised Manson a record deal only to renege on it. The official story was that Manson, reeling from the rejection, wanted to “instill fear” in Melcher — so he chose Melcher’s old house on Cielo Drive as the site for the first night of murders. He knew that Melcher didn’t live there anymore. He just wanted to give the guy a good scare.

[…]

Melcher testified that he’d met Manson exactly three times, the last of which was around May 20, 1969, more than two months before the murders. After Manson’s arrest, Melcher became so frightened of the Family that Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer to relax him before he testified. “Ten, fifteen years after the murders I’d speak to him and he was still convinced that the Manson Family was after him that night,” Bugliosi had told me.

If Manson had wanted to kill Melcher, he could have. He had Melcher’s new address in Malibu. Gregg Jakobson, a musician and a friend of the Beach Boys, had testified at the trial that Manson called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass.”

“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.

“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Manson said. The Family had “creepy-crawled” Melcher’s Malibu home — that’s what they called it when they dressed up in black and sneaked around rich people’s places — and stolen the spyglass. When Melcher himself testified, he confirmed that he’d noticed it missing around “late July or early August.” Candice Bergen, his girlfriend, had noted the disappearance, too.

The suspect who opened fire at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin is a 15-year-old girl, but 97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 were male:

In 2006, a former U.S. Postal Service employee fatally shot six people at a postal facility in Goleta, Calif., before taking her own life. Authorities said writings later found at the home of the woman, who had struggled with mental illness, indicated she believed she was threatened by a conspiracy involving postal employees.

In 2018, a woman with an apparent grudge against YouTube opened fire at the company’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, wounding several people before fatally shooting herself.

That same year, a temporary employee fatally shot three people — and then themself — at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Md. While authorities and some friends initially identified the perpetrator as female, some media outlets later reported they had started identifying as transgender in the years before the shooting.

Women were also part of pairs that carried out shootings, like the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and the 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J.

An infamous school shooting perpetrated by a woman happened in January 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer fired out of the window of her San Diego home at children arriving at the elementary school across the street.

Nine children and two adults — the principal and janitor — were killed in the attack.

Steve Wiegand, a reporter with the San Diego Evening Tribune, began randomly calling homes near Grover Cleveland Elementary School to talk to potential eyewitnesses. He connected first with Spencer, and after talking for a while, got the sense the shots had come from her house. Wiegand asked why she did it.

“She said ‘Because I just don’t like Mondays. Do you like Mondays? You know, it just livens up the day,’ ” he recalled.

On the other side of the country, Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Irish new wave band Boomtown Rats, was being interviewed at a radio station in Atlanta when he saw a news story about the incident come across the wires.

Struck by Spencer’s phrasing, he went back to his hotel room and penned “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The song, released in July 1979, spent four weeks at the top of the singles chart in the United Kingdom.

Sharon Tate was right to be wary of Polanski’s circle, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Pic Dawson, who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party, had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as 1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest — she’d been caught stealing hotel towels and keys — was actually a ruse to force her to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.

According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan — all twenty-seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot — were joined by a fourth partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any crime — and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal on his record.

[…]

As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.

[…]

Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book you’re looking at.

[…]

In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am high… I am really out of my bird.”

He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that he was dealing with some wild people:

They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California, everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up… They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than that.

[…]

In recent months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia. Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘ For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”

That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger man — and the more sober, too, if only by a hair — wrested the gun from him.

Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere else.”

In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d fucked me or not!”

[…]

In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”

They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him, he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain, which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together — so I know he’s not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”

Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage. “‘ I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you are.’”

[…]

After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy, too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You can’t kill somebody long-distance.”

[…]

Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point. Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.

I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.

“The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”

I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”

[…]

Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said, “nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”

[…]

As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency — he wouldn’t say which — and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe, was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.

Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle — they were still close — as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute. Both of us are second-generation intelligence.

[…]

Tacot reminded me that Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed.

[…]

Some people told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence ties were all fictitious.

[…]

Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover — and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.

[…]

I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.

“Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said. “You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any exposure on the Jamaican thing — there never was a Jamaican thing. They don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought we were going to do a movie.”

[…]

Later, when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”

“What community?” I asked. “Who?”

“The ties that bind.”

It is easy to see how Polanski’s friend Frykowski may have gotten in over his head, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in the months before the Tate murders:

When Tate and Polanski left, they gave Frykowski and Abigail Folger the run of the place, and things got weird. The couple threw parties all the time. The door was open to anyone and everyone. The crowds grew rowdier, the drugs harder — not just pot and hash, but an abundance of cocaine, mescaline, LSD, and MDA, which was then a new and fairly unheard-of synthetic. Frykowski was especially enamored of it.

MDA?

MDA was first synthesized by Carl Mannich and W. Jacobsohn in 1910. It was first ingested in July 1930 by Gordon Alles who later licensed the drug to Smith, Kline & French. MDA was first used in animal tests in 1939, and human trials began in 1941 in the exploration of possible therapies for Parkinson’s disease. From 1949 to 1957, more than five hundred human subjects were given MDA in an investigation of its potential use as an antidepressant and/or anorectic by Smith, Kline & French. The United States Army also experimented with the drug, code named EA-1298, while working to develop a truth drug or incapacitating agent. Harold Blauer died in January 1953 after being intravenously injected, without his knowledge or consent, with 450 mg of the drug as part of Project MKUltra. MDA was patented as an ataractic by Smith, Kline & French in 1960, and as an anorectic under the trade name “Amphedoxamine” in 1961. MDA began to appear on the recreational drug scene around 1963 to 1964. It was then inexpensive and readily available as a research chemical from several scientific supply houses.

[…]

A 2019 double-blind study administered both MDA and MDMA to healthy volunteers. The study found that MDA shared many properties with MDMA including entactogenic and stimulant effects, but generally lasted longer and produced greater increases in psychedelic-like effects like complex imagery, synesthesia, and spiritual experiences.

Back to the story:

Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash — Folger, his heiress girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially — he negotiated a deal with his new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood.

[…]

“I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time, where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction.”

[…]

Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal — they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.

“I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”

All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he was convinced one or more of them was to blame.

[…]

Tate had been horrified at the scene that greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing — she wanted the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won the confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of them didn’t want her to fix it — they wanted her to leave it.

Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.”

That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.

Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback — who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault — was even more certain. One night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined.”

And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert, a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”

Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice. Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”

Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship. She was quite lost.”

A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable company she kept — with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.

Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her — he didn’t want her there.

I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs, where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild — they would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.

“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”

After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come back], and she was here.”