“I’m quite convinced that, no matter what I say, I’m not going to be able to convince you to kill for me,” film-maker Errol Morris says drily. “And, alas, I have to say that I don’t have the desire to kill anybody or to convince you to kill on my behalf. It just isn’t there. Call it a weakness of will or weakness of character.”
This is not a sentiment that an interviewer is used to hearing from an interviewee. But it makes more sense in context. Morris, who has previously worked as a private detective, is discussing his new documentary, streaming on Netflix from Friday, which challenges official accounts of the most infamous killing spree of the 1960s.
Chaos: The Manson Murders takes apart the conventional wisdom, popularised by the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, that cult leader Charles Manson’s followers were motivated by a desire to trigger an apocalyptic race war. It explores instead the no less dramatic theory that the murders were linked a secret CIA brainwashing programme and the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
But Morris also leaves open the possibility that the Manson “Family” murders were less the result of a grand conspiracy than of confusion, incompetence and, in a word, stupidity. The director of The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War and Separated acknowledges that doubt and scepticism inform all his work.
Speaking via Zoom from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Morris says: “The hope was to put the audience in my position of thinking about this stuff, of maybe not providing such clear, definitive answers to questions but providing a platform in which one could consider these things.”
Manson was a petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood when he reinvented himself in the late 1960s as a guru-philosopher. His cult recruited teenage runaways and other lost souls, particularly attractive young women he used and bartered to others for sex.
Manson sent his Family out to murder Los Angeles’ rich and famous. In August 1969 they arrived at the Cielo Drive home of Sharon Tate, an actor who was eight months pregnant and married to the film director Roman Polanski.
The Manson Family stabbed, beat and shot to death Tate and her friends – celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski. They also shot dead a teenager, Steven Parent, whom they encountered on their way to the house.
When the case came to trial, Bugliosi argued that the Manson Family was trying to provoke a race war – an idea that Manson allegedly got from a twisted reading of the Beatles’ song Helter Skelter. This narrative became codified in 1974’s bestselling book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.
It was rejected, however, by Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Morris’s film is the product of an on-off-on collaboration with O’Neill and incorporates interviews, archival footage and even Manson’s music. Morris explains: “Tom’s major achievement is showing how Helter Skelter, the whole basis of Bugliosi’s prosecution of Manson, was a kind of fabrication born out of necessity.
“Bugliosi was charged with getting a death sentence, convicting these people, sending them to the San Quentin gas chamber, and he achieved that end [though Manson ultimately avoided execution]. But do I feel the Helter Skelter explanation of the Manson crimes is satisfying or true? I don’t. Do I think that Bugliosi was pretty manipulative and crazy in his own right? I do.”
Heading in a different direction, the first few minutes of Chaos include a clip from The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 thriller about a US military veteran brainwashed by communists to become an unwitting assassin. Chaos explores the notion that the Manson Family may have been influenced by or connected to MKUltra, a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research programme.
In short, was Manson acting of his own free will – or was he controlled by others?
Morris, whose 2017 miniseries Wormwood investigated the case of Frank Olson, a scientist who fell to his death from a hotel window after being dosed with LSD by MKUltra, says: “Did such a program exist? Yes. You can’t say that it’s a complete fabrication, a product of American paranoia. In the aftermath of world war two there was this attempt to see if we could programme people and, if we could, provide false memories that people thought of as real memories and so on.
“Was there such a program as MKUltra, even though the CIA did its levelheaded best not simply to deny its existence but to erase all records of its existence? Yes. But alas, establishing causality between these things is another thing altogether and it could descend quite quickly and easily into imaginative fiction.”
Morris’s film tells how Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist on the CIA’s payroll, worked out how to induce insanity in a person without their knowledge. He conducted a one-on-one psychiatric examination in 1964 of Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F Kennedy, after which he declared him to be “insane”.
Morris says: “Do I believe that Manson was programmed by MKUltra, by the government – a Manchurian candidate programmed to kill? Not quite. Can it be proven? I don’t think so. But can it be disproven? I don’t think it can be. One can provide the requisite scepticism.
“There’s a series of – to use the fancy word – epistemological problems and part of me, by inclination, inclines to a certain kind of chaos, to a feeling that, if there was no conspiracy, people stumbled and bumbled into this mess and it may not be possible to square it with any kind of simplistic, rational account. I think of it as my version of Occam’s razor, that instead of defaulting to the simplest explanation, how about defaulting to the stupidest explanation?”
Chaos also considers the theory that Manson’s rejection by the record producer Terry Melcher (who previously lived at the Cielo Drive house) may have played a role in the murders. But none of the unanswered questions is more central than: how did Manson get people to kill for him without hesitation or remorse?
Morris admits he does not know. “But my guess is that it’s the oddity of that time in history, this strange community that he part-created. I don’t think these things have some kind of generic explanation. They are a product of context and history, etc, etc.”
The film-maker interviewed Bobby Beausoleil, a Manson Family member serving a life sentence for the murder of Gary Hinman in 1969. Beausoleil tells how he had been trying to negotiate with Hinman over a drug deal when Manson arrived and sliced Hinman’s ear, leaving him bleeding badly. Beausoleil was afraid that, if he took Hinman to hospital, the injured man would alert the authorities. When Beausoleil called Manson and asked him to take charge, Manson told him he “knew what to do”.
Morris says: “Manson has put Bobby Beausoleil in a position where he’s going to take the fall for this and Bobby made this decision that his best alternative was to kill: ‘This is what I should do in order to avoid further complication, further prosecution, further whatever.’ He brutally kills Hinman and takes his car.
“Now, after killing somebody, do you want to try to leave the crime scene with all of the incriminating evidence? I think: bad idea. When the police finally stopped him, they found the murder weapon in the wheel hub of the car. This is not a crime where someone was careful or thoughtful. It’s a crime of confusion and idiocy and Bobby Beausoleil is not stupid. In fact, quite the contrary. How does Manson get someone to do something really, really, really, really stupid?”
When the case went to trial, Manson turned up in court with an “X” carved in his forehead, saying he was “Xed out of society”. The women standing trial with him mutilated their own foreheads the next day. He later changed his carving to a swastika. When the women eventually confessed to murder, they absolved him of any blame; their lawyers said they had been brainwashed.
Morris adds: “I asked myself if I have thought enough about it. You had isolation, desperation, drugs: you mix it all together and maybe that is what you get. You get stupid violence. Insanity. Murder. But do I need to go back to the government and Manchurian candidates and MKUltra in order to provide an explanation? I don’t think so. Call me sceptical.”
Indeed, his documentary became a meditation on the nature of investigations and elusiveness of truth, especially in cases with conflicting accounts and missing puzzle pieces. It all goes back, says the film noir fan, to a line spoken by Robert Mitchum in 1947’s Out of the Past: “All I can see is the frame. I’m going in there now to look at the picture.”
Chaos: The Manson Murder is available on Netflix on 7 March
