Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 311: Charles Manson Part 2 - LSD Zombies

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

The Charles Manson series comes to an end as Alex, Mike and Jesse explore all the LSD induced "brain washing" and conspiracy theories that took hold after the horrid murders.  http://www.chilluminatipod.fm MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thank you to - All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Sources: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helter-skelter-vincent-bugliosi/1004765613 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BGly0gcu-8 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chaos-tom-oneill/1129822092?ean=9780316477543 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwoA7NvaacI https://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/5/26/charles-mansons-hollywood-part-1-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-manson-murders https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/manson/mansonchrono.html https://www.charlesmanson.com/vicinity-crimes/barker-ranch/ http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/dbjypb.int3.html

The event of the summer has arrived at Dawn Valley North Lexus. Lexus crafted. Drive yours today. Right now lease the 2025 Lexus Ux300 hybrid premium package from just 528 per month for 24 months at 2.9% plus qualified Lexus owners receive rates as low as 0.9% on select models. See Don Valley Northlexus.com for details. At Don Valley North, Dawn Valley North for Lexus. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Shluminati podcast, episode 311, as always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined today by the only two boys I could ever do the show with Alex Fasiani.

back, Jesse, welcome back, Jesse to the show. We missed you last week. We had a replacement, though, that was very good at carrying, like, the weight that you carry on this show. Yeah. They were just extremely funny. Abby was excellent. And if you ever quit, she'll take your spot.

So I've heard. So I've heard. So, uh, I'm here to say, you can't get rid of me. Yeah. I'm doing this out of spite from now on, really. Well, listen, welcome back is actually a great segue because welcome back guys, both of you and welcome back, Jesse, to America, right? That's two welcome backs because we took a break between our two Charles Manson episodes.

I just want to start out by saying, every little secret is real first, of course, but I also want to know, how was the old UK, Jesse? Did you guys forget about Charles Manson yet? Did you have fun in jolly old England? Did you practice chaos magic while you were out there? Yeah. I did not. Although I did go to Birmingham and I did see all the, like, heavy metal stuff and that was

pretty cool, uh, went to the, uh, Black Sabbath Bridge. Oh my God. Did all that. That was very delightful. I know, here's what I learned. Birmingham has seagulls. That's right. I didn't know that was possible, but I guess they followed the channels inland and just chilled. So that was the whole thing I learned. That's cool. That's like the most British thing you've ever said in your life. You're like, I've just discovered that Birmingham has seagulls. I didn't know that was a thing. like Brighton Bristol Shore Birmingham? No clue It doesn't make sense to me but they did

You can hear them everywhere It was great Did you guys have Manson on the mind This last week while you were gone Were you thinking about Manson? No I didn't Once think about Manson I'm gonna let you know when I was overseas

Not once Although every single person I met Every single person was like So the U.S. A? Yeah, you just like, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'd rather not discuss it. Comedy is tragedy plus time. That's what I always say.

And speaking of which, let's talk about Charles Manson. What did you guys think of? Shuluminati presents Charles Manson Part 1, Garbage Dump. What did you guys think of that episode? Garbage dump. It made me excited for garbage day. Yeah. Did you, did you think about, did you learn anything about Charles Manson that you didn't know before?

Did you think about it in a different way? It was a pretty, I felt like it was pretty much the intro to Charles Manson and everything you need to know. Yeah. Like you, I am, I am, I have, I know an unhealthy amount about Manson, so. Yeah, I didn't know all the pre,

like there's pre-Manson Manson, and then there's Manson Manson, like crazy dude in prison Manson. Yeah. And that's the Manson I know. So I kind of know like, Helter Skelter, Kuku Bananas. I'm in prison now.

Big time. I mean, that's pretty much, that's pretty good. I mean, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. Yeah. And honestly, like, that does imply, yes, that we are back today with Chulminati presents Charles Manson part two, which despite what anyone may tell you is subtitled cease to exist. And to start us off today, speaking of jolly old England, UK, Europe, Birmingham, Seagletown, USA.

How about that USA? What do you guys think about a Beatles theory that has nothing to do? with like the helter-skelter weird fascist murder racism thing like like my question is is it truly a conspiracy theory without those things yeah well i mean okay check this out figure this out figure this out with me because this is the only this is like my own unique thought that I'm adding to this everything else is like a riff on stuff that I read this is like something I was thinking about this whole week all right remember and then I have something I want your thoughts on after. Okay, okay. Remember the

excerpt from Manson prosecutor Vincent Bouliosi's book Helter Skelter where he says quote, according to former inmates at McNeil, Manson's interest in the Beatles was almost an obsession. It didn't necessarily follow that he was a fan. There was more than a little

jealousy in his reaction. He told numerous people that given the chance, he could be much bigger than the Beatles. Okay? So that's something about Manson that Manson believes. And if you think about it, If you think about it, like, wasn't he a little bigger than the Beatles? Kind of, if you think about it.

Like, I mean, in a different way. Yeah. Well, but, yes. Way. Yeah, exactly. But didn't we just learn two weeks ago that the very same summer that the Beatles, probably the biggest band in the world were recording the white album, you had also Charles Manson sitting there in a private studio with fucking Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson from the Beach Boys,

which is like the probably the only band that is like absolutely in the same breadth as the Beatles and who many might even call their worthy American like rival band equal band at the time, right? Isn't that pretty nut? Like if you're trying to. That is crazy. No, it is not. The synchronicity is crazy. Yeah, you're going to go beach boy. Like that's the only warrior that you can get in your corner. Whatever. Yeah. Well, they're not around. Yeah, debatable. But yeah, they're there later. But like, yeah, you know what I'm saying. Right. Like, that's, that's pretty crazy like if that is not the actions of an evil hippie music wizard who's gathering power around him to take down the Beatles like what is I love that yeah I like that I like that a lot all right

I need your thoughts on mine now okay yeah yeah domino from the X-Men yes power isn't luck she's a chaos magician or if you're a chaos magician you're laughing at home right now because you know that that's one and the same thing bang yeah fuck yeah yeah okay okay now answer my question yeah okay do you guys like me yeah only when you're here i don't even have to think about it willed that with chaos magic all right great yeah i don't even have to think about it i do like you um yeah i jerked it to that earlier it was like they like me and now you said it so like if that's true that you did are we in love if that's true that you did jerk it earlier congratulations it's not it's very not true i had a long

day. Yeah, could have done it. Me too. I was working. Me too. I was writing this giant script. By the way, have you guys heard any of Charlie's songs?

We went over this a little bit last time. Yes. Do you think he had a chance? Do you think he, no? They're mediocre at best. Do you think he was ever going to take down the Beatles? No.

No, I don't think he could have done it out of that. Well, if you guys want to hear him at home, I'll put... He became a beach boy, maybe. Yeah, well, the Beach Boys did release one of his songs, and it's not bad. I would say it's better than the A side.

I would say, maybe uh but yeah i'll put look at your game girl i'll put garbage dump i'll put cease to exist because those are thematically appropriate and then i'll also put a link to never learn not to love by the beach boys all in the links uh for this one so you guys can like check this out i think everybody likes to look at your game girl the best i think i don't know i'd like to look at my game boy i like i like to look at my do you remember the game girl what wasn't there like a pink game boy that was the game girl I think you came from a separate,

I think that's a separate timeline you came from. Was that Earth B? That was Earth B. All right. Well, anyway, look, girl, at this point, guys, I should take a second to remind you. The Nintendo Game Girl never existed, R-slash Mandela Effect.

Now, that's an episode we should do. Oh, no. It's for Alex in particular. Yeah, that's so crazy. Anyway, look, look, guys, at this point, I need to take a second and remind you that this episode is part of our special month,

which is LA month which is going to go longer than a month this is a real thing I think some people are thinking that LA month is kind of a joke but it's like not a joke it's like a real thing where we will spend probably even more than a month honoring this great weird city and as I said you need to watch this space at the top of

each episode this month and more to learn about all the cool bonus shit that we've got planned this is not a mystery thing this is just a cool month that we're doing because LA rocks and it's getting beat down by a lot of shit right now and I think it's cool to appreciate the city that's all around us.

And it's longer than a month because it takes a while to get around L.A. Yes, that's allowing for traffic, yes. And I already invited you to something special that we're planning last episode if you were paying attention. And in the last Manson episode, I hinted that you should keep August 30th free. So if you did, that's good because the reason for that is Mathis is flying out to L.A. to do a couple neat things that we've been talking about. And one of them that we're going to talk about today is that we're doing a live call

in special episode, just like coast to coast a.m., where you, the listeners, can call in and, like, just like in a radio show and talk to us about whatever dumb, crazy bullshit that you want. And if you do listen to coast to coast a.m., you know that they don't just have crazy people calling. They also have, like, sort of expert special guest people appear on the show from time to time. So along those lines, we're going to be visited by special LA related expert guests, including Ainsley Lane, aka spooky foodie on all streaming platforms, who investigates all sort of great, like, haunted locations in L.A., hence the spooky, and especially restaurants and bars, hence the foodie.

And she's done some really good meetups and events, including a neat little restaurant club. So she'll be cool to talk to. She'll definitely have some L.A. stuff to talk about, as well as another guest, our fellow local mysterious podcast hosts who are returning guests. Allie and Nat from Let's Get Haunted who will surely catch us up on all the cool stuff that they've been doing since we last had them on

to talk about what lies beyond the ice walls, I believe is what we had them on to talk about. And we learned you were a Disney hand. Yeah, we went on their show and I found out that I was the most Disney adult person that I ever. I believe it. It's true.

I didn't know. I just didn't know. I didn't know. And I know some people have been asking about Let's get haunted and are we ever going to do something with them again. So we are. So there you go.

Bang. but yes more stuff is coming this la month there's all sorts of surprises so at the top of every episode keep watching this space for exactly when and where we're going to be streaming that it is on august 30th so prepare yourself uh keep supporting us at patreon dot com slash chill monty pod all the rewards are now there in a single affordable $15 tier or a $10,000 tier if you are like some kind of weird oil baron or something um there are plenty more surprise to come your oil princess I promise he will be your princess that's the new um i'll get the bumper stick in this says princess to my oil king i'll do it that's great every little secret is real and there's just a few more things to say before we get back

on the manson train first don't you think it's weird how nebulous and corrupted specific points in something so seemingly objective as history can become once we pay lots of attention to them like how we'll never really know who shot jfk or how we'll never probably know who zodiac is or how jack The Ripper is like literally more of an imaginary person than a fake person. Isn't that crazy? I must stress, for those of you are not watching the video portion of this show, as Alex was talking, Matt Fis had his eyes almost glazeover look completely like...

The moment I went metaphysical, he went straight to it. Huge rip. He ripped it up. He was like, I'm going to need this. Yeah, he was like... Jesus, take the wheel. But is that enough to change history for real? Is that kind of the same thing as magic?

Or is that some kind of infinitely looping paradox? I don't know. And by the way... The Invisibles is about, I think. Yes? Dude, the Invisibles? Better than I remember more... Like, you know what?

If you're mad at Neo-Gaman for being a shit, right? A fucking truly shit person? Read the Invisibles instead. It gives you that same great 80s British invasion feel. and Grant Morrison is literally wizard so it's all good also if you are thinking to yourself

man these guys should do another rotten popcorn episode gentlemen I propose who watch the new War of the World's movie oh my god it was made for us when can we do this immediately we'll do it in a couple days

I wanted to get it out of the way I hear it is truly worse than any Neil Brie movie I want to see it through those I have to sit there I literally have only seen

like five seconds of it and it looked all rotten popcorns are now on $15 tier as well so if you are of the $15 tier and did not have it before you have a bunch of them to listen to yeah

so that's tight oh I can't that's awesome yeah I'm so fucking can we just skip this episode and go do that real quick sure no yeah I didn't work on this

this is not important to me which which look by the way if you want to listen to the first half of this thing as a refresher again they're very referential to each other so you guys know what happened and who everybody is so now it would be a good time to pause

and come back. You guys think it would be gosh if I said like I'll wait and then I wait a little bit and then I was like good should I do that? Yeah go for it I say you should go for it. And go ahead and do that right now. I'll wait. Oh you were going to do

a little Dean sample what Jesse just did And then extended a little bit A little bit. What else? Oh, yes. This show contains ample graphic descriptions of consensual sex,

both group and solo, various dangerous, as well as less dangerous drugs, seriously violent crimes, including murder, kidnapping, multiple incidences of sexual assault and animal abuse and experimenting on animals,

let your kids know about the dark questions they'll soon have for you and that no answer you give them will ever really be satisfactory again or set them up with some Bluetooth headphones and teach some French on Duolingo I don't give a shit what you do also on top of that

we're also going to be making jokes about this dark stuff and even worse some of it's probably going to be factually wrong even though I promise I tried my goddamn best to do a good job I'm just a video game YouTuber comedian game show host who likes to be mysterious online please don't judge me like you were an expert

in a way that's almost you more your fault in mind in a way if you think about it in a way yeah that's what i like to just blame the listener yeah almost almost it's almost more your fault in mind if you trust me at this point uh anyway this time instead of dropping some kind of crazy chluminati lore let's just start with a quote from the short story the biography project by the fantastically entertaining sci-fi writer dudley dell whom of course we all know is actually the innovative american sci-fi author horace gold who also wrote Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, among others, during a brief stint in DC Comics before World War II.

Here we go. The bioteam spent hours prying further. When the scientist was in his 30s, he developed a continuing habit of looking up and smiling secretly. On his deathbed, 40 years later, he moved his lips happily without fear. My guardian angel, Carson interpreted for them, you've watched over me all my life. I am content to meet you now. Glass started. He went to one bioteam after another, asking a brief question of each.

When he came back, he was trembling. "'What's the answer, Doc?' Zatz asked eagerly. "'We can't use the biotime camera anymore,' Glass said, looking sick. "'My colleagues have been investigating the psychoses of Robert Schumann, Marcel Proust, and others, who all eventually developed delusions of persecution. "'Yeah, but why, Zatz persisted?' "'Because they thought they were being spied upon. And they were, of course, by us.

All right. Now that we've got tons more time slices to sift through, just like last time. And remember, gang, if you think about it, today's episode isn't so much about Manson as it is about people who've studied him, including all of us by the end of all this, actually. So, you know, keep that in mind as well, I guess, if you can. Is that chaos magic? No, probably not.

Now, obviously, in addition to our highly sensitive biofilm camera, which captures literal moments in time for us to see for ourselves here on the show, I also read a bunch of shit and listened to a couple podcasts, including Helter Skelter by Vincent Blyosie, Chaos by Tom O'Neill. The film that are based on both of those books, there's now a reenactment documentary of Helter Skelter, a new Netflix documentary about chaos by Errol Morris. I've seen all this stuff. There's also, you must remember this, season four series. Charles Manson's Hollywood, which is very good. There are many links in the description, some books and some other things there as well. But I'm combining what I believe to be the most true version

of what happened out of these various versions. And then I will reframe them with authentic glimpses into mostly chronological timeline. Though, honestly, the machine's a bit of a poet at heart. Like I said last time, especially this time. It's a little bit more all over the place, let's say. So sometimes there's the odd glitch. Reasonable license may or not be taken to engage.

the listener, and we'll sometimes see things into more thematically resonant time order. Here we go. We begin unexpectedly in the twilight of the 1990s, about to be hit by the violent end of another era in America with a big old pile of Hollywood secrets, okay? In a slice from March 21st, 1999, we see Tom O'Neill, author of the book Chaos, one of the two huge Manson books on which this episode was heavily based, who was living in Venice Beach, Los Angeles at the time being given the very assignment that eventually culminates in the publication of this book 20 years later in 2019. It is one day after his 40th birthday and the magazine,

which is called Premier, was hoping for some sort of 30th anniversary article about the Manson murders in which he goes and he follows up on some of the aftershocks that it sent through the Hollywood scene, if you know what I'm talking about. He accepts this assignment. He's a freelancer and he accepts. In the next slice, O'Neill is reading Vincent Blyosie's book Helter-Skelter, which is the other big Manson book I used for this episode. Some might say it's the Manson book,

even, if you will, according to some people, in the way that Robert Gray-Smith's Zodiac book is like the Zodiac book, even though it's like not the best one. And he's getting the sense that things might not be exactly as they appear in the book. But were they? Were they as they appeared in the book?

Because to his surprise, over the next few days, O'Neill gets very passionate nose from 36 people close to the case including relatives and friends of Tate Polansky and Sebring and tons of Hollywood people like

Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Kansas Bergen, who was Melchers G.F. at the time, Terry Melcher, the producer, David Geffen, Mia Farrow, Angelica Houston, Bruce Dern, Kurt Douglas, Paul Newman, Elliot Gould, Ann Margaret,

Hugh Hefner, Peter Fonda and Diane Ladd, all knows. And Diane Land's manager actually tried to set up an interview with Diane and quote, this is from the book. The next day, she called back saying that Ladd had had an emotional, visceral reaction. The manager said, I don't know what happened with Diane back in the 60s, but she adamantly refused to have anything to do with the piece. She even told me that if her name was in it, she was going to contact her attorney. So finally, after going after some smaller names, O'Neill finally gets a lead where he, in her views Peter Bart from last time, who was the editor-in-chief of Variety for many years.

We quoted him in the last episode. And when we see them talk, Bart implies they had it coming for the crazy life that they lead. They talk about it for a bit. It's the live-frieky, die-freaky mentality. Do you guys know what that is? You can kind of put it together, right? It's like... Yeah, I mean, I figure what I mean.

Yeah, fuck around and find out kind of. It's like, you know what? If you smoke pot, it serves you right, that somebody murders you on the street at night. You know what I mean? That kind of thing. Yeah, that bullshit. That kind of thing. Um, yeah.

So, uh, next, we know O'Neill interviews Boliosi for the first time for six hours in April of 1999. Uh, Bliosi gives them some stuff, but dodges questions on Melcher. Uh, this is the day he mentioned the hidden videotape in Polanski's house to Boliosi, uh, which we covered a bit last week. But the tone is a little more accusatory here with O'Neill saying, quote, Romans a sicko. Uh, I'm sorry, with Boliosi saying, quote, Romans a sicko. He was making her do it. Because if you remember, there was a little bit of, like, a weird, like, porn tape situation last time. And then something kind of important happens.

Here's a bit from the book from O'Neill about the slip-up that Vincent Boliosi made that day, which Tom O'Neill did not notice until he went back to these notes six years later in 2005. Quote, as a DA, he wasn't assigned the Tate murder case until November 18th, 1969, months after Polanski's August 17 return visit to the house. In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bliosi to authorize search warrants. If he'd learned about

the tape from the detectives back in August, if he'd been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house, then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he'd ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling. Maybe it was something he felt

he had to cover up to protect some celebrity's reputations. The point was, we'd never know because it was something he'd hidden from his readers. Though I can't, though I hadn't caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. And when I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship. So there's a quote. Next, we see O'Neill interviews Polanski's longtime's friends, Victor Lowndes and Gene Gatowski, who confirm that Polanski had a secret meeting in a Denny's parking lot on the way to his first meeting with police the day after the murders when he like flew straight into town on August 10th, 1969. They say that the man he had

the meeting with is just Roman's friend who was being there for him in a tragedy. The man is called Vitold Kachanowski, another Polish guy, who also rides all the way to the studio with Roman in Roman's car, still talking to him all the way through the car ride and all the way into Roman's private suite on the Paramount lot where he's been staying because he doesn't want to see anybody and it's like the extra security keeps people away. They are talking, this unit, the police are outside, they don't even let the police in until they're done talking, right? That's not normally how I deal with the police.

Kachianowski, especially when my wife was murdered, especially when my wife was fucking murdered like a day ago. So you're just saying they got like celebrity treatment. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. But also he was talking to this guy, this weird guy. Kachinowski first ends up on police radar as a friend who told friends that he'd gone

into hiding because he knew who murdered Sharon and the gang. He thought that the word pig on the door was actually the name Pick, PIC, in reference to a violent drug dealer that he knew called Pick Dawson, who'd been thrown out of Seattle Drive by Polanski earlier that spring for gate crashing

a party. So O'Neill notices that Polanski denied ever-knowing Kachtowski in a police polygraph, which is weird, and schedules an interview with the guy, which we see in early 1999. So he actually is able to talk to him. This guy tells him

that Polansky didn't know shit and was only being secretive because he was worried that Voichek-Ferkowski, who was one of the guys who was murdered who was living in the house, sort of living in the house on and off at the time with his girlfriend, Abigail, while Roman was away. He was just worried

that that guy was committing drug crimes out of Roman's house while he was gone and then doubles down in the interview in 1999 on Pick Dawson being the one who was going to come after Frakowski anyway. regardless of whether he was the murderer at Cielo Drive. O'Neill quotes him in the book by saying,

I remember Voichick telling me that they threw Pick Dawson out of a party, he said, taking a sip of wine. They told Pick Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off. Kachanowski remembered another party a few weeks before the murders where he had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, they were standing on the other side, looking at Voichek and me, and they said, you sons of bitches, we will be back and we will kill you.

If Frakowski were alive, I ventured, and Kachinowski could ask him one. question, what would it be? Looking down into his wine, he said quietly, did you ever meet anybody from the group of people who came to kill you? So that's what he wanted to ask. You want to know, did you know any of the people who murdered you? In the next slice, we can see different slices of O'Neill interviewing Dominic Dunn from Vanity Fair and director James Toback, and actress Joanna Pettit and Polanski's manager Bill Tenet. These are the names of people who said yes to him, right?

Not the huge names. Dominic Dunn says, quote, I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it too. James Toback said Warren Beatty, who declined an interview, invited him and actor slash sports legend

Jim Brown to an orgy at the Tate House, and that, quote, I was going to be included because I was with Jim and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined. Joanna Pettit says, quote, I lost it when Sharon was killed. I had to be hospitalized. and missed a funeral.

At the time, I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came when she asked him to come back and she was here. Which is, you know, sad. For some balance, we also see that O'Neill spoke with Polanski's friend, production designer, Paul Silbert, who said, quote, James Tobac is full of shit and always has been. Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I had ever been to, and I was up there frequently. Whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale.

private. He might have been hinting at orgies, but there were never any. But then to swing things back the other way. They were orgies. Well, look, swing things back the other way, Bill Tennant, right, who again, Roman's manager at the time, said, quote, there was nothing innocent about it. It was retribution. He who dies for the most toys wins. I think it's pretty self-serving to call that period and what was going on innocent. What's innocent about drugs? What's innocent about promiscuous sex? You tell me where the innocence was. Nobody cares. gave a shit about Sharon Tate, not because they weren't nice, but because she was expendable, as expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.

Interestingly, we see his first subject, Dominic Dunn, also tells him to get a haircut from J.C. Brings' protege, Little Joe Torre Nueva. So he does. So we watched O'Neill interview Joe Tori Nueva about J.C. brings connection to the criminal underworld via a series of haircuts that he does with the guy in 1999. He gets his haircut like too much. He tells him Sebring is the first guy to ever style men's hair instead of just cutting it

and then he revolutionized male grooming with the quote, Sebring method and that this quickly made him a barber to the stars. He said that this along with the fact that Jay saw clients in a private room saw Sebring involved with some pretty serious mobsters from places like Chicago and Vegas and that

after the murders, Little Joe says he got a call from a notorious Chicago outfit operator Charles Babe Barron who tells him, quote, don't worry, little Joe, you're going to be all right. He didn't do anything to anybody. Nobody's going to do anything to you. Which is a pretty weird thing for a mobster

to just call you and say after somebody dies. I would say. In the next slice, O'Neill finds a transcript from the Manson trial, which shows Greg Jacobson, if you remember, he's the third guy in the Golden Penetrators with Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher. God, I love that stupid name.

Yeah, horrible name. saying he, Greg Jacobson says he got a call from Charlie about a missing spyglass from Terry Melcher's house, which reveals that Terry Melcher was possibly more connected to the family than he originally thought, and that they had even known his address and creepy crawled his Malibu home, which would be weird considering that the official story at the trial was that the family had never been there, right? O'Neill writes, quote, I found evidence that Melcher lied on the stand under oath. and Bugliosi, or Bulyosi, sorry, and Bulyosi definitely knew about it.

Maybe he even put him up to it, suborning perjury, right? So next, we see O'Neill interviewing the owner of Cielo Drive, Rudy Altobelli, at the classic steakhouse, Musu and Frank, which is where Rick Dalton meets Marvin Schwartz in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And he also cast some doubt on Terry Meltcher's story. In many timeslices of many interviews through the spring of 1999 and beyond, which were all conducted over fancy meals that were paid for by the Premier Magazine expense account. O'Neill takes Rudy out on a bunch of dinners, and he tells him that Melcher and Manson,

Melcher and Manson, wow, it's hard to say. Melcher and Manson hung out often and that Terry was involved with Manson as much as Dennis Wilson was. Then we see him give Tom a number for Carol Wilson, who is Dennis Wilson's ex-wife, who said that she kept a diary on everything that Dennis and Terry did because she fucking hated Terry's guts and was even romantically involved with J.C. Bring for a while. So it's all wrapped up together. All looped into each other. Yeah. One of the funny things about Jay Sebring, one of the funniest things about Jay Sebring is that because he's a hairstylist and he's like kind

of a little guy, everybody kind of thinks he's gay automatically, but he's like not. And so he has like this like sort of like magic power to like get places where normal, normal straight guys can't go. This whole thing like 1960s, P. Diddy? yeah i don't know i don't look it's certainly like i mean right now it's all hearsay about right but to assume assuming the hearsay is real obviously i guess my question is going into this this is

post conversation about the victims and is this an ex is this trying to explain why mansum would have targeted them Is that? I think what he's trying to do here is that he's trying to imply by looking, by going around talking to all these people, he's trying to pull at the strings that kind of hold the story

together and show how there's all these things like there's this, there's definitely, like, in this section that we're going to look at right now, you're definitely going to be looking at this sort of what was going on in the Hollywood scene that was weird. Is there something weird about this? here are the clues that are that there may have been something weird here are some clues there may not have been something weird and i guess for what purpose though i guess is the question i think what is the objective i think he's trying to find i think he's trying to find and establish another motive like right now we're just going through it from his point of view so he's just following the lead right

now he's trying to you know get people to talk about this uh murder for an article and a lot of people said no and now he's just talking to the people that said yes and he's finding all these weird things about the book that's all that's more to it than the story that being told yeah that's all that's all he knows for sure right now but he's following the leads um and uh yeah so next we see o'neill getting a call back from carroll wilson who he called he followed up on the phone call and just a few days later she calls him back canceling their phone meeting after first implying that mansons reach in hollywood went further than anyone realized saying quote i thought long and hard over the weekend, and I can't talk to you. It's a scary thing, and anyone who knows

anything will never talk. In one session, after taking Altebelli back to Cello Drive for the first time in 10 years, which the house itself was demolished in 1994. So even though he was out there in 1999, they were just looking at whatever's there now instead. Rudy tells O'Neill that when he heard it was Manson, who had been fingered for the murders, the first thing he did was call the quote two carols, which are Carol Wilson and Carol Jacobson, and yes, Dennis and Greg's wives were both named Carol. He says, quote, I said because of their husbands, I was stuck with all of this. I was left in the lurch. They knew it was happening at the house. Terry was the instigator of the whole thing. That's what Rudy Altebelli said. O'Neill has a good part about this in his

book, though, where he says, quote, Altabelli seemed to be towing with the idea of letting me in on something bigger. He did this a lot. A seemingly offhand remark would complicate his entire portrait of the period. Terry talked about Manson all the time, he said. He thought it was wonderful. He asked me to manage him. But hadn't Terry said he wanted nothing to do with him? Terry stocked Manson. They thought they had Jesus Christ. Later when I had transcripts of the trials, I'd see that Altabelli wasn't just embroidering. On the stand, he'd said that Melcher, along with Wilson and Jacobson, had talked to me on many occasions about Mr. Manson and his philosophy, his way of living, and how groovy it was. Tellingly, in his own testimony,

Melcher acted as if he hardly knew the man behind this groovy philosophy. Presented with a photo of Manson, he told the grand jury, I don't know him, but I think I have seen him at Dennis Wilson's house, which is not the same impression that anybody else seems to have about Tarian Manson. Next, we see O'Neill is on his sixth call with Mike McGahn, who is one of the lead investigators on the case, who we remember from last time, who now lives in Idaho in June of 1999, who tells him that there were no interviews conducted

at all with Terry Melcher, Greg Jacobson, Dennis Wilson, or Rudy Altebelly during the investigation, which is odd, but that the two carols were interviewed, their wives, within a week of the murders, with Carol Jacobson's happening just

one day after the murder. That's high priority. August 10th, 1969. So that's, that's, that's an odd thing. A few weeks after that, we can see O'Neill is showing Manson trial defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald, who was one of the girls' attorneys, a photocopy of the notes that Vincent Blyosie took during his interview. This is important. He's showing Fitzgerald, a photocopy of the notes that Vincent Bliosi took during his interview with the biker Danny DeCarlo of the straight Satan's. We talked about him last time. This guy, one of these bikers who was not really in the family, but he, like, came by a lot and kind of, like,

did security for them in exchange for, like, food and drugs and sex and that kind of thing. He sees notes in his, from his interview that he has with the guy, where he describes three visits by Terry Melcher, twice to spawn ranch, and wants to Barker Ranch, the one in Death Valley, from after the murders happened. he shows Fitzgerald who to his utter astonishment immediately recognizes Blyosie's handwriting how the bits about Melcher's visits are crossed out by Blyosie's pen and after cross-referencing that with the testimony that DeCarlo did at trial these parts that Blyosie crossed out are the only thing that he didn't repeat on the

witness stand of all the stuff that he said so it's like almost like Boliosi went in and just said nope that didn't have it. happen. In the next slice from that same summer, O'Neill is interviewing the Beach Boys recording engineer Steve Despar, who remembers hating the weird recording sessions filled with stinky, sickly

underage girls to the point that Brian Wilson's wife had a new sanitary bathroom seat installed and said of Manson, quote, he was after Melcher. Melcher was not out of the picture at this point. He was a part of the project. When I recorded Charles Manson,

it was for Dennis and Terry Melcher. It's another, just another hint that Terry Melcher might not be telling the truth. Next, O'Neill is standing in the archives of the L.A. County Sheriff's Office a few weeks later, reading an interview with family member Paul Watkins, who is not to be confused with Tex Watson, he's just another guy with a similar name, Paul Watkins, which seems to corroborate one of DeCarlo's accounts of seeing Melcher at Spawn Ranch after the murders had already taken place. It says, quote,

Melcher was on acid. He was on his knees. Asked Manson to forgive him. Terry Melcher failed to keep an appointment, called him a pig. They're all little piggies. Helt their skeleton meant for everyone to die. Charlie gave Greg Jacobson a 45 slug and said, give Dennis Wilson this and tell him I have another one for him.

So that's a pretty different portrait than the one that Terry Melcher point. I'm never done acid. What the fuck's it like? It's just tripping out. Um, I can give you The story I've told a million times It's the infamous Jesse Was definitely drugged by

Oh yeah, that's right Dude's where I thought like We're not there I was walking home but wasn't dude Yeah yeah That was that was 100% acid Never doing that again That's wild

It's pretty it's pretty it can be pretty tame It can be pretty wild Just depends Okay Yeah all right Suddenly in the next slice We have O'Neil standing In the rooftop lounge

On top of Terry Melch 's high-rise apartment building on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, a few days after talking to De Carlo, or finding the De Carlo testimony, and he's confronting him. It's on July 3rd, 2000. He calls Terry on the phone, and he's like, meet me on my roof in 15 minutes. He confronts him about some of these things he's heard about him that are different than what is in public record, right? Melcher threatens him with the power of four law firms and reminds him that he's dealing with a pretty serious customer. This slight dramatization based off true events that we're about to hear is for Mathis and Jesse to read. Mathis is going to be playing Tom O'Neill for us

today, the writer, and Jesse is going to be the legendary producer, Terry Melcher, who I just realized produces that one Paul Revere in the Raiders records where they're all the blue outfits on the front. That's, you know, that's a good one. Anyway, here we go. I need to do the story. I don't need the truth. You were a powerful guy. Was. M. Dennis Wilson was the only one that really knew what was going on. He's talked about it in various ways. It sounds like he knew all about it. He was there. After a while, you get used to it. It's a terrible thing to say, but you kind of get used to it. So what's the best thing? thing that you and I can do about it.

There has to be an explanation for this. Why was this in the files? How was it suppressed? Why? If they were lying, how did they testify to other significant factors? I have no idea where that second ranch is. I have no idea in the world. It could be in Kuwait.

If it is true that you were at the ranch after the murders, it undermines the entire helter-skelter motive for the prosecution. I'm curious why you want to talk to me about this out to crucify me because nobody's ever had this information that i have about you at the ranch afterward joe lively do you know who he is uh he can shut down everything networks magazines anything fax me a draft you know i can't do that terry you know i like you if i didn't like you i take your briefcase and throw it off the balcony okay I happen to like you

So I hope You'll be fair That sounds like a threat But I will be fair with you That's not a threat Is the truth Thank you James You can't believe how accurate to life

That scene really was Just like the time slice Strangely though The next slice is back in the summer of 1999 Where O'Neill meets with Bill Nelson Of Mansonmurters.com Which is like one of those websites

If you know what I'm talking about he is a retired evangelical minister who since dedicated his life to the murders as a hobby session as I like to call it at and that's not two words that's one word a portmanteau of hobby and obsession it's not a hobby session it's a hobby session like if you like true crime is a hobby yeah taking on one very specific murder for the rest of your life is an obsession I think yeah so we're going to call we're going to split the diff, I'm going to call it a hobby session. As I like to call it

anyway, and that meeting happened at a Denny's in Costa Mesa, California, where he buys $40 worth of photocopied homicide reports from him, and they exchange war stories. However, it's this quote from the book that really turned my head.

Quote, Nelson believed that certain elements of law enforcement knew that the Tate La Bianca murders were planned, or they knew who was behind them. They'd been unable to act because it would have exposed their secret intelligence gathering operations. Nelson had watched nearly every televised interview Manson had ever given. He felt that Manson, quote, never lies. He just, quote, withholds information. But Manson would never tell the truth about the murders. It would

involve snitching, and there was no greater transgression in a criminal's mind. Hearing all this at Denny's made my head hurt, but I felt I had to indulge Nelson. In spite of how far-fetched his theory sounded, some of them resonated with me long after I pulled away from the restaurant that day. And then in this next slice, we watched Terry Melcher die of cancer at age 62 in 2004. You may already be familiar with his obituary from last time, which strangely goes out of its way to explain that Melcher has nothing to do with the Mansons. I think it's an odd occasion for that, but to eat their own, I suppose. Yeah.

Uh-huh. And then just like that, we are back in 1969. where just before Thanksgiving, on November 18th, prosecutor Vincent Blyosie has just been put in charge of the Manson case. At least that's what he said. On November 19th, 1969, we see Boliosi arriving at Spawn Ranch for a search and find George Spawn being tended to by an 18-year-old hippie girl. They tape his consent for later, and they find some bullets belonging to a 22-caliber pistol.

A few days later, we see Blyosi and the crew drive out to Barker Ranch, which is the one in Death Valley for photos, and a search there as well. And there, they discover Manson's old hippie bus. And in it, they find a stack of 10 magazines from between 1939 and 1945 that were all about Hitler, Nazis, and Rommel's Desert Corps, which is not that surprising. Though I do want to take an aside right now to say that I ordered a Fantastic Four comic on the internet, which was Matt Fractions, first volume of Fantastic Four, by the way, in case

you're wondering. And instead of that very cheap, true. paperback, I received a like 1941 issue of Time magazine from the day Bernie Sanders was born that is worth like $300. That's like kind of cooler in a way.

No, I got to give it back to the person who wants it because they have my fantastic four and like they, it wouldn't be like to look at it though. I mean, it's still cool that you got like to look at it. I don't want to touch it, but I will say there was a spam. There was a spam advertisement on the back that's very cool. On November 21st, 1969, Blyosie is having trouble interviewing family members because unless he gets them completely isolated from each other, they coordinate their stories and include the truth on purpose. He also sees Manson in person for the first time on his way from jail to the courtroom with five deputies to be arraigned for burning a loader.

I talked about this arson that they did last time. He cannot get over that Manson is 5'2 and he's wearing like buckskin. I feel like he would look like the link or something. Like he would look like the lone ranger, but like tiny. He's a little guy, a little guy. On November 24th, we see the Manson Girls brought to Los Angeles where they will have no contact with each other for individual interrogations.

On Wednesday, November 26th, we see a deputy DA poke his head into Bugliosi's office, sorry, Bolioli's office, to tell him Bobby Boussela's murder trial resulted in a hung jury due to lack of evidence. we also see the girls question that afternoon at Sybilbrand Institute and deals are dangled over all their heads but it's really Leslie Van Houghton

who gives up the most info through like little girl's style I know something you don't know type games talking to her because she's so poorly socialized and is kind of tripped out she mentions Zero's strange Russian roulette death and how weird it was that he was playing that game by himself and starts implicating Susan and Linda and Patty and sort of herself too for the Tate La Bianca murders and that's where it starts to like come together a little bit. Also there's a fingerprint found and Tex Watson is arrested because they match a fingerprint from the Tate residence to an arrest that he had in April and he decides to try and fight extradition and ultimately avoids being tried with Charlie and the girls. He definitely was there and was definitely tried for all these things,

but he was not tried with Charlie and the Girls, even though he was eventually extradited and was able to be called to the witness stand. On November, I'm sorry, on December 1st, we see Patty Crenwinkel, who is arrested in Mobile, Alabama. And on December 2nd, Linda Kasabian turns herself in in Concord, New Hampshire.

And then on December 3rd, a print for Crenwinkel is found in blood on Sharon Tate's bedroom door, which is a French door, by the way. and that puts her there, right? It's like bang, bang, like it's all happening. This is like day, day, day, day, one, two, three, four. On the fourth, after listening to her confession of the crimes,

which we discussed last episode, Susan Atkins is promised that the prosecution will not seek the death penalty for her crimes if she testifies and is truthful before the grand jury. They're seeing a star witness here. That's what they're hoping for. Boliosi interviews her for several hours that day, and she tells him, Charlie can see them right.

now and here's everything they're saying um which is probably not true uh the next day december 5th we see atkins give her grand jury testimony in front of the grand jury explaining how much she loved charlie and would do anything he said and that they saw him as kind of like a jesus like figure and then she goes into very great detail about what she knows about both the tate and la bianca murders and walks everyone through them both in order and talks about henman and talks about everything just blah blah blah blah blah blah just says everything um then it's It's 4.37 p.m. on December 8th, 1969, and the grand jury issues indictments for Charles Manson, Tex Watson, Patty Cranwin, Winkle, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian, the driver. On Sunday, December 14th, Pugliosi is standing on his front porch, and he's reading a copy of Los Angeles Times with a headline, Susan Atkins' story of two nights of murder.

And he realizes that her testimony was leaked to the press. and there's a whole story behind that. It turns out a couple of them are involved in it and we're getting paid by a publisher for it, and that's crazy. Bulliosi says this about it in Helter Skelter, quote, whatever the ethics of the whole matter,

the Atkins story created immense problems which would plague both the defense and the prosecution throughout the trial. The story was not only reprinted in newspapers all over the world. Even before the trial started, it appeared as a paperback book titled The Killing of Sharon Tate.

It was felt by some that the Atkins' revelations, would make it impossible for the defendants to obtain a fair trial. Although neither Aaron nor I nor eventually the trial judge shared this view, we were all too aware from the moment the story broke that finding 12 jurors who hadn't read or heard of the account and then keeping any mention of it out of the courtroom itself would be a difficult task.

So that was a challenge. That same day, December 14th, back at Civil Brand, we see Susan Atkins pass her cellmate, the informant Ronnie Howard, who we talked about last time, an illegal letter, which is called a kite. It says, quote, I can see your sight of this clearly. Nor am I mad at you.

I am hurt in a way only I understand. I blame no one but myself for even saying anything to anybody about it. Yes, I wanted the world to know M. It sure looks like they do now. There was a so-called motive behind all this. It was to instill fear into the pigs and to bring on judgment day, which is here now for all. In the word kill, the only thing that dies is the ego. all ego must die anyway it is written yes it could have been your house it could have been my father's house also and killing someone psychically you are all physically you are only releasing the soul life has no boundaries and death is only an illusion if you can believe in the second coming of christ m is he who has come to save maybe this will help you understand i did not admit to being in the second house because i was not in the second house i went before the grand jury because my attorney said your testimony was enough to convince you

me and all the others. He also said it was my only chance to save myself. Then I was out to save myself. I've gone through some changes since then. I know now it has all been perfect. Those people died not out of hate or anything ugly. I'm not going to defend our beliefs. I'm just telling you the way it is. As I write to you, I feel more at ease inside. When I first heard you were the informer, I wanted to slit your throat. Then I snapped that I was the real informer and it was my throat that I wanted to cut. Well, that's all over with now, as I let the past die away from my mind. You know what all turn out okay in the end anyway, M or no M, Sadie or Sadi or no, Sadie, love will still run forever. I'm giving up me to become that love a little more every day.

Cease to exist, just come and say you love me. As I say I love you or I should say I love me, my love in you. I hope now you understand a little more. If not, ask. So that's a letter, so that's a letter that she wrote. That had the exact, you know, like when you watch a video online of one of the sovereign citizens, you go over by a cop, and the cop's like, I need your license. Yeah. Because you're like, I don't want to give it to you. It's like, well, if you're going to drive, you need to have a license.

It's like, well, I wasn't driving. I was traveling. Yeah, it's like doctrine. It's like they know the little things to say. Yeah, that's exactly. It's nonsense. It's pure nonsense what I just heard. Yeah.

It's not like you're using your own roads. Right. Where we're going, we don't need roads. No roads. Oh, yes. On December 15th, LSD Island. One day later, an ABC news crew recreating the route the killers took to escape Cello Drive, the night of the murders, pulls off the road at the first available spot they see for the killers to change clothes, and they look over the side, and 50 feet down the embankment is a bundle of bloody clothes

that the murderer is left behind with dry blood all over them that's been there for three, three, four months. Insane. Damn. So embarrassing for the police. the next is to be most of the true crime cases so embarrassing for the police 90% the time the next day we see susan atkins standing in front of judge kean pleading not guilty to all eight counts of her indictment and a trial date is sent for february 7th 1970 that same day los angeles resident bernard weiss after three phone calls telling the story to three different cops and then calling the news to peer pressure the cops the lAPD finally accept the 22 caliber high standard Longhorn Revolver that his son had discovered and reported near Sialo Drive back in September. It was immediately noted that the two live rounds in the cylinder matched the bullet

count from the autopsy report. And after matching the damage to the grip with pieces found at the scene, it was established that it was the same gun that was at the murder scene, but it still wasn't connected directly to Manson. Can you imagine having that in September and instead of December? Anyway, another very important, embarrassing moment for the police. How embarrassing for the cops. December 17th, 1969, I think it's the next day or yeah, that's it. Next day maybe like two days later.

About four days. Yeah, whatever, whatever you want. It's all fake. The next day, December 17th, 1969, we see Manson standing before Judge Keen asking to dismiss his public defender so he can represent himself. According to him, quote,

Your Honor, I'm in a difficult position. The news media has already executed and buried me. If anyone is hypnotize the people are hypnotized by the lies being told to them there is no attorney in the world who can represent me as a person i have to do it myself uh on december 19th two days later uh we see leslie van houghton before the judge this time asking to have her attorney donald barnet dismissed as well but rather than represent herself she wants him to be replaced with marvin part who we know today was an attorney manson saw as more agreeable to his plans of running the entire defense however he

wanted to as one unified thing even though it was supposed to be you know four separate people on trial that that guy was just that lawyer's like whatever fuck yeah he didn't want to any work bad vibes bad vibes on the defense bad vibes on the defense uh then after mansin meets with attorney joseph ball a former state bar president who was on the warren commission who vouches for him they bring in a ringer lawyer to talk to manson and walk him through what he would have to be doing to represent himself uh the guy's like you know what he kind of can do it like I don't think he should but he kind of can so that's what he tells that's what this lawyer tells the judge we see him before the judge again on Christmas Eve in 1969 who says

quote it is in this court's opinion a sad and tragic mistake that you were making by taking this course of action but I can't talk you out of it Mr. Manson you are your own lawyer so he becomes his own lawyer which is so crazy on this on January 2nd I ever go to prison I'm just going to be like I'm my own lawyer yeah this is so don't do that I'd advise you with no real legal knowledge except for this. Don't be your own lawyer. Listen to this guy. I'm just going to present sigils.

Oh, yeah. And tell them the intent behind it. I'm going to jack off on my nests. I'm offering myself, yeah, to any, to any prosecutor out there who's trying to put Mathis away, put me on the stand. I'll be like, dude, he's jerking into those sigils. He's jorking it to a sigil on the reg, my guy. Next slice, January 2nd, 1970, we see Blyosie in a meeting with his team, deciding that more than anything, if they want to win this case, they need to prove that Manson had total control over his followers.

They were afraid that if the case went to trial too soon before they had a chance to investigate the crimes better than the cops seemed to have, they wouldn't have anything to go on. And the trial date is set a little further ahead than Biliosi anticipates and breathes a little bit. He feels good about that. I'll get into Y in just a minute. On January 19th, after trying to get Leslie Van Houghton to submit to a psychiatric examination, probably on the road to establishing an insanity plea, which would have fractured his all-for-one plan at the trial, Manson presses her again to replace Marvin Part now,

her second attorney, with yet another attorney, Ira Reiner. Next, we have several slices between then and the 20th. 8th of January, which show Manson making all kinds of strange motions in court and asking for all kinds of pro per privileges, like a tape recorder and unlimited phone time and using the press to communicate with Susan and others, implying that he wants her to recant her testimony. It seems like Manson realizes at this point that he doesn't have much of a case and he needs more time, and that is why the judge grants a continuance until February 9th, and they decide they'll set a trial date then.

So throughout February, we see Manson trying his hand at directly generating press now, granting phone interviews from jail. They even interviewed Jerry Rubin from the Chicago 8 slash the Chicago 7, which scared the shit of bulliosi because it made him think that Manson's main strategy for this might just be to disrupt trial proceedings, right? Because that's kind of famously what the Chicago 7 did. And honestly, they weren't far off. His charisma gains him a sort of cult following folk hero status in the press.

He's even named Man of the Year Charles Manson is by famous Los Angeles underground paper Tuesday's Child, which also the next month printed a cover of Charlie on the Cross, which is crazy. And then we get to February 9th where we see Judge Keene setting the trial date from March 30th, 1970, which galvanizes Blyosie into figuring out his helter-skelter motive for presentation at the trial, which we talked about last time. And through Rudo Altebelli and Terry Melcher, he discovers that Manson had been at Cielo Drive earlier that March, which we also talked about while Sharon was getting her pictures taken

by Shiro Khatami, the Iranian photographer. And you can actually see those pictures online. They're very easy to find. We already mostly covered this in part one, but I mentioned again now to lock in exactly when all this happened. And why, and just to have you imagine Vincent Biliosi listening and re-listening to the White album like he's going to write a game theory video on it, which just makes me laugh.

And to reiterate the gulf between what Terry was saying about his relationship with Manson and all the stuff we've heard everyone else say about. That same month, Biliosi meets with Paul Watkins, again, not Tex Watson, the guy who claimed to see Melcher on his knees before Manson, begging for forgiveness, high on acid. And he asks Charlie, he asked that guy, he asked Paul. about Charlie's quote programming techniques which he tells him are based mostly on drugs

and finding and exploiting people's deepest fears he says that whenever Manson passed out all the LSD to everybody that Manson himself would always take like a less dose so that he could like keep his wits about him and manipulate the people around him he's very much keeping them like fucking just tripping all the fucking time of him pretty shitty of him to do

me he was so sober enough yeah you just manipulated them constantly which is why they saw him the way they did because he was just fucking manipulating their reality in real time via drugs. Yeah. In the book, Biliosi writes, quote, as Manson's second in command, Watkins had enjoyed Charlie's confidence more than most of the others. I asked him if Manson had ever mentioned Scientology or the process. Watkins had never heard of the process, but Manson had told him that while he was in prison,

he had studied Scientology becoming a theta, which Manson defined as being clear. Watson said that in summer of 1968, he and Charlie had dropped into a church of Scientology in downtown Los Angeles, and Manson asked the receptionist, what do you do after clear? When she was unable to tell him anything he hadn't already done,

Manson walked out. Towards the end of the... He's like, this is bullshit. Yeah. Towards the end of the month on February 26th, 1970, we see Boyosi signing an agreement with Linda Kasabian's attorney, Gary Fleischman.

Apparently, Susan Asher, Atkins called from where she was at, demanded to see Charlie saying there was no chance she was going to testify at trial, and now Bliosi feels like they need another star witness. So they call Linda Kasabian. The agreement says that once she provides a full and complete truthful statement at the trial, she will receive full immunity because she is not Susan Atkins. She is Linda Kasabian. She stayed back. She didn't get as involved. She's more. They were more willing to do this, so they actually offered to grant her full immunity. And they sign it. On March 5th, we see Susan gleefully finally getting to meet with Manson, much of the disagreement of her lawyer. They talk for over an hour in some kind of strange double language that totally freaks to their lawyer out and makes her leave. And the next day, she fires him.

Pretty crazy. They talk in a double language for an hour. Think about that. The same day, March 6th. That's how ingrained they were. Wild style. The same day, March 6th, at court. We see, I'm sorry, not the same day.

day. The next day she files her attorney, that is the day that we're in court. We see Manson making more bizarre requests. He's having the quote, quote, the deputy district attorneys in charge of the trial be incarcerated for a period of time under the same circumstances that I have been subject to, which is just imaginary. And for him to quote, be free to travel any place I should deem fit in preparing my defense. And Manson against his wishes at this arraignment or whatever you want to call it, is assigned a new attorney, Charles Hollow Peter, because the thing of him representing himself is not working for anybody. What?

It's not working out. Wait, what? And Judge Keener's like, you know what? You're going to take this guy. If you want to find somebody else, fine. I don't give a fuck. But you got to take this guy right now because you are no longer your fucking lawyer. The next day, Linda Kasabian, the new star witness, has a fucking baby.

Names him Angel. She just has a fucking baby. Um, March 11th, a couple days later, we see Susan Atkins brings in a new attorney herself. Day Shin, uh, who had previously represented Manson several times who was accepted by the court despite possible conflicts of interest since it was clear that Susan just didn't give a shit. Like, you know, I don't give a fuck, man. And we, we have no other option. She doesn't care. It's better than the clown show.

He was clearly, yeah. Dude, imagine though, imagine he requests their arrest and they could judge like, you know, he has a boy arrest them. let's they should they should they should be in jail for 17 years themselves uh he tells the press that going forward the this new lawyer immediately he tells her that susan will be denying every single thing that she said to the grand jury so she's just off the table as a witness at this point um on march 15 four days later linda is sitting in an unmarked police car driving the routes that they took during the crimes with bulliosi she tells him that she had spent a large portion of those nights watching the group try and

fail to murder various people around town, including a priest in a church that ended up being locked and a guy stopped next to them at a red light, which they just didn't do for some reason because the guy drove away, I guess. And she even claims to have led the group away from the apartment of a friend of hers, where Manson had asked her to drive them there for the purposes of having them like go upstairs, go into his house as friends, and then turn on him and kill him. And Linda basically took them to another floor where there was nobody. And like that didn't go down the way that it could have.

A lot of failure. Yeah. I mean, she did it on purpose according to her. Well, that and fair. Yeah. Two days later, following a tip from Linda Kasabian about some stuff that Mary Brunner and Sandra Good got caught trying to buy with a stolen credit card on August 8th, that like in that same window of the murders, we see the La Bianca detectives pulling

an arrest report from the San Fernando PD showing that they were in the same car when they got arrested with that stolen credit card, they were in the same car that Manson was in one day earlier when he was pulled over in San Diego, right? So if San Diego, if he had the car in San Diego and then he got the, that means that he got the car back to Spawn Ranch and the girls took it somewhere else. So it knocked out any alibi that Manson could possibly come up with

and like squarely places him at Spawn Ranch on the day of the murders. It's like a time period where like disappearing is a little easier than it is. And they are failing spectacularly even at that. Yeah. I mean, it might be like they are bad at it and there might be other forces at work. We'll see. On March 19th, 1970, we see Manson's new attorney, Hollow Peter, making a motion to have

Manson psychologically evaluated and another to sever his case from that of the family. This makes Manson furious. and after the judge refuses another request for Manson to represent himself, he eventually requests attorney Ronald Hughes. Bouliosi writes this about Ronald Hughes, quote, something of an intellectual, Hughes was a huge balding man with a long, scraggly beard. His various items of apparel rarely matched and usually evidenced numerous food stains. As one reporter remarked,

you could usually tell what Ron had for breakfast for the past several weeks. Hughes, whom I would get to know well in the months ahead, and for whom I developed a growing respect once admitted to me that he had bought his suits for a dollar apiece at MGM. They were from Walter Slazac's old wardrobe.

The press was quick to dub him Manson's hippie lawyer. On March 22nd, three days later, we see Hughes. That this guy walking into court, half eating hot dogs. He's like dripping on it. I feel bad for that guy.

Are we going to fucking represent Manson? Yeah, beat time. Start choking on his hot dog. was legit the vibes. Three days later, on March 22nd, we see Hughes telling the press that Manson had met with another attorney overnight, Irving Canarek, who is fair, Caneric, who is famous for his long-winded, overly meticulous, almost purposefully and definitely purposefully obstructionist tactics, and was considering bringing him in as Manson's lawyer.

So it's like almost like a threat or something. Bulliose. Lawyer number 72. Well, dude, look, Biliosi pulls a great quote about Canerrick from Superior Court Judge Raymond Roberts and the transcripts from the People v. Bronson in which he says to Canerrick, quote, I am doing my best to see that Mr. Bronson gets a fair trial in spite of you. I have never seen such obviously stupid, ill-advised questions of a witness. Are you paid by the word or by the hour that you can consume the court's time? You are the most obstructionist man I have ever met. you take interminable lengths of time

and cross-examining on the most minute unimportant details, you ramble back and forth with no chronology of events to just totally confuse everybody in the courtroom to the utter frustration of the jury, the witnesses, and the judge. So that's the kind of guy I feel like if it was him,

his response to be like, but does it work? Right, right. You know, it's weird, it's weird because as much as we're going to slam on this guy for the rest of this episode, I don't want to slam this man. Bulliosi goes out of his way to be like, listen, this guy sucks, he's an asshole, I hate everything about him, I hate it what he does. The dude was not being facetious ever. The dude was like,

this is my job to like do this with the law. I do it and he takes it seriously and he says he fought for Manson like he was fighting for his own fucking life. So, you know, all the shit I'm going to say about him right now that's going to make you hate this guy. Just remember that he did it completely in good faith. It's also literally his job. Yeah. Like, but, That aside, even Bulliosi, he's like, probably the guy who was most affected by him was like, dude, you're, I don't respect your game, but you're a good dude. I mean, he's clearly trying to, like, people who play blue and magic. It's one of those who don't have the facts, you know, you have to argue something. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like the people who play in Blue and Magic the Gathering. I don't, I hate them. Yeah, but no, very much, very much. It's that kind of vibe. Next, in the last week of March, we see Bliose. see asking lots of papa if he will have the bullet that manson put in him removed so they can forensically link it to manson citing the considerable risk to his health and his safety as well as a sense of pride that he has gained about having the bullet in his body lots of papa declines

that same week we also see in yo county police getting an anonymous tip that paul watkins is going to be killed by the family for talking to the police and three days later on march 29th or 30th we see Watkins being pulled from his burning Volkswagen van with second degree burns on 25% of his body saying he was quote unsure of the origin of the blaze but that earlier that night he'd had an altercation with several girls at the ranch we walked out on when they called him a quote Judas for what he'd done um so I don't know if that was what it seems like it was but it might have been on April 13th we see Manson filing an affidavit of prejudice against Judge Keane and has him in place with Judge Older and Every defendant can do this once, but just to spare everybody the nightmare, the defense team gets together, and they decide, yes, we are going to accept Judge Older, and now June 15th is set as the start date for the trial. God, it just, yeah. The court system is just so, it's nuts. It's fucking nuts. Slow.

On April 16th or 17th of 1970, a couple days later, we see comparison tests were finally run between the. the shell casings from Spawn Ranch and the gun found by Bernard Weiss's son near Cielo Drive, the 22 Longhorn Revolver that had already been confirmed as the murder weapon finally establishing a complete link between Charlie the family

the weapon, the murder, all one thing, all the same gun, big danger. Time to fuck shit up. It's like a physical evidence to support this more hearsay evidence, right? And now as we switch time periods again,

I just wanted to say, I hinted at this next part last episode when we were talking about how it was possible that despite all the crimes that they were clearly so guilty of that the entire family was released, Scott Free, three days after what, at the time, was the largest police raid in California history, if you remember, which Boliosi said all came down to them being released for all having been arrested on a misdated warrant. apparently back in the year distant retro year 2000 that did not sit right with tom o'neill who we've got time slices of heading back to the source to see exactly why the leniency exhibited towards the family so regularly rubbed him so hard the wrong way you know what i mean mathis oh yeah yeah but i don't like it when it's the wrong way you want to just get it rubbed so hard the right way specifically pointed out math that's in my script that's in my script one One wrong way a month is probably good for variety. Yeah. There's no wrong way to rub a hard one. That's what I always said. Yeah, I like that. Chuluminati.

That's our new tagline. Patreon.com slash cheluminaity pod. There's no wrong way to rub a hard one. That's your 10. Actually the $10,000 Jesse. We're going to do a poster that's the two of us and it says there's no wrong. It's like it has the Chulminati logo. And then like a third sliver of the poster is like Jesse and it says

Chulminati podcast. A bunch of guys being chill. what's supposed to be where Jesse is is just a silhouette of him but he's not there it says Chulminati pod don't swear in the first 30 seconds though I guess that's done now

yeah I guess that's done now yeah I guess we made it you fucker we lived we survived that bullshit uh anyway the first time slash IDs for YouTube I just got my real ID anyway the first time slice

shows us that O'Neill interviews retired detective Charlie Gunter who tells him Bobby Boselay lies and that him calling the ranch after he was arrested is the sole reason that the Tate La Bianca murders ever happen. This is the copycat theory again

which is that they just wanted to make it look like the same as Bobby Boussela so that they would let Bobby Boussela out because it clearly wasn't him. That's the only all this theory is. He had a wiretap of the call that he never showed anyone which was destroyed and he wanted to get it off his chest after 30 years.

years. That's what Charlie Gunter had. He asks O'Neill to get Aaron Stovitz, Boliosi's co-prosecutor, who heard the illegally recorded tapes before they were ordered destroyed. He says, quote, get Stovitz to say it. Say Charlie Gunther gave me this reluctantly. Say I owned up after a long conversation and did it reluctantly. Ask him, how can it hurt? Promise me. Promise me. I don't want them to all back on the street. I'm worried this will do it. I'm worried this. I'll put him out on the street. That same year, We have O'Neill discovering a quote from Aaron Stovitz, the guy that he's talking about, in a 1970 Rolling Stone article under the pseudonym Porphyry, where he says,

Bosseley, quote, puts a phone call in at the ranch telling them that he was arrested there and telling them he hasn't said anything. Now, this is only a supposition on my part. I don't have any proof to support it. I suppose he, meaning Manson, said to himself, how am I going to help my friend Boselay out by showing that the actual murder of Hinman is still at large? so I know that Melcher used to live in this house on Cello Drive. Go out there, Watson, with these girls, and commit robbery, and kill anyone that you see there.

Don't forget to leave, and this is very important because in the Hinman case they wrote political piggy in blood. He said, don't forget to leave a sign. Then, we can see O'Neill at his second visit with Stovitz in late summer, denying knowing anything about the tape at all besides, quote, rumors, and who tells him, quote, tell Charlie Gunther, Mr. Stovitz is a great deal of faith in you, but unless you have some notes, it didn't happen which is crazy O'Neill calls Gunther back the next day

he's just told him what Stovett said it deflates him and all Gunther has to say back is is that how he wants it then let's drop it you're just not going to be able to use it that's all so that's crazy

next we have two weeks later and this time when O'Neil asked him about it again Gunther says he hadn't seen the tape itself but it heard about it. He completely changed his story and just said you know what I just heard there was a tape. I don't even know if I saw it.

I don't even know if there really is a tape. Then it's a few weeks later. And O'Neill is in Vegas interviewing his partner, Gunther's partner, Paul Whiteley, who also says he's seen the tape and mentions the phrase, quote, leaving a sign. He doesn't believe in Helter Skelter either. Next, with Gunther's sideline for a while, O'Neill is listening to a radio show from 1971 with Detective Preston Gillerie, who tells the interviewer that he had began.

to notice a strange tendency in Manson's interaction with police for him to get away with rather serious crimes with very little lasting punishment or penalty. Here is O'Neill himself explaining that, quote, Hillary's thesis was this. Manson had gotten away with far too much of the spawn

rants in a month before the murders. Even though he was a federal payrollee, Manson had no job, he had ready access to drugs, alcohol, and underage girls, he had a cache of firearms, and LASO officers knew all about it. At LASO's Malibu Station, Spahn was in its jurisdiction, Manson's lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said.

Firemen patrolling the ranch's fire trails had even encountered Manson and the family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high. Make no arrests. Take no police action towards Manson or his followers. And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the family were committing, they were never apprehended. and Manson never had his parole revoked.

There was even an occasion when Manson was picked up by LASO police for statutory rape, but they just ended up cutting him loose. Next, as sort of a temporal after-slice, if you will, we see Guillory eagerly watching K-Cal News in December of 1969 after risking everything to blow the whistle on what he saw as the Manson cover-up. In the middle of the broadcast, which does not feature almost any of the information that he leaked, The phone rings, it's internal affairs saying they know he's the leaker, and he loses his job at the sheriff's office. A few days later, still in December, we can see a memo sitting out on a desk at the L.A. Sheriff's Office,

which implies Guillory's a drug addict leftist who is out to ruin their reputation for some reason. So that was an internal memo that they just, by the way, that guy was fucking crazy. Back in the summer of 2000, O'Neill is interviewing Guillory at his house. he tells him, and this is really a bunch of quotes put together so you can understand them more clearly, but it's all one conversation. I'm just going to say them all right now. We were told not to bother these people. Tell the captain, whatever we saw or heard, that was one of the first things that I was told when I got to Malibu. We were asked to generate memos every time we had contact with any member of the family. A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, we can't keep this person in custody. He's too valuable. We want him on the streets. My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason. I don't know. How could anybody possibly say we led him on the streets? Manson was under some kind of loose surveillance by our department or somebody else.

We know he's being watched by somebody, but we don't know who. The thing is this. If he was under surveillance, those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven homicides. Why was there no intervention? Probably somebody saw them come and go, and there's a log entry someplace. And then, of course, later, they find out. where they all went and all hell would have broken loose. We did find evidence of enough criminal activity, stolen property, narcotics, to violate

Manson's parole in the first place. It was astounding. I could never figure out why he was released. I thought what they were doing was illegal. All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone. All of our reports were gone. Normally, you had access to your own reports.

They were all gone. Disappeared. The whole file was gone and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spawn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone out. outside the department. Crazy. Sounds like a UFO cover of me. Guillory expands on this even more

in an interview with the writer Paul Krasner where he says, quote, it appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought. There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary.

Manson was never arrested because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers. I believe there was something bigger. Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers. I got to believe he was in

based on all the info we have maybe a winning player in someone else's game that's what he says uh next sometime in mid 2000 we see a slice of o'neill standing in the closed case archives in east la uncovering documents proving that the sheriff's office was aware of manson's parole status even before the raid uh and a search warrant describing manson with zero fear of police threatening them with hidden snipers while at the ranch and boasting about all the crazy weapons he had so he just knew that he wasn't going to get in trouble. After that, we see O'Neill standing there with the original warrant in hand, the one that was supposedly misdated. It was dated August 13th, perfectly legal for a raid on the 16th. It literally is not misdated, which is different than what it says

in the most popular and widely read book on the subject, which is weird. Later in the summer of 2000, O'Neill is interviewing Samuel Barrett, Charles Manson's parole officer from the time of the killings and he's telling him that he was never made aware of Manson's arrest from that August and that it was the DA's job to file charges. O'Neill tells him the sheriff's and the DA said it was supposed to be Barrett's job and he says, quote, they pass the buck. It's all hearsay without firing charges, which is crazy. A few months later, and we see O'Neill visiting former DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnik, completely unrelated character, specifically chosen again for his outside expert opinion to show him the documents that he found out about the raid.

And he says, quote, chicken shit. This is all a bunch of chicken shit. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant, maybe big, possibly the FBI. You know, there's an old saying, an enemy of my enemy is my friend. So if Manson figured out this black, white confrontation, he may have been giving out information of the FBI, helicopters, agents carrying automatic weapons, three different departments, four weeks of official surveillance.

They had this massive raid in everybody's release. two days later, the more that he's released, the more I feel that he was released because they got more out of him by having him released. They'd be, they'd been watching this guy for something large. The thing that I wonder about is who was watching. That's what this totally, totally unbiased guy says. In 2005 now, jumping ahead on the timeline for a bit here to resolve the specific storyline, we see Tom O'Neill calling the sheriff's office for access to the archives again, and by their furious reaction, he discovers that no one really knew he was looking and all that stuff in the first place besides Gunter and the guy Gunther called to let O'Neill

into the building. Next, weeks later, we see O'Neill waiting for over an hour to have a dinner with the, quote, contemptuous and condescending Sheriff Lee Baca himself, who denies that there's anything to see here, explains anything that doesn't make sense as sloppy, incompetent police work, and gives O'Neill the number for the sheriff's office expert on enforcement. So that's who he calls. Commander Robert Osborne. The dude tells him that, quote, it's possible that a phone call was made, yes,

but what benefit would be gained by keeping it a secret forever? The theory that somebody asked them to do something different than the norm is not implausible, though I don't know why they wouldn't tell you. I can't imagine why they would want to keep it a secret. I don't see anything to be gained if, in fact, there was some other agency involved in 1969 or 2005 to keep that quiet. So that's what the sort of like another impartial guy said. In 2014, we watched Detective Gunther die, frustrated that he had to give up on telling his story.

And also that in his interview, Lee Baca implied that he was incompetent after spending 20 years in homicide. Flash forward to 2017, we briefly catch a glimpse of a jury finding Sheriff LeBaka, who had always been known to flaunt his power, offer favors to friends and accept bribes, guilty of obstructing an efferves. FBI investigation into abuse in county jail. So he went to jail for that. Next, we're in November 2000 and Jim Meigs, who is the editor-in-chief of Premier Magazine, is fired. And it turns out it is not unrelated to the amount of money he'd been spending, funding O'Neill's ever-expanding Manson-Peace, lots more pressure to deliver from the new

unsentimental management. The 30th anniversary has come and gone. In another slice, just a few days later, O'Neill has to walk away. from Premier with the project for good. He decides he's out. He doesn't want to be in that situation. He takes the project and he goes. On his own now, a few weeks later,

we know O'Neill is reading a police report from June 4th, 1969 about Charles Manson getting pulled over high and driving without a license in San Fernando Valley. He's arrested, and so are all four of his passengers, Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, Tom J. Wallerman, and Nancy Pittman,

who are all pretty fucked up on stuff. Manson even tells them that he's on parole, but regardless, O'Neill discovers everyone but Susan Adkins is released in less than 24 hours, and the only reason they really keep her there is because she literally had a warrant out for her arrest less than a week old for Mendocino County, where she was violating her probation. So he also reads that about a week later, she's picked it from a jail in L.A. by two officers and booked into Mendocino County Jail on June 7, 1969, which is three days later. according to O'Neill

the case against it was airtight writing quote she had probation officers in both L.A. and Medicino and neither was happy with her. According to their report she'd brazenly divide all attempts at supervision since her sentence was imposed since she'd received a courtesy transfer

of her probation from Mendocino to Los Angeles County she changed her address more than six times without permission. She hadn't sought employment. She failed to check in for almost every monthly appointment and most recently she told the probation office that although she knew it was forbidden, she was moving to the Mojave Desert with her friends with no plan to return to L.A.

Describing Ackins' whereabouts as totally unknown, the probation office report advised the best thing is to revoke the defendant's probation as it appears she has no intentions of abiding by it. Okay. Nevertheless, the next time O'Neill reads about Susan, that cold millennial winter, it's in a transcript where she's standing before Judge Wayne Burke in the Mendocino County Superior Court building, watching him inexplicably terminate her probation two years early, saying, quote, the defendant has not violated probation. She has complied with the terms probation is reinstated and modified to terminate forthwith. She is released, which is extra crazy because he already knows it's a repeat of what we see happen in January of 1968, where her probation

officers get worried about her obsession with some guy named Charlie, lose track of her when she runs away with him. And then finally, despite no one wanting him to and everybody advising against it, Judge George Jones, just like Judge Wayne Burke says, fuck the rules, fuck you, fuck everyone, and fucking terminates your probation again. So this is now the second time

her probation has been inexplicably terminated by a judge against the advice of every expert. That same season, we see O'Neill interviewing Susan Atkins' probation officer from the time Margot Tompkins, who said she was shocked when that ruling came down from Judge Burke, explaining

in, quote, judges almost always went along with the probation officer's recommendation. Clearly, she had not had any employment, no fixed addresses. I have no idea why he would have done that. We also know that O'Neill interviews the 1969 head of the Mendocino County Probation Office, Thomas Martin about it, who says, quote, that seldom, if ever happened. Judge Burke was not somebody in the woods. There was something in his mind, something that he knew that he never shared with us. Then, around that same time, late 2000s vibe, sorry, not late 2000s vibe.

2000 vibe. Late 2000 vibes, not late 2000 vibes. The year, 2000. Yes. While trying to get to the bottom of why this is happening, O'Neill is reading another police report from June 1968, where the teenage son of the Mendocino County Mayor, I think I talked about this last time,

wakes up after an all-night LSD-spiked weed orgy with Susan Atkins and further Manson girls, Mary Brunner, Stephanie Rowe, Ella Jo Bailey, and Patty Crenwinkel, saying he, quote, saw flashes when he closed his eyes, and that his, quote, legs look like snakes. And all the girls are charged with felony possession and, quote, contributing to the delinquency of minors

and they're all tossed in jail. But one day later, after a phone call from someone called Roger Smith, they are eventually all able to go free. So. Roger Smith from American Dad? Yeah, Roger Smith. So just so you guys know, since we don't have a time slice of it, Roger Smith used to be Charlie's parole officer when he was in San Francisco, which we'll talk about more in a minute.

But what's weirder is that when these girls were arrested, he wasn't even working as a parole officer anymore at all. But for some reason, he was still close enough to Charlie and his family that he and his wife drove all the way out to meet them from the Bay Area, took custody of Mary Brunner's baby son with Charlie that she just had, Michael Valentine, aka Poubert Manson. They were-Ber Manson. They were appointed temp foster parents by the court. They kept them for eight weeks, and while his friend Alan Rose came down and spent time with Susan and company, hired them all lawyers, and got almost all charges dropped on lack of evidence besides selling drug to minors. But three of the girls were let off completely scot-free, and Susan and Mary just got probation, which as we know from the time slice, was terminated two years early. Back in 2000, we see O'Neill reading the Atkins and Brunner probation documents filed by an officer David, Mandel, which he bought from the Ukiah Superior Court.

And seeing note after note in there from Roger Smith, the same fucking guy, he notices that while he mentions he used to be a parole officer several times, he never once mentions in any of the notes his connection to Manson or the girls. There are even some notes from Smith's wife, who was amazingly also called Carol, which is crazy. It's the third Carol wife in his fucking story. Maybe the whole Martha situation in Batman v. Superman wasn't as weird. we thought it was.

Right. No, it's still weird. No, yeah, that movie's not very good. A few days later, we see O'Neill on the phone with Carol Smith, now divorced in the year 2000, who tells him that she had nothing to do with these notes and that she's pretty sure her ex-husband used her name without telling her, which is crazy. Next, we see a moment seven years later in Marin County in 2008, where O'Neill tells Officer Mandel about the connection between Roger Smith and the Manson family for the very first time.

Mandel, a career parole officer who remembered being touched by Smith and his wife's willingness to step in and care for the poor baby Pooh Bear Manson and letting that figure heavily in his recommendation for probation said, quote, of course it should have been disclosed. It's a huge conflict of interest. I should have put two and two together. So he didn't know either and he's fucking pissed and he wouldn't have given him probation if it had happened. if he had known. Back in 2001 now, we can see O'Neill interviewing Roger Smith himself. Smith tells him that at the time he was studying links between drugs and violent behavior and that the National Institute of Mental Health had funded an experimental program

called the San Francisco Project, where certain felon's progress was monitored as they passed their rehabilitation after recently being released from prison. In his book, O'Neill says, quote, when Manson arrived in the Bay Area in March 1967, he was attached to the program and to Roger Smith. Manson's participation in the San Francisco Project has never been reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful bond, because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average parole officer would. This project studied the relationship between federal parolees and their supervisors. Researchers wanted to know how varying degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates.

The six participating parole officers, all of whom had advanced degree. in criminology, were assigned one of three caseloads, normal, averaging about 100 clients, ideal, numbering 40 clients, or intensive, which was 20 clients. Roger Smith fell into the middle group, Ideal, and he met with his clients once a week per project guidelines. But at some point, his ideal caseload became even more intense than his colleagues' intensives, and by the end of 67, he'd winnowed his set of payrollies from 40 down to just one Manson. So that's the quote from the book.

A few weeks later, while interviewing Smith's research assistant, Gail Sadala, we see O'Neill react with surprise when she tells him that Smith told her that he'd also been Manson's probation officer earlier at Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois, where Manson had spent some time several years earlier. He tells Gail that Smith acted like he hadn't meant Manson before the San Francisco Project in 1967,

and she says, quote, he didn't remember that? I'm surprised. It was always my understanding. That's why there was this connection. So they already knew each other, maybe. Looking back at time slices from Smith's 2001 interview, we can see him tell O'Neill that he was the one who suggested Manson should move from Berkeley to Hayd-D District, where he immediately started doing daily LSD trips. And suddenly, according to Smith, he, quote, seemed to accept the world after experiencing the effects of LSD. A few days later, we watch O'Neill discover a progress report Roger Smith made to the head parole office on July 31, 1967, which says, quote, Mr. Manson has made excellent progress. He appears to be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.

Once he finishes reading the report, O'Neill cross-checks it with his Manson timeline to find out that on the very day that he was writing that report, Manson was actually sitting in jail for 30 days after a felony interfering with a police officer, charge, which he got from trying to step in while underage Manson girl Ruth Ann Wish Morehouse was being arrested. Apparently, even though he'd just been in prison four months earlier, he'll walk out of jail this time in just a couple days, which is crazy. When O'Neill asked Smith about it, he said he didn't know about that conviction. I had no excuse for why in the same letter he asked for permission to let Manson travel to Mexico to play music in a hotel band without even mentioning Manson's history, which we touched on last time,

of being arrested and deported to Mexico from Laredo, Texas, as recently as 1960, during his pimping days when he was pimping children and splitting the proceeds with their parents. Yarks. Yeah, well, look at a little of that guy.

Yeah, he also had no excuse for why after his request was rejected that Smith tried again two weeks later, this time, promising the parole board that he was being, that Manson was being offered a job there in insecticides and soul oil additives by a Mr. Dean

Morehouse, who is actually the father of Wish, who is the girl that Manson got arrested over, and who himself was an ex-minister and recent Manson family recruits. The idea that Manson would get arrested for trying to stop the police from dealing with Ruth Ann

Morehouse, and that Roger Smith didn't know about it, and then turned around and hit the board with a plan using the same girl's father is fishy. A little bit. In fact,

Smith just says he did it to show Manson it wouldn't work and that, quote, in hindsight, it was not a good decision. But O'Neill doesn't buy this and he asks, quote, twice and at the expense of your own credibility and then Smith like crashes out and says, quote, if you want to be conspiratorial, yes.

I was doing research on Mexican drug trafficking at the same time I was trying to send him there. So yes, You can make it look like that, but that wasn't, that wasn't what it was. I wasn't a career P.O. I only did it for a couple years because I needed the money while I did my dissertation. My wife was a teacher, but we had no money. Was I a career committed parole officer?

No. So that's what we said. Strangely, though, if we recheck the slice where O'Neill is reading the probation reports for Susan and Mary, it says they claim to have spent all winter with Manson in Mexico and nobody can find any other record of their whereabouts to dispute it. and it seems like Manson really did end up in Mexico that summer somehow, maybe, possibly. This guy, they can't keep the handle on him. Dude is like the opposite of Solid Snake.

I don't get it. Yeah, he really is, and he gets away. A few weeks later, in 2000 or 2001, we see O'Neill writing an angry letter to the parole commission spokesperson, Pamela A. Posh, asking her how Samuel Barrett could have ever taken the stand at the Manson trial and described his parole file, which in 2001,

only contained 69 redacted pages of a promised 138 pages, how he could have described it in 1969 as, quote, about four inches thick. We also have another slice where Posh writes back saying that though it's extremely unusual, especially for, quote, notorious felons, they quote, apparently did not retain all of the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson and that his giant San Francisco Project deep-tive activity monitoring file has also mysteriously gone missing.

So I don't know why. It's weird. It's definitely weird, but it's not there. So sorry. To round out this section, we end with the vision of O'Neill, standing and reading over an unpublished paper by Roger Smith called the Marketplace of Speed, violence and compulsive methamphetamine abuse,

which details Smith's philosophy about how sometimes a social scientist studying people doing illegal things as to convince them that, quote, they can trust him with information, which in other hands would place them in jeopardy, and perhaps most important, he must resolve the moral dilemma of being part of something

which he may find morally objectionable at best. Probably by association he could himself be arrested. In a very real sense, he becomes a co-conspirator, with information and insight which, under normal conditions, the average citizen would be obliged to share with law enforcement. He must try to understand what individuals within the group feel. how they view the straight world and how they avoid arrest or detection.

So he literally is saying that to do the job properly of researching drug addicts, you need to be willing to help them break the law. This paper was, I mean, I don't know. I feel that's a debatable perspective to have. I agree. This paper was a dissertation which Smith submitted to Berkeley in August of 1969, just before the murders, but was the result of research, which has never been published, by the way, which was conducted with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, which is the same

organization that funded the San Francisco Project under a different umbrella, which Smith himself titled the Enphetamine Research Project, or ARP. So now we've got the San Francisco Project and the ARP, both under the National Institute of Mental Health. He formed the ARP to study hippies who did speed out of his HQ at the recently launched Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Yeah, yeah, I'm studying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, in order to get an understanding how it works, I figure I have to do it with them, not to get addicted, but just to see that perspective on the world. I'm also running another study about porn. Yeah. And in order, like, so I got to, like, research that, though. It's about getting my dick sucked and eating chili dogs. It's crazy.

Yeah, there's also that whole orgy thing, people was having? I want that. We're going to run studies on that too. And chili dogs. We're going to run study on, like, what makes chili dogs so good? We're going to run studies on that.

And if we can combine them, we can weaponize it against them. Do chili dogs make orgies better or worse? It's like really like that almost exactly, except he's like, what happens when we give speed to people? And like, will they get violent or whatever?

How does it, how does speed affect the violence in someone's life? To blend in with the hippies, Smith said, quote, I took off my gray flannel suit and my wingtip shoes and grew a mustache. Soon the kids on H. Street were calling me the friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.

Strangely, the last slice from this section comes from August 18th, 1977 of all times. And of all places we seem to be in the breakfast nook of one John Lennon, X. Beetle in New York City, where sitting on the bar is a copy of the Washington Post

open to... Randmore sent some of the head of Lenin. Yes, he did. Do you think someone could summon the head

of Manson? What? I definitely think I definitely think you could but I wouldn't want to. I don't want to be like, no, I wouldn't want to

either, but I don't want to be confronted that with that much Mansonness at once. I don't think I handle that. You're a mansignness. I don't need that. It probably probably has

old man smell too. It's probably bad. Old Mansi smell. And he just yells at you in like nonsense the whole time. Yeah. So sitting on the bar of John Lennon's

breakfast, Nick is a copy of The Washington Post from that day, open to an article revealing that the directors of the National Institute of Mental Health had allowed the CIA to use it as a funding front to various ends, including giving LSD to federal prisoners in Kentucky to the tune of $300,000 through the Office of Naval Research, saying, quote, the report said that Dr. Harris Isbell, the then director of the center, was approached by Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA man in charge of M.K. Ultra, who told him that his research with LSD was important to national interests.

The report goes on to say that without specifying a precise interest on the part of the CIA, Mr. Gottlieb stated that the CIA would provide money to continue these studies. Anyway, we'll be talking more about that later. For now, it's trial time. It's June 15th, 1970, the first day of the trial, and Canaryk is fighting the court to keep the jury from being sequestered. We cannot see into his mind, but in his book, Bouliosi speculates that

until this point Canaric had been completely against any type of publicity and so he thought that this was maybe likely a taste of how Caneric would fully take on requests and fight even directly against his own recommendations if he had to if it came from his client

they end up sequestering the jury at the Ambassador Hotel anyway it's a very famous hotel in L.A. It's the one where Bobby Kennedy was killed it's not there anymore but it's a nice hotel they were in a nice place and they better have been because they were there for a while. The questioning was designed to eliminate anyone who couldn't vote for the death penalty

and people who'd already read Susan Atkins' leaked confession. On July 14th, my birthday, we see both the prosecution and defense accepting the jury selections. Peace on my birthday. On July 17th, we see Leslie Van Houghton, formally requesting Ira Reiner be replaced as her attorney by Ronald Hughes, the hippie lawyer. once again, despite the obvious conflict of interest, likely in accordance with Manson's commands behind the scenes. So this is literally a guy who was Manson's lawyer already in the same case now representing somebody else, which is like crazy. He's got a job. On July 24th, everyone is

waiting for opening statements to start, but when Manson enters the courtroom, everyone is surprised to see he's carved a bloody X into his forehead overnight with something pretty sharp. Outside on the street, family members passed out a tight... Only his first evolution. Right. Outside on the street, family members passed out a typewritten statement from Charlie about it, which said, quote, I have exed myself from your world. You have created the monster. I am not of you from you, nor do I condone your unjust attitude towards things, animals, and people that you do not try to understand. I stand opposed to what you do and have done in the past. You make fun of God and have murdered the world in the name of Jesus Christ. My faith in me is stronger than all of your armies. Governments. gas chambers, or anything you may want to do to me. I know what I have done. Your courtroom is a man's game.

Love is my judge. What a fucking killer final line, though, though. That last line. That's why they like them. That's where they like them. It's the same reason people, like, to this day are like, you got to admit, Trump's got jokes. You're like, what the fuck, dude?

Urban Canarek interrupts Bugliosi's opening statement with nine separate objections, all of which are overruled and when Bouliosi is done Caneric requested the whole thing either be stricken from the record for the trial or for the trial to be declared a mistrial he is denied on both requests witness testimony begins with members

of the victim's families and their friends and continues with William Garrison who was the guy who had been in the backhouse the whole time that the murders at Celo Drive took place Boliosi asked him how loud the stereo was he says medium loud after court was over that day Manson told the sheriff deputy

escorting back to lockup that he'd probably pay a hundred grand to be set free and then he really just wanted to go back and live in the desert and then he heard officers who release inmates they're not supposed to only get a six-month sentence the next Monday, July 27th we see that over

the weekend Leslie, Susan, and Patty have also put exes on their foreheads but they did theirs with a burning hot needle so it's blistered by Wednesday. They see that That's worse in a way. That's like I'd be more painful that. I feel like it definitely is like more dangerous to do it that way.

I don't know. I don't know which one's worse. But by Wednesday, we see almost everyone in the family has now done the exact same. The same day. It's like wearing the fucking, I'm sorry. I just think of the fucking bandaged ear.

Yeah. Fucking in the church for Trump. Yeah. Everybody's fucking only that stupid band. Yeah. It's literally, it's literally just idiots, guys. Can I just tell you this time?

Not anybody here. Somebody I know. Literally use the argument. that they don't see people driving around with, like, Biden or Harris. It's merch, so it makes no sense that anybody, like, wanted to vote for them because they weren't wearing, like, branding. There's no fandom. There's no fandom out there.

I'm like, there's no hypebeats out there. What the fuck? There's no hypebeats out there. Yeah, nobody wearing a fucking earpiece, ear bandage. That same day, Linda Kasabian Star Witness begins her testimony. And Caneric does his first objection as soon as the clerk asked her to raise her right hand on the grounds that she's insane. And he causes a scene in front of the jury in which they say all kinds of irresponsible things like she did LSD 300 times and went crazy and claim

they'll prove it all later. And Biliosi's like, how is this happening in front of the jury? Like, what in the fuck are we talking about here? After she's sworn in and asked if she's aware she's charged with seven counts of murder and one kind of conspiracy to murder, Caneric objects and moves for a mistrial. It takes 10 minutes for Bliosi to ask another question. By the 29th of July, we see Canarek object over 200 times to the, to Lindik Sabian's testimony. He's found in contempt of court and sentenced to a night in county jail. I got me in after that many times. That's it.

Later that day, Ronald Hughes is also found in contempt for saying, quote, that's a lot of shit, Your Honor, to something Bliosi said and also has to spend the night in jail. But that's only because even though unlike Caneric, he had the option to pay $75, he instead had to take the jail time after telling the judge quote I am a pauper your honor and the judge did not care and send him to jail anyway during that's nuts though that's crazy though because that guy went on for so long before he went to jail

and that one other dude just like so annoyed and he just like no you that describes our court system so fucking perfectly it's because the first one happened and then you can't be like lenient on the next guy it sucks during Linda's testimony as she describes the instructions that Charlie gave to everyone on the night of the tape murders we can see Charlie staring straight at her dragging his finger across his neck in a slitting motion

can't believe that happened in court I can't believe that happened in court I'm so cartoonish and then it just kept going anyway like I don't know that's just Charlie I guess uh-huh next that's how it is that's how it is with all bad people next at a press fucking way you're gonna fucking die you might as well just stood up and it was like you're gonna die bitch and he basically well next at a press conference

in Denver on August 3rd 1970 we see then-president Richard Nixon commenting on how the press makes heroes out of criminals. And he fails that... Yeah, yeah, dude. And he fails to use the word alleged when he says... Maybe we're not living through unprecedented times. Maybe we're not living through something that hasn't been done many a time over.

We have definitely been presented a lot of times. Yeah. So Nixon fails to use the word alleged when he says, quote, I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case, front page every day in the newspapers. It usually got a couple minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who was guilty directly or indirectly of eight murders. Yet here is a man who, as far as the coverage is concerned,

appear to be a glamorous figure. By watchman. In bookstores now. The next day in court, just after the noon recess, we see Charlie standing up in front of the jury holding up a front page of that day's L.A. Times, which has the headline, Manson Guilty Nixon declares. The bailiff immediately grabs it from him. These are sequestered jurors, by the way.

The bailiff immediately grabs it from him. And after a long voir dire, all the jurors swear under oath that they weren't going to be influenced by what they saw. And the trial continues. On August 7th, we watched juror Walter Vitzelio being excused from the case due to him and his wife's poor health. And in another slides from the same day, Vincent Biliosi receives a word that his witness,

Ranch Han, Randy Starr, who was going to link the rope and gun directly to Manson and his testimony, had passed away of a, quote, undetermined illness at the Veterans Administration Hospital. Bulliosi eventually orders an autopsy, but it's revealed he just died

of an ear infection. It's a total coincidence. Or is it? I mean, like, ear infection is killed back of the day, but back then, no? It's like 1971. Yeah, I feel like they would have,

how did I figure it out? I mean, you know, when you're old, you never know. on August 18th and he was a stuntman so he might have been banged up and pretty that's fair yeah on August 18th we see bulliosi finally getting through to potential witness

Juan Flynn who the family were really scared of since he had Charlie not just grabbing him by the hair at knife point and telling him who you think's responsible for the killings but also had him boasting of killing 35 people and saying quote well I've come down to it

the only way to get Hilt or Skelter going is for me to go down there and show the black man how to do by killing a whole bunch of those fucking pigs. So that's Juan Flynn. That's why they're scared of him. He wants to remain in hiding due to how many threats he's received, but he says when the time comes, he'll come and he'll testify. Also, he never mentions it in court,

but he's also Shorty Shea's best friend, and he had a vendetta against these fuckers. He wanted to take him down because they killed his best friend. On August 19th, finally, after 17 days, Linda Kasabian steps down from the sand, having gained a lot of sympathy from the jury during a cross-examination, an ire from Charlie and the family for her level-headed, incredible testimony in the face of attacks against her character, her safety, and the safety of her loved ones.

As the trial continues and many more witnesses are called, The Manson Girls, who are not on trial, hold a permanent vigil on the street outside. On September 10th, 1970, we see LAPD calling Bulliosia at home to tell him that Barbara Hoyt, one of the Manson Girls that he was going to put on the stand was at a hospital in Honolulu. When he talks to her, she tells him that Wish Morehouse took her on a free trip to Hawaii instead of testifying at trial. And they had several deep conversations together out there over the course of four days. However, after getting a phone call in the morning of the ninth,

Wish suddenly has to leave and books a single ticket just for herself back that same day. and when Barbara goes with her to drop her off at the airport which is like you look like shit you need to eat some food and she buys her a burger and she eats and Barbara eats the burger and when she's done

wishes like how funny would it be if that burger had 10 tabs of acid in it and then she gets on the plane and leaves and Barbara just like slowly goes insane and is found like collapsed on the street by like a passerby and ironically it was this event that weeks later

convinced a fully recovered Barbara to actually come back and fucking testify. How funny would that would be. Meanwhile, the world begins to fucking melt. Poisoned her with a fucking LSD burger. God, Dan. Throughout September, we see Bulyosi call witness after witness to back up and expand Linda's version of the murders

and build up his case for Helter Skelter. But every step of the way, Caneric objects to every single thing he possibly can until even Bulyosi gets held in contempt of court for yelling at him and his fine $50. He even has to have his wife come down to the courthouse to get the money. So it's extra embarrassing for him.

On the 18th of September, we see Biliosi followed out of court by Manson Girl Sandra Good and two men that he does not recognize. He says to her that he's disappointed in her for not saying anything, even though she knew they were going to attack her friend Barbara and give her the LSD Burger. And she looks in him silently. Can you make me an LSD burger? Because I feel like Alex LSD Burger would be so delicious. Yeah, you know what? Mine only has one type of acid in it too, which is pretty good. That's fine.

That's way safer. So she threatens, she turns to look at him and threatens him silently by pointing at her knife and, like, picking up her knife and, like, playing with her knife. And he's like, whatever. So, like, he keeps walking. They keep following him until they've almost caught up with him. And he's, like, now getting, like, quite wigged out. Pretty scared at this point. He turns to her, threatens to knock the two dudes out and says, quote, listen, you goddamn bitch and listen good.

I don't know for sure whether you were or weren't involved with the actual attempt to murder bar. but if you were, I'm going to do everything in my power to see that you end up in jail. Listen, yeah, listen good. I love that. He said, listen, you goddamn bitch. Yeah, sorry, sorry. So that was on Friday after court,

and on Monday the 21st of September, we see Irvin Canerrick filing a motion that Biliosi was interfering with the defense witness and should be held in contempt and added that according to Section 415 to the penal code. He should also technically be arrested for making obscene remarks

in the presence of a female. In another slice, we see Biliosi walking in the middle of the night, furious at yet another I'm not sorry not walking we see Boliosi waking up in the middle of the night furious at yet another hang up call that he gets he gets them all the time

during the trial yeah that's got to be annoying as fuck in another we see Manson telling a bailiff quote you can't silence your phone back then right exactly like it's just a big ringer I mean you could pull out the you can pull it from out the wall right but when you're the fucking lead prosecutor

on the Charles Manson case you cannot do that in another slice we see Biliosi waking up up in the middle of the night, he's, yeah, he's, he's, uh, getting hang up calls. Then we see Manson telling a bailiff, quote, I'm going to have Blyosie and the judge killed. The next day, we see Blyosie being assigned to bodyguard for the duration of the trial. And in another slice, we see walkie talkies being installed in Blyosie's house and the police station so that he can still call the police in case somebody cuts his phone lines, which is

fucking not. It's fucking crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Because it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, or what F70, whatever. Yeah, but it's like it's walkie-talkies. Yeah. But he got a bodyguard. That's kind of fun.

For the whole trial. That's kind of fun. That's kind of fun. Kind of stressful. Listen, listen. There had to have been a couple days that man didn't have anything to do. And like he had some fun with his bodyguard out and probably walking around like feeling like a badass or something. Sure.

I look. I'm sure it's not totally shitty to have a bodyguard. What's that movie with Owen Wilson that came out where the kids have a bodyguard? A couple years ago, like 10, 15 years ago. It doesn't matter. Next time. A next slice on October 15th, after the testimony of Barbara Hoyt and Juan Flynn, Manson, who had been acting kind of tense all day because he was starting to realize how

Blyosie was going to make his case. He gets into a little back and forth with the judge after he makes the unsurious suggestion to cross-examine a witness himself. He threatens the judge when he says, and the judge is like, I'll have you removed, and he's like, I have my own way of removing you. And all of a sudden, Susan, Patty, and Leslie stand down. up and start chanting in Latin, and according to Bulliosi, quote, it happened in less time than it takes to describe it. With a pencil clutched in his right hand, Manson suddenly leaped over the

council table in the direction of Judge Older. He landed a few feet from the bench, falling on one knee. As he was struggling to his feet, bailiff Bill Murray leapt two landing on Manson's back. Two other deputies quickly joined in, and after a brief struggle, Manson's arms were pinned. As he was being propelled to the lockup, Manson screamed at Older. In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off. For the rest of the trial, Judge Older carries a 38 revolver in his robes just in case. Out in the street, Manson's girls warn of Judgment Day. You think he's guilty?

Dude, it's really up to you if you think he's guilty because he really wasn't there. It's really fucking weird. Over the course of October, we see lots more witnesses take the same. stand, including Greg Jacobson, Rudy Altebelli, Shirokatomi, who talked a lot about Sharon and Roman, the Golden Penetrators, Vojek and Abigail's drug and party scene, but Caneric's interruptions were only getting worse. And while Paul Watkins was testifying, again, not Tex Watson, George Older called Caneric to the bench and said, quote, you are trying to disrupt the testimony with frivolous, lengthy, involved, silly objections. You have done it time and again

during this trial. I have studied you very carefully, Mr. Canarek. I know exactly what you're doing. I have had to find you in contempt twice before for doing the same thing, and I won't hesitate to do it again. He did again? He didn't. I mean, he definitely did, but he didn't do it right then. However,

on Monday, the following Monday, November 16th, actually a couple weeks later on November 16th, we see 320 pieces of evidence being introduced, and we see canary object to every single one of them.

But nevertheless, at the end of the day, Bouliosi is finally able to rest his case at 4.27 p.m. after calling like 80 witnesses, all of whom were subjected to lengthy cross-examinations by multiple defense attorneys and court recesses for two days. Three days later,

on November 19th, we watched the defense argue their motions to dismiss, which are standard and are of course denied, but then when Judge Older asks Fitzgerald if he's ready to proceed with the defense and allows him to call his first witness, he surprises everyone in the world, probably when he says, quote, thank you, your honor, the defendant's rest. So this is like crazy. The defense just rests. Immediately, Susan, Patty,

and Leslie jump up in demand to testify, which is not expected. But after an hour of yelling, Fitzgerald admits off the record that there was a rift between the clients and the attorneys because suddenly the girls got together and wanted to say that they did the whole thing themselves and that Charlie wasn't even involved. So they decided to rest their case to minimize any damage that can be done to their clients, with Ronald Hughes saying, quote, I refuse to take part in any proceeding where I am forced to push a client out the window. Judge Older decides to allow them to testify, even though the defense has arrest. The judge asked Charlie if he also wants to testify, and Charlie says no. And then Caneric motions to sever Manson and try him separately. It's denied.

But then once Susan takes the stand, her attorney, Day Shin refuses to ask the questions that he's prepared for him on account of them being incriminating, and they recess. The next day, we see that Manson also decides that he wants to testify and that he wants to go first. So just to be safe, they decide to do a trial run without the jury present. Manson gives a rambling hour-long speech with Blyosie calls quite hypnotic. I'm not going to read the whole thing, of course, but just to give you a taste of the vibe, but he was saying stuff like, quote, there's been a lot of changes and a lot of things said about me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot of

could be cleared up and clarified. I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good. So I've stayed in jail and have stayed stupid. Yeah. Purposefully stupid sounding. He like gumps it up. He was fine. And he gums it up for one sense. So I've stayed in jail

and I've stayed stupid and I've stayed a child while I've watched your world grow up. And then I look at the things that you do and I don't understand. You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are. And you say how bad and even killers your children are. You made your children what they are. These children that come at you with knives,

they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call the family were just people that you did not want. People that were alongside the road that their parents had kicked out that did not want to go to juvenile hall. So I did the best I could. And I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love, there is no wrong. I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters good if they do it with a good thought. I was working at cleaning up my house. Something that Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road picking up his children, but he wasn't. He was in the White House, sending them off to war. I don't understand you,

but I don't try. I don't try to judge nobody, man. I know that the only person I can judge is me, but I know this, that in your hearts and your own souls who are as much responsible for the Vietnam War as I am for killing these people. I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves and judging the lie that you live in.

So that's what Charles Manson said. Is that becoming a Manson girl? He really is like a supreme manipulator. Absolutely. Where even in the face of like, dude, we are all on to what you're doing. He still tries to lay it on

thick. And now imagine though, like you're getting that hour long speech while you're dosed to fuck on LSD and he's not nearly as much and you're already like he was saying because they were vulnerable people that he kind of picked up like stragglers that needed like somewhere to go

and now you're getting that every day like where he's just dosing with LSD and then he's preaching at you like that you're gonna see like God and him after a long enough time of him manipulate so like yeah he wasn't there but he's fucking 100% responsible for their fucking deaths for manipulating

these victims and they're responsible too but for different reasons. Like his like, the fact that he was like, I didn't get to grow it up. I'm stupid. Like, but then he immediately goes back to being poetic. It's like instantly like indicative of who he was. Right.

Exactly. Once he's done, the judge asks him if he's ready for the jury. And he says, I've already relieved all the pressure I had. And then he walks over to the girls and says, quote, you don't have to testify now. And he sits back down. Then the defense introduces their exhibits. And the court takes attention.

day recess for both sides to prep their closing statements. On Monday, November 30th, when court resumes, Ronald Hughes is mysteriously absent, having gone missing while camping near CESB-Hspe Hotsprings. He died of a heart attack from one too many hot dogs, of court. Well, he disappears while camping near CESPi Hot Springs where he was seen and spoken to by several groups of teens who were all in the area and who said he seemed fine and looked good and was in no danger. his abandoned VW was found

and had some court documents inside but others that he was meant to have including Leslie Van Houghton's secret psyche Val were missing when the story makes the news later that week and reporters visit the place where he lived they find a mattress inside of a friend's garage behind their house

in a filthy space filled with trash and one neatly hung bar certificate one and this is the reporters find this they just go to see where he lives and that's what they find he was like this is before like the times like the cops bar that shit off the reporters are just like in there on december third we see hughes replaced by attorney maxwell keith who had a lot of homework to catch up onto

the tune of 18 000 pages um and on december yeah on december eight we watch as judge older informs the jury they're going to be sequestered over the holidays and on december 12th we see the sheriff's office suspending their search for ronald hughes who at this point is assumed to be dead, which is crazy. That's nuts. Yeah. Once court reconvenes on December 21st, 1970, we see Biliosi start to make the prosecution's opening

argument, which sets up the health or skeletal motive, demonstrates his control over his followers, and shows the involvement and culpability of the other girls. When he finishes this three-day presentation after Christmas recess on December 28th, thanks to Canaryx's constant interruptions, it lasts that

long. Charlie has tried... You think he was monotone the whole time he did it i i've never heard him talk i've never heard caneric talk i want i wish i did because it's he sounds like bueller guy he sounds like an interesting cat he sounds like an interesting cat at one point he like had a nervous breakdown and got hit by a car because his wife left him and he like had to get back from that and his life hit rock bottom crazy guy crazy guy caneric now i feel bad uh so during that three day presentation that lasts a week because of caneric and christmas

Charlie has tried to break out of jail with some kind of string contraption. Juror morale has slipped. Somebody was hanging up some papers in the lobby of the hotel that said bah humbug on them and stuff. And Sadie, as she's walking by during court one day, is able to, I'm sorry, Susan was able to grab some of Bliosi's notes and rip them in half, for which he calls her a, quote, little bitch under his breath, which he seems to have a bad habit of doing. it makes the front page of the Long Beach Independent with the headline, Manson Prosecutor takes swing at Susan. And from then on,

the defendants are not allowed back in court and stay in the lockup until the end of the trial, which they probably should have done quite some time ago. Before Manson took a swipe at the judge. Yeah, with a fuck, try to stab with a pencil. In Fitzgerald's closing statements, he spends more time defending Charlie than his own client and never once asked the jury for a not guilty verdict for her.

In Shin's closing, he says, about one sentence per witness in an attempt to rebut them. Maxwell Keith argues that Leslie Van Houghton couldn't be to blame if she really was as brainwashed as Boliosi said. And Kinerick's argument takes more than twice as long as Bliosi's at seven

full days of testimony and goes all over the place. Yikes. Yeah, that's a long time. On the fifth day, the jury sends a note to the bailiff requesting no dose for them and sleeping pills for him. On the sixth day, Judge Older says, quote,

are abusing your right to argue just as you have abused practically every other right you have in this case there is a point mr canerrick at which argument is no longer argument but a filibuster yours is reaching that point and finally on the seven days he goes one full day after that and ends his and ends his thing by saying charles manson is not guilty of any crime which is hilarious uh at one of the noon recesses during caneric's closing manson asked to see Biliosi and he says he wants to correct some excuse me

says he wants to correct some misconceptions about himself saying quote hippies don't like the establishment so they back off and form their own establishment they're no better than the others I'm a very selfish guy I don't give a fuck for these girls I'm only out for myself other guys bullshit them and say I love you and only you and all that baloney I'm honest with them

I tell them I'm the most selfish guy in the world and I am says that to Biliosi just chilling, just to rap. Cool. On January 13th, 1971, Vincent Blyosi gives his final summation during which Caneric receives

yet another contempt citation as fined $100 in 1971. Talks mostly about Linda's testimony and how strongly all the other witnesses' testimony supported it and how the forensic evidence tied it to reality and how fully Charles Manson had dominated his followers and how his will was their pleasure

and now he had created the helter-skelter delusion in his mind. Two days later, on January 15th at 3.20 p.m., we see the jury walking out of the courtroom to begin their deliberation. On Monday, the following week, we see the jury requesting a record player and a copy of the White album by the Beatles. On Tuesday, they asked for the letter Susan wrote to Ronnie Howard, and there are no further request for the duration of the deliberation.

A week later, on the 20th, 25th of January, we see Boliosi in bed with the flu. It's a different time. Keep that in mind. He gets a call saying that the jury have their verdict and he needs to go to court immediately, and he does. That same day, a secret court order is issued to fortify the Hall of Justice due to rumors that the family will enact something that they are calling judgment day against the courts if Charlie gets a guilty verdict. There are 27 pages of instructions in the secret court order because apparently somebody with the family worked at the Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

Arms Depot, and when they quit, they noticed that there was a case of hand grenades missing. Just a case of hand grenades. Remember when that happened, like, a couple years ago? Pretty scary. Yeah. I was about to say that sounds familiar, but not in this case. Yeah. I don't remember.

Oh, wait. No, I do remember. Yeah. Once everyone was in chambers before the judge, the courtroom was sealed, and the reading of the verdict takes 38 minutes. Blyosie explains that, quote, the people had obtained the verdicts that they had requested against Charles Manson, Patricia Crenwinkel, and Susan Atkins. Each had been found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit murder and seven counts of murder in the first degree.

The people had also obtained the verdicts requested against Leslie Van Houghton. She had been found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of murder in the first degree. Then it's time for the penalty trial, which is a total. really different trial than the guilty or not guilty trial. But first, we're going to take a brief deviation. Last week, I mentioned that most of the slices that we were able to get came from a period starting in 1967, which usually means that the machine thinks that's a very important time. In this time, Charles Manson is living in the Hate-Ashbury District of San Francisco. So before we finish the trial, I just want to slot in this last bit of lore so you can see the

whole confusing picture. We're still going to check in with Tom O'Neill's journey. But before we do that, let's just go back again to June of 1967, where we can see Dr. David Smith, another Smith, not Roger Smith, but David Smith, proudly opening the Hate-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic at 558 Clayton Street. Here's a quote from Tom Neal about it who says, quote, when it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic or the HAFMC was an immediate sensation, staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department. it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering non-judgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment over those who just needed a kind ear. Lines of the H-A-F-M-C sometimes stretch around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could do to advertise its psychedelic affinities.

Exam rooms were painted in Aqua and Dayglow Orange. One of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love. In 1965, we see David Smith walking home from the Alcohol and Drug Screening Unit, this is two years earlier, at the San Francisco General Hospital, where he works while studying as a 26-year-old post-doctoral student at UC San Francisco. He sees kids walking on the street, on LSD and marvels at the fact

that he's injecting test rats with the same stuff in his lab. In 1966, one year before he opens the clinic, we see Roger Smith, the other Roger, not David Smith, but the actual, the guy, the parole officer, Roger Smith, publishes

status politics and the image of the addict, which is about how the police in San Francisco were able to successfully demonize and stigmatize the largely peaceful opium addicts of the Chinese ghettos of the 1920s and how it enabled them to unfairly brutalize in prison and deport Chinese people in America. And it never happened again after it happened in the 1920s. When America learns its lesson, we learn our lesson. Yeah. We never repeat anything. Never. Hey, uh, just,

done, baby. Just, just so you can hear me say it. Fuck ice, you guys. Oh, yeah, fuck ice. Jesse loves ice. In my soda. In my white wine, uh, in some random day. In my San, in some random day in the summer of 1967 we see Charlie and his girls arrive at the free clinic and Charlie jokingly orders treatments like he's at the drive-through saying things like two gonorrhea's, one abortion, one stitches to go.

It's clearly not his first time here. And unlike his later life at Spawn Ranch, nobody's too scared of him or thinks he's crazy and strangely he seems legitimately kind of welcome. However, as we can see later that same day at his apartment on Cole Street, as he sweetly places a tab of acid into each of his family members wading mouths, according to Smith, who wrote a bunch about

Manson in his 1971 memoir, Love Needs Care, and that's David Smith. He was slowly brainwashing his followers with LSD in armchair psychology and manipulation, followed by intense sessions of, quote, unconventional sex practices. Smith said Charlie's practice of treating the girls like objects took away their independence and agency and turned them into, quote, self-acknowledged computers, empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in. In another scene from that summer, we see someone offered Charlie some speed in Golden Gate Park, which he refuses because he's afraid of needles. This becomes the norm for the family until much later at Spawn or at Barker Ranch when people

finally start doing hell of speed, even though they don't really talk about it in the trial and Blyosie tries to avoid talking about it as well. Definitely the Manson people do speed, maybe not Manson. The next slice is strange, which sometimes happens when there's no consensus of facts over something which happened in the past, and it splits into two of the same clip, but with a few differences. So in the first clip, we see Manson piling into the clinic, much like we did in the last slice, visiting his ex-parole officer Roger Smith, who was a different guy than David, who also had an office at the clinic. So they both are working out of the clinic. David and Roger Smith now

are both working out of the clinic. The girls would throw themselves at everyone in the clinic and flatter Roger by offering him their services, even if he always refused. However, in the other slice, though all the same stuff happens, the occasion that they are all there is because Roger Smith is still Manson's parole officer, and that he's still regularly checking in with him at this time. Strangely, though, when I looked up more time slices from other time periods to try and find the truth, I found clips of Smith both reluctantly admitting to being his parole officer at this time and vehemently denying it as well at other times.

So he said it both ways. and since it doesn't look so good and light of other facts I'm about to get into but I don't know what do you guys think is it weird that he was possibly taking parole check in meetings with Charles Manson on the premises of a research project that's funded by the CIA oh yeah that's a fucking movie that's not normal

that's not like go back I'm just I'm just sensationalizing this no that's weird if you're if you're like in this like you just found Shulminati or been around for kind of recently go back and listen to our MK Ultra episode because this kind of ties directly fucking into it like this happens after MK Ultra's done but then they've just got all this LSD

that they got nothing to do with and Dulles doesn't really kind of stop doing shit. So yeah, absolutely. I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't deny it. Because they were trying to, in the 60s, they were trying to crack mind control. Big time.

Like through LSD, they were trying to figure out mind control. Spoilers. It's very obvious that Manson was in some way mind controlling the family. So like some way, yeah. You could, if I was a researcher, of a diabolical nature you could justify being like

maybe there's something to it through him yeah so before David Smith started the clinic you work for a group called the Diggers which are kind of like anarchists but they're like really nice anarchists and they operated a free infirmary out of their headquarters which they called

the happening house because it was a cool time and we have a slice from 1972 of the Diggers founder Emmett Grogren Grogan Grogan Grogren, I'm not sure which, writing a few sentences about Smith

in his memoir, Ringo Levio, link in the description, where he says that he was, quote, more concerned with the pharmacology of the situation than with treating the ailing people who came to him for help. Just because no one was made to pay a fee when they went there,

didn't make it a free clinic, he wrote. On the contrary, the patients were treated as research subjects, and the facility was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency. so that's so that's how that's that's the diggers impression of smith uh in his 2001 interview with david smith we can see as tom o'neill gets him to admit that even though he did his two-year

research project on amphetamines and how they affected rats he never completed a dissertation on it so he never got his phd however there is a slice from 1969 where smith publishes an article based on that research in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which is the in-house publication of the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, but is still nevertheless a published paper. So in one test, you know, we can see how he does it. At one test, we see 16 rats are split into two groups of eight closely confined rats who are then injected with anphetamines, who over the course of the day become increasingly violent until they all kill each other, basically. Some of them literally kill each other, some of them die of their own wounds, whatever, whatever, whatever. In another similar test, we watch him discover that pre-gaming the rats with different chemicals before giving them the amphetamines will sometimes cause the rats to sort themselves automatically

into violent and nonviolent groups and kind of stay together, or sometimes it would completely pacify them altogether or whatever. But those are the kind of experiments that he was doing. At this point, O'Neill starts to notice unignorable similarities between the way these rats live and the way the family was living at the time, cramped as they were in that little apartment on Cole Street. But he doesn't think it's anything besides an interesting observation. Until in another slice, we see him reading from Smith's book, Love Needs Care, where he finds

Smith talking about the rats as, quote, proxies for human beings. When he asked Smith about it in his interview, Smith says, when the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody. Suddenly, what I'd learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was applicable to people. But so, wait, isn't it Manson afraid of needles? Didn't the family famously avoid speed while they were in the hate? Yes, they did. But in his interview with O'Neill, we hear Smith say, quote,

I happened to study amphetamines before they hit the hate. The hate didn't give me the idea. It's kind of like a historical accident. I was studying LSD before LSD hit the hate too. So he's also been studying LSD. Imagine being a rat getting LSD. I feel like I'm a rat all the time. This sets O'Neill off on a research spree.

Did I tell you I just got my real ID? That felt very rat-like. This sets O'Neill off on a research spree, and in his book, he writes, quote, In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion of Smith's rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines. suggestibility was among the most prize effects of LSD from a clinical perspective, and yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never mentioned acid.

I asked Smith of LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it, and then a moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself. Yeah, I stuck LSD in him, he said. Yeah, you know why, you got me. I don't read too good. And next, and next we see O'Neill, making another important discovery. Just like the San Francisco project, which put Manson together with Roger Smith and

Smith's own amphetamine research project, the ARP, David Smith, LSD Rat Research, also happened to be funded by the CIA's favorite friend, the National Institute of Mental Health. And in fact, though he doesn't mention it, it's like David Smith's research is the spiritual sequel to some other National Institute of Mental Health Research from 1946, which was carried out by psychologist John B. Calhoun. He literally never mentions him, but it's just uncanny. O'Neill says, quote, Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups, even without drugs, become uncharacteristically aggressive.

They erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the behavioral sink. Calhoun's term for his aggregated rat cultures, subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering in feeble followers. and organizing female rats into a harem of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was the probers, hypersexualized male rats that stalked and raped both male and females and often cannibalized their young.

The probers would commit frenzied and berserk acts against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here. The probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat fleeing if he caught sight of them. Sounds pretty familiar to something very specific that we've been talking about for about two episodes now.

In another slice, two days after Manson was announced as the mastermind of the tape murders in 1969, it's mourning at the clinic, and Roger Smith is filing a police report. Amazingly, somehow, just coincidentally, the ARP office that night got burgled. And amazingly, all of his files that he had, all the ones about Manson, everything that he had on ARP, Every piece of the ARP files were stolen.

So, I guess that's gone. All those files, they're just gone now. And the next slice from December of 2001, Tom O'Neill is having his big sit-down interview with Roger Smith, and they get to talking about how strange it was that Bouliosi never called him as a witness, considering his expertise and personal knowledge of Manson, and suddenly Smith loses his temper. This scene is for Mathis and Jesse. Mathis will continue as Tom O'Neill, and Jesse will be Roger.

Smith. That's not the same as David Smith. Was there something going on behind the scenes that your testifying would have exposed, a big picture, that they didn't want exposed, maybe like in L.A., where they kept releasing him for offenses without charging him when they had evidence against him? Okay, you're operating from the theory that he was tied in. Something else was going on. Tom, I can't help you. I don't know. I really don't know. Because you were part of his gestating phase in San Francisco, I thought maybe you might have an indication. Yeah, I saw his talent. I saw his bullshit. He was very glib. I had known for a long time how powerful his effect was on people.

His particular brand of Psychobabble was as persuasive as anybody on the street. It was a time when birth control pills first KAA became widely available. you will find this absolutely stupid women used to walk around and pull up their sweaters to show that they didn't have bras and they would actually seek you out to have sex unheard of then comes the whole drug thing then comes the hate aspery the whole bay area was one of the most electric places you could possibly be it was like a magnet the beginning of one of the most incredibly destructive patterns of drug use I'd ever seen. The first six months I was there, oh, doggie, there were 36 murders within like a six block radius of the office we had. No, it was middle class, totally naive kids. It was the worst modeling stupid theater you've ever seen.

What about Manson? He was very odd. He was a hippie. It was clear. He was very manipulative. but he was high but was he highly dangerous no i didn't see it i did let him travel and there were some checks and balances basically when he was in the bay area he was in my office every week i saw him a lot not only in the office he came in with his girls after a while and i think that became kind of his

annoyance to the office? My association with the clinic really was pretty intermittent. He said, it wasn't until after I left federal probation that I came down here. The chronology confuses me. The people at the clinic all thought he was coming in for probation. No, no, no, no. I had left probation. So he was just coming in to say hello? First of all, he didn't come in that often. I never saw him in any official way, and I also never invited him. Nothing happened according to schedule in the hate Ashbury. You had people walking around jacked up on two grams of feet, tempered out with heroin and people carrying guns and tweaking on acid. And it was absolutely crazy. Actually, Charlie and his girls were the sameest people around in some ways.

Didn't it weird you out? There was this unquestioned loyalty to Charlie while they were in San Francisco, but there was almost a good nature quality to it. There's still the ability to joke with him and push him. And what about Spawn Ranch? They were isolated. They were doing acid every day and they were essentially without any reality checks at all. There's a time when everything flips.

And I don't know when that was, but it sure as hell wasn't when it was in San Francisco. So then why haven't you talked about it for 25 years? There were a lot of people who became overnight experts on Manson, particularly back then. Even now, I'm better to tell you to get the fuck out of here at some point. You understand what I'm doing here and what's important, which is me. Yeah. So understandably, O'Neill leaves this meeting. feeling pretty discouraged, like he's never going to get the neat, tidy ending to a story

like this needs. But in the next slice from a few weeks later, we see him writing an email to his agent that says, quote, you're not going to like this, but I think the JFK assassination is involved and the CIA's mind control experiment, which, you know, we'll get back to pretty soon, I promise. But now, let's talk about the penalty trial. We have slices of the trial from late January to early February. Bulyosi calls witnesses like Officer Thomas Draynan and finally

gets lots of Papa on the stand to establish Manson's capacity for murder himself because after all he fucking shot that dude and the defense team calls Patty and Leslie's parents emphasizing how normal and even good and high achieving these girls were before meeting Manson and how they as brainwash

pawns didn't deserve the same harshness as the mastermind Manson because now you remember this is a penalty trial so they're just deciding whether or not they're going to get the death penalty basically Susan's father declines to appear. On February 9th, 1971, we see Vincent Boliosi waking with a start to a 6.5 earthquake, thinking it was the family breaking in to kill him.

In another slice, on February 16th, 1971, Judge Older finally unsequesters the jury after eight fucking months. Yikes. In slices from late February to early March, the family testifies to try and save Charlie and make him seem as nice as possible. and that he didn't totally hate black people and other uncomfortable stuff. Susan makes up a bunch of lies

to confuse things when she goes up on the stand. But the stuff the jury knows rings true is all really gruesome and sad and in the end it makes her seem pretty sociopathic. Patty, Leslie, Clem, and Wish also all testify, possibly to try and soft launch another go at the copycat crime theory around Bobby Bosley.

But everything they say is pretty weird, like, quote, when I was stabbing her, I was really stabbing myself, or that the murders were, quote, just a thought and the thought came to be, or the quote, cry for her death? If I cry for death, it is for death itself. She's not the only person who has died. Or, quote, I joined the family when I was born of white skin. And in the end, it ends up probably doing them more harm than good. On March 4th, yeah, some weird quotes. On March 4th, Manson shaves his head and gives himself a classic cartoon devil beard saying quote I am the devil and the devil always has a bald head uh next we see the defense calling up

bulliosi but mostly it was flowing law lucifer was a beautiful angel yeah that's true a bald beautiful angel no long flowing hair maybe it was a wig maybe it fell off yeah so next we see the defense actually calling bulliosi up to the stand

but mostly it's just day shin who is Susan's lawyer trying to get the no death penalty deal reinstated, even though Susan was like, I lied. I lied in my grand jury testimony. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And so, uh, she doesn't get the deal. Like, it was supposed to be no death penalty if you don't lie, but she clearly lied. Um, Blyosi didn't bite on it. So it didn't really go anywhere. And Caneric also tried some stuff with Blyosy, but eventually his questions were so obtuse and irrelevant that Judge Older actually had to step in and just be like, all right, you're done. Go. Sit down.

A few more slices exist of other witnesses, mostly several LSD experts who were brought in to last minute to establish a lack of guilt on the part of the brainwashed drug-addled followers of Manson, like maybe because they were so high they couldn't think for themselves,

but that's not really how it goes down. Canaric uses a weird hypothetical about whether or not LSD would be useful at a school for crime, which is a hilarious tangent that he went on. But by March... Good question, though. I don't know.

But by March... 18th, 1971, the last witness is all wrapped up, and the final arguments begin. Boliosi's opener is short. It runs about 10 minutes. Here's a short excerpt from it where he says, quote, I am not going to address myself to the frantic effort by these three female defendants and the defense witnesses to make it look like Charles Manson wasn't involved in these murders. I'm sure all of you clearly saw that they were lying out on that witness stand to do what they could for their god, Charles Manson. Well, Charles Manson has already been convicted. He has already been convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit

murder. The difficulty in your decision, as I see it, is not whether these defendants deserve the death penalty, ladies and gentlemen. In view of the incredibly savage, barbaric, and inhuman murders they committed, the death penalty is the only proper verdict. I then stated, the very heart of my argument. If this case were not a proper case for the imposition of the death penalty, no case ever would be. In view of what they did, life imprisonment would be the greatest gift, the greatest charity, the greatest handout, as it were ever given. The difficulty in your decision, as I see it, is whether you will have the fortitude to return verdicts of death

against all four defendants. So that's Blyot. That's the flavor of Blyosie's opener. Ray Kinerick's argument lasts three straight days and mostly takes the line of like, sure, he's a bad guy, but he didn't do this, and probably the people who did it, all did it because they were high as fuck. That's basically what he says.

Shin's argument focuses on Susan's age and how she probably feels, quote, unconscious remorse, even if she doesn't show it. And Keith, Maxwell Keith, attacks the need for the death penalty itself and argues that these girls' lives might actually be worse than death right now anyway. Fitzgerald basically just does a math problem about how you shouldn't sentence someone to death for what they did with three hours of their 200,000 hours on the earth. All fairly... arithmetic, bro. Yeah, on March 23rd, we see Manson yelling to Boliosi from the lockup that, quote, if I get the death penalty, there's going to be a lot of bloodletting because I am not going to take it. And this causes Judge Older to immediately re-sequester the jury.

In their final arguments that day, March 23rd, I believe it is, Biliosi calmly takes his time to rebut the points made by the defense. And the next day, we see Kinerick use his time to read several chapters from the New Testament until the judge just has to be like, what are you doing? Stop! He's just literally reading the Bible. Shin attacked the DA's office

for what he saw as the bad deal that they gave Susan. Keith once again attacked the notion of a death penalty and Fitzgerald basically just described in detail exactly what would happen to these girls step by step to give you the reality

of them being sent to the gas chamber at St. Quentin Prison. Not a bad defense if you got nothing else. We see the jury go into deliberation on Friday, March 26th. And three days later, on Monday, March 29th, they reach a verdict. The clerk reads it out. We, the jury in the above, entitled action, having found the defendant Charles Manson guilty of murder and the first degree is charged in count one of the indictment do now fix the penalty as death. So that's for Manson. Immediately, all three girls leap

up. Patty says, you have just judged yourselves. Susan says, better lock your doors and watch your own kids and Leslie says your whole system is a game you blind stupid people your children will turn against you they're all removed to the lockup they listen over the loudspeaker as one at a time they each are also sentenced to death

in the aftermath of the trial there are several different slices to see one is Fitzgerald telling a reporter the trial cost him 30k in income and 10k in expenses in 2025 money that's over $315,000 another is shin

losing 16,000 of his $19,000 royalty check that he got from being the leak for Susan Atkins' book to the Manson families themselves, who also have rights to the book. But then he also reveals that Caneric got 5K of it to help upset his own expenses because he was living out of his car

and sleeping in the press room most of the time. So he actually left him down 2K on the royalties that he got. And then he had the energy to go and ramble on for hours. Yeah. Jesus. Pretty neurotic guy, I think. In another slice from 1999, Tom O'Neill is sitting down for lunch at Santa Monica Seafood.

with Canerrick, because he actually interviews the guy, and he asks him if he was paid to defend Manson, because Caneric traditionally did not want to discuss it at all. And Canerick says, yes, but also that he can't say who, smugly teasing that, quote, it would be big news. It might surprise you. In another slice, Hugh's body, Ronald Hughes's body, is discovered that same weekend, quote, badly decomposed, face down, wedge between two bowlers in Cessby Creek, Miles from where he was last seen alive, as of today, according to Wikipedia and other sources, his cause of death is still ruled undetermined. In another slice from 2017, we see Quentin Tarantino writing the end of his new movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he and his stuntman kill Susan Paddy in text that night.

And Rick Dalton is recognized at the gate by Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate, who invite him in to meet Vojcheck and Abigail, and they're still alive. and they're chilling out together in their jammies in the driveway in America never got scared of themselves and the 60s went on forever and Superman beat Lex Luthor and Fantastic Four Stop Galactus and studying history literally changes history

and the vibes are happy and the vibes are good and I would say that I think that movie has a pretty nice ending and finally one last slice from December of 2019 once upon a time in Hollywood and chaos the book are sitting next to each other

on a kind of tasteless Christmas display table inside of Barnes & Noble at the Grove in Beverly Hills and a best-selling fiction novel is also on the table which features a Manson-esqueathetic and characters that are based on all these assholes we just heard about

and next to it, Helter Skelter is also on the table and for some reason people are still buying it. Thank you for listening. Charles Manson, J.F.K. M.K.O.O.O.R. and the CIA will return in Shilluminati Presents Dark Laurel Canyon in just two weeks.

Also, Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison will be there, so don't miss it. Also, don't forget about our live call-in show on Saturday, August 30th with Spooky Foodie and Let's Get Haunted and Y-O-U. And also, we'll see... Are you the time for that yet or no? No, that's for next week. You're going to come back and you're going to find out why. We'll see you on November 1st for our sold-out live show in Chicago with Cox and Crendor. Patreon.com slash Chulminati pod.

Chulamadipod.fm, R-slash Chulamati Pod. Get us out of here, Mathis. Thank you guys so much for listening. We appreciate you for you. Goodbye. Bye. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Joluminaati podcast.

As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by the... I don't know who they are. There's two... What? Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer. Neo and Trinity. I don't understand, and I probably never will. Let me just tell you right now that there's two Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield.

I'm telling you, I think he literally just looked up, famous duos. Cheech and Chalk. And it's been going through the list ever since. I'm trying to dig deep. Which one of you is Dick Powell? Me? Your name's Jesse Cox I want

Elinartee I want my body I want Illuminati I want my body good I want to Luminati. I want to Luminati.

As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by Alex and Jesse. like a shooting star across the sky that's actually a UFO.