Charles Manson.Photo:AP
AP
The country was shocked — and gripped — when members of a cult known as theManson Familybrutally murdered actressSharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and eight others in the summer of 1969.
The cult’s eponymous leader,Charles Manson, was ultimately convicted on several counts of conspiracy to commit murder, as wereseveral of his followers, whom he had instructed to killat least nine people over a several-week period: Gary Hinman, Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and Donald “Shorty” Shea.
The Manson Family murders, which occurred in Los Angeles, have long sparked intrigue and theories as to what preceded them.
Netflix
The film even introduces the theory that Manson had links to the CIA and MKULTRA — the infamous and mysterious agency study of LSD and mind control.
O’Neill, who is featured prominently in Morris’ documentary, spent years researching the case and has called into question law enforcement’s Helter Skelter narrative.
Two years before the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson was living in San Francisco while out of prison on parole. While there, he began attracting a following of girls and young women, with whom he would go to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
In the documentary, O’Neill reveals that Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a brainwashing and LSD researcher who worked on MKUltra, recruited subjects from the clinic to be studied.
Tom O’Neill.Netflix
Around that same time, O’Neill claims, the CIA was studying how to create “programmed assassins.”
The film also draws parallels between Manson’s apparent attempt to connect the murders to the Black Panthers and the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, programs that the agencies used to surveil and sometimes infiltrate left-wing groups in the 1960s.
The documentary reveals that Manson, despite being arrested multiple times, was spared having to go back to prison because of letters of support from his parole officer in San Francisco, with whom he would meet regularly at the medical clinic.
Over time, Manson was able to brainwash his followers, including Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten, among others, who were convicted of the murders.
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Regarding the use of LSD, O’Neill says Manson got his followers to “completely abandon their sense of morality and their code of ethics and to believe that there was no such thing as evil.”
O’Neill says that in a report to the CIA, West also said he was successfully able to use LSD to create false memories in subjects.
“What does it all mean?” O’Neill asks in the documentary. “I’m very honest about not knowing.”
source: people.com
