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Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

Tom O’Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, The Village Voice and Details. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (https://amzn.to/2RGhdQM) was published by Little, Brown in the summer of 2019.

Tom O'NeillguestJoe RoganhostJamie Vernonhost
Apr 16, 20202h 55mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 15:00

    I'm ready. …

    1. TO

      I'm ready.

    2. JR

      Okay. Tom, how are you?

    3. TO

      Good, Joe.

    4. JR

      Great to meet you.

    5. TO

      You, too.

    6. JR

      I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks and, uh, we'll tell everybody what it's called right off the bat. It's called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the '60s. And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a, a, a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes, and this is what you have ... I mean, you've essentially been obsessed with this for ... How, how many years did it take you to do this?

    7. TO

      Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kinda happened.

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. TO

      But, uh, in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, uh, I think a day to the 20th year assignment.

    10. JR

      And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours.

    11. TO

      Never.

    12. JR

      You were writing an article. L- l- let's fill people in.

    13. TO

      The, yeah, the beginning was, uh, I was in between magazines, uh, and not working, and I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years, um, and she was at Premier Magazine at that point, which was a monthly movie magazine. And she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders, which was 1999, happened in '69. And I was like, "Eh, no, no thanks." You know, never been interested, hasn't the story been written, you know, to death?

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. TO

      Uh, and, uh, she said, "Look, once we talk about it, you're gonna see Manson comes up much more often in popular culture than you're aware of. Uh, just trust me on that and I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story." I go, "But, you know, what, what about the 30th anniversary? I, there, there's no angle." And she goes, "You've done it before. You'll find an angle." We had worked together a lot, and that began a spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last, last year in March when we turned the manuscript in.

    16. JR

      That is so crazy that it took that long. (laughs)

    17. TO

      I know. I know. The magazine shut down five years later.

    18. JR

      So you never got the, you never got anything printed in the magazine?

    19. TO

      Well, no. I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too. I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three and a half months, uh, so I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any m- person's life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway, so I thought I needed the money (clears throat) and, uh, I needed a job and I knew that I could get into Premier Magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a, a yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over. And, uh, once I had a good story there, this would have been the first, then I'd be set. So I agreed to do it and long story, very long story short, uh, after a month or two when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them, uh, I met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs, and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence which was just, you know, a small portion of what I ended up having in the end, he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August '99 (clears throat) and he started contracting me by the month. And that continued for a year and a half. All I did was report the story on Premier's dime. He lost his job.

    20. JR

      Because of you?

    21. TO

      Well, that was kind of what was whispered around the offices. I never heard that, uh, you know, that was ever substantiated. I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it. He went on to a, a career that was fine anyway, but, uh, when the new guy came in, he demanded the story right away. I mean, I, I understood that. And at that point, I got a book agent, uh, through a friend, and my book agent got me out of, uh, my obligation to Premier.

    22. JR

      So Premier essentially paid for you to start your book?

    23. TO

      Yeah, a lot of money.

    24. JR

      Oh, my goodness.

    25. TO

      Yeah. And that's ... I'm actually ... Because it was resolved not in the courts, but we all had to sign non-disclosures.

    26. JR

      Mm.

    27. TO

      So, uh, I didn't get entirely away with it for, for nothing, but, um, at that point though, that was I think 2001 or late 2000, then I was on my own. I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book. So that happened next and, and finally in 2005. And when we took the proposal out, it was book length. It was 220 pages and, um, my, uh, agent who's big shot at ICM who was also kind of ... What I would do, I, I, I would seduce people into this story and get them as obsessed as I was-

    28. JR

      How would you do that? Like, pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book.

    29. TO

      In the beginning, in the first years? Uh, just that the trial that had occurred that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi had a lot of, um, malfeasance in it, uh, by the prosecution. I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense. I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher who played a big part in this and will probably talk about that at some point, lied on the stand. You know, suborn themselves in a, in a murder trial and if you commit perjury in a murder trial, you could be convicted of murder. I mean, you could be sentenced to a murder. You could get a, a murder sentence too because of that. Uh, so there was about a dozen of those and none of them happened all at once, you know?

    30. JR

      So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they murdered somebody?

  2. 15:00 – 30:00

    They did a lot…

    1. TO

      about 15, 17 years. When it was all exposed in the '70s and there were these hearings, first, um, the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the Church hearings, and then finally, s- uh, Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye held hearings. Um, the CIA admitted that they had done this, but they... No one would say exactly what they did. All the records had been destroyed when the two people who ran it, Richard Helms, who would become the director of the CIA in the '60s, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was kind of the mad scientist who, um, had supervised all the, all the... They had safe houses in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, where they would experiment on people that were lured in- into these, um, apartments and houses that were either look, looked like brothels or hippie communes or whatever. And, um, the people who were working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic that was run by another Smith, which makes it a little confusing, but Dr. David Smith, who founded it, um, he had given an office to a scientist named Jolly West, Louis J. West, who, um, was when, when the hearings occurred in the '70s, identified as a top MKUltra researcher. He was an academic, uh, come out of the military, had been at the Okla- University, or Oklahoma University, University of Oklahoma, sorry, and then UCLA running the psychiatric divisions. He denied ever being involved in MKUltra, and this was one of the moments, I think it was 2001, when, you know, things really kind of shook the course of my reporting, was I learned that West had been at the same place that Manson was in the Haight in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create. And I knew, actually... I'd interviewed West about seven years before for a story I did about celebrity stalkers and people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or try to kill them, and he was an expert in violence, hypnotism, brainwashing, and he was the chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point. Uh, he was dead when his name came up in the Manson story, and there wasn't a lot of... I mean, I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit, but when I did a little research, I found out that there had been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKUltra. He always denied it. He was never prosecuted, never even investigated. He went to his grave threatening to sue anybody that said he would have anything to do with this kind of a program. Uh, again, through another long story, but I got access to his files, which had been left at UCLA, uh, and never... They had never been processed when I called, and when, when I made the request, it took them two or three months to process the papers. I went through them f- through the whole summer looking for a needle in a haystack, and it was intuition, gut. I just thought there might be something there, and sure enough, I eventually found it. It was correspondence between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that ran MKUltra beginning in 1953, about conduct- conducting experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to, uh, have amnesics, uh, uh, a- amnesia of the acts, uh, after they were programmed and, uh, everything that he had been accused of and denied, he did. Not only did he do it, he created the blueprint for the whole program with Gottlieb. Uh, the fact that all these kind of, um...... interesting research programs merged at the Haight, at the clinic, and then Manson came out of it with the power to do exactly what the MKUltra had been trying to create for up to that point, I thought was worth investigating further, and that's why I kept going and going and going.

    2. JR

      They did a lot of crazy shit back then. Are you aware of Operation Midli- Midnight Climax?

    3. TO

      That, tho- those were the safe houses in San Francisco. Yeah.

    4. JR

      Yeah. Well, that was the brothel version of it.

    5. TO

      Yeah. Yeah.

    6. JR

      Where they, they lured these johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them.

    7. TO

      Yeah. George Hunter White was the head CIA g- guy, and he would sit behind a two-way or a one-way mirror and watch them. The, the johns would be dosed with LSD. They tried aerosols or just drinks, different things, and then they would study their behaviors.

    8. JR

      Aerosols?

    9. TO

      Yeah, aerosol sprays.

    10. JR

      Really?

    11. TO

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      But that would get the prostitutes too then, no?

    13. TO

      No. The prostitutes would get 'em in there, and then they'd go to the bathroom or something-

    14. JR

      Oh, and then they'd spray 'em?

    15. TO

      ... or to be in the bathroom. Yeah.

    16. JR

      Oh, Jesus.

    17. TO

      And again, the, the problem is the records are so scant because Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency. And the only reason anybody ever discovered that it existed was a whistleblower, somebody who used to work for the State Department, who remembered that there were records in a warehouse. And they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in '52 until the end in... the possible end in '73. And, uh, i- it was just financial records of where research took place, how much was spent, what kind of equipment was bought, but nothing about the content. The guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hersh to expose it, was named John Marks. He wrote the first book about MKUltra that came out in the mid to late '70s called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And after he wrote his book, he never s- y- you know, he spoke, uh, did a little bit of a tour, and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s. And when I told him what I had, what I had found fr- uh, in West's files, these documents, he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington, DC. And he told me, he said, "The reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn, you know, telling me that they'd been victims of MKUltra." He goes, "I couldn't go anywhere. My whole life became crazy because everybody thought that they were subject to this," 'cause nobody knew. They did these drug tests on prisoners, hospital patients, johns, hippies, people that had no idea that this was going on for 25 years.

    18. JR

      (Exhales)

    19. TO

      So, Marks became th- the authority. So he had never given an interview till he met with me, and when he looked at my documents, at that point I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually, 'cause I kept going back to the files and getting more. He said it was the most unredacted, uncensored, uh, account of what the real objectives were and what was really being done. He had never... He said, "If I had had that, my whole book would have been different." Um, so, it... that's one of the problems about saying, "Well, how much did they do?" or "How far did they go?" There's barely any record, and that's another reason it took me 20 years, 'cause I was trying to find out, uh, whether or not West had actually interacted with Manson and/or the girls. I mean, I knew he was in the same facility. I knew that everybody that worked there, 'cause I interviewed everybody that was alive, they... most of them were still alive back in the 9- late '90s and early 2000s when I did this. They all said, "Oh, yeah, Charlie was..." you know, "We knew it was Charlie and the girls. They'd come in every day or every few days to see Roger, and, and West was there recruiting subjects." Now, West, while he was there, that summer, had opened something called... what he called the Haight-Ashbury Project. And in his, uh, correspondence and papers that I found, he called it a, a laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.

    20. JR

      (exhales)

    21. TO

      (laughs) Yeah. And just like the Operation Midnight, uh, safe hou- they call 'em safe houses, which were disguised as brothe- uh, you know, bordellos and that type of thing, or brothels. These... this was an apartment that was decked out, or as he called it, tricked out to look like a communal hippie place. He had six graduate students, and I have his letters to them before they came to work in this. He goes, "Grow your hair long, wear jeans, dress like hippies, and lure people in there."

    22. JR

      (exhales)

    23. TO

      So they ran that for the summer of '67. And West was getting people from that Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street, uh, to participate in that.

    24. JR

      Good Lord.

    25. TO

      And, um, I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there, and they all, in these diaries, said, "We have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here. We feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else. What does Jolly want? Why is he making us bring these people in?" So, uh-

    26. JR

      Imagine doing that to graduate students, telling them to bring people in and drug them up. Imagine telling them-

    27. TO

      Well, some of them liked it.

    28. JR

      ... to make an apartment... I'm sure they liked it.

    29. TO

      Because they were also, you know, encouraged to use LSD.

    30. JR

      Yeah. I'm sure.

  3. 30:00 – 45:00

    Mm. …

    1. TO

      Uh, and not, not just me, but most experts think that that was a cover, that they didn't want to admit they... that they had developed these technologies that were effective. They also claim that they had released everything they had. I found the same report where West said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness, uh, but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress, so that's a crime right there.

    2. JR

      Mm.

    3. TO

      You know? Um, so there's a lot of that stuff, uh, in the book.

    4. JR

      So the speculation is that this guy, through these experimental treatments, that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKUltra techniques and did that to him and induced some sort of-

    5. TO

      Well, th- this is speculation.

    6. JR

      Yes.

    7. TO

      And I'll, I'll go there-

    8. JR

      Okay.

    9. TO

      ... for this. Uh, the guy had no history of violence, uh, never been arrested, uh, was a stellar, upstanding citizen. His only problem was he had these horrible headaches. All of a sudden, he shows up by a small girl's body, who'd been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it. A year earlier, Dr. West, who became a psychiatrist within a week or two, possibly had, uh, uh, experiences with him before, but I... there was no record. Oh, when I tried to get the record from the medical center at, um, Lackland, his file, uh, that... his name was Shaver, I think it was, S-A to S-I was missing. So, where Shaver would have been in the, the medical records, it was gone. So, I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any ki- kind of experimental program there.

    10. JR

      So, is the speculation, and again, this is speculation, that he did commit the crime, that he was somehow or another induced into committing this crime?

    11. TO

      Yeah. A- and again, this is speculation.

    12. JR

      Yes.

    13. TO

      It's completely circumstantial. The objective was to get people who would go out and do things. Not even necessarily kill. That's... that was the ultimate goal.

    14. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    15. TO

      But to do things against their will, against their moral code, even.

    16. JR

      Right. But how would they know that this child would be there? How would they know?

    17. TO

      Oh, no, no, no. She wasn't targeted. It-

    18. JR

      So, was it just that they'd put it into his head to go-

    19. TO

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      ... do that-

    21. TO

      And something-

    22. JR

      ... to anyone?

    23. TO

      Yeah. Something clicked and went wrong.

    24. JR

      So, it wasn't a precise thing.

    25. TO

      No.

    26. JR

      It wasn't-

    27. TO

      No, no. Um, nobody really knew what L.S.... This was the very early days of experimenting with LSD in the... in the early 1950s. West was one of the premier researchers in LSD, but he was still new to it. Um, he had actually come out of... He had first gained national attention for being one of four or five doctors who treated Korean prisoners of war, who were returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. Um, the United States said that, "We don't use that. That's against the Geneva Codes." Um, and these guys were brainwashed by the, the North Korean, Chinese, Soviets. Uh, so when they were brought back after the war, West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them. What a lot of researchers believe, um, is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they'd been brainwashed by the Koreans, when they actually were telling the truth. Because there's a lot of evidence that's come out as recently as five, six years ago, that we did use these weapons in Korea.

    28. JR

      Oh, boy. The old double-cross.

    29. TO

      (laughs) Yeah.

    30. JR

      So, wh-... is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two-bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system, and, uh, had been incarcerated for, what, half of his life? Something like that?

  4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

    Now, this was b-...…

    1. TO

      had known both of them for two years and... Which was also a lie. He had only known Susan... He couldn't have known Susan for two years. He knew her for about a year. He did know Mary pretty well, um, and he never disclosed that he was Manson's parole officer. And Manson's identified in these same files as the person who lured these women into crime, that they were his communal wives, that they would steal for him, prostitutes themselves for him, and the other people that they interviewed. The probation officer argued against it saying, "They're gonna go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue their life of crime." But the judge released them.

    2. JR

      Now, this was b-... They were doing Charlie's bidding according to the, the record. What they were trying to do was recruit people into the family.

    3. TO

      Yeah.

    4. JR

      And so they would offer them drugs and, and, and, uh-

    5. TO

      Sex.

    6. JR

      ... sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties. And where they screwed up is, they got an underage boy who was the-

    7. TO

      Freaked out.

    8. JR

      Right. And he was the son of a local-

    9. TO

      A sheriff.

    10. JR

      ... sheriff. Yeah.

    11. TO

      Yeah, yeah, and he ran home to his-

    12. JR

      And he said his legs turned into snakes and... Yeah.

    13. TO

      Yeah. Yeah.

    14. JR

      Yeah.

    15. TO

      Um, that's when they (laughs) screwed up in that situation, yeah.

    16. JR

      And that's how they got arrested that time.

    17. TO

      Yeah. That was 68.

    18. JR

      And still they got released.

    19. TO

      Yeah. Yeah.

    20. JR

      Which is really crazy.

    21. TO

      Yeah.

    22. JR

      It's like there's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were arrested and then it seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told, "Hey, you gotta let these guys go."

    23. TO

      Yeah.

    24. JR

      "There's... This is a higher... The situation is above your pay grade."

    25. TO

      Yeah. Well, real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file and saw that... I mean, and Helter Skelter, Bugliosi, I think describes two arrests that Manson got released on, uh, technicalities, you know, shotty police work or something, when he should have been violated. But what he didn't do was talk about three or four more and if you've gotten up to chapter 10 you've seen all that stuff laid out.

    26. JR

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    27. TO

      So when I got this record, a, a pretty substantial record, I took it to someone named Louis Wachnek, who was a retired judge and a retired district attorney from the valley out around here, Van Nuys, um, 'cause I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked. 'Cause you have to look at everything in context. Things work at... differently today than they did in 2009 or 2000 when I interviewed him, but he was there in '69 in the DA's office. I brought the documents to him and we laid them all out on his kitchen table and he's looking at them, and the poor guy was, um, very sick with cancer and he, he talked like this, but I had the recorder going, and he's looking at all the documents and he's seeing this pattern of catch, release, catch, release and he's going, "Chicken shit. Chicken shit. This is all chicken shit." He goes, "He shouldn't... He should have gone back the first time." He goes, "They wanted him out." He said, "He, that he was more important to somebody out than in." He goes, "You've gotta find out who it was." And I go, uh, "How do I do that?" And he goes, "You're not gonna be able to. That's... He's an informant." I go, "But who should I... What should I look at?" And he goes, "Well, he was working either for local law enforcement, uh, the federal government, the FBI, but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing." So that was important. Another, uh, turning point was a bunch of years later, was when I brought similar materials to Stephen K, who was Bugliosi's co-prosecutor in the case.

    28. JR

      Can I stop you for a second? So the speculation, his speculation was that Charlie was an informant.

    29. TO

      Well, and again, an informant has many definitions.

    30. JR

      Right.

  5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

    What did he say?…

    1. TO

      it showed me that he had s- a very different account of something very important in the narrative. Um, and I took that away, and I thought, wow, I'm gonna ex-

    2. JR

      What did he say?

    3. TO

      Uh, well, uh, first let me explain. It, it's... it was off the record.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. TO

      In 2005, when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell, and he started threatening (laughs) me and, uh, with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher, trying to get them to stop the book, he wrote about what he told me, and he claimed that, uh, I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this. But once he put that in the letter, the lawyers at the publisher said, "Well, it's not on the record anymore, because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he sues you," which he said he was about to do.

    6. JR

      Not off the record, you mean?

    7. TO

      Yeah. They said, now it's on the record.

    8. JR

      Right, right, right. Right.

    9. TO

      I mean, he has... he violated his agreement with you.

    10. JR

      Yes.

    11. TO

      So what he told me was that, uh, famously, an audio t- or videotape was taken from the Tate house by the police-... excuse me, the first day after the murders. They found it hidden up in a loft. Uh, videotape- videotaping, home videotaping was relatively new at that point. Not a lot of people had cameras, but Roman Polanski did. And in Helter Skelter, Vince says, in the book, um, that the police took the tape, viewed it, and it was just Sharon and Roman making love, and returned it to the loft. Uh, Roman was in London at the time of the murders. He came back immediately, and then about a week later, he went up to the house, and one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft, and he never even knew that they took it, allegedly. That, that's the story. Found it and took it. Vince told me, originally off the record, that the tape wasn't of Roman and Sharon making love. It was, uh, Sharon being forced to have sex with two men against her wishes, and he said Roman was the one who was making it 'cause you could hear him in, in the background. Um, y- y- you know, if you read the b- well, you've read those chapters, Roman did a lot of bad stuff to Sharon.

    12. JR

      Yeah, he seemed like a terrible person.

    13. TO

      He was pretty bad, yeah.

    14. JR

      But when you, when you hear what he did, what the reason why he can never come back to the country, you go, "Well, okay."

    15. TO

      It makes sense.

    16. JR

      It makes sense.

    17. TO

      Yeah, it's not that surprising.

    18. JR

      He's a monster.

    19. TO

      Yeah, yeah. I mean-

    20. JR

      A monster that's really good at making movies.

    21. TO

      Yeah, yeah.

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. TO

      Which we're not gonna see anymore 'cause the last one he made, which is supposed to be one of his best, they're not gonna release it in the United States.

    24. JR

      Mm.

    25. TO

      But, um, once I had that, that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down 'cause I'm like, "Well, if this was different in the official narrative, what else might they have changed?" So Vince and I were talking on the phone about every week for two months. He was so accessible. So I'd be interviewing people, and one of the first things after that that I found was, uh, the perjuries, uh, by Terry Melcher on the stand. I found ... I got access to two separate files and found that Melcher, Doris Day's son, record producer, young boy wonder who lived in the house with his girlfriend, Candy Bergenonciello, up until January 1st of '69, then moved to Malibu, um, and Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February. Melcher was the part of the motive for why the house was picked. And again, this is getting into the weeds, but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition.

    26. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    27. TO

      Um, Manson sent his followers up there to instill fear in Melcher by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them. I don't believe that. That's the official narrative. But, um, Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson, one at Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson's, uh, two there, I think, and then ... Oh, no, one there and then two when he went to the Spahn Ranch in, uh, April and May of '69 to listen to them play music with the possible- possibility of recording them. Uh, and he didn't think they were talented enough and told, uh, Charlie that in so many words, and then, again, this is the official narrative, uh, that's when Manson kind of spiraled and went crazy because he'd been rejected by Terry Melcher, so he decided it was time for Helter Skelter, the race war. And again, a lot of these things don't add up when you step back. Well, why didn't he kill Terry Melcher at the house in Malibu 'cause he knew where he had moved to? Why did he just go to this other place and kill strangers? Maybe Terry wouldn't connect it, all that. The bottom line was, Terry, on the stand, and in all the official accounts of th- this case, of which there are many, not just Helter Skelter, but lots of books, his relationship with Manson ended in May of, of '69. He said he never saw him again. When the murders happened at his former house, it never occurred to him it had anything to do with him or that Manson did it. I stopped believing that a month or two in, and then I found these documents showing that Melcher actually had gone to see Manson twice at the Spahn Ranch after the murders, and then once all the way out at Death Valley where they had the Barker Ranch, where they were hiding when they were finally captured in, in the fall of '69. Um, once I could document that, that changed the whole, uh ... I mean, it didn't change, but impacted the motive. I mean, Melcher was a principal witness. Again, 'cause Charlie wasn't at the Tate house, Manson had, or Bugliosi had to convict him of conspiracy. In other words, ordering people to go up there and kill, and he had to have a reason for that house. So Terry provided it by saying, "Yes, I did go out there and try to record them." And then eventually in the questioning, it came out, "But I never had anything to do with them again. I had no idea. I never saw them or heard from them again."

    28. JR

      The motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher 'cause Tery- Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star.

    29. TO

      Right.

    30. JR

      So this is what Bugliosi was using, but it didn't make any sense-

  6. 1:15:00 – 1:21:55

    (laughs) …

    1. TO

      originally in 2008. And then th- I'm not good with the deadlines.

    2. JR

      (laughs)

    3. TO

      Figure that out.

    4. JR

      Well, it, it's a great book, even if it took you 20 years to write it. It's-

    5. TO

      Yeah. No, I mean, they, uh, they extended it, and then in 2011, they lost their patience. And it, it, it was a surprise 'cause I, I knew that the editor and the publisher of Penguin Press, the imprint, who are very serious, you know, publishers, very (laughs) well-known, I, I knew or, or I thought that they believed in me and understood why it was still taking long. So, when I got the call, it was devastating. And then even worse is, a year later, uh, my agent got served with papers, and they took me to court. Well, it never got to court, it was resolved, but they sued me for my advance, which was substantial. And I'm not allowed to say anything, uh, except that it was resolved 'cause there's non-disclosures.

    6. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. TO

      But let's just say you, you've h- I mean, you putting me on here and, and the advance stuff you g- has helped the sales. I'm still not making money 'cause I owe a lot of people money.

    8. JR

      Mm.

    9. TO

      Um, so that was crushing, and it held up the book 'cause we couldn't take it out and try to resell it until it was resolved. It took about a year and a half to two years to resolve the lawsuit. I, luckily, I got a pro bono lawyer. I was busted broke. Uh, and then once we resolved the lawsuit, was about 2016, '17, then we could take it out, but we weren't sure we were, we were gonna be able to sell it because it had this bad history trailing me.

    10. JR

      So, from 2011 to 2016, it's in limbo.

    11. TO

      Well, it is, except I ne- I worked just as hard every single day.

    12. JR

      Wow.

    13. TO

      And then I was involved with, uh, a director, and I kinda hint in the book who it is, but I mean, it's n- I don't think it's a secret. Errol Morris, do you know who he is?

    14. JR

      No.

    15. TO

      Um, he did, uh, Thin Blue Line.

    16. JR

      Oh, okay.

    17. TO

      Yeah. He's won an Academy Award for a documentary he made about Robert McNamara.

    18. JR

      So they wanna make a book about the

    19. TO

      ... No, no. ... eternally- So Errol, Errol Morris, I think you had a son on Hamilton, Morris?

    20. JR

      Yes. Oh, that's his son?

    21. TO

      It's ... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    22. JR

      I love Hamilton.

    23. TO

      Yeah, yeah. Well, Hamilton was... He wasn't officially part of this project, but he came to the shoots. Um, Errol approached me. He actually is a writer for Penguin Press, uh, an author there. He writes books too. Uh, not too often, but occasionally. And he knew about my book 'cause they had asked him at one point if he wanted to collaborate on it with me when it w- when I was struggling with it. And he said, "No, no, I wanna make a movie about it." And they said, "Well, it's not a movie, it's a book. Maybe after." So when my deal got canceled and I was in limbo, I thought, "Well, I can go to Errol now." I'd never met him or spoken to him, but I sent him an email, got his email address, and he called me, like, the next day, and he goes, "Are you kidding me?" He goes, "I've always ..." He goes, "I was fa-" 'Cause I, uh, he had got my proposal. He said, "I was so fascinated by this story, and I've always wanted to do something on both Manson and MKUltra." So, it took about six months of legal stuff 'cause, um, since my book was still owned by Penguin, but the suit was happening, and he helped this process. He got them to allow him to work with me on what became a n- was gonna be a Netflix series. He sold it. He, he shot a, what do you call it, a teaser.

    24. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    25. TO

      So he spent two days, and this was 2014, with me. One day at my bungalow where he wired it with, like, 15 cameras on remote cables in the ceilings and then interviewed me all day, uh, at the house, at my house, and going through all my files and everything. And then the next day, his crew took, like, half of my apartment to a sound stage in the valley somewhere and recreated my apartment. But then he w- used all his magical tricks, like he had a camera 200 feet in the air, it would zoom down and spin. It was beautiful what he ended up cutting and putting together. Um, and then in 2015, he changed what he wanted to do with the documentary. It was gonna be a six-hour series. He had sold it, and I had never signed the final contracts 'cause I said, "Errol, you gotta give me a clearer picture of what this is." Well, at one point, he decided he wanted to do the story of Frank Olson with my story. And Frank Olson's son's, Eric's pursuit of his father's, uh, possible murder by the CIA in 1954 because of what he had found out about the Korean POW, uh-... uh, biological stuff. That became Wormwood, which I don't know if you saw, it was a Netflix series about two years ago. It's the last thing... Oh, no, Errol... It's the second-to-last thing Errol did. It was his first six-part series. That happened because I backed out when, you know... I di- I didn't like the direction it was going, so Errol and I fell out, um, over that. We're still friends and he gave me some pictures for the middle of the book from, from the shoot. Uh, and he did just, just Frank Olson and Eric's pursuit of it. So that took up, like, a year and a half of, um, working with him and his people to develop it. And, and then it all stopped. And I actually walked away from money that would've really helped me, but I s- you know... I was willing to give him control, but I didn't like where it was going, and I'd already invested 16 years of my life at that point.

    26. JV

      (imitates gun firing)

    27. TO

      And I just thought, "I can't, I can't do this." You know, "I still need this to be my vision and not somebody else's." And he was pretty upset and pissed off, um, but he, he made another good series that, you know, evolved out of my project. And, uh, and at that point, uh, it was about 2015, '16, I just kept reporting and working to get the lawsuit resolved. And then as soon as it did, um, my agent took, took it out and he said, "Before I take out this new proposal, I got a collaborator." Dan Piepenbring, young, uh, had started working with Prince on Prince's memoir, and then Prince died in the middle of it. And because once Prince was dead, all this stuff had to be settled with his estate, Dan had, like, a year of not doing anything. So our agents were at the same agency. They put us together. And at first, I was apprehensive 'cause he was, like, 29 and he wasn't even alive when this happened, and I thought, "What is this kid gonna know about this case and all of this stuff that COINTELPRO, chaos, MKUltra? I'm gonna have to teach him so much. That's gonna take a year." But the... when I met him, uh, and I saw the writing he had done before, I'm like, "This guy is perfect." And he was, so we turned it out in a year. Well, we took it out and, and Sloane, my agent, said, "We've got to send it to Penguin first, because we still have that resolution that hasn't been resolved. I mean, it's, it's all agreed to, but we have to finish what, what we have to do, so they need to know about it." They saw the new proposal (laughs) and made us an offer for the book that matched-

Episode duration: 2:55:04

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