Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring in conversation with Ariel Wesler at Live Talks Los Angeles

this is done you completed this book well I want to start off just by asking you you devoted the last 20 years of your life you called it an obsession you never thought this book would be completed talk to me about the process that went into middle part and then even when I got him on in another deal I was still anxious because I stopped I became such a pessimist but it's kind of nice to have it behind us now well you were freelance reporter right for premier yeah why it actually just left us magazine which was a monthly at the time and had gone to a weekly tabloid so everybody at the top of the masthead you know we didn't want to do that kind of reporting I was a contributing editor they all went to premier I wasn't sure what I was gonna do but I did one story for details then I got a call in March of 99 asking me to do 30th anniversary piece about the crime which I wasn't at all interested in I'd never read helter skelter never been interested in murder and mayhem and really didn't want to do it but I needed a job I hadn't worked for a couple months and I know I could I knew I could do it in three months I know the deadline was three months and back then they paid well and I really loved my editor because she had been my editor at all of them at the top of the mass said the editor in chief the West Coast editor we all worked together for like seven or eight years so it was a safe place and I thought yeah you know why not a couple months and then on to the next thing I learned a lesson at what point did you realize that there was more how long you'd been working on this before you realized ah there is more to this story probably about six weeks in about halfway through what was originally supposed to be the the assignment things started kind of falling apart in the official narrative after some critical interviews and then I started looking at the pieces and the places they went were pretty alarming and for better or worse I hooked the editor-in-chief in and he became as obsessed as I was my own editor who was you know editing the piece and assigning it she's very skeptical you know and she just wanted the story and she wanted it in time so they assign it in March I was supposed to turn it in and June I think and it would have run at the end at the beginning of July for the August issue but luckily or unluckily Jim MiG's the editor in chief was like I would show him what I had and he was like oh we can blow the deadline it doesn't have to be an anniversary piece which is rare in journalism that usually doesn't happen they don't say just extend whenever happen no I stole think was pretty unique because they kept kept me on the payroll for about a year and a half I signed a contract every month just to keep reporting this story because Jim became as obsessed as I was and then he lost his job if they pulled the plug and then I was on my own in about 2000 late 2000 only 2001 several books have been written on the Manson murders movies yeah everybody thinks that they know what had happened what could possibly be left to tell and there was a quote that stuck out to me in this book you say my goal isn't to say what did happen it's to prove that the official story didn't and that carries quite a lot of weight that wasn't my objective in the beginning but once I started uncovering stuff I actually had to go through an evolution and realize that I might not be able to ever find out what actually happened you know had the beginning in the middle but possibly not the end and when I finally accepted that you know what a lot of urging of agents publishers you know people that you know make a living from this and don't just isolate and not have any money like I was so they were pressuring me to finish in my just basically said Tommy you know you might never find the smoking gun you found a lot of smoking pistols but you just might not have an ending but you've uncovered so much contradictory information that in so many different ways not just the Manson case but it bled out and - you know the other things that were going on and the shirley's even all the way back to the 50s that's how backwards and forwards and sideways that when he said just present everything and you know let the readers make up their own mind about what happened so I wanna ask Tim when you talk about presenting everything but you got to create a narrative actually keeps 100% of his reporting or not 100% but a lot of it and what you call the main transcript which is a single Microsoft Word document that when you double-click it takes about five minutes to open and when it does it's so long that the page count at the bottom of the screen just turns into asterisks it's like more than 30,000 pages yeah and it's and I had to get he Dan came on in 2017 and I had to kind of indoctrinate him into that into that transcript yeah but in the beginning was there a moment where you were like oh this guy's crazy about the time I signed on the dotted line I was like wait yeah but I very quickly saw and converted yeah just like poor Jim yeah yeah you have a good way of getting people on your side yeah but yeah I mean tom has a great problem for any writer to have which is just a glut of material and absolute surplus in every possible way and I think the the trouble with a book like this is not even knowing where it ends but where it begins and how the various tendrils of his reporting connects to one another because in this case we're dealing with prosecutorial misconduct we go into the FBI in the late 60s the CIA Manson's Hollywood connections and there's really only one way to link those things and it's through Tom so I think you were initially very reluctant to insert yourself into the story until you saw or I just sort of made you see by sending you chapters and hoping they were okay we also had to be there yeah and we realized that so much of the narrative is me confronting people with information that implicates them and not telling the truth you know in a variety of cases and investigations but primarily Madison and it's really difficult to write a scene or to convey that you know that when you confront somebody and you show that they're lying and they go you know they talk in circles and don't answer without that dialog and myself and the scene there's you just can't say oh he didn't have an answer he didn't know yeah the scenes are the drama that I think well I think it's presented very well in the book - especially with Julio see he's becomes this nemesis in this book Manson's prosecutor and in the beginning you talk about how you were cordial yeah it changed drastically pretty much yeah I was very friendly in the beginning I mean the first time he was like the second or third interview I had an early April of 99 and I went to his house you know he and his wife were really sweet that Italian him there italian-american they had fresh cookies and coffee we sat down and talked for a couple hours and he and I drove out to this lunch and hat that's his favorite place in the valley that lunch talked some more then he gave me a tour of some of the sites in the San Fernando Valley connected to the case and then we went back to his house and talked for it was six hours I think total and I walked away thinking wow I mean he's the protagonist of the magazine piece he gave me so much access and so much information but he didn't give me anything new he was just kind of regurgitating everything that was already in the book and that have been presented at the trial and at the end of the I mean I was aware of that during the interview and at the end of the interview I did the Hail Mary pass in journalism when you say if there's anything you could tell me off the record you know I need sigh I'd really like something fresh it doesn't have to be attributed to you and he struggled for like a few seconds he had this kind of a internal debate I I've gotten to know it I got to know him so well he passed away a few years ago but III knew every gesture later and what it meant before it happened but uh he said turn it off turn it off so I turned off my recorder and then he told me something off the record that hadn't been reported before it was pretty disturbing and intriguing and it would have remained off the record if our relationship hadn't changed and that's not to say that I put it on the record to punish him I wouldn't have done that but he brought it out as an example of something that he said I had misrepresented and luckily I had notes and he had told other people so I could corroborate it but he put it in his potential lawsuit you know he was threatening me with four or five letters from 2006 to ten first letter was 34 single-spaced 50 pages of exhibits and so that kind of was one of the first areas where I thought this isn't gonna be a standard story because I followed the lead of what he told me gotta buy the book to see what it is but I know I'd actually tell you right now but to explain it and give you the context on that you would interviewed drug dealers obviously Bugliosi you had been threatened with lawsuits you have been threatened with your life threatened to kill you did that ever scare you away I mean if you ever really feel like your life was hanging in the balance here honestly not really I mean there were a couple in there in the book a couple of guys that were selling drugs the victims and in 1969 who I tracked down in starting in 99 and 2000 you know one of them was a little scary and I knew that he was capable of doing what he said he was gonna do but I just you know if you worry about that stuff you never get anything done the bully OC threats were a little bit more he scared me more than anybody else because he had legal I mean he and again I won't explain it cuz it takes too long it's in the book but he had done this with other nemesis's of his he would damage them to stop them from doing what I was trying to do you know report the truth and there were a couple things that actually went to civil lawsuits that he had to settle and papered some pretty serious damages for some bad behavior and he was starting that with me he was had invented a story that he was gonna blackmail me with and why are you crazy you don't need to do this you're a successful author I'm just trying to report what I found so yeah the other thing I thought was interesting you're talking about reporting you're dealing with the topic that could easily be construed as going down the path of conspiracy theories and you grapple with that we are going okay is this reporting or am I just going down a rabbit hole of conspiracies you know Allah JFK assassination and and the moon and everything behind that so what kind of gauge did you set for yourself to be able to balance that that was a self-learning thing I mean I went down some rabbit holes for months at a time and you know would follow a lead and think I had it and then finally realized that I had wasted three months with some really intense heavy reporting now most of the time that was devastating to me some of the times because I like he said I'd never throw anything away all of a sudden six years later it would be important and I would be thank God I saved all my notes and when I interview stuff so in a couple cases it was worth it but I usually everything that's in the book is the solid stuff that we can document and cooperate I mean ironically Vince has this and helter-skelter he's talking about his opening to the jury and urging them to take notes because it's gonna be a long trial and at the time it was the longest trial ever in the state of California it was more than a year and he said what he claimed was a Chinese proverb which is the palest ink is better than the best memory meaning anything that's on paper in a document is better than talked with in my case talking to somebody about something that happened in 69 in 1999 because people's memories fade you know or they conflate stuff they invent stuff not because they wanna lie but they just don't remember what they remember so whenever I thought I was onto something important I would try to get documents and that was you know that took a year to get access to the LA DA's files and I'm sure they were get regret ever letting me in there but they did and I was in there for a lot a lot of time and I same thing happen at the sheriff's I didn't get into the sheriff's files no one had ever been in them and no one had been in them sense until about a year and a half in and when I got in there was because I had worn down a couple of the retired guys who made a call and talked to the guy who did security he let me in the back door and I spent a summer there then once you get stuff on paper that's made at the time of whatever incident I'm writing about you know we can usually bank on that for being the closest you're gonna get to the truth you talked about sourcing this really was a good example of on the ground you know boots boots on the ground hoarding a lot of reporters today and you're looking at Google you're doing internet searches all the files are online you talked a little bit about actually flying places and them and the benefit to making these contacts and interviewing all these a lot of these people in person and my background is interviewing like Tom Cruise and ours and for about the next movie in their last movie and it's really mundane I don't know if anybody in here has done it that's what I did for like 10 years I was a celebrity journalist I started doing investigative reporting in the entertainment on the entertainment industry and that's when I kind of thought oh my god this is so much more fun you know trying to get people to talk about what they don't want to talk about but it was all you know once I started doing this particular story every I never went online in ninety I mean people there was something probably that I could have found but I was going I lived in Venice I went down to Venice library every single day and I exceeded the maximum books I think I had seven because I didn't have enough money to buy a book so I would get like 75 hundred books at a time be I couldn't tell if they appreciated the fact that you know they knew that I the variety of the areas once it went into the CIA from Madison I know they were kind of talking about me behind my back but I got used to that you know everywhere but yeah so eventually I evolved into using the Internet and I mean when all of a sudden you could get a book an old book and do a word search on Google Books and then later Amazon that if I had that 99 maybe I'd be done in 2003 I don't know but the internet really the blessing of it for me was I was able to learn how to use it to find people you know to mix up data use put information a whole bunch of a varieties of databases I found a guy that was Jay Sebring his best friend it was with him right before the murders who disappeared his name was Steven Smith I mean how more generic can you get I saw him in China and I did a Skype interview with him in China I never thought I'd find a guy like that I found a guy who was kind of in witness protection you know who thought when I showed up that I wasn't there to interview but it was one of his enemies would come to kill on them a mob guy so the internet you know with the internet it did help that way you spoke to a gentleman by the name of Steven K and at a point in the book he tells you that what you had found could very well change what had happened to Manson yeah that was kind of a turning point yeah yeah I would say so yeah I mean I knew he had to say that and I didn't know how you never know how these people are going to react so I took in a bunch of documents that were Vince's interviews with two principal witnesses that he put on the stand for the prosecution and they completely contradict it they were his first interviews with them in his own hand I found them in the DA's files you know it was allowed to make copies of them they weren't really looking at what I was making copies of they were supposed to but they they let me do it anyway and that's a running theme I feel so I brought these documents and I'd interviewed Stephen a lot and I think he was an he was a head DA of South LA or South Central I'm not sure what that office was called and it was his day off but he was in working he said come in so the whole place was empty and I went into his office with these documents and I explained to him before they're gonna show the Terry Melcher who was Dwarfs Days son and was allegedly the reason that Charles Manson had picked the house on Cielo Drive to instill fear in him and get back at him for this rejection even though even though Manson Meltzer didn't live there anymore again this is all you got to read the book understand why some of this is important or but anyway these prosecution witnesses who were massive family members who Vince relied on described these scenes of Melcher coming out to the spawn ranch and Barker ranch after the murders that happened and one of them described notes are falling on his knees and begging Manson for forgiveness now this completely blows the whole timeline of everything and Ben said you're never gonna get me to believe that excuse me Stephen Kay said you're never gonna get me to believe that happened he was fully Ozzy's Co prosecutor on the case and after the case he did all the parole hearings for 30 years I think he did 60 parole hearings he knew it better than Vince at that point and I said just read these and luckily that he allowed me to tape the interview and he literally is reading and then all of a sudden he's just going like this and he's sinking lower in the chair and he goes I don't I can't believe this he goes this changes everything I thought I knew about this case and if it's changed this and what else did he change I don't know what to think anymore so that was kind of important when you get somebody who was so intricately involved intimately involved to say yeah yeah you've got something now and and he actually said that I might want to go to the DA that current DA at the time and show it to him and I said what if I do and he said he might call habeas corpus which would mean they'd be all all the including maps and all the convicted killers who were in prison would get new trials so yeah if you want to be responsible for that yeah so right what do you say to people who say well what is the endgame here I mean Charles Manson and I just said my job as a reporter is to find out the truth and then let the chips fall where they will if he didn't get a fair trial why didn't he I mean I don't think he ever would have walked free but if he deserved another trial then he should have gotten in all of them should've dan I want to bring you in here I felt like there was a little bit of a turning point also in this book where you go in to the secret history of the 60s and the CIA and their role in kind of mind-control playing a playing a role in haight-ashbury free clinic you mentioned this and possible paths that may have been crossed between researchers and and Manson in theory did you choose to kind of stack the book that way and yeah yeah I mean it was a struggle to structure it because I knew that we were going to have to weave in these more historical research driven chapters with the ones more about Tom so there's true crime in it and then there's investigative journalism and then there's history and then there's kind of a dash of memoir and the way into that history seemed to be through Manson's time in San Francisco which as Tom discovered very few people had reported on accurately or and like the missing year yeah the so during the summer of love in 1967 Manson who was then just out of federal prison went to San Francisco which is where he formed the family and it's strange because he was a federal parolee at the time he was being supervised by a parole officer who should have stopped him presumably from giving a bunch of girls acid and making them follow him around for the rest of their lives but he didn't do that he just sort of let it happen and instead of meeting with Manson in a in a parole setting or a police office he would meet with him at this free medical clinic in the Haight Ashbury in fact it was his idea that mansion should live in the Haight Ashbury at all despite the fact that he was a violent felon you know in Dora and during that summer that was a summer the Charlie Manson became Charlie Manson you know the person that had this mysterious power over these young mostly young women to get them to do whatever he told them to doing quitting kills strangers you know without question and it was during that period that evolution there's not a history of it written especially in helter skelter Lee OC writes about it I think he dispatches it in a couple paragraphs you know so I went and interviewed the people who had all who worked with him in the indica who treated them in the clinic and observed them up close how much was negligence do you think I'm Bugliosi start leaving it out of helter-skelter versus because I would always go back and forth also with the police and stuff you know was it just typical negligence if Vince were sitting up here with us right now you could never use the word negligence in a sentence with his name because he never made a mistake which served my purposes because he says that again and again in the book so how I don't think any of it was negligence some of the stuff I showed Stephen Kay that it gave me too complicated to explain here he goes I understand how then wouldn't have used this or changed the whole prosecution with this information Steven K Kent came on halfway through the trial he wasn't down at the beginning and he said it makes no sense that he didn't call these San Francisco doctors who had actually written articles about Manson's control of his followers right after they had been charged with the murders so that was out there in the public world you know and then since Ted had to call former Masson family members as witnesses who were getting in exchange for their testimony lighter sentences or some kinds of favors oh I don't think negligence is the right word for him for other aspects yeah did you ever get to interview Manson himself yeah yeah I did unfortunately he wasn't allowed to have guests he wasn't allowed to have visitors because he was always challenging Authority you know big surprise in prison and he was in solitary for most of the time that I tried and in 2000 yeah mm I talked him on the phone two or three times but I couldn't get in I wanted to sit down across from him I mean I knew I still might not have gotten any more but I thought at least I'd have a better shot if I could look him in the eye you were his Valentine's Day date I understand yeah the first time I talked to him was Valentine's Day 2000 and my editor at the magazine she was in New York actually but premier had an office and it was in West LA I'd actually never even been there but she would not let me call him or his group he had like a support group outside and inside the prison it like a PR team that set everything up and she wouldn't let me call Manson from my home she didn't want them to have the phone number so I agreed to go do it from the premiere offices and it was like 9 o'clock at night and I was pretty excited until I realized it was Valentine's Day night my date was Charlie Manson and that's all I had going on that night and I didn't plan it but the very first thing I said to him when he said hey and I said I hide charlie happy Valentine's Day and he goes hey man yeah thanks same to you so that was when you look at your apartment and you're going through all of this I'm thinking you have hundreds of interviews and documents and all of this what did your apartment look like I'm picturing something some beautiful mind or your drawing you spent a lot of time in there it was cluttered but organized I knew there were I mean the last count there were like 250 binders like 3 to 5 inch 6 inch big heavy notebooks with documents and whatever and you know I had 10 or 12 years of audio tapes hundreds of audio tapes from interviews and just massive amounts of files but everything was in order there's a couple pictures in the book I think of the office yeah there are yeah yeah it's actually it's exactly the same I'll give tours if anybody wants to come over your highlights well you if you could total up all the minutes you must have spent just highlighting things and tagging with those I said with the stable place every couple weeks to get those little stickum things and if you look at my original copy of healthy skelter it looks like a mad person owns it because there's notes and millions and millions of flags yeah it looks like that what was your lowest point going through all of this you're you know at times I know it you really it's a roller coaster ride through this through this book you feel like you have something and then you find out maybe you don't and you're second-guessing yourself was there a moment where you thought about maybe dropping this completely yeah like every mom no and and lowest points who a dozen I mean the worst really were when I would gear up a really big important interview that took me like a year to get the person to agree to talk to me and I'd be so prepared for it I've had like all my files and my questions and everything's organized for instance Roger Smith who was Manson's parole officer would give him like one interview in thirty years I went out to Detroit Ann Arbor Michigan to see him where he ran the psychiatric unit of the men's prison there and I spent a night at his house and granted he got me a little drunk maybe that was part of the plan we both did but I didn't get you know what I went for yeah you know just a lot of stonewalling and dodging and that was you know you really think you're gonna break somebody and then you don't it's like oh my god it's back to the beginning but the worst might have been when the very worst might have been when my book deal got cancelled in 2012 that's devastating you know especially when they were so excited about it when they bought it and they just treated me like I was the next thing and then all of a sudden I was the bad guy and after they canceled it you know I knew that yeah I had no money I'd spent all the money from their advance and I went out with the publisher was also my editor and I asked him to meet me in New York cuz I wanted to look him in the eye and say did you think that I went crazy or did you lose faith and what I found or what why did you pull the plug and he said it was not his decision it was business and she he he actually got really emotional because I knew that he did believe in her too but at the end of our our meeting he said to me the one thing I and promise you is we're never gonna come after you for that money we know that every nickel went in here you know you're reporting I know you had lived you spent everything on this so don't worry about that and then like six months later my agent Gaad what do you call it uh served serve papers at ICM the first time ever he said ICM that an agent was served papers and I was sued for a lot of money and that just crippled me you know I I couldn't go out and resell the book until that was resolved and it took at least a year and a half I think and that was a low point you got support a little bit from your parents you're from Pennsylvania right yeah and there is a kind of a heartfelt moment in here yeah what a few but there's also a moment in here where you go back more than a few hours no I kept we kept we both decided that we would try to keep us you know just have a little bits about what was going on in my personal life because I didn't want it to be about me really it was told through my eyes but yes so that was actually active after the Robert Roger Smith interview and it was only like 2002 when I thought oh I got to do this for another year and it was a moment when I really thought about stopping and luckily I had also kind of brainwashed my father into becoming a true believer and what I was doing he was a lawyer he was a tax attorney and he was like a managing partner of the oldest firm in Philadelphia no real button-down but he became completely engaged and helped me get charles charles manson's federal parole file from the Bureau of Prisons and he was writing letter I mean he was going over all the letters I did given me all this legal advice he was getting angrier and angrier that they weren't giving us stuff that they had to release so when that all happened he's like no no he's not given I I told him he was taking me to the Train I was going back to New York before I went back to LA and I just you know he could tell I was down and he said you will always have your mother and my support because we believe the way we don't want you to stop so that that help yeah those are the hardest things to get you to talk about by the way yeah yeah you go for days on your reporting yeah tell me about your dad yeah yeah all right I think um there's another great moment in the book where you talk about how you would write down in moments of great doubt you would make a list of bullet points that you and write down on little pieces of cardboard that you would keep in your pocket or office just to remind yourself I'd have to pull them out because I'm like wait why am I doing this and I'd have you know I tried to keep it to 10 and they were the most important discoveries but I do nobody had ever reported before it I thought wait this is why I'm doing it because I need that to be put out there in the world so I'm not gonna stop until I get to this place here with I love the Rolling Thunder revue carpet here is great so here you are you're poking holes and helter skelter yeah and do you think there's a lesson that we take away from this about I mean about law enforcement is that that's well in law enforcement yeah but I would also just say you know I don't want to be that guy that says always question authority but you should always pushing Authority you know it's like I I grew up you know my parents were you know pretty liberal and I was raised to you know always question everything but I trusted the cops a lot more I trusted federal agencies much more but after doing all this I I'm a lot more skeptical of stuff that's told me and I hate to encourage the so-called people to think the deep state you know was involved in nefarious things that ended up in the current president getting persecuted I would not want to be a part of you know giving those people any kind of support but that said I think it's really important when you see what the CIA did in the MKULTRA program and how they lied about how they covered it up and how this particular doctor Jolly West who you know was right down the street usually I think I'm kind of just granted but already closed yeah yeah he was there for like 20 30 years of very prominent psychiatrists and he was doing LSD experiments on patients without their awareness you know psychiatric patients and prisoners on people without their knowledge and when he was accused of it he he said he'd never done it you know he was gonna sue people and I found the letters between him and the head of the program in the CIA in 1953 outlining the whole thing you know discussing how they were gonna do it I they were gonna cover it up and how they were gonna basically can create mind-control assassins so that was one of the points on the a ten-point list that I carried around can you talk a little bit about how you related that to kind of LSD and and the family being in a group kind of maybe helping to create some of that my well I mean that was Manson basically did what the CIA was trying to do for 20 years in about a year and a half he created people who will go out and kill without any remorse any hesitation be somewhat amnesic actually they're not really sure if you read the accounts they've given the killers of what happened at the crime scenes they changed like every five minutes I think they settled on one story but I mean he basically developed the technology to use LSD and also other forms like hypnotism he had studied hypnotism with a guy that's in the book that was in Hollywood and he had been in the military he learned to do what they were trying to do at the same time the psychiatrist was in the clinic with him so Manson's somehow gain this knowledge when he could barely read he was practically illiterate in year and a half in all of the interviews that you did hundreds of them is there one that you'd like to have back that if someone else is sitting here right now that that you would enjoy interviewing again oh yeah really fun most of them are in the book but I mean the old Hollywood stars and even some of the drug dealers a lot of fun I mean that guy Charlie taco the one who was one of the first suspects and he was a pretty heavy dealer and scary guy you know I would go see him in his nursing home and interview him and he was pretty much an invalid and I told him I take him anywhere he wanted for lunch just to get him out of there he loved something called Coco's uh-huh yeah but even he you know we had a love-hate relationship and he would bully me because I was exposing his sordid past but he was lonely and that's how he was getting her to talk to me so the one day I took him to Coco's we had to get the attendant who he was always you know bullying you know yelling at and calling him a derogatory name for Latino he wasn't racist and when we were taking him out to the car he starts yelling at me that he's gonna kill me if I'm reporting this stuff and at the same time the antenna was putting his arm over my shoulder so the two of us can lift them into the car and I'm like you're completely at my mercy charlie can't kill me I can have you killed so those were fun you know I'm sure in hindsight right ya know at the time that was you mentioned in the book of there's a lot that obviously you couldn't fit in here are there a couple of stories that stand out that didn't make it into the book whether it's Dan or he's the one who would say no no Tom we cannot get that in hey it's 500 pages I know we were only told how much more we told in the beginning we were gonna get like 300 we pushed it now reading the power broker now which is 1200 page yeah so he's like yeah yeah should have pushed it no there were yeah I spent a lot of time researching sahaan and the parallels of his you know alleged shooting of Robert F Kennedy and what happened before during and after and it was like the same cops one of all the same DA's and I think you agree that we had really important stuff but if we had added that it would have been at least another to one or two hundred pages and I'm not Robert Caro you know they're not gonna give it to me one of the points I want to mention you talk about Terry Melcher and his role especially when you're poking holes in healthcare skelter how he comes back to see Manson after the murders yeah and that was something never mentioned in helter skelter no what was that like when you found that well when I can't monetary at his house yeah that was weird you know I had had these preliminary conversations with him so he kind of knew what I was finding out and at one point the person who was first giving me this information was what the guy who owned the house where the murders happened at Cielo Drive Rudi el Alta belly a real character also a real mysterious guy but you know I had insinuated myself into his life and gotten his confidence and he was telling me all this stuff then I collaborated it in the notes and then I was just about to go to interview carry and carry called Rudy and he was furious because he had learned a little bit about what I was going to report and he said Vince was supposed to take care of all this this was never supposed to come out so I went I went in to see him when he finally agreed to see me knowing that he had basically said that to Rudy and sure enough it was you know a pretty tense interview for about an hour an hour and a half which alternated between him threatening to sue me with I mean he named like six law firms I was like no wait is it Smith Jones and Jones or John cuz I got to get this right and then the next minute he's asking me if I want to publish it right his memoirs for him I'm like but I'm accusing you of lying about you know on the stand committing perjury you're also asking me if I'll be your official biographer he said yeah he said you have any idea the stories I have on Doris Day his mother we never called mommy said Doris I could tell you stuff about her and Sinatra Elvis Presley I mean you have no idea of what kind of life she lived I'm like tempting but no no I want to do this yeah and then he tried to throw me or my briefcase off the roof that was the highlight I read that I was like wow okay yeah and unfortunately we weren't even crazier scenes it just didn't end up in the book they didn't lead to something and then we had to let them go yeah one guy threatened to slit your throat right yeah his house well that's where you do it well he had all that he collected Asian art he was a very wealthy collector and we were in his house in Beverly Hills and I was asking him questions you didn't want to answer he told me that he was actually a yogi a spiritual guy who had a following and he told me shut the [ __ ] up and stop asking me those questions I'm like but I came here at nine o'clock he goes I don't want to talk about shouting he was really close friends with Jay Sebring and Sharon and spent a lot of time and I had these police interviews that again can conflict it with the narrative that I'm that he was had to have the answers to so I said whether I'll just leave and he goes you're not leaving he goes you're gonna [ __ ] stay here till I'm done talking about spirituality and the light I'm like that's that's not what I came to I'm sorry I saw what I came to talk about at nine o'clock at night and he goes you'll [ __ ] listen to me until I tell you you can leave or I'll slit your throat from ear to ear we'll find out and he had betrayed all these big Swartz all over the walls and he was so intense and those guys are wiry those yogi guys seven years old was yeah so I said you know and then finally when he released me he didn't walk me to the door and that's one of those moments and that happened a few times where you had to turn your back to these crazy people and walk away and leave and I just wasn't sure something was gonna come flying through the air it seems like to you you find you were pressing people on the fact that Manson this could have been avoided seems like there were people that could have stepped in to stop him before the murders happen yeah I mean the sheriff pennal they were you know they were if you read the book you'll see I when I went to the sheriff I liked all these surveillance reports they were preparing this massive raid that occurred August 16th exactly a week after the murders and they rounded up the whole group of them about 33 of them including Madison and they've been preparing the rave for like two months and they were watching the rants they knew his comings and goings they knew where he was a day before the murders that he was expected back and then when you look at each time they could have taken him into custody and then chose not to it's all laid out in the book it's kind of complicated to explain but I develop we develop it I think a pretty strong case that they deliberately allowed him to remain at-large for a certain amount of time when he killed a number of people you know there was another guy shorty shade was killed later so that's another thing you know I went to present all that information to Daryl gates it was pretty well known sheriff of LA County for years who was in prison now yeah well he was still the sitting sheriff but I'm glad because he deserves the way he treated me in that interview Lee Baca right Baca I am leavin I say I'm sorry yeah no Daryl gates wouldn't talk to me yeah Lee Baca thank god he's here Lee Baca and gates is dead [ __ ] was not yes so when I showed him all that stuff you know was assumed he didn't have a sward and didn't threaten to kill me but he kind of walked me Namie leave do you think that this could happen in the 21st century do you feel like these murders we could see something as notorious as as the Manson murders nowadays could this happen again you first don't jump in I mean again I don't really still understand how they happen and well I don't want I know a lot but I don't believe the official story so when you said you think that same thing could happen again it depends at the same elements have or in the position to allow something like that to happen I hope not I mean yeah that's probably not a great answer but maybe I mean the thing the interesting thing about the Manson murders and I think we write about this in the book is that they've been surpassed in terms sheer violence and and grizzly core many times over by now and there have been any number of murders that have captivated the more Prairie inside of the national interest in the same way that they did but there hasn't been anything I think that has that same kind of social component to it where suddenly people are afraid of say hippies as they were after the Manson murders where this was like the souring of yeah certain vision that the 60s had had tried to embody and then it had it had gone belly-up but these murders in people were like these hippies aren't just you know getting laid and smoking dope they're violently it was a real cultural shift you know a confluence of events that you know basically exploded with these murders so that the impact they had on everything side in society and culture I don't know that could happen again maybe it would also depend on I mean the the equally horrific question is are these programs that the FBI and the CIA had active in California and the late 60s is something like though are could those happen again are they happening yeah where are they trying to smear leftist groups and discredit them and so in fighting in order to to defeat what they regard as bankrupt politics I completely indoctrinated him I'm so proud of myself he never would have said that two years ago before you got me are you worried about how victims families could react to the blow yeah I got close to a few of them and I talked to them you know I don't know how anybody who survives something like this from the ones that I know are so strong and most of them are advocates at the parole hearings and I know that I mean you think they were immune to it and that's yeah that kind of haunts me a little bit I address that in the acknowledgments I mean when you really really think about what happened that night it's hard to imagine you know knowing a victim let alone being related to one of them I mean it's written there's nothing murders bad but this was pretty horrible so yeah I'm worried about that I hope I talked to a few of them just this past week and gave two of them the book and I'm tweeting I don't know if they're out there I can't really see but I really like you guys well it's a tough hill to climb and Dan you mentioned you're going against a narrative and a story that has been mean this this murder rocked the the country to its core I mean it made headlines around the world and and now you're finding no concrete evidence to the contrary do you think that'll take time for people I guess have you gotten feedback so far from people who are going no there's no way this can't be and are you hoping to kind of slowly chip away at that well I'm hoping you know the book ends with me us telling the story of me trying to get the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and the OU APD to release these tapes that Tex Watson made that I discovered in 2008 when his attorney accidentally told me about them and where they were and I started trying to get him the attorney died and long story short how many times do I say that he I shared the N from what I could inform the Attorney's Office and it actually had gone bankrupt and he died and it was part of the bankruptcy case I shared that information with one of the deputy das who handled the parole hearings at the time not Steve Kay he had retired and they ended up you know making going to court to get them and fighting Tex Watson for them for more than a year and a half and I was helping them they actually had a subpoena that they issued to try to get them behind the judges back during the hearings that they used all my information and and the promise always was that as soon as they got them I would have access to them with them and then of course as soon as they got them and listen to them sorry the plans have changed i they wouldn't give me any information shut me out shut the families out who also we're trying to get access to the tapes Tex Watson's on tape tells why the murders happen how they happened and how he had gotten involved with the group and I I've been told it was eight or ten hours of tapes before anybody else any of the other killers primarily Susan Atkins who was the first one to officially talk had talked and before they'd even been identified as killers it's all on this raw tape so if the things happen differently like I alleged that they do in my book it could be cooperated on these tapes and maybe that's why the DA's office refuses to I'm not the only one trying to get them a lot of journalists have done open record act requests one of the less even Helens attorneys been fighting tirelessly in court he's gone all the way to support the state Supreme Court trying to get them and they will not let anyone hear them it's the only piece of evidence that we know of that they're sitting on fifty years later that they won't release you filed numerous FOIA requests for you yeah yeah I'm just gonna ask you do you feel that my train of thought this book if if Bugliosi is still alive does this book get published it would have been more difficult and you know I wanted him to be I really wanted him to answer this stuff our last face-to-face confrontation same kitchen the same house in Pasadena six years later so the first one was 99 the last one was 2005 and he and I sat across the table from each other screaming and yelling and I was gay and I couldn't get him to answer anything honestly and I thought well once it's out there he's gonna have to answer other journalists and unfortunately died you know I had this weird respect for him anyway maybe just because he did talk to me all those years but if he were alive he I mean he was trying to stop the book before it was published I mean if you see the letters are incredible and putting them up on I put some pages of them up on the website I have but going through that vetting process was pretty rough anyway and it was easier because he passed away but I would much rather have him alive and accountable before I open it up the questions I just want to mention this book got published so after it got dropped there's a kind of an interesting story here that I wanted you to touch on that the same people who dropped it ended up wanting to pick it up right after the castle's a deal in 2012 start a lawsuit in 2013 the thing isn't resolved to like late 2016 or early 2016 and then my agent can take it out again so then I get gifted with this guy and we do a new proposal our agents take it out and the first offer we get is penguin press that people that had sued me and stopped me for two or three years second offer was little brown and let's just say I went with a little brown I'm really happy with them very good I want to take some questions now for anyone who who has them feel freedom so if anyone know anyone has a question raise your hand and I'll bring the microphone to you real quick a reminder around here questions typically start with a w or an H sometimes a D they are generally short we do not believe in two-part questions and only Arielle gets to ask follow-up questions tonight hi sir I was in Berkeley during Mac shears publication of the Berkeley barb and I remember an issue in which he referred to someone who knew Charles Manson in the Haight Ashbury who had had meals with him and conversations with him that Manson bragged about not being able to control boys girls were much easier and did you know anything about that article is the Berkeley barb during the same so it was about that it was after the murders or well that's what I'm trying to remember that I don't recall I never saw that one in particular I thought I loved the barber was a great paper and it was a great resource I saw a lot of stories after the fact by people reminiscing about you know whatever brush they have with Manson and the girls I don't think I saw that one but we definitely quoted in the book yeah yeah we quote the barb quite a bit in the LA Free Press yeah but I don't recall seeing that either yeah if you find it I love to see yeah yeah any other questions hi my name is fernando i'm brazilian filmmaker i want to know if you plan to take your book to the screen here alright and if that series mine hunters was playing to do a season on charlie manson do you think if conflicts with that somehow I didn't hear the latter part if what theory if you plan to take the book yeah I got that yeah we actually sold the film rights and they're they're talking to writers right now to adapt it I don't know why they don't trust us we could do it right yeah but it's it's in process but you said there's another show that your ass yeah there's a show by David feature called minehunters oh my hundred yeah and then on the second season saying that the yeah I heard that yeah I've never seen it but I also heard that the guy that plays Manson in Quentin Tarantino's movie is also playing Manson in the minehunters arc or whatever but yeah I don't know anything I've no I don't know much more about it than that my question is do you think you know tax and patrician Susan and that group that they did in fact kill the residents of Benedict Canyon and if if so why do I think the people that were convicted yes yeah yeah well I think they participated yeah and why did he do it well that's a really great question you know why because Willie OC presented this motive which was to ignite a race war to blame them the murders on blacks and he was asked in an interview in like 70 or 71 in pan house whether he really thought that the family believed that by committing these murders to start a race war if they believed the helter-skelter motive has been said I'm convinced the women did like 100% but not charlie and the interviewer didn't follow up and ask him the logical next question well then why did he send them there to kill if it wasn't to start the race war which is what you presented to the jury and convicted them with I didn't do my job because I didn't see that interview until after he was it was too late well actually he was still alive but he had stopped talking to me so I couldn't ask them that question but that's what I would have loved to have asked him if I had one more chance well if you thought that Manson had another motive or another reason what do you think it was and why didn't we have gone about it ever I know there's a renewed interest in in the subject because of the Tarantino film and I wondered if you could give us a couple of points of how your book if you or if you've seen the turn to you know film how it differs from from that story I the only thing I know about Tarantino's film is I think it takes place over three days and 69 two days in February that I don't think I'm assuming it's the first two-thirds of the movie that don't include anything or maybe just a hint of the Manson Family and then the third date is August 8th the day of the murders and I've heard stuff but I really don't know enough about it I like what I see as far as the you know the period recreations and stuff looks fantastic but I haven't seen it nobody's invited me Dan I'm curious do you think there's enough for a sequel I do yeah look for a chaos to chaos here yeah some time meant by 2040 okay another question out here hello it's been reported that uh Abigail Folger interacted with Charles Manson when she was at the free clinic in haight-ashbury can you come yeah a tenant reported that in the Oh a free pass and then in his book the family and I chased that down but I could never corroborate that there definitely is a possibility that you know her mother volunteered there in that as I think and Abigail often went to San Francisco to the hate that was you know she was raised outside of San Francisco but I could never find anything solid that she had Manson had met before and I looked hi you mentioned obviously the Herculean task of collecting all these materials and how many binders you have in everything and are you looking forward to getting back some more of your living space are you going to live with it or are you gonna give tours or you want to do a sequel I can get rid of that but it's all in one room it's an office and literally when you leave that room there's no hint of medicine anywhere else in my place and that saved the day because I used to live in another place and the office was in the living room area and it kind of took over the entire bungalow that was a fantastic place to live but I lost that place and the new place I got an extra bedroom so I can always shut the door and and stay away from it like it's a black hole sometimes if I go in there well yeah I mean we are seriously considering doing something with a lot of the stuff that didn't end up in the book so it's always gonna be I'm never gonna get rid of anything you know in our final question for the evening this has been delightful and you have a very good sense of humor for somebody who's gone through thank you gone through the only way to survive it yeah well it's been extremely entertaining I can't wait to watch it again on the video but anyway I hate to ask this but have you had any problems with people following you or whatever considering that you're dealing with things that the CIA did nothing I know of I mean yeah they're good at not letting you know but I don't really think so I mean I've had some once you know they started doing pre publicity for the book about six weeks ago and then I created an Instagram page and a Facebook page just to have documents and and stuff that we don't have enough room to actually show in the book for people to access and I'm allowing commenting on there which I might have to stop because there's a lot of people you know there are people that think I you know the people who think NASA is innocent so they hate me for suggesting that he's not there are people that are supporting then spooly OSI which is expected but some of them can be pretty scary and then the CIA FBI that's the problem with the book I cover so many areas I got I mean like every single camp but nothing that I'm not concerned about Pope knock on wood well it is incredibly intriguing the book is chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the secret history of the 60s Tom O'Neill thank you thank you Arielle thank you Dan

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Length: 62min 7sec (3727 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020