The CIA's Secret Mind Control Experiments on Charles Manson | Tom O'Neill

hello world in 1999 entertainment reporter tom o'neil accepted a three-month assignment from a film magazine to write a story about the infamous charles manson tate la bianca murders that changed hollywood tom missed his deadline but continued to investigate the murders falling down a 20-year investigative rabbit hole that birthed his new book chaos which is the product of those two decades of meticulous research hundreds of interviews and falling out with publishers that led to financial and legal repercussions for tom tom's book charles manson the cia and the secret history of the 60s presents his research into the background and motives of the tate la bianca murders committed by the manson family in 1969. the evidence thomas uncovered blows massive holes in the official narrative of the charles manson story and exposes corruption and cover-ups and mantin's connection to the cia's mk ultra lsd testing and psychological warfare mind control programs tom's book is the holy grail of true crime and on this episode tom tells some shocking stories that had to be left out of the book so without further ado buckle the [ __ ] up and enjoy this terrifying episode with tom o'neill mr tom o'neill thank you thank you so much for coming out here man i really appreciate you being here so your book chaos what a fascinating journey this has been for you a 20-year journey to create this thing 20 years it's actually came out two years ago this past week to your birthday oh wow i've never stopped continuing to report on the same subject really yeah did you think you'd be able to just kind of wash your hands of it afterwards well i know i wouldn't be able to do it entirely but i hope to yeah and i think i didn't work for like two days after it came out and it was just all of a sudden going right back to the open-ended stuff and the good thing is i get lots of people that reach out to me with information once the book came out and you know you get a lot of nuts too but one out of ten is somebody with good information a lot of people once they saw that i was a legitimate credible person then they started trusting me with stuff so i get people from places that i would never be able to find them on my own a lot of them are retired military retired law enforcement and they'll say okay i know a little bit of this a little bit of that and then i go through it and the ones that are giving me stuff that i can substantiate i'm going back to and uh talking about doing a second book with my collaborator and publisher yeah but it opened up a whole new can of worms of of things that the people that were coming that are coming to you now because of the book that yeah you probably never would have known about but with you being the one doing the outreach and the other thing is there are people who are even more obsessed with the subjects in my book than i am and uh some of them had all this backlog of information and didn't know what to do with it and they didn't know what i was doing because i was working in a vacuum for 20 years and you know a lot of them sound like they never get out of their house but they get access to documents they do foia requests a lot of it is government stuff that's really kind of buttressing what i have in here but it's adding to it and giving it more of a foundation and i told my agent excuse me i told my collaborator all along that i didn't want to do a second book unless i had something really explosive to add you know to anything that we began in the first that couldn't finish and he said you know we have so much stuff we didn't put in the first book it's the second book and it'd be pretty quick to turn around because a lot of it was already written and we just set it aside because it was already too long but um we're probably going to decide in the next couple of months you know how to go about it whether to it's going to happen i just know it is i'm not going to do it alone cause i can't take another 20 years no this guy he he and i became such a good team in two years we turned around a book that i'd already been working 18 years on wow so so you like my shirt marilyn manson yeah you got to be careful with your where you wear a shirt like that right now because it's been canceled i believe yeah he's been canceled officially canceled yeah and you're a big fan i've always been a big fan of marilyn manson yes since i was a little kid the first thing i ever saw was when he did like the mtv music awards or whatever i think i was maybe 10 years old something something something like that really young i was super intrigued and followed his music ever since yeah well i mentioned he may have been a piece of [ __ ] person behind doors but uh my opinion on it my uh my you know far away 20 000 foot opinion on it is that uh if you're getting into a relationship uh a romantic relationship with that guy you kind of have to have an idea what to expect it's not going to be normal yeah yeah yeah uh well unfortunately i think the visit was kind of i mentioned earlier that he invited me up to his house and uh i think it was last february did he really the last i can't even remember now um it was well before the scandal after your book came out he had the book and uh he started reaching out to my agent to see if i would meet with him and he was so cryptic in emails uh that my agent didn't think it was really him and he told the secretary to get rid of him and she was a fan so she said if i get on the phone with him i'll know whether it's him or not and she got on the phone with him and she said it's him and he just said i would love to have him come to my house i have something to show him that i don't think he knows about or that he's ever seen before and it terrifies me to even possess it so she said he said you could call him so he and i got on the phone he didn't think it was safe to tell me what he had on the phone he wanted me to come see or hear it he was being very vague and the fact is he didn't need anything i mean i love going into unusual situations and i thought i wasn't a huge fan you know i actually became a little bit of one when i did some homework but my collaborator is a musician he's an ex-drummer and he loved him and he had just finished and published a book on prince where he was working with prince on his memoir and then prince died it's actually how i got him as my collaborator because when prince died their project came to a screeching halt and then he had to wait a year or two to figure out whether or not that he had enough material to finish the book without prince but um i told dan my collaborator i said how would you like to go with me to marilyn manson i don't know if i want to go up there alone and because are you kidding me so he got on the plane just to just go up there so we went to the castle in the hills and uh he uh [Music] i don't know if he's ever gonna listen to this uh no he won't i've been trying to get him on this for years yeah he'll never do it yeah number one i i did love the guy but he didn't have anything what he had was an audio tape that he thought he had found in the house he lived at the tate house where the murders happened he and trent rezner moved into the oh they recorded an album there right yeah well they were living there and recording an album right and while they were there he found stuff that had been like left behind by the previous owner and tenants and uh one of them was an audio tape of roman polanski's police interrogation and i had it already you know and it's and you can get it i had it actually 20 years before when nobody had it but in the last five or six years it somehow got out and there are bootlegs and you can buy it online right so it was difficult because marilyn was you know already partying we didn't even he said don't come before 11 o'clock at night so we got up until 8 11 and it was actually a historic night if you're a fan because it was the first time he and his guitarist who he threw out of the band a number of years before twiggy twiggy were together and they they had reconciled recently yeah but they hadn't met yet so he invited twiggy over to um hang out with me and dan and him and talk about manson and twiggy i guess had been through rehab and everything they were both really sweet guys but twiggy was sober and marilyn has this amazing screening room that feels more like a harem unsurprisingly there's no furniture you just sit on pillows and it's pitch black and there's just you what would have been a huge beautiful window with a view of the valley because she's high up in the hills but it's all blacked up with bricks because i think all the windows in this house are like that i'm not 100 sure so um we just spent like three hours talking about the book and he was trying to find the point and the tapes that he said well even if i had him you probably don't have this and i'm pretty sure i do well and then i thought well i'm just going to humor him i didn't mind we were still having fun and but thank god for twiggy because maryland didn't know how to operate any of the technical stuff so twiggy was going through everything and were they this little like cassette tapes or yeah they were cassette tapes and we finally when we were done listening to them at about three or four in the morning let's just say there was a lot of substances offered to us and dan and i were on an adventure so we accepted them twiggy stayed away from everything right and i think he left at about three in the morning and then the even better stuff came out because he didn't want to have the time twiggy twiggy yeah and then at about seven in the morning i said to dan i go because dan's 20 years younger than me i said dan if i do any more of this stuff i'm gonna have a massive heart attack or a stroke i go i can't die at marilyn manson's house he's got enough problems oh my god so we literally left i think it's 7 or 7 30 in the morning and it was fun i mean the one thing i can tell you about him since you are a fan yeah is he's one of the smartest guys and funniest i mean he could be a stand-up comic the problem was he was so kind of let's say feeling good that he slurs a lot and he and he also talks under his breath and he doesn't he's not sure he's not performative he'll just say these off-the-wall remarks that almost make you piss in your pants and i miss so much because he was slurring a lot and i thought this guy could have a whole like 10 other career i know he acts now but um you know he's a really intelligent guy you know he was having problems with his fiance then it was the night before the oscars and they had had a huge fight because they disagreed on what he was going to wear to the oscar party they weren't going to the oscars but they were going to the big vanity fair party and he helped dan and i help him decide what to wear oh really yeah and he had already uh po they had been supposed to get married two or three times already and they kept fighting him and cancelling it she was somewhere in the house we never met her who which one which which women was it which she's gonna say she's his latest she's a filmmaker i can't remember her name she's beautiful i mean he and i dan and i when we looked her up the next day she's a beautiful woman i don't know if she's still with him or if she's made any of these allegations but he went through all his old ex-girlfriends with us and told us stories and really he should have made us sign an nda but he can trust us you know uh right yeah he um did you drink any absinthe uh he had it yeah i not he brought out tequila when dan looked at the tequila i don't know my tequila he said this is like a 300 bottle of tequila and of course we're sitting on the floor because there's no furniture and you get kind of uncomfortable and after you drink a lot of tequila and do a lot of other stuff you're not as mobile and at one point he had brought out a second bottle of it and i knocked it over right after we opened it and he has a shag rug oh marilyn i'm so sorry i spilled a bottle he goes oh man i got cases of them in the basement don't worry about it so um oh my [ __ ] god what a story yeah yeah you know it was an open book we were talking about the rumors about you know the rib being cut out oh yeah what did he say about that he said it wasn't true he had a scar there for something i can't remember half of what happened that night luckily dan took notes the next day so i call up dan to refresh i should have done that i didn't know you were a fan that's one of the most classic uh rumors about him is removing the rib his own dick yeah yeah yeah and he had a bunch of funny witty answers when people would ask him that yeah in articles yeah yeah but yeah he's a [ __ ] he's incredibly intelligent and witty yeah like on the spot being able to just just destroy people yeah and he had just finished his record which had a song or maybe it was a title had chaos in the in the uh in the title oh yeah we are chaos yeah and you know my book's called chaos and he's like don't you try to uh uh sue me for plagiarism i didn't steal it from you it's a common word i don't don't worry about don't worry about it but when you're performing it you know hold the book up or something for your millions of fans but i guess he's not going to tour now yeah i don't know if he's doing anything i don't think he's been in the public at all since since uh evan rachel wood came out and said all that stuff about him and then a couple other piled on i think yeah yeah but i think uh one one of his ex-wives actually said that yeah like he does do a lot of dark demented [ __ ] mm-hmm but he never did anything that that that was dita von t right she's like you know he would never do anything as far as like rape somebody or like i think he should have stayed with her because she wasn't one of the nicest things to say about when we were talking um yeah it was uh it was a trip and then he he texted us i knew he wasn't going to bed and he had mentioned at some point that he never gets up before 5 in the afternoon and he did text me at like 5 30 or 6 saying he just wanted to make sure we got home okay and we were fine i'm like wow i said i couldn't do that a second night in a row but whenever you do it after i've had a few days rest and relaxation just let me know i'll come back and then a couple months later he just he texted me easter sunday morning so i know he hadn't gone to bed yet at like seven in the morning and just said happy easter tom and you know and i have marilyn manson you know into my phone so marilyn manson happy easter wow yeah oh man man it's it's kind of just so bittersweet just his story his life's like you can't be that age and sustain that lifestyle yeah yeah i don't know how so uh yeah it was uh he played us some new music that hadn't been released uh so he had a music video that hadn't been released and uh dan got to talk to him about music which made him you know so happy yeah but i'm older school i'm like before maryland my music was patty smith right right the ramones and stuff like that yeah well his obsession was with you know those those days with the you know the just the american obsession with and the combination of someone like charles manson and his story being a serial killer he was just as equally you know such a part of american culture that as marilyn monroe was and that mixed with like the kennedy the kennedy assassination and all the obsession around that and just it's just it's just fascinating how obsessed people are with true crime and these kind of cultural iconic american stories definitely so so what what do you what is the next book going to be about is the next book how could you possibly expand on everything that you went through over the past 20 years to create this book believe it or not it wouldn't be that difficult um first of all for your listeners if they're if they don't know anything about the book i don't want it to be oversold it doesn't answer the biggest questions it raises basically that's why it took so long i kept looking for a smoking gun to prove the thesis is there's more than one in here and my agent kept telling me after like the first five or six years you've got enough stuff you don't have to prove everything you you definitely completely blow apart the official versions of of the manson murders the the reason for the murders uh the fact that there were more people involved in the commission of them and the manipulation of manson that's huge that's enough but i was never satisfied because i always felt like i was you know one day away and going on and on so that's what keeps you going right yeah for better or worse so what what i've gotten since the book came out is i've gotten a lot more substantiation it's like building a pyramid and i'm almost at the top and i'm thinking i told dan my collaborator a week or two ago i said i think if i can get a few more things in the next month then we can just i can stop and we can go and start on it uh if not i do think we have enough anyway even if i don't get it but i'll still want a little more time uh we didn't write anything about the saran uh case in the book the assassin of robert f kennedy the assassination occurred about a year and a month before the tape murders in los angeles and the same cops same attorneys same players and i uncovered a lot of new and pretty compelling information proving that sir ham was a manchurian candidate somebody was programmed to be in the in the pantry believe me i'm not the first one to do that a lot of really respected writers and authors have been trying to get this case reopened for years i have some new information but we couldn't link it to the main psychiatrist in our book who we alleged manipulated manson he was a good candidate but i said without linking it it would have been two or three whole chapters that wouldn't have stayed on our narrative through line in the book so when we do the new book i think i will be able to link it and that that's one thing for instance that'll be in the new book and also the jonestown case you know with the jim jones and the mass suicides and guyana all this stuff happened in the petty hearse kidnapping right so it's basically just kind of undoing unraveling a lot of stuff that are pretty much landmark historic crimes in the united states that occurred in the 60s and i try to stop in the 70s right that were presented to us by media you know a media that was complicit with the government and the cia to cover up truth and realities of how many of these things were provoked how frustrating is it knowing that there is evidence out there that basically would give you the answers yeah this book like the the what is it the guy tex watson there's those recordings of him there's tapes that are somewhere that you just can't get your hands on but it must be so frustrating to know they're there and they exist yeah that actually the book kind of ends with me uh trying to get those tapes and i won't spoil the story but um that was incredibly frustrating i hope that comes through in the book because i helped number one i discovered these tapes existed that they were in a safe in an attorney's closet in texas that he had kept since november of 1969 and it was what he had told me were 20 hours of audio tape of tex watson manson's kind of right-hand man who did most of the killing and all the murders you know manson was absent from the murder scenes right the second night of the the la bianca murders he tied them up and told the others what to do but left before the murders happened so text before anyone knew who he was who the madison family was they weren't in the papers yet only the police consider them suspects um had been detained he had fled home to his little town in texas where he was from and the lapd wanted to interview him as a suspect so they called up his cousin who was a lawyer in the small town that he lived in and excuse me he was the sheriff of that town and the cousin agreed to take his nephew or uncle nephew into custody while the two lapd cops came down and he called the the lawyer bill boyd and bill boyd came over and said i'll represent him and he said what are these guys coming down here to talk to you about he said i have no idea he goes well something happened in los angeles and he said he beats me so the two cops came down and sat down with a lawyer uh texas parents and his uncle the sheriff and they said where were you on the night of august 8th 1969 august 9 1969 and the others put it together and someone said are you talking about the sharon tape murder and he said i nothing i never knew i had nothing to do with that so bill boyd said to the others can i have a few moments alone with them and they said yeah so they left and then he said to taxi set charles was his real name he said charles this is pretty serious allegations i want you to think about it and then answer as honestly as you can uh these these detectives questions and i'll represent you and make sure you don't go to the death penalty because he already knew he could tell that he was getting caught up in some lies so they left text alone for an hour or two and then bill went back to see charles and again alone just one on one he said do you know what these men are here for and he goes you know that girl sharon tate that actress that they mentioned he goes yeah he goes i killed her and he said okay i'm going to tell them you're not talking to them but that i'm going to represent you so he said you're done with my client you can come back you know with the subpoena or whatever but right now he's my client i don't want him answering any questions so then he went and recorded charles for two days just telling everything about how he met madison what other people were around and i called him this lawyer in 2008 i think to interview him and he made the mistake during the interview of telling me you know i have these tapes that nobody's ever heard and they were before anything had been written in the newspaper so they're probably like the purest account of what really happened charles was so honest and he just talked for about 20 hours and he said he even described other murders that the police had never learned about the minute he said that i thought number one he's implicating his former client who's always your client in other murders and number two he's never going to let me hear those tapes so when i said so you're talking about murders that the police hadn't discovered and he said yeah other murders and then all of a sudden he realized what he was saying and goes not that charles had committed but the charles was aware the others had done and i said well who were they goes why haven't listened to them and i guess then it was like 40 years because i know there were a couple bikers they killed and i was already looking into these missing bikers who had been last seen with the group in death valley and i said mr boyd is there any chance i could come down and listen to the tapes and then he got really nervous because then all of a sudden he's realizing he violated his confidentiality well you know um i couldn't do anything without charles permission and but i'll i'll ask him and then that was it he wouldn't take my phone calls his secretary would always say oh he had no time to see him he's traveling and after like three months of blowing me off i told the secretary to tell him i was going to write to charles in prison tell him what he said and ask for an interview and she had just told me he was in china on business so she said i'll tell him and she hung up and the phone rang a minute later and my caller id said mckinney texas and it was him on the phone don't you dare write to my client if you if you say that i said all that all deny it god damn it i said but you said it all on audio tape he said i didn't give you permission to tape me i said not only did you give me permission you did it on tape god damn it so he died two months later of a heart attack on a treadmill at about age 68 or seven i think i hope that had nothing to do with it oh you definitely did long story short the tapes went into his firm had gone bankrupt so um they went to the bankruptcy court and for about two years i tried to get the court to release the tapes to me rather than put them up for auction or destroy them or whatever they were going to do and again it's a very long story but i'll keep it short the the trustee in charge of them ended up contacting the deputy d.a in los angeles who knew what i was doing and really wanted the tapes too and was kind of advising me and i said if you don't think i'm legit you can get in touch with him so she did and then of course stupidly i was naive enough to think that that wouldn't ruin my chances but sure enough patrick shakira arranged to get the tapes from her and he had always promised me that the minute if he got them first i would sit down with him and listen to them for the first time who's patrick he was the deputy d.a who was in charge of all the parole hearings of the manson family so he started he called me up really excited he said i can't believe it they're going to release the tapes to me but we can't let the press know because if the press finds out and tex finds out he's going to stop it but somebody down there in texas found out oh no the the trustee told watson's current attorney because she had to i don't know why patrick thought that wasn't going to happen so then watson immediately went to court to stop the tapes from being released and then there was a two or three year process from the county court to state court to the state supreme court where they finally decided that the tapes should be released and then the lapd and the da's office got them and then they wouldn't talk to me anymore and to this day they're sitting in a vault because i believe those tapes tell the truth about why things happen how they really happened and who was behind the scenes manipulating manson wow austin can you hit the power button on the ac real quick um let me check the camera what camera this camera okay oh yes go to your scooter right a little bit tom just hit it down to like 75. um so this may be a stupid question but tex is in prison for life so he does get parole hearings okay he has four children that he's had in prison um he got married and uh until the late 70s prisoners were allowed even convicted murderers on death row were allowed to have conjugal visits sharon tate's mother doris tate when she found out that watson had had his first child she spent i think 10 years lobbying the legislature the state legislature of california she became a political activist and she finally got them to write a bill saying no more conjugal visits for prisoners in california so because of the late doris tate prisoners can't get laid in prison anymore oh wow but he managed to have four kids before she was she prevailed and they're now grown up one of them is in the marines the wife he had them with divorced them and i think he's remarried to a new new woman that's so weird how women love to marry people on death row yeah yeah bruce davis another convicted manson family member is married you might recall the year or two before charlie died he was engaged right young woman that really looked a lot like susan atkins star who is interesting now she is now the lover of um oh shoot i forgot his name uh he's an actor and he was a manson obsessive there was a movie called buffalo 66 vincent yeah yeah yeah sure because this is fascinating and it's never been reported before to my knowledge yeah um she was engaged to manson living outside of the prison walls and corker rim with a guy named gray wolf who was manson's communication man on the outside like when i interviewed manson i had to go through gray wolf to get to manson everything had to come through him so gray wolf was an old hippie in like his 70s star was living with him and visiting manson every you know weekend that she could wow and they were this close to getting married and then manson found out that she was [ __ ] uh gray wolf oh so he ended his relationship with her and his relationship with gray wolf who had literally devoted his life to making sure manson had money got his mail any interview that manson did had to be approved by gray wolf right and a friend of manson's who i i kept in touch with said that charlie cried himself to sleep every night after found out he had been betrayed by both starr and graywall and i thought you know she couldn't get laid with charlie so she was maybe thinking of manson when she slept with this guy who looked a lot like him same age but maybe a foot taller um huh i would imagine a guy like like manson would would have already been able to cope with that idea by that point having spent his whole life in prison of course like having you not thought of that scenario already like and i mean when he was mance and he was sleeping with five women a day there was nothing about monogamy in their lifestyle but you know i guess when it's when you're an older guy and uh it's done to you maybe uh all right and the girl star she was much younger yeah yeah she was like in her 20s or something yeah and she shaved her head she did the swastika on her forehead i can't remember if it was scratched in or maybe tattooed or something um the the actor's name was vincent gallo and he was kind of an underground indie actor but yeah i'll show you a picture pull him up on the screen austin this guy that guy yeah no yeah huh he looks kind of like he looks like a yeah freak yeah he was a calvin klein model uh he used to live around the corner from me in little italy in manhattan in the 70s and 80s oh really yeah and he did a lot of really good movies he directed a couple he moved out here he does character parts and some films and he's obsessed with manson yeah so i think he got to know gray wolf and they were interested in he would buy stuff at auction you know manson's paintings and things like that and somehow star got in the mix so as soon as gray wolf threw star out my sources told me that she moved out to malibu and he took her in and they became lovers and now they're in new mexico or arizona or something wow that's wild yeah yeah that's totally wild a lot of soap opera drama even to this day so you met manson face to face no no no never you never got in the same unfortunately when i interviewed him in 2000 he was what they call in the hole in solitary confinement he wasn't allowed to have visitors he was only allowed out of his cell like for an hour a day and he was allowed to make phone calls one night a week so during the period that i had finally set up the interviews i couldn't go in and you always want to face somebody right and it's really frustrating especially with a guy like him that plays so many games yeah so we talked on the phone two or three nights one of my claims of fame is the first time i spoke to him i went to premiere the magazine who had commissioned the article because my editor didn't want them having my home phone number so she's like you have to do it at the offices i don't want them to know how to find you i'm like if they want to find me they're going to find me but i agreed to do it who's they uh manson and the people that are on the outside okay his crew out yeah yeah yeah so i went to their offices and you know it was nighttime like nine or ten o'clock and all of a sudden it occurred to me it was valentine's day and i'm like wow this is tragic my valentine's day is a date with charlie manson so when he answered the phone or when he got on the phone he called me and i go hey charlie how are you doing goes real good man how are you and i go great happy valentine's day goes oh thanks man same to you charles manson was your valentine yeah marilyn manson texted you on easter yeah i was at a wedding in london about 15 years ago and there was this very old man there and we had a competition to see who had the greatest brush with evil he won mine was the manson thing happy valentine's day charlie he was a jewish man who when he was about seven or eight years old um was playing with some friends and the fuhrer adolf hitler was surveying this little community he lived in that was they had already been partitioned off the jews and he said to um this little boy was like seven or eight your cute little boy was like an ice cream cone and he said yes so hitler bought him an ice cream cone so at the wedding they had a boat to decide who who had the best brush with evil and they decided that getting an ice cream cone from adolf hitler was scarier than manson saying happy valentine's day jesus yeah i would say it trumps the manson valentine's day holy [ __ ] yeah okay so let's backtrack a little bit tell explain to people who don't already know how how did this whole thing start for you like how did this whole journey start with with you just being you weren't initially interested in this story at all you just kind of like came stopping me yeah i was freelancing you know i had moved out to la for what i thought was going to be two years sublet my place in new york was going to go back the following like six months later my editor who i'd written with at another magazine that we had all left it was called us magazine it's still around it used to be an entertainment magazine that was mostly about motion pictures music and tv and john wenner who owned it in rolling stone had decided to make it much more tabloidy reality tv was just starting and he wanted us to do stories about the kardashians or reality people so all of us at the magazine let our contracts go and quit and they all went to premier magazine all the people who i worked for so she said you should come over with us but you got to do one great piece here and she said the manson the anniversary of the taylor bianca murders are coming up in august this was march and she said um do a story on it i'm like a story on i'm what and she goes read the book you'll find an angle like oh come on leslie i got number one i've never read the book hasn't it been written to death and i didn't say that you know to be funny i didn't realize it till after i said it and i just said there's nothing about that that interests me and she said well it's what i got for you right now and i know you need the money because i hadn't worked for a few months and she said here's here's something i'll tell you now that i put his name into your head you're going to realize that you hear him reference sometimes every day she said i hear he's always you know compared to the most evil person in the world described as a metaphor for evil popular culture news and sure enough all of a sudden i'm here seeing his name in newspapers just as a descriptive like an adjective or something so i agreed to do it and it was supposed to be a three-month job and i read helter skelter and i circled stuff or noted stuff that seemed a little bit you know something that i thought could be explored a little more and there were lots of stuff that booliosi who was the author vince bouliosi and also the prosecutor who convicted the manson family group in the trial in 70 and 71 there was a lot of stuff i could kind of go along with but i'm like leslie this is so amorphous i don't know how and she said once you start you'll find an angle you always do i've been working with her for like 15 years in the magazine business and she was always my editor and we thought alike and she was great so um she said if you can't find anything else just find out how it changed kind of the culture of hollywood because you know that's when everybody started retreating from public places stars you know putting walls up buying guard dogs they didn't feel safe in their homes anymore that didn't interest me either but i thought all right i need the money um but what i did was i read helter skelter and then i interviewed vince bouliosi first spent about six hours at his house he was very generous with me talked and talked and talked said a couple things that are too complicated to explain in an interview it would take like a half hour but if you read the book it takes chapters and it's not till the very end you realize why it's so important a couple lies he told me but after that he basically told me everything i'd already read him he'd said to other interviewers for years and years i thought why don't i reach out to people who've never talked about the case principal witnesses because at the time people really were frightened of the manson family members on the outside so the prosecution witnesses the guy that owned the tate la bianca the guy that owned the tate house that rented it to him has always been pursued by journalists because he's never talked about his pivotal part in all this terry melcher doris day's son who also was connected to manson right so i with the passage of time i thought maybe they won't be as frightened you know maybe people who wouldn't talk will so first actually i reached out to people like sharon tate roman polanski's crowd you know they were very close friends to dozens of hollywood people but most close to robert evans the producer ally mcgraw [Music] michelle phillips john phillips of the mamas and the papas warren beatty jane fonda roger vadim none of them would talk to me no one would talk to me and it started getting really frustrating and then i went to the witnesses people who actually were lesser known except in the hollywood industry and i got a couple to agree to talk to me and i realized it wasn't that they were less scared but nothing had really happened to them since then a lot of them their lives went off the rails being associated with this especially this one guy rudy who owned the house where the murders happened and he was a principal prosecution witness for boliosi he had to testify about manson having this visit to the house before the murders to establish that manson knew where these people lived and how to get into the property and rudy had lost his life savings he had owned that house kind of became a drug addict went through everything had to sell the house to trent rezner of the nine-inch nails and was living in a shitty like garage apartment in the city and then that then eyes what year did you sell the house to trent resner i think it was i think he owned it for 20 years after the murders so that would be 79.89 maybe around then uh and he had a long time business partner who was his lover that guy had died and he was being kept alive and his bills were paid by an interesting group of his former clients he was a talent manager dick van dyke jack nicholson jimmy darren who was a kind of a pop singer actor and sally kellerman so they would give him allowance because they all felt so sorry for him wow so i started trying to get him to talk to me and first he wanted me to pam and you're not allowed to pay people i said i'll just take you out to a really nice meal that's the best i can do so we went to the famous muso and frank restaurant which if you saw once upon a time in hollywood it's where al pacino's character has his first big dinner with brad pitt and leonardo dicaprio it's a classic hollywood yeah movie location restaurant so um that turned into weekly dinners for about two or three years and yeah and weekly yeah for two or three years i mean because he was lonely right after the very first dinner when he was driving home he was he said he was chased off the road got in a car accident was almost killed he thought that it was because he talked to me everything did happen he did have an accident somebody hit him and ran he did have to go to the hospital i tried not to get paranoid nobody ever did again he got notes and stuff from people telling him to stop talking to me but the point being he never he didn't have enough money to buy another car so then i had to drive out there to van nuys from venice which is he always wanted to go about five or six o'clock so that meant a two-hour drive with rush hour traffic then he always wanted to go out at swank places in hollywood so that's another rush hour traffic could be 45 minutes we get to a restaurant and he wouldn't order food for two hours because he wanted to have all his martinis or gin and tonics and the next thing you know he's grabbing the waiter's asses he was a real character and he got away with it but um and then i'd have to on the way home stop at the supermarket at midnight and i didn't pay for his groceries but walk with him through the store and it took forever so it was like a eight-hour investment and i had to drive all the way back to venice but he was giving me information and that's how you get it you know you have to really kind of embed yourself into people's confidence and lives right and he was the first and then there was like dominoes because people knew he was talking to me more people talk to me and then but it doesn't happen overnight so uh that's when the story changed and evolved into something that wasn't going to be a magazine story anymore my editor-in-chief of premier became obsessed with what i was finding so he kept extending my deadline he said we don't need to do it for the anniversary this is too important so i think they paid me for a year and a half a monthly salary just to report the story then that editor-in-chief got fired and i went to my editor who worked under him and i said please tell me jim didn't get fired because of all the money that he had spent like 100 and like 150 000 not just on my salary but on my expenses for dinners and stuff and i would flown to london to interview people she said it didn't help so so a new editor was hired and i got a call the next day from him he said sounds like he got a really exciting story there i hope so he goes well i'm really going to be proud to publish it and i'm slating it for the issue after the next oh i can't finish it jim would have told you he goes no no jim's not here anymore he goes you've got to have it in so at that point i got a book agent and i didn't want to put out what i had because there were so many loose ends and i thought once i put out the most important stuff you know the la times maybe i was grandiose the new york times they're going to put their teams on this and they're going to get they're going to finish it right yeah so my agent got me out of my contract with a caveat that i had to reimburse blah blah blah um so definitely the right thing to do yeah yeah so at that point well sometimes i wonder because the next thing i knew you know i didn't sell the book for another five years in 2005 i sold the proposal but i got an enormous it was going to go to auction so the publisher penguin press gave me a what's called a preemptive bid which is higher than they'd normally pay but for i think it was 48 hours nobody else could try to sell uh make a deal with me and if i didn't take their offer in 48 hours and they would withdraw then it would go to auction okay so i said yes my agent said they're really the best publisher in the business you know they do like presidential memoirs and they're boutique and powerful and just publishing with them is going to give your crazy conspiracy book complete legitimacy so i did and they gave in advance that was like record-breaking for somebody who had never written a book before i just been a magazine journalist and that looked like it was going to be a real happy ending but then they got impatient in 20 2011 and a long story short they canceled the deal and worse they then sued me for a return of the advance which had been spent by me on all my reporting so from 2 2012 to about 14 or 15 the everything was frozen i couldn't go out and try to sell the book until the lawsuit was resolved to get a pro bono lawyer so i just kept reporting as if i was going to have something how are you paying your bills uh i was living borrowing money and living off of what little was left from the advanced but i lived very frugally i mean i've done it in new york for years you know i was a struggling journalist i drove a horse and carriage in central park for eight years i knew how to hustle okay but i didn't have any real full-time job during that period because i worked seven days a week researching so once the lawsuit was resolved in 2016 i think or 15 i got dan as a collaborator and we revised my book proposal the original book proposal was book length it was 220 pages in fact when anne and scott the two people at penguin press bought it they said you know you've written the book all you have to do is fill in some of the this is the guts just fill in some of the stuff and i'm like yeah easier said than done they're still reporting so once i got this wonder kid on and only because prince died if prince hadn't died he would have been working with prince for three more years prince died and all of a sudden his agent said to my age you know i heard you're looking for someone dan would be perfect for this he can't pick up the prince thing for at least two years until that estate is figured out because they were all fighting over whatever prince you know his money his future projects so dan had like two years off and he and i turned it out in two years wow and it came out literally we turned in the final draft i mean after all the edits and notes from the publisher uh the day before what would have been the 20th anniversary of the magazine assignment so it was literally 20 solid years that's incredible man yeah that's incredible but i don't advise anybody to do that it's i took off 40 years of my life it was brutal i mean you keep thinking it's going to end and it doesn't and the scariest thing is if the book had never come out yeah that would have been i would have been the tragic figure who you know spent his whole life writing a book and then never publishing his book so i mean now i feel like if i got run over by a bus today that's fine yeah this this is still here right right you hit the you achieved your goal you got you got it out yeah and you can wash your hands but you're still you're still you know obviously going to put out more yeah it's not going to take 20 years so okay what was the guy's name who owned the house the who sold the trent resonator uh rudy altabelly rudy and he tell you an interesting story about him that just happened recently so quentin tarantino released his movie you know a few months after my book came out once upon a time in hollywood and i think it was his most successful movie box office wise to date and i had two mutual friends of his and one of them is one of his producers and his longtime first ad and the other one was an ex-girlfriend who's one of his only ex-girlfriends who remained friends with him so both of them gave him a copy of my book an advanced copy that i had signed months before my book came out and months before his movie came out and they both they said we're not going to give it to him unless we read it first we know you we love you but we want to make sure it's something that he'd like because everybody wants you to give something to quentin right so they did and you know he never read it and i i wasn't surprised because um he you know he's about to release one of the biggest movies of his career right a lot of publicity so uh about a year after like last fall i think it was i got a call from one of our mutual friends and he said can clinton call you now i'm gonna go excuse me i needed him like two years ago but sure i go why he goes he's obsessed with your book he finally got to read the one i gave him and he has a million questions and you know if quentin tarantino has a million questions that means it's like so he called me from israel where he was living and um in israel well i just read an interview with him a couple days ago i knew he was there and i didn't know why i knew he had married an israeli woman and had a baby there but he when the pandemic hit they wouldn't let him back in so he got i guess hopefully he's not still there now he was on jimmy kimmel a couple nights ago okay but he was there during a lot of that and the interview i read said i think he was in tel aviv he didn't say anything about you know bombings violence or anything he just said how much he loved it there yeah so he and his wife and kid have now moved back i think in the last month or two but so he started calling me and it wasn't just because he had a million questions but it was because he was doing the novelization of the movie where he's adding fleshing out characters adding scenes and he'd always wanted to write a paperback book kind of like a pulpy paperback book so that comes out tuesday and he talking about rudy altebelli and like our second or third conversation like and rudy how did you ever get rudy to talk to that's amazing he goes damn it you know i've got his character in the book i didn't have him in the movie but but i have to you know fake his name you know or he goes or do you think if you reached out to rudy and asked would he take like a quarter million dollars from me to let me use his name in the book and not and promise not to sue me oh quentin rudy's been dead for 10 years kidding me you just saved me a quarter million dollars you know i'm still in debt hundreds of thousands of dollars right and i'm like rude or clinton give it to me well i should have said give me the cash and i'll deliver it to rooney oh yeah you definitely should have done that so the book comes out tuesday and i'm hoping you're the name of it it's the same name as the it's the title of the movie once upon a time in hollywood yeah yeah so i think he's he was on jimmy kimmel a night or two ago and i was flying so i didn't see it but i read the recap of the interview but i'm hoping you know for the in-depth interviews you know if he was telling me the truth he said oh my god he goes i thought i knew this and i didn't know anything about this character that character i'm hoping he'll mention the book because all the quentin fans then might be interested and get the book right yeah so we'll not sneak but it's already you know it's going to be a bestseller because it's a quentin tarantino book it's the first one he's ever written and he keeps saying i didn't just turn the novel into a script he goes it's like a whole fresh take new characters much more about the manson family the murders all this stuff because there was literally barely anything about me yeah yeah he released a trailer the publisher released a trailer last week that he put together for the book so it's like a two-minute trailer and he has scenes in the trailer that are in the book but they were cut from the movie so there is a scene between um matt the manson character at the house looking for terry melcher and they don't show who he's talking to but in real life it would have been rudy altobelli um so the guy who owned the house he went up there looking for him so well i'll know a lot when the book comes out tuesday i hope he gives me an acknowledgement if i saved him a quarter million dollars oh right yeah he definitely just put your name in there shut you out somewhere yeah yeah [ __ ] quinton um so rudy so when you talk to rudy i mean that what what was it about rudy that opened what did he tell you that open pandora's box for you but he it began very slowly he started telling me that he had suffered more than anybody else who was associated with the victims sharon and um the voi jacob recalci abigail you know they were all his friends too rome he lived in the house behind the main house so rudy owned this beautiful property at the top of cielo drive it was like a a french design country house one story with like beautiful views everywhere there was a pool and then there was a guest house so he lived in the guest house bought the house i think in the 40s and he among the tenants who stayed there were katherine hepburn clark gable carrie grant and then terry melcher who's the son of doris day he was a music producer he moved in there in 65 moved out in january of 69 and they all rented from rudy and rudy always stayed in the back house because that's all he needed but he only ran into people he thought he'd party with he was a huge partier yeah he was one of the first out gay guys in hollywood who flamboyant didn't care what people thought real character um and when he when roman and sharon moved in he and sharon became very very close sharon tate so they moved in in february of 69 and then in march the two of them went to europe him to do script notes and fixing on the day of the dolphin which he was going to direct in london and sharon went to make a devil movie called the 13 chairs in italy um and then they came back sharon came back in july and um rudy never came back he went over with sharon he flew over there he wasn't her manager he was just her best friend so they flew together and then he went off with an actress named olivia hussey who um was in romeo and juliet which was this big sensational 1969 movie so his relationship with roman and sharon and terry melcher was really important to what became the line of inquiry i was doing did people in hollywood have relationships with manson that were concealed by either hollywood the machine the publicity machine or law enforcement and rudy started kind of telling me yeah so he'd get drunk i'd usually drive him home and he'd always want me to come into a shitty little apartment for one more night cap and that's when he'd start talking and he had a few drinks and he goes you know what terry went on he had a great career produced all these bands he was still alive then romans never suffered for this he was the only one who lost their house lost their reputation because people thought he had a relationship with the family you know even law enforcement they eventually said he did a relationship with the manson family that was another reason for them to come up there um he was just bitter and angry and he said if the truth ever came out about roman and them and terry and dennis wilson of the beach boys and some other people he goes nobody would believe it but it's true and i could tell you and so he ended up started telling me how to prove that the district attorney bulliosi had covered up the much more involved relationship with uh terry melcher for instance and then government people who were involved with with manson and it's hard to say with if people haven't read the book and i don't want to give too much away because part of the fun of the book is you think it's gotten pretty crazy and it's over and then like the next couple pages is like no what it's even crazier so the official narrative of manson is that from a young kid his mom was a prostitute yeah and he was just involved in a bunch of petty crimes throughout his life in and out of prison and he kept getting out of prison and then eventually there was one point where he went in for seven years and then he came out different in 67 and he immediately violated his parole he was paroled to los angeles without permission he went up to san francisco to the bay area turned up at the parole office and said i want a parole officer up here they looked him up and they said you're not allowed to be here you've got to go back to la they wrote to la la demanded he come back he didn't and then all of a sudden something happened which i can't find the paper record of the reason i have the records i do have is i did freedom of information request to the bureau of prisons and i got a part of his parole record for the time he was supervised from his release until the murders which paints a whole different picture he got assigned to a parole officer in san francisco named roger smith who was a criminology student at berkeley and also a drug researcher uh and working out of the haight ashbury free medical clinic and that's where things get really crazy um now is was he connected to sydney gottlieb uh not that i know of but um jolly west who was a psychiatrist who went to leave of absence from the university of oklahoma to study the explosion of the summer of love in 67 he somehow anticipated that like six months before he went to the hate he opened what he called a hippie pad a laboratory described as disguised as a hippie pad where they put up you know posters and he had grad students he told them in january grow your hair long i want you to staff this hippie pad and we're gonna study the young kids that are gonna invade the hate in the summer he knew this all in advance and there's a whole reason that i won't get into here about how he knew it because it was well it was basically engineered by a bunch of these people to happen in government uh and jolly west had been working in the cia's mk altar program since 1953 which was a program that their ultimate goal was to learn how to create programmed assassins people who would kill without recollection or of not only the killing also their programming and that was what this guy's specialty was he was a very well-known psychiatrist and in the 70s 75 this information about this seeker program mk ultra came out because a state department person who found the records what was left of the records blew the whistle there were congressional hearings he was identified as one of the cia researchers who gave drugs to prisoners to people in fake apartments to study them in the hayton in new york and a couple other cities and he was fingered but he denied it and he was never investigated at that point by 69 he had after 69 he went to los angeles to ucla and became the head of the psychiatry department there until he retired and then died the year i started this book he it was the year he died oh wow and he was actually murdered by his son what well he was dying of cancer as was his wife and the son had uh they were his wife was a doctor too they had a family plan that if they ever became terminally ill that the son would give them administered uh lethal drugs to them so nobody know it at the time but after both of them were dead and i think the son waited a number of years there's no statute of limitation on murder but for this kind of thing i'm not sure why but he did publish a book in the early 2000s so they died and both they died like six months apart his parents were killed by the sun and that was 1999 and the sun published a book in about 2011 called the last good night where he describes the planning and the killing of jolly west and his wife catherine by lethal drug administration um where is he now you want to know that's weird so the son wouldn't talk to me when i before he wrote the book he said i will never talk about my father it's too dangerous he had too many secrets i couldn't get him to talk to me then the book comes out in 2012 or 13 where he talks about the rumors of his father being cia but he doesn't say anything more it's mostly about just the human family drama of what it's like to have to be talked into it by both your parents and then to actually carry it out for them i mean he got a lot of press he was on good morning america you know all the talk shows so when the book came out i thought well now he's gone public i'll try him again but i waited a year or two and found out he had died in the previous year or two and he would have only been about 55. i can't find any record of where he died how he died his two sisters neither of them would talk to me one's in europe and one's in new york i beg them to let me interview them so i don't know what happened to him whoa yeah i just found a death notice you know on ancestry and no record of him at any of his old addresses that's so weird yeah yeah so he didn't get any trouble for killing his parents even though they wanted him to kill them he didn't yeah i mean i have the book and i somebody asked me recently how he got away with it and i think it was something technical like he enabled them to inject it themselves he gave them everything you know he did all the concoction but he didn't do the injection something like that or so he said who knows he did it to a way you know he had lawyers advising him and there was definitely a risk of him getting charged but i think it would have only been as an accessory and maybe it was that that if it's only an accessory after a certain number of years they can't charge you right rather than the actual murder i'm not sure that's a good question though wow what a crazy thing so jolly west was working at the haight ashbury free medical clinic which serviced the community in the summer of 67 it was built to take care of the needs of all these runaways and it was opened by a guy named david smith this gets confusing david smith allowed jolly to recruit subjects for his studies of hippies and lsd around the corner in his hippie pad laboratory disguised as a hippie pad and roger smith who was the parole officer of manson had manson come to the haight ashbury free medical clinic where he was working on his own drug research and doing his parole and it was during those pivotal two or three months manson got out in march of 67. he was just an ex-con you know he'd been in prison half his life he was 32 i think it was 17 years in and out of federal institutions for dumb stuff like stealing cars and robbing grocery stores yeah and he was never in a county jail except waiting for you know federal trials yeah silly stuff stealing a car and then taking it across the state line which makes it federal um the last thing he went to prison for was stealing an envelope from the mail which made it a federal offense so if that had been stealing there was a check for 37 that he cashed if he had just stolen that check and cash it would have been a local thing he probably wouldn't have even gotten jail time but since he took it from a mailbox he got a 10 year sentence and that's we're going to go into that more in the second book about it looks like they wanted him in these federal places for all those years and even bullios admits in the book why every single time he committed a petty crime and you know stealing car is not that serious it happens all the time but he always happened to go across the state line maybe just for a few hours making it and then come right back he said it was weird bullios he admitted it well i found evidence that there were he he didn't go of his own volition he had no reason to go to the next state that right because they were doing this research in prisons wow so i think well i don't want to say it now because i haven't proven any of this part yet but i'm building a case now that he this all began when he was still in prison they're experimenting with him have you ever met a guy named i heard of stephen kinser yeah he wrote the sitting godly book right right yeah i talked to him about that and his his the way he explains mk ultra is just fascinating how it's basically you know he had to go to different countries went to germany just because he was violating the human right like the stuff he was doing he had a license to kill from the government like he was destroying people so you had him on the podcast yeah how'd it go it was great maybe it was you guys somebody asked me if i would go on a podcast with him and i yeah yes it was yeah i wanted to have you guys both on together and i said you know i said i don't think he'd do it i my book his book is very straightforward you know he's a new york times best-selling author not academic but it's very sober you know and i don't think he'd want to be in my category uh and he kind of shut down a little bit when i started to ask him about charles manson yeah yeah of course yeah i'd love to sit down and ask him why louis jolly west isn't even in his index in his book and this guy my book was already out before his book and nobody wants to take somebody else's findings even you would obviously acknowledge them but i have the documents i show that he was gottlieb's first psychiatric partner when he was at the lachlan air force base in texas i have all the letters that i found that west accidentally left in his archive at ucla where they're page after page after page describing what kind of experiments they're going to do they're all illegal on human on patients and wes says we can hide it from the other doctors on these wards because the patients are already suffering from mental illness so what i do to them it's just going to look like another one of their but it's going to be with my drugs and hypnosis and gottlieb's like well you have to double you know all the ways they're going to hide their correspondence gottlieb had an alias he wanted wes to have an alias but west didn't want one because he thought that would draw attention if anybody caught that so he did that for from 53 to at least 67.68 i've got a paper record of him corresponding with gottlieb and nobody had has the unredacted record like i do like everything got uh kinser saw here's a little bit of my sour grapes yeah with stuff he got through other people's freedom of information act requests and it's all redacted because i read this book he doesn't have new information in there from documents he's got he's got a lot of great stuff in there that fills in got gaps but for him to completely ignore the scientists that john marks john marx is the whistleblower who was a state department official who found these financial records for mkultra went to congress told them about it caused the congressional investigation seymour hearst the famous investigative journalist worked with marx and he wrote the first big stories in 1974 or five on this horrifying program that our government did since the early 50s where they were testing drugs on people without their awareness using making them human guinea pigs and some of these people died you know committed suicide or or had massive nervous breakdowns right so i was i didn't think kinser was if he hadn't even mentioned my findings i knew that he didn't want to have anything to do with my book why why would he what would be his reasoning of of ignoring the stuff about west um do you want to know what other people tell me yeah i do yeah i don't i i'm fascinated by it do you know what a limited hangout is what's a limited edition a limited hangout is when an agency uses a media person to release more information than they've released before because it's coming out anyway or is about to come out to try to keep people from suspecting even worse so people accuse him of being i actually would love to have him see this podcast and reach out to me and tell me he's going to sue me or something so people i know who are serious researchers think he's paid by the cia it's like it's called a limited hangout guy wow so because people would question it if it came directly to a government agency there's not a lot of new information in his book so there's only been a couple really good books about mk although they were all written in the 70s john marks who was a whistleblower wrote the very first book it's called the search for the manchurian candidate seymour hirsch wrote about it in a couple books a guy named uh optin and lifton i think their names are they wrote a book called the mind manipulators in the late 70s and nobody really wrote a book just about mk ultra until kinser did and i think his book came out like six months after mine or something i think that i mean there's a lot of stuff that's not substantiated in this unless you read a cover to cover it sounds crazy you know right and that's why i mean i don't want it i i know that i was on rogan and rogan's audience is an audible you know they listen to books and i'm so glad that people are buying the book much more since i've been on a show but almost all of them by the audiobooks and i listen to audio books now but if you do the audio you're not seeing all the sourcing hold it up hold it up a little higher so we can see it on the uh yeah i think it's 60 70 pages of endnotes and i don't know if you're an author but what authors do in the endnotes is we cheat by adding more information than you really should because it doesn't fit in here you don't want to stop the reader with like where this came from right it disrupts the flow yeah it disrupts the flow so you put in the endnotes but then what you do is you give a little more that you had to cut out of the main narrative because it gets too detailed so some of my endnotes are like a half a page long and there's just so much information in the endnotes i'm more proud of the endnotes have to really yeah yeah yeah so um yeah so people that get the they also you don't get the pictures right in the audiobook no you don't get the pictures yeah we got all these it's just people i mean i don't nobody has the with all the you know media on on your phone and everything these days it's just people don't have time to do anything i i can't blame them i'm the same way okay you know who has time to sit down and in front of a book for hours on end so this is rudy in the guest house having a party and that's candice bergen uh and this is like 1966. rudy altabelly and then this is him when i would go see him in his apartment i took that picture of him and he had like 20 cats wow yeah that's incredible yeah so what um yeah yeah you hold it up by your face um there you go and pointing you can just point to it that way the camera can see it right this is rudy with his kitten yep he took care of like 20 straight cats and had three crippled dogs and got mugged in his neighborhood like once a month and then when rudy lived in the guest house in the 60s whoever was in the main house became especially the women would be like his pet so candace berger and he were very close she was terry melcher's girlfriend so that's a party he's having with karen and or terence or candace in the guest house that's that's candace and terry melcher but yeah if you guys didn't get the if you only get the audiobook no i'm going to order i'm going to order the hard the hardcover that's a picture of me when i was young when i started the damn thing and didn't go white until my threats wow man look at your computer oh yeah the computer really tells it all i know and the one at the bottom is me more recently in my office with uh okay oh my god what a bookshelf that is that's incredible um yeah another thing about about mk ultra is they like all the studies they did on the prisoners like whitey bulger yeah apparently like what's the story with him and mk ultra well the government admitted after he died that's when it came out i can't remember who i think was a journalist or something or maybe it was during his trial i thought he was like openly talking about it yeah he was talking about but nobody would believe it but during his trial i think it was his lawyers were able to get his prison records and somebody sent them to me recently where they have the dates that he's given lsd and this was all in the 50s you know before manson was in prison but in the 50s he was still a kid he didn't well he got out of prison in 67-32 so 57 he would have been 22. um he was in the same prisons that were treating people like bulger experimentally with lsd so one of the jurors who convicted whitey bulger reached out to me when my book came out and she's gotten a lot of national attention she didn't know that there was a little bit of mention in the trial but the judge wouldn't let too much of it in after he was convicted he started writing her and telling her all about the experiments and she is a very good reporter she's not a journalist but she lives in boston and she started looking into it working with researchers and found out that it was much more extensive than anybody ever knew and could have been the reason he became such a violent so sociopath uh in the years when he was very young yeah that happened and then when he became a notorious killer after and that entire time being protected by the government he was a federal informant you know and um well with two agents who the the fbi denies that anybody but the agents knew that he wasn't that they weren't they were rogue agents that were paying him to get information and provoking him and stuff so she wanted me to write a book with her and i just said i can't do something just on whitey but keep coming to me with your information and all so we've been sharing information since i haven't talked to her for a few months so i don't know if she found another author but yeah whitey bulger had what happened to i believe manson in prison on paper i don't have a record yet like she got but i'm working with some people now trying to get records from when he was in prison and they won't release them because they say their medical records but he's a convicted dead notorious criminal so i've got i actually have a lot of work to do i have to find out how they got the medical records of whitey i think i think was because whitey was alive and white he shared him and he had access to his own records but i don't think i'm ever going to get the rest of the records from if you read in the book it took me like two years to get the records i did get from the bureau of prisons about manson and the at trial when he was convicted his defense attorney was trying to get his prison record and they wouldn't release it to him and this was during the death penalty phase of the trial and when i talked to experts about that they said they can't anything should be allowed to be introduced when somebody's life is at stake so the state was arguing for manson and the others to be you know uh executed irving canaric the defense attorney wanted to show that manson had always been a docile prisoner had never been badly behaved in prison never been violent and he couldn't believe that this the government that u.s government wouldn't release the record and he screamed and hollered and since this the the trial was such a circus and urban canary was pretty crazy too nobody took them seriously and it wasn't i talk about it in my book the attorney general in 1971 john mitchell who ended up going to his prison himself for being part of nixon's cabinet and part of the plumbers and stuff you know in the mid to late 70s he sent a representative of the department of justice who worked beneath him to argue to the judge against releasing manson's file i can't find evidence of that happening any other case in the history but i believe that's just like the watson tapes there are secrets in there about what was going on with manson's head and what they were doing to it that they're never going to share wow so the record i got was i think 70 pages out of probably 300 or 400. they described it one of the kineric got somebody to describe what the parole record looked like and i think they said it was like two phone books thick and i got like that much so who was his parole officer before he went in for the seven years well that was interesting the parole officer who violated him in 19 so he got he got convicted for the stealing the the uh the the letter in the um in the yeah the mailbox the mailbox yeah uh and that was a 10-year sentence and he was released i think after two years on parole and then within a month or two he didn't show up for a parole hearing not a parole hearing an appointment with his parole officer they immediately violated him sent federal marshals to texas who went into mexico where they had information that he was in mexico the the mexicans turned them over to the marshals at the border of laredo and texas they don't do that for these small-time criminals and then they brought him back to l.a and then he was sent to due to the next eight years of his prison sentence which would have taken him i think to 69 or 70 but then they decided to release him two years early in 67 so he could go and do what he did but what's so ironic and you'll i mentioned this in the book he got sent back to prison for missing one appointment one meeting you know you're supposed to go either once a week or once a month roger smith when he was his parole officer he wouldn't show up for meetings and then when he was down in la for months at a time and he was never violated um he was getting arrested for rape for drug possession for uh pimping during 67-69 charges dropped every time in my book i have a scene where i take this record that i got and what few pages they released to me um you know the prisons and to this retired district attorney named louis watneck and van nuys and she the judge he was a judge yeah right okay so he had been he had been a d.a and then he became a judge and uh i think was van nuys and then he retired and he was sick and dying and he's like on a oxygen machine so he's raspy but i had a tape recorder and he's going through my documents and he actually manson had come before him when he was a judge on some petty charge and he said i dismissed him on that case i remember because there was no evidence but it was something like breaking into a car or something but he remembered very well but then he was looking he said i had no idea and he said there's something this is this is chicken [ __ ] this is all chicken [ __ ] yeah and i'm like what's chicken [ __ ] he goes well you know obviously people make mistakes we're a bureaucratic system but this is like almost on other every other week he's getting picked up taken in booked and then released without charges all of these are violations of his parole he should have been sent back 10 different times on the stuff you're showing me but he also should have been prosecuted on half of these things and they just dropped the charge dropped the charge he goes somebody wanted him out he was more valuable to people outside than inside somebody worked to keep him out on the street like he was an informant i said i said you mean like an informant he goes well people confuse what an informant is an informant doesn't just provide information sometimes and there's a history of it they can provoke other criminals to commit crimes they can conspire with them and then walk away and then the police know what's going to happen right before it happens they can be much more proactive so he said you to me he goes you've got to find out who he was working for i go how am i going to find that because i don't know you're the journalist and i go well who do you think it was he goes well i'd start with the los angeles sheriff's office then go to the lapd he goes they're not going to tell you but that's who you should look at and i goes that he goes no dea [Music] fbi he didn't say the cia but he said it could have been any number of agencies who he was either sharing information was sharing something with and they wanted it to keep going but there's no way this is an anomaly like just a couple mistakes he goes this is a pattern there's no way we would have missed this whoa and what was important about him was he you know he was in law enforcement you know from the prosecution side and then as a judge during that same period so you know a lot of times if i show it to somebody now they'd say of course you should have been picked up we have computers but you didn't so he was important because he knew exactly how they shared information how it came in and even roger smith's relationship with manson his parole officer for the first year while he became charlie mansion he came out of prison he was panhandling playing guitar in the bay area gets hooked up with roger and within a couple months has his following of women you know the first six months i think he had anywhere from four or five to ten women that were following him all over the bay area going to the clinic he would leave the women with the doctors to get tested you know for vd and get some of them were pregnant get pregnancy attention and he'd go in and meet with uh roger for his parole hearings and everybody you know they described it to me i'm not the first one to report it they said the women would follow manson they never stood beside him they always had to be behind him they wouldn't spoke unless he spoke to them first they would pick things up for him they were like slaves how did he become this guru in a few months how did he develop the skill to all of a sudden have these people do whatever he said and then within two years do whatever he said including go kill some strangers in a house that you've never been to before except for tax right and do it you know with as much you know brutality is is imaginable and then come back and not even be remorseful about it um so that's the kind of thing that you know the book shows what was basically withheld from the public and that's what booliosi did you know he wrote the best-selling true crime book of all time and held her skeleton skelter yeah that to this day you can probably go into any bookstore yeah even if you google like charles manson documentary or book there's also there's also a documentary called helter skelter well no there's two scripted movies okay so the movie the first one that was made in seven the book came out in 74 i think and then the first tv movie it was a two movie which they didn't do back then it was like a big event i think was 76 and to that at that point it was a highest rated tv movie in the history of television it took one and two spot i think number one i know number one was the second part and number two was the first then he remade it in uh the early 2000s he updated i mean it was the exact same story but it was right new actors you know juliosi's narrative believes he's narrative again yeah and then you know in my book they'll see it opens with our confrontation my confrontation with vince in his kitchen where he's threatening me and right trying to stop the book and writing to my uh publisher and uh calling me at all hours of the night now what what obviously your your first meeting with bullios you was very pleasant yeah so the first time i went over there and this was what was interesting too and for people who people listening who aren't familiar we will remind you billy osi was the prosecutor right on on manson's trial bullios he was an unknown prosecutor in 1969 and he was given a career-making case you know this is the highest profile murders in the history of california uh the craziest case and not only did he know it was his ticket out of the da's office and then he wanted to run for president and or be a famous author not only did he know it was his ticket out he got a book contract and hired an author to sit in the front row of the trial every day for a year and a half which today would get you this bar but back then they didn't have uh the bar association didn't have rules about it because nobody did it until he did it people never knew he did it until i reported it in my book because kirk gentry that his co-author told me well the cops told me you know who were at the at the courthouse every day you know he had a damn author in there he was playing for his reading audience he didn't care about justice he was making it as sensational as possible and kurt gentry told me that's the truth he said i had a spot in the press thing that vince reserved for me and he would be pissed if i wasn't there every single day so um yeah so he wrote the book and it became the best-selling book of all time and then is it still the best-selling book of all time true crime yeah true crime book of all well you know i i say that in my book and little brown's like we have to fact check that and they said you know what that's we're not going to fact check it we know it's likely but we can't get records from all the way back to 75 right but we do know that it's sold millions and millions and millions of copies i think it's sold like 18 million or something over it's always reprinted so it launched his career and he left the da's office right after and he wanted to run for he did want to be president so he was famous he was on talk shows interviewed by everybody in the world and he ran for the district attorney of los angeles and a few months before the race he was the democratic nominee he would have won except the couple came out and went public herb and rose wisell this is the craziest stories on the book herb wisel was a milkman in pasadena in 1964 and the bouilloses were on his route vince had his first child vince bouliosi junior in 65 i think it was within a year of the baby's birth vince decided that it wasn't his child that it was the milkman's child so he started stalking the milkman and harassing him and the milkman didn't know who was accusing him of being the father of one of his clients or customers child except that it was a man who had eyes everywhere what he didn't know was vince was using investigators for the da's office to trail him and report on him and he told the investigators that he was a witness in a murder case lied to his own office to get info because he was just paranoid about did he actually believe this guy was the real father or was he just he did and he so much so that he he picked up the kids at school and when the parents found that out they had they said to the kids you can't ride the bus home anymore he intercepted them on the way to the bus picked them up the daughter told me this story she got in touch with me after the book came out scoot this way just a little bit just scoot to your right just a little bit yeah you're just getting out of frame there you go the daughter wrote me an email after and i wrote about a lot of this but what i'm telling you now i didn't i knew that the parents thought he was going to do something with the kids because he talked about when they got out of school he would write these anonymous letters to them i have one or two of them on my instagram page because i post stuff up about it yeah and they're threatening letters saying you know implying that he's going to hurt their kids the daughter wrote me after and she goes you got everything in your book about what he did to our family is right but you didn't get a lot of other stuff which i'll share with you and i'm like what what kind of stuff and she goes well for instance he picked me up at school took me to a toy store i told me i could buy whatever i wanted brought me home left me on the sidewalk with this pile of toys i was five years old my mother comes to the door and vince waves to her and drives away and she said my mother just burst into tears because she had already been you know they knew that there was this man who was a danger to their kids and he was sending them a message i can win your kids over if i want this is while he's a deputy d.a prior to getting a science this guy's a psychotic piece of [ __ ] yeah and then what happened was the milkman finally hired someone to tell vince because he would sit in front of their house and watch them so vince knew he was being tailed and he was about to be exposed but he didn't think the milkman would go public and the man wasn't going to go public he just wanted him to stop so vince sent his wife gail to the door to insist to the other wife to talk her husband into taking a blood test so gail gets goes to the door rose answers and this is all in the depositions that came out later and she said my husband is mentally ill that child is his child but he won't believe me and the only way to get him to stop this is for you to get your husband to take a blood test and she goes i absolutely won't do it and we are going to sue you for everything as soon as we find out who your husband is because they still didn't know his name so i think it was that day or the next day they did get vince's plate number they found out who he was they contacted the da's office no they contacted first they found out that vince had a private lawyer so they called him that lawyer arranged for a meeting between the couple and vince and his wife and then submitted everything he said i'm sorry he goes i thought he made my wife pregnant and i wanted to know whether this is my baby or not what's wrong with that and they're like you've been sending us threatening letters you park outside our house you picked up our all this stuff so you lied to your own your own office and told them it was murder they were searching them for murder so the lawyer said vince you can't do that anymore and if the da's office didn't know about it he said they're gonna find out about it so the i'm gonna have to tell them because it's better coming from us than you you have to pay them a financial settlement and promise you'll never follow them so vince offered them 200 in cash and the wise else that we don't want your money we want your word that you will never bother us again and he didn't um a year later the tatella bianca murders happened the da's office knows about this history of vince and they give him the biggest highest profile job in los angeles and you'll see in the book i believe they needed somebody that they could control as a d.a who would be a cro you know who would break the rules and vince was compromised someone they had leverage on so this story didn't become public until he ran for district attorney of los angeles after the manson convictions after he left the da's office he runs for the d.a and the wyzel's never wanted to go public with this but they thought that's the most powerful law enforcement person in the city he's insane look what he did to us so they went to his opponent and said we have a story to tell the opponent said well you tell the public that and they said absolutely so they stood on a stage there was a press conference and they told what i just told you actually i might have told you more than they told cause they didn't i don't think they knew about the da's investigators until they actually had the civil suit so vince responded with his own um press conference and he told the media here's what happened that man was our milkman in 1964 and he stole 200 from our kitchen table when i was at work and my wife was upstairs he delivered the milk and he stole 200 i was investigating him for the theft of two hundred dollars now listen you know the press didn't ask these questions but they he basically called that him a thief uh the lawyer for the wise elves didn't say it then but he told the police or the reporters later number one that story can't be true because vince wouldn't have been investigating him in 1966 whatever the date was the statute of limitation on home robbery or whatever was two years so he was saying he was investigating him for a 200 theft more than two years after right he said right i called the pasadena police department why didn't he ask them to investigate it they have no record of this death being reported so we're going to sue him for libel and then it went to court and vince paid them a fortune and the agreement was they could never go public he admitted to telling the lies wow then vince lost the election and then two years later he runs for attorney general of california even bigger position and a woman comes to his opponent in virginia cardwell and she said he shouldn't be the attorney general she beat the [ __ ] out of me held me captive made me lie to the police she had gotten pregnant with his baby and he he gave her i think 300 to get an abortion and uh called the doctor and the doctor said she never even showed i mean the doctor's not supposed to say anything but since it's been polios yeah the doctor said she didn't come in for an abortion he went to her house and she said i'm catholic i'm not getting i'm boarding that baby he beat the [ __ ] out of her for like four hours she went to the santa monica police department i had the photographs you know black and blue everywhere uh she had a miscarriage and then after he beat her yeah yeah and then that night someone saw it on that one of the journalists that one of the papers saw it on the ticker or whatever you know they see everything that comes in and out of the police station bullios accused of assault and kidnapping by a woman so the next day it was in the l.a times the los angeles herald that this famous prosecutor had beaten up this woman and uh and this is before he ran for attorney general he was writing the book at that point held her skelter and vince went back to her house with his secretary held her captive for four or five hours until she agreed to go to the police and say she filed a fake report so um the secretary typed up a receipt and the story they came up with was that virginia who had recently gone through a divorce had consulted with vince about uh custody payments her husband her ex-husband wasn't paying for the five-year-old kid who was in the house when all this stuff happened and had never had a sexual relationship with him he'd never been to her house and so she was gonna go to the police station and they called her up because they wanted her to come back in for more questioning and vince was in the house with her and so was his secretary i was like no i did not and she said what you want me to come okay you're going to send a car she said oh no i'm fine i can go they knew something was funny so they sent the cops anyway and vince was still there he wouldn't let them in the house and i interviewed the cop who who came to try to get her out of the out of the house he eventually did then what happened was the police interviewed vince and he lied to them he said she's in love with me she's stalking me and it's just over a two hundred dollar bill so um again with the two hundred dollar two or three hundred dollars yeah so then um she still told the story to the police that she had made it all up because she was angry at him for charging her because she was terrified of him and it wasn't until a couple days and the papers reported that she was crazy and she was charged you know with filing a false report vince was vindicated and then a couple days later her brother said she told her brother and he said no we're hiring a lawyer you can't let this go on an address so they quietly filed a lawsuit against him he admitted to everything paid her i think ten thousand dollars or something and then a year later runs for attorney general and she did the same thing the wise elves did they had they violated their nda and she violated hers and she knew he'd call her a liar but she knew he couldn't sue her because he'd have to answer the questions so he lost the race again because of that because everyone believed her and not him right so he was a monster you know and that was the end of his political aspirations but he did write probably 15 best-selling books for the next 20 or 30 years until he died now when you guys got into that that heated argument like the last couple exchanges before you published the book yeah what what parts of the story was he pushing back on the most like what was the what was the the biggest part was terry melcher because terry melcher he called one of his most important witnesses because if it weren't for terry melcher manson never would have known that this house existed so terry melcher had met manson through dennis wilson the beach boy drummer at dennis wilson's house the official story was he met him once and then later agreed oh and and then dennis drove terry home with manson in the back seat and manson saw the house and saw where terry lived and the official version is manson knew terry didn't live there anymore but the tate house but he wanted to kill whoever lived there to send a message to that to melcher and then to the world that helter skelter was happening and and he wanted it to look like the blacks then it was crazy all vince made most of this up the race war the race war yeah yeah right yeah explain that for people who'd so man well manson did talk about a race war that he said was coming and he called it helter skelter named after the um beatles song that had come out in the white album i think in the winter of 69 like january of 69 or something and he did talk about it and prophesize it but he never the only people that said he wanted to ignite it by committing these murders before were three former manson family members jubilee let's say manhandled into saying that you know there was a truth that he would talk about it but not that the murders happened for this um so terry you know it was really difficult to convict manson of the tape murders because he wasn't in the house when they happened it wasn't as hard to get him for la bianca because at least he was in the house accessory but vince had to show that manson knew the house was there knew what kind of people lived there maybe not who they were and then ordered these people to go and kill so terry had to get up and testify about yes manson had seen my house and then terry said it was part of the official version he went out to the spawn ranch twice to audition manson in june before the murders and then he said he wasn't talented i didn't tell him that i just said he'd be better as a tv documentary and then i never saw him again but what i found when i got access to sheriff's files because of a cop who i think felt sorry for me retired cop called another retired cop at the barracks and said let this guy in the back door because his job was to be the security guy at the archive so i was there the whole summer of i think 2000 going through the entire manson file and i found all these smoking guns about the fact that melcher rudy had already told me that melcher had manson's one of his followers dean morehouse living with him in the house and the girls were up there and manson was up there all the time in the tate house in the tate house with terry melcher before roman and sharon moved in okay and that rudy said he told melcher they had to leave because they scared him and i got corroboration of that from other people but then what i found in the files was that um terry went out to see the family right after the murders happened and there's an eyewitness account in the police report a guy named paul watkins said that terry fell to his knees and he was crying and begging forgiveness to manson and that manson said they all had to die all the pigs had to die now the frustrating thing for me is the sheriff who took the report was dead so i couldn't ask him what that meant you know what these are notes so i didn't have a tape recording and it's like shorthand like they all had to die terry falls to knees crying begging for forgiveness from charlie first week of september 1969 so like a month after the murders paul watkins who told the police this who was one of the acolytes of manson was dead so i couldn't ask him paul watkins was uh one of his followers he's one of the followers he's the one who told the police the story about terry falling to his knees yeah okay and then terry denied that the story was true right so i couldn't verify it from anybody else except that report then i found other witness eyewitness reports of melcher going all the way to barker ranch in death valley to have another meeting with manson and this was like two weeks after the spawn ranch won uh and you know it's a substantial trip it's like six hours to get out to where they were hidden in the valley at that point i mean in the in death valley at that point and there were two or three different family members who talk about terry coming going off in the choir with manson and the two or three family members who told the police that admitted it wouldn't talk to me and then terry denied it and the cop that took it was also dead or i couldn't find him but i found so i found out that terry's relationship was significantly different than he said under oath he said he barely knew manson he met him once at wilson's and then twice at spawn ranch and it was all about music you know maybe producing him so the fact that as stephen k who was poliosis co-prosecutor in the trial said to me when i showed him these documents stephen k who's bullios he's co-prosecutor he was an assistant d.a who helped bully oc prosecute questions people first he said you will never be able to convince me that terry melcher had anything but a fleeting acquaintance with manson because i'd already told him what i found and i said now i want to show you the documents i had like three meetings with him in his office because he was still in the da's office and he said you'll never convince me of this he goes i knew terry i he goes i uh i cross-examined him on the stand not only at the main trial but at the watson trial right then i showed him the documents and i described it in the book he's he's shaking his head and he's cause i can't i don't know what to think about this anymore he said i've been going to these parole hearings for 30 years at that point every time a manson family member had a parole hearing he had to go represent the state and he had to go through the official story it usually took two hours how the person who was on parole met the manson family what they did in the murders everything and he had this blueprint story that he told again and he goes now i don't know what to think about this anymore and clearly this is vince's handwriting he had taken these interviews from these people this changes everything he said and more frighteningly if vince lied about this what else did he lie about so um that's why for instance that revelation about terry was really really important and that's why when i took the set that i took to stephen to terry's house i'm like one of the two people he's ever talked to about these murders he gave one interview in the 70s he released a solo album of himself singing yeah and then he agreed to talk to me in i think 2001 and it was only because he knew that i had something on him so i went to he had just moved down from carmel where he had lived with his mom doris day hadn't recorded music for like years but had decided to do kokomo with the beach boys which i think is the worst beach boys song ever but it was their best-selling song of all time and then worked with lou adler again who had produced all his early stuff he was getting back into the music business after being retired for like 10 years so he got a penthouse on ocean drive in santa monica and he says don't go to my apartment and just go right up to the roof oh my god [ __ ] i go up to the you know have to go through the doorman the door and said yeah he said don't go to his apartment just take the elevator to the roof oh but i got to the roof and it was you know there's a pool okay there's an outdoor dining but he was the only one up there it was the fourth of july um like three in the afternoon it was weird there wasn't a single other person on this beautiful roof but it wasn't i thought at first am i gonna be on a bare roof so he was there and a big bottle of wine and from about three in the afternoon he's already wasted and i i knew his drug i don't know how to pronounce it deladon or something like that it's his what the drugs that he like to take it's like xanax but it's called kalonapin no no it because the d d out the d-i-l-u i can never pronounce it so he's stoned and high and he's got sunglasses on he looked like jim morrison from the photos i'd seen because he used to be a blonde young good-looking guy he was bloated his hair was long and he had these aviator glasses on and he's slurring and i sat down with him for like an hour or two on tape showed him the same documents i had shown stephen yeah wouldn't even look at them so i'm reading them to them they go that's [ __ ] people just trying to be famous they're always trying to go terry this is serious i mean you purged yourself in a capital case meaning you lied and gave testimony that resulted in people getting the death penalty all seven of them got death penalties but the supreme court overthrew the death penalties in the early 70s saying it was unconstitutional for anybody so they suspended the death sentences and that's the only reason none of them were killed by the end of the 70s right they all got their senses commuted to life in prison with possibility of parole right but for you to purge yourself in a death penalty case you can be susceptible to the same penalty so it's found out that you lied in a death penalty case you can get the death penalty if your testimony convicted and sent somebody i think if they got it executed so it's a serious charge and i go it's not and again it's not like one little lie or fib but everything you said about manson and how you knew him where you met him who else you had them living with you in that house and they asked him you know he was on the stand for like three or four hours did you ever meet this person no no no no i go you lie almost every word that came out of your mouth was a lie so finally he's like who sent you why are you doing this who wants to [ __ ] with me i go i'm a journalist he goes listen here's what here's what i offer you nobody has i've never written my memoir i've been asked so many times to write about my mother my life producing the mamas and the papas the beach boys my mother's records [Music] about her life with sammy davis she was part of the rat pack frank sinatra all those guys i could tell you stories that would shock the world we would have a best seller you want to do it with me i'm like terry you know what this sounds like i said number one why would i trust any of your stories when you lied about this but number two you're trying to buy me off right and he said yeah it'll be a much more sense nobody's gonna believe this [ __ ] i'll give you my book we'll do it let's do it i can tell you're good i go nope sorry then he said okay he goes i have lawyers and he starts naming these lawyers and i heard of some of them who will crush you if you try to publish this i will crush you and she he said in fact right now i'm gonna take your briefcase and throw it off the roof i'm like terry you know i have copies at home i wouldn't have been yeah so that's you know there's a lot more of it in there but um that was yeah i mean the same thing with vince he was calling me and threatening me and when i was at his house saying we're quarters off we turn the recorders off he goes i will hurt you like you've never been hurt in your life and i said what does that mean vince he goes that's you interpret it whatever way you want but i will hurt you like you have never been hurt in your life i go does that mean you're going to beat me up like virginia cardwell you know are you going to stalk me like the milkman you know it's crazy austin can you tell them to quiet down um okay so the reason you want under the water yeah i have in mind okay will you do sparkling water awesome will you grab a bottle of water from the fridge out there thanks man um okay so when i go off into the weeds just go like this no no you're good a lot of times they get too deep i love it i'm just right now i'm having trouble understanding how okay i understand the evidence that you found throws off the official story and it throws off the helter skelter narrative um the fact that terry melcher met with manson in the weeks following the murders how how is that significant right right like how like obviously it it's significant because you it's it's changes the whole story it make it shows that their [ __ ] was covered up [ __ ] was false but what is like it's the smoke that i mean it opens the door to the possibility like were these people killed because of something terry had done why would terry be begging forgiveness thank you forgiveness for what why did the most important thing is just that the prosecution withheld this for instance when i showed this stuff to paul fitzgerald who was probably the sanest of the defense attorneys he was leslie's attorney i know patricia cramer uncles and as buliosi said in the book the smartest and the best we were having lunch at a dim sum place in chinatown and he starts pounding his hand on the table he goes this is amazing he goes i've been interviewed a thousand times about this it's probably like 2001 or two he goes this would have gotten the case thrown out this principle witness lied under oath and then scripted the lies he goes everything at that trial just like stephen k said now is is questionable because he lied with his own witness and he knew the witness was lying he goes you he would have been arrested for that disbarred automatically and he would have been charged so um you know other stuff i found out this isn't in the book but uh that makes the whole helter skelter thing fall apart is i found out that there was an attempt on the lives of the same four people sharon vojcek abigail folger and jay sebring the night before at j.c brings house he lived down the canyon from sharon lived at the top of cielo j lived in a castle on easton that was a famous they thought haunted castle because this film director paul i forgot what his name was was murdered there by probably his wife who was a famous 1930s starlet but the the studio protected it made it look like a suicide jay lived in this house had wild parties there had secret doors was into s m had drugs well the night before they were all murdered he had dinner for sharon and and wojciech and abby and him and while they were having din when they finished dinner he had installed cable tv now when i first read this in a police report that's how i found out about it because it's not in the popular literature it was in the police files i thought they didn't have cable tv in 1969 but then i looked it up talked to experts and they said they started introducing cable tv in the mid-60s the public didn't have it you had to have a fortune but you could subscribe and they had it and only some very wealthy people had it jay had cable and they were going to watch a movie after dinner in his bedroom and then all of a sudden there was according to the police report from an electrician who was he had installed all of the wiring for jay's house his father was jay's lawyer he was a law school student paul greenwald and paul went to the sebring house three days after the murder because his lawyer who was jay's lawyer said go get a suit for jay to be buried it was probably two days after and when he was there he told the police that the night before the murders jay had called him because the cable had gone out and uh he went to the back of the house when he went to get the suit two days after and you know the police were guarding the house and they interviewed him only because he came then they said what are you doing here and he said well i think you should know this when i went to the back of the house the lines had been cut and i could tell by the gradation that they were deliberately cut because they were all sliced in the same direction there were like four lines and two of them were cut and he said it couldn't have happened it couldn't have been a gardening accident because it was nine o'clock at night there wouldn't have been gardeners there it wasn't an animal that chewed through it but it seemed significant that the night before those same four people died at the tate house somebody cut the wires at jay's house now if you know the the tape murder scene the first thing they did was text climb the pole and cut the phone wires just the phone wires not the lights to the house so nobody could call out right so paul greenwald i found him when i found this report and he said oh yeah i remember following that i mean telling them that like it happened yesterday clearly someone tried to kill them the night before and i asked him for more detail than was in the report he goes well what's interesting is the lights were on in the house they only lost cable they didn't know what they were doing you know they were trying to cut the they thought it was a foam wire it was a cable they'd never seen it before but they they cut they hit another wire and he said that causes a surge of electricity so every light in the house would have blazed and he had lots of flowers yeah just for like a second and then they couldn't watch cable so jay caught and this is in the police report jay called greenwald at nine o'clock said i have sharon and gibby and voy check over and we've lost cable we don't know what happened can you come over and look at the wires and greenwall said i've finally got this girl to go out with me who i've been trying to get to go out for three months it's nine o'clock i'm i've got to be at her house in like five minutes please and jay said i forget it we'll go to the daisy which is what they did they went to the club the very next night watson cuts the correct wire at the tate house about well a couple hours later about 11 30. they go in and slaughter those same four people and then steve parent who happened to be in the back house visiting so if if this is all true and it is you know i have the contemporaneous report that the green wall gave in august 12th when he went to get the suit that means that the whole argument that booliosi made that these people were strangers to their killers that they picked people they didn't know just that they knew had to represent hollywood and glamour because manson knew terry used to live there so that meant that whoever there was now was likely in show business it meant no they were stalking and targeting specific people at least one of those four people maybe two of those four people maybe all four pouliosi kept all that out of the book and again the only reason i found it was because i got access to after i got into the sheriff's files then i got an lapd cop who had caught he was a sergeant who was in charge of the tape murder investigation and he had copied the entire file and i heard about him through collectors he was selling it for 200 000 and he was the only one who had the whole file holy [ __ ] and he wouldn't he wouldn't uh consider letting me look at it for free i flew out to sun valley idaho and this is when bruce willis and demi moore were still married this cop who had retired lived in the mansion next door to bruce and to me at a beautiful millionaire's mansion he was a really corrupt cop holy [ __ ] so i uh i spent two days there went to the house twice he had a great story he had married a homicide detective a woman he and her left their spouses in the middle of the night and ran off together and got married and they were still married all these years later so i got drunk with them for two days they were both alcoholics um i'll do whatever i have to do i'll shoot heroin if that's going to get me man you've had a lot of fun escapades yeah with your subjects so at the end of two days he agreed to read from some of the stuff he had on these principal witnesses long story short that was like 2001 i think it took me until 2008 they relocated from utah to palm springs palm desert bought a beautiful house that used to belong to russ meyer this famous pornographer who made all these 60s pornography films and they lived there then so i started visiting him there about once a year and finally i broke them down and he said here's the deal i want to write my own book he said if you organize all i've got here like two or three boxes you know alphabetize it index it put it in an organized way he said you can copy whatever you want so i spent a week there in his garage taking everything copying almost all of it if not all of it and then putting it in hanging files in these boxes with labels and everything except every day at lunch time he'd come out time to go to lunchtime oh god so they'd take me to this little steakhouse every day and they didn't like it if i didn't have a martini with them and they didn't like it if i didn't have two martinis so we'd get rip-roaring drunk at lunch and then go back to the garage and i'd try to keep working and he'd keep drinking and just sitting there in a folding chair telling me stories and elsa his wife would stumble out go would you leave that [ __ ] kid alone he's gotta work and i go i was staying at a friend's house but it was a week of that and i got everything and that's where i found that report about the the wires oh my gosh but that's why it takes 20 years it took me seven or eight years to get him to finally let me look at it and that was probably ten visits to him one in utah and then nine in palm springs until i won him over he died a couple years ago and then she died last year and i know that the sun i shouldn't even be saying this on this i don't care the sun is a a cop now and he has the files and um i've always been worried that he's going to sell them i guess it doesn't matter now because i took the best stuff but there's another box of stuff there i'm not going to say because i don't want to publicize i'll tell you after the show okay but it's really really important um that he wouldn't let me look at then and the sun has it now whoa yeah this is just kind of to give you the overview of why an investigation like this doesn't happen like it does on tv right yeah have you ever considered doing any sort of like docu-series on it or anything like that has anyone approached you about that yeah yeah i mean especially since you've done the joe rogan thing that probably blew it out of the water yeah it sure did but before rogan actually before the book came out i told you that my first publisher sued me and everything stopped yeah as far as me being and my agent said he goes frankly you're getting sued by the biggest publisher in the business the most respected that's why we went with them um i might never be able to sell this book again even if we resolve the suit and settle he goes you've got a black mark against you because you couldn't deliver that book i'm like thanks loan he goes i just want you to know the truth so i actually reached out to i don't know if you know who errol morris is errol moore isn't that hamilton morris's dad he knows hamilton yeah yeah hamilton i don't know much about his dad but i've heard the name well his dad is a lot more famous than hamilton but hamilton has got his following i know hamilton now oh yeah errol errol made his first movie that kind of broke him out was the thin blue line okay about a wrongly convicted uh killer in texas that got the guy out of prison right and it kind of changed documentary filmmaking back in the it's probably the mid 80s just phenomenal technique everything he did so every movie since then has been a big story he won the oscar in i think 2005 or six for a movie called the fog of war where he got uh the secretary secretary of state mcnamara bob mcnamara who prolonged the vietnam war by lying about it under president johnson never admitted before that they knew we were going to lose the war that they had uh reduced the number of casualties they basically lied to keep the war going errol got mcnamara on camera to admit about all these lies and break down and cry when he was like 90 years old and it won him an oscar for best documentary so his last film was about timothy leary and his girlfriend it came out on showtime last year so in 2015 i reached out to him because when penguin was still working with me they thought he would be a good match for me as a collaborator because he also wrote books right and i said i'd love to work with errol moore's because i'm a huge film fan so they sent him my proposal and they're all said i'm not going to write a book with this guy i want to make a movie about him and they said no no we got a book we got we'll get back to you when we're down the book so it occurred to me when i was desperate and broke and when my agent said we might never be able to sell the book i said i'm gonna go see if errol wants to make the movie now and i had his email address i'd never met him or spoke to him but i had it on the bunch of things from the agencies so i just emailed him out of the blue and he called me that day again long story short he and i worked together for a year so he came out to my place in venice with a crew and shot for three days i think they wired my whole bungalow with cameras there were like 15 cameras on remote tracks and then they went in an empty bungalow across the lot and they had like 10 computer guys with these massive screens controlling the cameras yeah they'd be tracking across my ceiling and then it's just errol and i in the bungalow one other woman who was pulling focus on one camera that you couldn't use remotely and then like a crew of 20 or 30 people on the whole property and then we went to a sound stage and they moved half of my apartment to the sound stage like my desk my chair all those books you saw in that picture which is a nightmare because you guys just we have to put them back exactly where they are and they promised but of course they didn't then they recreated my apartment on the soundstage in hollywood and then they had a camera like 50 60 100 feet in the air swirling down like when i'm going through my stuff and then he has smoke and all his he does a lot of weird yeah beautiful stuff so he sold it to netflix and it was going to be a series about me and the book and it was going to be six hours and right after he sold up but before i signed the contract with netflix he changed the focus and there was another guy who he decided he wanted to combine our stories this became a series called wormwood it was on netflix about four years ago and it's about a guy named eric olson whose father was murdered by the cia in 1953 thrown off a building and at the statler hilton in new york city because he was going to be a mk ultra whistleblower and to this day the government only admits that it used him in an experiment but that he committed suicide but with eric the son who's 70-something now has spent his life trying to show that he was murdered got enough evidence together that arrow believes them and most people do wow so errol did wanted to combine blend our stories of arrow eric chasing his and me chasing mine and i said oh that's not what i signed up for yeah you know and my book isn't written if my book were written maybe but you know right now you're the author of this story i'm not going to give it up to you if i'm sharing it with a whole other story and no you've dedicated way too much to this so i walked out on it and i you know i would have made significant money and i was getting evicted from my apartment not for not paying because they were demolishing it and i was fighting that it was the lowest time in my life but you know i walked away he was furious there was nothing he can do because my contract gave me an out until i signed the deal with the first deal i signed with him in a was just to work with him and nobody else until he sold it and when he sold it because he invested a quarter million dollars to shoot all this with his own money until he sold it um i would work with him but then as soon as he sold it it would be my last chance to quit if i didn't like the direction it was going in so i quit and it was a tough decision and he hated me yeah and then he ended up just doing eric's story which is like wait that's what i wanted and it was called wormwood it was a big success you can see it on netflix he used real actors for the first time in a documentary so a blended documentary was scripted so amazon studios optioned this they got a hold of the proposal that dan and i my original proposal was 220 pages and we shrunk it down to um about i think 30 when we decided to take it out after the lawsuit was resolved in 2017 so we sold it to little brown they published it but before we'd written that they somebody got a hold of the proposal even though it was under nda brought it to amazon and amazon came to us with an offer to option it so that meant that they for 18 months could develop it even though there was no book but just own it until the book came out and i didn't want to do that because they wouldn't say whether they were going to do a limited series or a feature film right i knew it was going to be scripted i preferred documentary but i knew script it was much more money and i'm a lot of debt because my resolution with penguins looks out [ __ ] it script it gave me the money but it would be a million times better if it was an actual job a proper documentary that's where this is going and it might be a happy ending so what happened was my agent said you can't get them to commit to one or the other you have to hope that when they get the book they'll see it could only be a limited series and i said how much are they going to give me and he said that he goes you know that if they give you that then you and dan can write the book full time you don't have at that point i had started driving uber which is horrible oh no all you can do is the book and you need to do it and get it done in two years or less so i took the money they renewed the option when the book came out and hired a screenwriter he finished his feature length script not limited series pulled his hair out you know he told me he goes now i know why it took you 20 years and how does i don't know how to condense this to two hours but that's what my assignment is right so he turned it in november to amazon and you know he did a good job but it just doesn't reflect the book it just jumps across so amazon pulled the pulled the plug and they didn't say it was because they didn't like his book i don't know if this is true or not but they said it's because they're pulling away from movies with white middle-aged protagonists that they want to do people of color and uh women protagonists that really because the whole me too thing and all that wow yeah i don't think that's true i think they were trying to make him feel good i don't know but whatever but they pulled the plug so i called arrow i go i don't know if you're mad at me or not you know i hadn't spoken to him for five years but just so you know it's available again because i wasn't allowed to do a documentary well they own the script right so errol and i are oh i'm not supposed to be talking about this i don't care he wouldn't care we're negotiating now to do uh uh netflix has already said they'll do it so oh that's amazing we're going back to start [ __ ] yes dude but i mean no i don't get my hopes up anymore no not with that industry man you can't yeah you can't it's just full of letdowns i i've used to be a part of that world really yeah i pitched many tv projects and uh had my heart broken too many times which got me to the podcasting youtube world which you probably love yeah it's amazing it's so much fun i love it no one to no one to answer to well when we're off camera it doesn't even have to be today i want to ask you because i've also been thinking obviously about doing something like this yeah yeah yeah absolutely well thank you so much for coming in everybody the book is called chaos it's a beautiful book it's a masterpiece thank you and i'll link it below great thanks yeah i appreciate it tom hopefully we can do this again uh once your documentary's out or your uh alleged possible possible possible possible documentaries out yeah cool or the next book in 40 20 or the next book yeah i'm looking forward to that as well i'm looking forward to that yeah well cool thank you thank you tom okay i appreciate it great goodbye world [Music] you

Channel: Danny Jones

Views: 628,358

Keywords: Koncrete, podcast, underground, exclusive, independent, interview, interviews, koncrete podcast, documentary, tom oneill, Chaos, tom oneill joe rogan, CIA, charles manson, manson family

Id: _cq6GkM99_Q

Length: 134min 56sec (8096 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021