“When you know, you just simply know,” muses Charles Manson in one of Chaos: The Manson Murders’ many archival clips. Yet the thing about the infamous fiend’s story is that not everything is known—or, at least, that’s the opinion of Tom O’Neill, whose book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (co-written with Dan Piepenbring) is the basis for Errol Morris’ non-fiction Netflix film.
An investigation into the idea that the traditional narrative about Manson’s reign of terror is false, and that the truth involves intelligence-agency plots and covert Manchurian Candidate-style mind control programs, the famed documentarian’s latest is both a deep dive into a familiar tale and a rumination on the nature of conspiracies and obsession. For all its avenues of inquiry, however, it never quite gels into more than a collection of tantalizing but unfounded theories.
At the conclusion of Chaos: The Manson Murders, which premieres March 7, Morris arrives at the notion that O’Neill—who participates at length—is perhaps as fixated on a fantasy as Manson’s acolytes were on their leader. Still, any analysis of O’Neill or his train of thought proves sporadic and superficial, as much of the director’s film merely recaps the details of Manson’s rise from ex-con and wannabe musician to evil Svengali intent on having his minions commit murder.
By now, those particulars are well known to any casual true-crime aficionado: Manson being released from prison in Los Angeles and gravitating to San Francisco, where he collected a cadre of girls around Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s; his relocation with his admirers to former movie studio Spahn Ranch, where copious drugs, preaching, and sex took place; the fatal stabbing of Gary Hinman by Ranch resident and Manson pal Bobby Beausoleil; and the subsequent slaughter of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her acquaintances Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski (along with Steven Parent) on Aug. 8, 1969, followed the next night by the similar slaying of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.
Set to Manson’s music and deftly marrying audio and film recordings with diagrams, illustrations, photos, documents, and newly recorded interviews with O’Neill, Beausoleil, prosecutor Stephen Kay, and talent scout Gregg Jakobson, Chaos: The Manson Murders offers a concise recap of this notorious nightmare.
Furthermore, it smartly situates it in the context of the burgeoning counterculture, which preached new ways of thinking and behaving that, along with copious drug use, made some susceptible to self-anointed gurus. Certainly, Manson both dealt and promoted the use of mind-altering substances, and he convinced his female adherents to be sexually subservient. They ably complied, becoming so in thrall to him that they ultimately did his homicidal bidding.
Into this mix, O’Neill introduces COINTELPRO and CHAOS, two programs (the former by the FBI, the latter by the CIA) that were designed to infiltrate and “neutralize” left-wing groups, particularly the Black Panthers. This is of particular note because prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi successfully argued in court (and in his subsequent best-seller) that Manson’s “Helter Skelter” doctrine was all about starting a race war.
Before the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson had shot (and believed he had killed) Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, whom he mistakenly identified as a Black Panther member. To O’Neill, it seems possible that Manson may have been a tool of the government, intended to shake things up in an effort to spark a civil war that, to them, appeared inevitable.
Alas, there’s no confirmation that Manson had any real contact with the CIA or FBI, and that tenuousness also typifies O’Neill’s primary conjecture: that Manson was trained to control minds by Dr. Louis “Jolly” West using techniques he helped develop as part of the CIA’s MKUltra program.
The main evidence to support this speculation is that Manson was a frequent fixture at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic where West worked; that West played a role in MKUltra; and that Manson, in the course of a year or two, transformed from a “joke” (which is how most viewed him upon leaving prison) into a master manipulator capable of using LSD (supposedly a prime MKUltra tactic) to charm dozens of people into following him into Hell. O’Neill admits that he doesn’t have conclusive proof that this is true, but he draws enough vague connections to make it sound, if not plausible, at least possible.
Morris occasionally puts O’Neill on the spot, expressing skepticism about this alternative reading of the Manson saga. Bolstering that uncertainty is Beausoleil, who in a phone call from prison (where he’s serving life) offers a different, more pedestrian account.
To him, Manson was an everyday sort of criminal who repeatedly made mistakes and then compelled his disciples to commit crimes so he’d have dirt on them (thus preventing them from flipping on him).
“It was just blunder after blunder after blunder,” he says about Manson, whom he thinks ordered the Tate murders out of confusion—his real target, Beausoleil contends, was Melcher, who had previously lived in the Tate house and who had declined to produce Manson’s music. Couple that with a Spahn Ranch enclave predicated on isolation, drugs, and New Age-y overthrow-the-status-quo ideas, and a recipe for disaster was born.
Manson’s fascination with The Beatles and the Bible’s Revelation 9 additionally factors into Chaos: The Manson Murders. Yet while Morris allows O’Neill to raise various what-ifs, they never coalesce into something persuasive.
That, it seems, is Morris’ ultimate point, as he and Beausoleil agree that “people love conspiracies” because they prefer things to be complicated rather than mundane. Unfortunately, he doesn’t press O’Neill hard enough on this point, nor does he push others to directly address and assess the author’s theory.
O’Neill ultimately confesses that his book is titled CHAOS because this story is “chaotic.” In the final tally, however, Morris’ adaptation of said tome is equally scattershot, unable to connect the dots that O’Neill couldn’t, and unwilling to say something about that failure and the common desire to seek complex answers to relatively simple questions. It’s enticing hearsay, but hearsay nonetheless.
