“Frankly, I still don’t know what happened,” author Tom O’Neill says early on in Netflix’s new documentary Chaos: The Manson Murders. “But I know that what we were told didn’t happen.”
It’s an auspicious start to the new film, directed by Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Unknown Known) and based in part on O’Neill’s 2019 tome Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a wildly popular book that delved into potential connections between Manson and some of the century’s most infamous clandestine programs.
In a tight hour and a half, the film traces Manson Family lore from their formation in San Francisco in 1967, through their move to Spahn Ranch, friendship with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and near-acceptance into the Los Angeles music scene. It explains how a drug deal gone wrong led to the murder of their associate Gary Hinman, which in turn led to a two-day murder spree that took the lives of eight people, including actress Sharon Tate, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, and supermarket executive Leno LaBianca — and how they were eventually caught, prosecuted, and convicted of their crimes. It touches on O’Neill’s theories, extensively interviewing him throughout the film, while offering fresh interviews with an impressive cohort (including an original prosecutor and members of the family) as well as a reels of expertly curated archival interviews and footage — including plenty of Manson himself, who died in 2017.
For more casual viewers, it will be a well-produced, well-reported primer — while many documentaries focus on Manson the individual, this one instead looks at the context in which he lived: his music, his family, his connections, his manipulations. Yet for the legions of O’Neill fans eagerly waiting for the journalist to expand on the theories introduced in his book, the film probably won’t be satisfying. Why release yet another Charles Manson doc into a crowded field, rather than dig deeper into the conspiracy theories that made O’Neill’s Chaos such a hit in the first place?
When O’Neill published his book in 2019, it quickly took off: Joe Rogan had him on his show to talk it through for hours, while Quentin Tarantino consulted him when writing the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The conspiracies O’Neill suggested were just too juicy: What if the CIA’s MKUltra, a clandestine Cold War-era program focusing on hypnosis and mind control, actually had contact with the so-called family responsible for at least nine murders? And in an era of rampant counterintelligence programs conducted on anti-war and hippie movements, where did the FBI fit into all this? O’Neill had been reporting the story for 20 years, a magazine assignment that turned into an obsession. Though he still didn’t have all the answers — and admitted so freely in the book and interviews — he felt it was time to get it into the world.
The documentary leaves out O’Neill’s personal journey, but it does scratch the surface of his theories: As he explains in the film, after he got an assignment for Premier magazine to cover the 30th anniversary of the murders in 1999, he filed a public records request to get Manson’s parole documents, and started to find something fishy: As soon as Manson was released from prison in Southern California in March 1967, he immediately violated parole by heading north to San Francisco. Yet no one does a thing. There, his parole officer, Roger Smith, watches him get arrested multiple times, but again keeps him out of jail. “Every time he was arrested, instead of revoking his parole, Smith would write him a letter saying he was behaving well, he was doing great, he was fine,” O’Neill explains in the doc.
O’Neill saw this pattern and started to wonder why he was given such a long leash, and is where things started to get murky. At some point, Smith got an office at a local nonprofit called the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. Manson became a fixture there, visiting Smith and taking his half-dozen “wives” in for STI treatment on a regular basis. But the clinic had other uses — according to O’Neill’s research, it was a hub for Jolly West, the MKUltra psychiatrist who experimented on hypnosis and mind control — and who was, suspiciously, the last person to talk to Jack Ruby before he lost his mind. O’Neill openly wonders if the researchers stationed there might have been watching Manson’s actions, given that he was able to control his followers in a way that appealed to these government entities. O’Neill readily admits he hasn’t been able to place Manson and West in the same room, and is up-front that his theory is full of holes. But it was this suggestion that the CIA was somehow monitoring, or even influencing, Manson that gained O’Neill a following.
The documentary does explore this, and touches on other parts of his reporting. In the 1960s, an FBI program called Cointelpro was infiltrating the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers. O’Neill describes in the film a November 1968 FBI memo that says, essentially, “When the revolution finally happens, we have to make the celebrities understand that they’re going to be lined up against the wall with everyone else. So what happens? Eight or nine months later, Sharon Tate and Sebring, two of the biggest jet setters of that world, are slaughtered.”
Morris seems skeptical when O’Neill raises this, asking if he really thinks the federal government could have orchestrated the murders. “Orchestrated sounds like it’s planned in advance, executed, and then covered up,” O’Neill says in the film. “It coulda been just that Manson just had leeway to do whatever he wanted to do for two years. Maybe that was all it was.” The filmmaker seems to side with Bobby Beausoleil, the Manson family member convicted of killing Gary Hindon, who Morris interviews in the movie. Beausoleil suggests that the motivation was much simpler: Manson believed he was losing his followers, and forced them to commit crimes in order to stay connected to him. “I think it’s important that the story be stripped down to the bare bones,” he tells Morris from prison, where he has been since 1969. “There’s no doubt in my mind what the motivation was…. Charlie had gotten paranoid of his own people. He wanted to bind them to him through their committing bad crimes.”
Neither of those explanations, of course, jive with the theory Vincent Bugliosi presented both in court and in his perennial best seller Helter Skelter. O’Neill posits that the ambitious young prosecutor manipulated the evidence to build the story that Manson, convinced the Beatles were speaking to him through the White Album, told his followers to murder innocent people and blame the Black Panthers. While O’Neill diligently works through the holes in the prosecutorial argument — and his increasingly contentious relationship with Bugliosi in the years before his 2015 death — in the documentary, Stephen Kay, who helped Bugliosi prosecute the family, remains steadfast. “[Manson] was just obsessed with this race war idea and Helter Skelter,” he says. (Beausoleil, the former Manson family member, has his own theory: “[Bugliosi] knew what the truth was. He knew Manson talked about that kind of shit… but it had nothing to do with the murders. His intention from the get-go was to do exactly what he did. Write a book, make a bajillion dollars on that book, and live on it for the rest of his life, and sell the movie rights. Which is what he did.”)
In the end, while Morris makes an absorbing one-shot documentary about a well-worn crime, an exploration of O’Neill’s theories after more than 20 years investigating the case might have been a more satisfying film. There’s threads that they never pull (Were the Hells Angels’ involved? What did record producer and Dorris Day’s son Terry Melcher really know? What does Tex Watson say on his confession tapes, and why have they never been released?) and inconsistencies in Bugliosi’s story that they don’t consider. Skepticism on the part of a documentarian is good, but in this case, it seems to have hampered an exploration of the more wild theories that brought O’Neill such popularity a half-decade ago. “You’re suggesting Manson was a puppet?” Morris asks towards the end of the film. “I’m suggesting that was a possibility, yeah,” O’Neill replies. Allowing more of his evidence for that possibility into the film might not have gotten us closer to the truth — but it could have made for a more compelling ride.
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