Think you know everything about the Manson murders? This enthralling book will make you think again | Opinion

Few incidents in American history have been as meticulously analyzed as the 1969 Manson murders, also known as the Tate-LaBianca murders. And few people know that better than journalist Tom O’Neill, who spent two decades obsessing over the details of Charles Manson and his infamous group of followers known as The Family in hopes of unearthing the true motivations behind the slayings of actress Sharon Tate and others.

In 2019 – the 50th anniversary of the murders – O’Neill published “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties,” an enthralling read that seeks to poke holes in the official narrative of the murders as outlined in the book “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.”

When O’Neill started the project in 1999, his assignment was admittedly less ambitious than a 500-page investigation into one of the country’s most notorious cult leaders and the cultural context that fueled him. At the time, O’Neill was writing for Premiere magazine, which tasked him with reporting a 30th anniversary retrospective looking at the Manson murders’ lingering impact on Hollywood.

However, after doing some digging, O’Neill couldn’t help but feel that the story in “Helter Skelter,” published in 1974 by the prosecutor in the Manson trials, Vincent Bugliosi, didn’t add up. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one.

O’Neill details discussions with many people close to the case who agreed that Bugliosi’s telling of the events leading up to the murders in August 1969 – that Manson, high on LSD and inspired by The Beatles’ “White Album,” was anticipating a race war and seeking to move his commune underground in the California desert to wait it out in hopes of later repopulating the planet – seemed inconceivable.

But the information O’Neill uncovered from dozens of interviews, documents and Freedom of Information Act requests doesn’t always appear any more believable.

“It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it?” O’Neill writes.

Part of what makes “Chaos” so compelling is how O’Neill weaves his painstaking journey to report this story into the narrative, allowing readers to follow him to prisons, basement libraries, police stations, the doorsteps of former Family members, and his own robust archive of documents.

Where O’Neill is able to follow a paper trail to back up his claims is equally as intriguing as where he finds an egregious lack of one. By the end of the book, missing files related to Manson or people in his orbit prove par for the course.

Still, O’Neill manages to dig up never-before-reported details about Manson and The Family. As a journalist, it never failed to excite me every time he noted that in the book. Internal musing about the reporting process – how O’Neill prepared for interviews, where he messed up and the doubts he struggled with – also proved cathartic.