David Black
9 August 2023
The late Charles Manson is back in the news with the controversial parole of his former ‘Family’ member, Lesley Van Houten, who was convicted 53 years ago of murdering on his behalf. A new Netflix true crime series, How to Become a Cult Leader, features Manson in the first episode. Manson is portrayed as a sharp gaolbird, who learned to convince his 100 or so cult followers that he was god-like.
After more than 50 years the curse of Charles Manson maintains its grip. ‘Edgy’ ironists have his image tattooed on their skin; there is a roaring trade in Manson T-shirts and other merchandise (especially his songs, which have been covered by over 70 recording artists); and an endless output of film and television productions. He has become so much part of the culture that the mythology built around him and his disciples has largely buried whatever ‘truth’ is still ‘out there’. What How to Become a Cult Leader does not explain is how Manson got his gentle hippie followers to become vicious drug-addled murderers. Nor does it examine the role of law enforcement agencies in protecting him from justice and enabling him to commit heinous crimes.
Manson built a cult which deeply impacted American culture. Donald Trump built a larger cult – MAGA- which took over the US government for four years and to this day threatens the very survival of the democratic state (current indictments not withstanding). Experts in authoritarianism and fascism perceive the threat quite clearly. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat says “I see Trump as a cult leader. So [his followers] are cult followers, personality cult followers.”
In the future, presidential historians and researchers of new media mind-control techniques and state spookery will no doubt unearth many dark secrets about the Trump Years. In the meantime, one might ask: What does Donald Trump have in common with the late Charles Manson? There is certainly a stark contrast between their respective family backgrounds: Trump born rich and privileged; Manson born poor, to an alcoholic mother and an absent father. The similarities, however, are noticeable and many:
- Toxic family relationships.
- Delusions of being god-like.
- Messianic/apocalyptic dogma
- Pathological narcissism.
- Inflated sense of entitlement and victimhood.
- A taste for inflicting harm.
- Sexual abuse. Rape.
- Weaponization of racism.
- Endlessly repeated lies and false promises.
- Friends and protectors in high places (especially the secret state).
- An ability to get indoctrinated followers to commit violent crimes –and do time for it, pending future absolution (or presidential pardon in Trump’s case).
- Careers in the entertainment industry.
- Determination to fulfil the cult’s ‘mission’ even from a prison cell.
- Plotting insurrection and civil war.
Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ – A Case Study in Violent Cultism
Four years ago, Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties tore a few strips off the ‘official version’ propounded in the book Helter Skelter by the corrupt Manson Trial prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi.
The story begins in March 1967 – around the time Donald Trump was lying to the draft board about his bone spurs. 32-year-old Charles Manson was released from prison on parole after serving 7 years for check forgery. His parole supervisor, Roger Smith, who was researching gang violence and drug use, had the bright idea of sending drug-abuser and gangster Manson to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, just as the summer of love was getting underway.
In San Francisco, Manson, the guitar-strumming sugar-daddy, slid into his new career as a cult builder. Many of his recruits were under-age girls, whom he sent out to prostitute themselves, deal drugs and steal. In July 1967, Manson was sentenced to three years probation for obstructing a police officer who arrested a 14-year old girl he had recruited. But this didn’t prevent Smith from filing a report in which he claimed that ‘Mr Manson has made excellent progress’ in becoming a respectable citizen. In fact his whole cult was granted respectability. In O’Neill’s words, ‘The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbits.’
Roger Smith ran an Amphetamine Research Project at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which had been founded by his namesake, David Smith. The two Smiths jointly wrote a study of the Manson Family for the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, entitled ‘The Group Marriage Commune’, based on ‘participant-observer’ research at the Family ranch. The Smiths’ research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which was later found to have been used by the CIA as a front for the agency’s MK-Ultra ‘mind control’ project.
Dr Jolyon West, later exposed for his role in the CIA’s ‘mind control’ project, was provided with an office at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic to recruit subjects for ‘LSD research’. After West died in 1999, O’Neill found crucial correspondence between West and Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra. In a letter dated 11 June 1953, West wrote to Gottlieb outlining proposals for a project to use hypnosis and drugs to extract information from unwilling subjects, to induce amnesia of the interrogation, and alter ‘the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew’.
West added that the experiments ‘must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field’. O’Neill comments ‘All these were the goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.’ When O’Neill asked psychology professor Alan Scheflin if the Manson murders might have been an MK-Ultra experiment gone wrong, the professor replied, ‘No. An MK-Ultra experiment gone right.’ This was informed speculation, but necessarily so, given that the CIA operational files on MK-Ultra had been destroyed by Gottlieb in 1973.
The Manson Murders
In late 1968, Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ moved to the Spahn ranch, a 55-acre spread in Los Angeles County, California, which had previously been used as a set for filming westerns.
On 1 July 1969 a Black man named Bernard Crowe visited the Spahn ranch to complain about being ripped off by Family member Tex Watson in a marijuana deal. Days later, Manson went to Crowe’s Hollywood apartment, shot him in the stomach and left him for dead. (Unknown to Manson, Crowe survived and would eventually testify against him in court.) Manson told his followers that Crowe was a member of the Black Panther Party (he wasn’t) and that the Beatles White Album song, ‘Helter Skelter’, was a ‘prophecy’ of full-scale race war.
On 25 July, Manson and several accomplices invaded the home of Gary Hinman, a musician associate of Tex Watson. After two days of brutal torture, Manson realised there was no money to be had and ordered Bobby Beausoleil to kill him. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and wrote ‘Political Piggy’ on the wall in blood. Hinman’s body was discovered by friends on 31 July. Beausoleil was arrested on 6 August for theft of Hindman’s station wagon, in which police found the murder weapon. Beausoleil concocted a story that Hinman had been killed by two Black Panther militants.
On the night of 8 August 1969, Manson sent four members of the Family – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Linda Kasabian and Tex Watson – to the mansion home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon. On entering the property, Watson shot and stabbed to death 18-year old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker and was sitting in his car. In the house the gang found Voytek Frykowski, an aspiring Polish filmmaker; Abigail Folger, his girlfriend; Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; and the pregnant Sharon Tate (Polanski was away, making a film in Paris). All four of them were tied up, then knifed to death as they begged for mercy. Susan Atkins soaked a towel in Sharon Tate’s blood and used it to write ‘Pig’ on the wall.
The following night the four killers teamed up with other members of the Family: Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten and Charles Manson himself. They piled into a camper van and drove around the suburbs of Los Angeles, looking for another target. Manson entered the home of chain store entrepreneur Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, and tied them up at gunpoint. Manson then returned to the van and ordered Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkle to go in and stab the couple to death. After killing the couple, Watson carved the word ‘War’ on Leno’s stomach. On the walls, the killers wrote ‘Rise’, ‘Death to pigs’ and ‘Healter [sic] Skelter’ in their victims’ blood.
The LA police were now investigating three killing sprees which had in common the reference to ‘pigs’ written on the walls in blood. But despite the arrest of Beausoleil in connection with Hindman’s murder they chose to ignore the signs that the residents of the Spahn ranch might be involved. This was especially strange as they had been secretly watching comings and goings at the ranch for weeks.
On 16 August – a week after the Cielo Drive murders – the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office (LASO) mobilised dozens of officers and a SWAT team in a raid on the Spahn ranch. The raid had nothing to do with murders; they were looking for firearms, drugs and stolen property, which they found aplenty. Given that Manson and several of his followers were also in clear violation of their parole terms, they could have all been jailed there and then. But all were released without charges three days later. They were thus free to carry on killing. And they did. On 26 August Hollywood stuntman Donald Shea was killed because Manson thought he had provided the police with information that led to the 16 August raid (his body was eventually discovered in an excavation at the ranch in 1977).
Rock and Roll
Like Trump, Manson was determined to carve out a name for himself in the entertainment industry.
During the four months it took the Los Angeles police to connect Manson with the murders, the media speculated that somehow the hedonists of Hollywood, with their sex-and-drugs lifestyles, had brought disaster onto themselves. Manson was more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. The Cielo Drive mansion had previously been occupied by record producer Terry Melcher, who had auditioned Manson in May 1969 for a record deal. Melcher had been introduced to Manson by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Melcher, Wilson and songwriter Gregg Jacobson – nicknamed the ‘Golden Penetrators’ – were welcoming to the Family, who took over Wilson’s house for the summer, supplying drugs and sexual favours while running up massive bills for food, clothes, car repairs and gonorrhoea treatment. Dennis Wilson told Rave magazine,
‘Sometimes the Wizard frightens me. The Wizard is Charlie Manson, who is a friend of mine, who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records [the Beach Boys’ label].’
Bobby Beausoleil later claimed that Melcher promised to pay Manson $5,000 for his song ‘Cease to Exist’ (which the Beach Boys recorded as ‘Cease to Resist’) but then reneged on the deal. In August 1968 Wilson moved house and Manson moved the Family into the Spahn ranch.
Dennis Wilson and Greg Jakobson knew that Manson had previously shot Bernard Crowe. When O’Neill managed to get an interview with Melcher decades later he was met by evasions, denials, and threats to sue him and his publisher, Premiere magazine.
According to ex-LASO detective Preston Guillory, the police didn’t go after Manson ‘because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers after intelligence had revealed Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe. Guillory told O’Neill: ‘I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers . . . Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.’ Another interviewee, former assistant District Attorney Lewis Watnick, made the ‘educated guess’ that ‘Manson was an informant’.
COINTELPRO
Two of most notorious secret-state campaigns to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the American Left were the CIA’s CHAOS, an illegal domestic surveillance program, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Both of them targeted the Black Panthers. In the summer of 1969, COINTELPRO activities were at their most murderous (such as arranging assassinations of Panthers by cops or by rivals such as the United Slaves Organisation). In August 1967, J Edgar Hoover reanimated COINTELPRO ‘to prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability’. The Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive had become a gathering place for ‘liberal Hollywood’ figures such as Mama Cass, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda – all of whom were reportedly under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, one of the Cielo victims, was an outspoken civil rights activist. Hoover’s memo says,
‘An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP [Peace and Freedom Party] in which it is set forth that the BPP [Black Panther Party] has made statements in closed meetings that when armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.’
As O’Neill points out, ‘Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.’
Two of a Kind?
In today’s MAGA world, for Black Panthers read Black Lives Matter; for Anti-War movement read ‘Antifa’.
As regards Trump and Manson it would seem that, unfortunately, the American Psyche has room for both of them.
(‘Beyond Bugliosi: the Manson murders revisited’, my full review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), appeared in Lobster magazine Issue 80 (Winter 2020)
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