Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Chaos and secrets
Book by Radnor native shines light on Manson Family murders
A book by a Radnor native shines a light on the Manson Family murders.
RADNOR >> Fifty years ago during the night of Aug. 9, the gruesome and horrific murder spree that took the life of Sharon Tate, a pregnant actress and wife of director Roman Polanski, followed by similar homicides of a Los Angeles couple, the LaBiancas, the next night shocked America.
At that time Tom O’Neill, now 60, was a 10-year-old paperboy living in the Radnor who delivered The Main Line Times to his neighbors. Never would he have guessed that a 5,000 word article assignment for the former Premiere magazine would morph into a two-decade mission to find out what really happened when hippie cult leader Charles Manson sent his followers out into the night to kill.
O’Neill details his quest in his new book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” published by Little, Brown & Co. Written in first person and riveting from page one, the book questions the conventional theory of those murders and points the finger at prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who also authored “Helter Skelter,” along with the police and federal agencies. It lifts the curtain to show the dark side of the CIA’s LSD mind-control experiments and the FBI’s infiltration of left-wing groups in the 1960s and 1970s.
After graduating from Radnor High School in 1977, O’Neill headed to MacAlester College in St. Paul, Minn., but transferred to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He thought he’d be a playwright but that was not to be.
Instead O’Neill ended up supporting himself by driving horse carriages around Central Park for tourists.
“On a lark, I wrote a story in first person and sent it to New York magazine,” he said. He was surprised to see it published that Monday.
“They liked it so much, they didn’t change a word,” he said.
That began his career as a freelance writer, although he continued to pilot the horse carriages for a few more years. O’Neill’s bread and butter was celebrity interviews, notably for US magazine, among other publications, but he also did some investigative work.
“All of a sudden I had a career as a journalist,” said O’Neill. “I never planned it. I took one journalism class my senior year at Radnor High School. That was the only journalism class I’d ever taken.”
He got a call from one of his ed
itors asking him to write a story for Premiere on the Charles Manson case for its upcoming 30th anniversary. He found himself in the magazine’s office on Valentine’s Day evening 2000 waiting for a call from Charles Manson, who was then serving life in prison after his death sentence was converted. To get to Manson, O’Neill went through an intermediary nicknamed “Gray Wolf” who followed Manson from prison to prison and a convict on the inside dubbed “Pin Cushion” because of how often he’d been stabbed, said O’Neill.
Manson’s voice had a hillbilly twang that belied his evil actions, O’Neill said.
He wished Manson a happy Valentine’s Day and Manson said, “‘Hey, man, same to you,’” said O’Neill.
But that call did not last long as Manson lost his temper and hung up. The times that he spoke to Manson, Manson often responded with “non sequiturs and nonsense,” said O’Neill.
Although he missed his deadline for the Premiere piece, O’Neill became obsessed with the case.
He interviewed cops and prosecutors, dug up records and got a transcript of the trial. He searched out former members of the Manson family, many now living off the grid, under other names and having disavowed their former cult leader.
“Seven or eight of the really hard-core original followers publicly denounced him but he privately kept in touch with them,” said O’Neill.
When he spoke to Manson again in 2009, Manson knew that O’Neill had met with those followers.
“He got p——- off at me and put Pin Cushion on to yell at me,” said O’Neill. “‘I don’t know you,’” Manson told him. “‘You don’t know how much trouble you’re in.’”
Over the course of his research, O’Neill said that he faced “multiple threats on my life.” Many stars who were friends with Tate and Polanski, and ordinarily would have welcomed a chat with O’Neill if he were doing an entertainment feature, declined to discuss the heinous murders.
Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and then wrote the true-crime bestseller “Helter Skelter,” also threatened O’Neill during a six-hour interview at Bugliosi’s home. Bugliosi, who like Manson is now deceased, told O’Neill that he would sue him, when confronted over discrepancies in the case, including Bugliosi’s handwritten notes that appear to show a witness against Manson committed perjury. O’Neill also pokes holes in Bugliosi’s rationale for the crime, that Manson had tried to trigger a race war. However, in an earlier meeting when O’Neill first started his research Bugliosi was totally different, charming and friendly, even driving the author around the city to show him where the crimes took place.
As for the Central Intelligence Agency, “there were CIA researchers, one guy in particular, who was doing research to create assassins who came into contact with Manson,” O’Neill said.
The mystery of how Manson, a barely-educated ex-convict who had spent most of his life in various reform schools and prisons, had learned how to use drugs and mind control techniques similar to those developed by the CIA to get his followers to do his nefarious bidding, haunted O’Neill.
Manson, “somehow transformed from an ex-con into hippie cult leader,” said O’Neill.
“The book goes off into some pretty dark places,” he said, including that the FBI and CIA were running counter intelligence operations against left-wing groups like the Black Panthers and the anti-war movement “to infiltrate them and provoke them into crimes.”
O’Neill said his late father, William O’Neill, a lawyer, helped him with freedom of information requests. He spent time at Waverly Heights in Bryn Mawr, where his mother, Eugenia O’Neill, 92, still lives, while working on the book. The law library at Villanova University was invaluable, as was the media archive at the University of Pennsylvania, he said.
O’Neill had received a large cash advance for a book deal about the Manson case from Penguin but that went south and Penguin sued him for the return of the money. Some three quarters of what he’s earning from Little Brown goes directly to Penguin, he said. Luckily, Amazon bought the movies rights to “Chaos” or he’d still be driving for Uber to make ends meet, O’Neill joked.
He also credited his collaborator, Dan Piepenbring, with helping to winnow the masses of information that he’d compiled in his 20-year quest to peel back the onion that is the Manson case into a 520page book, replete with end notes.
After years of wondering in the proverbial wilderness, O’Neill is finally having his moment in the sun. There’s a lot of buzz is surrounding “Chaos,” and O’Neill was in New York from his Los Angeles home for television and other interviews when he spoke to a MediaNews Group reporter. For more information: tom-oneill.org or https://www.facebook. com/CHAOSTheBook.