The Official Narrative of Tate Murders Doesn't Add Up w/Tom O'Neill | Joe Rogan

So these groups were trying to incite violence. Now we get to the motive of the official narrative of the Manson murder, or the Te La Bianca murders, which is what the prosecutor, Vince Bouliosi, presented at trial, which was the famous Helter Skelter motive. In a nutshell, Manson believed that there was going to be a race war, and he wanted to incite this race war because he had convinced his followers that through messages he received from the Beatles' White Album, from their lyrics, from biblical Old Testament prophecies, that he had been told that he was going to be the savior of the world. And once the race war started, he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert, and when the race war ended, with the blacks winning, the blacks would be framed for murders. The Manson family would emerge and repopulate the planet with their perfect offspring and dominate the blacks. This was Vince Bouliosi's narrative? There was talk of that. There was a philosophy of Helter Skelter at the spawn ranch, where they lived in 68 and 69, that Manson would discuss, but whether or not it was the motive for the murders, I raised serious questions about that in the book. And Manson would discuss it in that way, that there was going to be a race war, and that they would emerge, and then their offspring? Yeah, yeah, except for the fact that what's questioned. The way Bouliosi was able to convict Manson, Manson wasn't at the Tate House when the murders happened. He had in the official story dispatched Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, Leslie Cassabian, and Tex Watson to the house, the former house of Terry Melcher. They didn't know who lived there. But just to kill everybody, and as Manson allegedly said, leave something witchy. He wanted it to look like blacks had killed these, all he knew was they were wealthy, beautiful whites. And he wanted to ignite the race war, because if the Panthers got blamed for these murders, then the police would crack down on them, they'd revolt, the revolution would happen, it would spread across the whole world, and then when it was over, and the blacks had prevailed, they were too dumb, Manson believed, to be able to run the world. That's when he would come out with his followers of their hole in the desert and take over the planet. Now Bouliosi said in interviews that I didn't have until after he and I stopped speaking, which was when he started threatening me with lawsuits and other things in about 2006, 7, I discovered two or three interviews he gave in the early 70s where he was asked if he believed that Manson really believed this craziness. And Bouliosi said, I don't think Charlie believed in it. He got his followers too, but he never believed in that. He was too smart. He was a con man. What the interviewers didn't ask him in the follow up was, well, if he didn't believe it, why did he send his followers to kill these people the first night at the Tate House, second night in Los Villas, upper middle class couple of the La Biancas, then what was the motive? And that's one of my biggest regrets is that I slipped, and they were kind of obscure. One was a penthouse interview, the other was a regional newspaper. But that I didn't have them. I thought I had done all the research. I thought I read every interview he'd ever given, but I didn't have it at hand to say, all right, Vince, I get that because I don't think Manson believed it either. Then what was the motive for the murders? Why were they sent there to kill? And that's what the book explores. So do you think Bouliozzi was operating with the knowledge that Manson was a part of these programs? Oh, that's the big question. Yeah. Again, I lay it out in the book. So I interviewed Bouliozzi. He was the first, not the first, but one of the first interviews I did when it was a magazine assignment. He invited me to his house in Pasadena. So it was April of 99. We spent literally six hours together. He was so kind and generous with his time. I thought I scored. I had the prosecutor. He hadn't given interviews. He always gave interviews about this, but he hadn't for a number of years. He agreed to do it for whatever reason. And during the course of that interview, I arrived at his house, went into his kitchen. His wife gave me Italian cookies, coffee and lemonade. Then he and I went out to lunch in the valley somewhere. He showed me some of the sites connected to the murders. Then we went back to the house and talked till sunset. And towards the end of the six hours, I did realize that even though he was talking nonstop and I'm recording everything, he hadn't given me anything new or different. I mean, I had just finished Helter Skelter. I read it for the first time because I'd never been interested in the case till I got the assignment. So I did what we call the Hail Mary pass in journalism, which is you ask someone if there's anything they could tell you off the record, not for attribution that will help them to get something fresh. Because I was still searching for an angle. This is the first month of reporting. And Vince kind of thought a minute and he goes, turn it off, turn it off. So I turned off the recorder and he did. I could tell he was debating, but then he told me something, which I'm not sure if I don't think I reveal it till the last chapter. It was off the record. It was salacious, pretty shocking. In the larger picture, it doesn't change anything really, but it showed me that he has a very different account of something very important in the narrative. And I took that away and I thought, wow, I'm going to... What did he say? Well, first let me explain. It was off the record. In 2005, when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell and he started threatening me with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher trying to get them to stop the book, he wrote about what he told me and he claimed that I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this. But once he put that in a letter, the lawyers at the publisher said, well, it's not on the record anymore because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he sues you, which he said he was about to do. Not off the record, you mean? Yeah, they said, now it's on the record. I mean, he's violated his agreement with you. So what he told me was that famously, a videotape was taken from the Tate House by the police, excuse me, the first day after the murders. They found it hidden up in a loft. Home videotaping was relatively new at that point. Not a lot of people had cameras, but Roman Polanski did. And Helter Skelter, Vince says in the book that the police took the tape, viewed it, and it was just Sharon and Roman making love and returned it to the loft. Roman was in London at the time of the murders. He came back immediately and then about a week later, he went up to the house. And one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft and he never even knew that they took it, allegedly. That's a story, found it and took it. Vince told me originally off the record that the tape wasn't of Roman and Sharon making love. It was Sharon being forced to have sex with two men against her wishes. And he said Roman was the one who was making it because you could hear him in the background. You know, if you read the book, you've read those chapters. Roman did a lot of bad stuff to Sharon. Yeah, he seemed like a terrible person. He was pretty bad. When you hear what he did, the reason why he could never come back to the country, you go, well, okay. It makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, it's not that surprising. He's a monster. Yeah, yeah. A monster that's really good at making movies. Yeah, yeah. Which we're not going to see anymore because the last one he made, which is supposed to be one of his best, they're not going to release it in the United States. But once I had that, that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down because I'm like, well, if this was different in the official narrative, what else might they have changed? So Vince and I were talking on the phone about every week for two months. He was so accessible. So I'd be interviewing people. And one of the first things after that that I found was the Purgerees by Terry Melcher on the stand. I found I got access to two separate files and found that Melcher, Doris Day's son, record producer, young boy Wonder, who lived in the house with his girlfriend, Candy Bergen on Cielo, up until January 1st of 69, then moved to Malibu. And Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February. Melcher was the part of the motive for why the house was picked. And again, this is getting into the weeds, but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition. Manson sent his followers up there to instill fear in Melcher by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them. I don't believe that. That's the official narrative. But Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson, one at Beach Boy Drummer's Dennis Wilson's, two there, I think, and then one there and then two when he went to the spawn ranch in April and May of 69 to listen to them play music with the possibility of recording them. And he didn't think they were talented enough and told Charlie that in so many words. And then again, this is the official narrative. That's when Manson kind of spiraled and went crazy because he'd been rejected by Terry Melcher. So he decided it was time for Helter Skelter the race war. And again, a lot of these things don't add up when you step back. Well, why didn't he kill Terry Melcher at the house in Malibu because he knew where he had moved to? Why did he just go to this other place and kill strangers? Maybe Terry wouldn't connect at all that. The bottom line was Terry on the stand and in all the official accounts of this case, of which there are many, not just Helter Skelter but lots of books, his relationship with Manson ended in May of 69. He said he never saw him again. When the murders happened at his former house, it never occurred to him. It had anything to do with him or that Manson did it. I stopped believing that a month or two in. And then I found these documents showing that Melcher actually had gone to see Manson twice at the spawn ranch after the murders. And then once all the way out at Death Valley where they had the Barker Ranch, where they were hiding when they were finally captured in the fall of 69. Once I could document that, that changed the whole, I mean it didn't change but impacted the mode. I mean Melcher was a principal witness. Again, because Charlie wasn't at the Tate House. Manson had, or Bulliossi had a convicted of conspiracy. In other words, ordering people to go up there and kill. And he had to have a reason for that house. So Terry provided it by saying, yes, I did go out there and try to record them. And then eventually in the question it came out. I never had anything to do with them again. I had no idea. I never saw him or heard from him again. The motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher because Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star. Right. So this is what Bulliossi was using, but it didn't make any sense. Right. Because Melcher saw him after the murders several times. Yeah. And not only, even if it made sense, it didn't make sense. You're right. And that's why I think, well, I think you could get away with anything then because the antics of the family at the trial and everybody was so horrified by what was going on. Nobody was looking at this critically and questioning stuff because every day, you know, Manson and the girls are getting thrown out of the courtroom for screaming, for singing, for dancing, for mocking the proceedings. So all this stayed under the radar. But once I could prove that Melcher lied and then two or three more, then I knew that I had to question the entire narrative. So Bulliossi started monitoring my interviewing. This is all laid out in the beginning of the book. So by the fall of the first year of 99, I got a call from one of my sources, Rudy Altobelli, who was another important witness. He was the man who owned the house where the murders happened. He was traveling. He was traveling actually in Europe with Sharon, who had come back about three weeks before to have her baby. And Rudy had told me from the very beginning, he was very close to Terry, Dennis Wilson, and the third guy, Greg Jacobson. Greg Jacobson was another important witness who lied throughout all of his testimony in the trial to fit a narrative that Vince needed. Rudy had told me that Vince called him, or excuse me, Terry called him and said, what are you telling this O'Neill? No one was supposed to know about that. Vince promised me it would never come out. So at that point, I knew that I was on to something even bigger. And then I got a call from Vince, and he left a message on the machine saying he wanted to talk to me. It was important. So I called him back and he said, you know, I'm hearing, I can't remember who told me. And that was another little game of his. He would never be, it was like Trump saying, this guy said to me or one of my friends or they say, Vince said, someone told me, I heard that you're questioning my tactics and my choice is at the trial. Is that true? You know, Tom, what's going on here? I go, well, you know, I'm looking at stuff, and you know, you knew where this was going. I mean, I know we haven't talked at that point. We hadn't talked for about six weeks, I think he goes. I want you to assure me that I'll be given the opportunity to answer any of these questions. He goes, because what might appear irregular to you as a layperson can be easily explained by me. I said, well, of course, Vince, I'll definitely swing back around to you before he goes. And I thought this was going to be out in August. And we were in like October, I think I go. Yeah, yeah, I got an extension. He goes, well, they're also saying you're doing it's a book and that you lie that it's not a magazine. So I go, no, no, no, I'm still getting paid by Premier because I was at that point. And I had no idea it was going to be a book because we're still in the first six, seven months. So at that point, I we stopped talking, Vince and I. And it wasn't until 2005 when I got my book deal that I went back to him with these questions. And I thought, hoped naively that I would get him to break down and say, yes, this was all a CIA operation. I was awful. Oh, God. That was stupid with me. But I thought, what else can he say when I put all this in front of him? But as. He must have been really freaked out by how deep you got into this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, you've read the prologue to the book where we open in that scene in his kitchen where he's screaming and cursing at me and saying he's going to hurt me like I've never been hurt before. And he's going to sue me for hundreds of millions of dollars. It's crazy. Well, when you get to the end of the book, you'll see the outcome of that day and what happened when he's begging me. He's saying he'll give me a quote on the cover of my book if I don't publish this stuff. And then when I wouldn't agree to anything, then the lawsuit threat started happening. So I naively. I didn't think he was going to break down and say I was working for someone else. I had no choice. But instead, he was evasive, threatening, screaming, denying. He had two recorders. I had two recorders. He went off the record every two minutes. So we'd have to turn off all the recorders. And Vince was not turning his... I'm like, Vince, you didn't turn yours back. Oh, no, you didn't turn it off. Wait. No, that's my record. No, this is yours. So one minute he's screaming and cursing at me going, do you have any idea how I will fuck you if you fucking put this in your book? And then the recorders go back on. But sometimes they were already on because we couldn't keep up with all the off the records. Jesus. I was at home that night. So I walk out of the house six hours, exactly almost six hours, just like the first time, six years earlier, he's grabbing me by the arm. He goes, this isn't quid pro quo. This isn't quid pro quo. But if you don't put this ridiculous nonsense in, he goes, a blur from Vince Boulio... He always referred to himself in the third person. A blur from Vince Bouliozzi on the cover of this book. You have no idea what that does. And I rarely do it. I'm very selective. I get asked 10, 20 times a day. I mean, the man's ego is... You'll see that in the book. Then I get home that night. There's messages, call me, call me. And he called me, I think it's a week, week and a half, almost every day, the next morning, a few days later, trying to... He would bully me. And then he'd say, no, no, look at what this is going to do to my family, my kids, and all that. It went on and on and on. You had to be very excited by that, knowing that this is... Oh, yeah. There's no reason for that guy to react like that unless you had him. I know. I know. And then... He kept... Not a year later. He said, when we finally... He goes at the very last phone call, which was a week and a half later, he goes, so you're really going to go ahead and do with this. Go ahead with this. I go, Vince, I'm going to report what I have. I go, if you want... Oh, at this point, the magazine deal had ended. I had sold the book. So he knew I had a publisher. I told him who it was. And he asked for my editor's name there. He said, because I will be sending them a letter. He goes, I will work on this letter for hours. It's going to be a complete rebuttal of everything you argued. All of your arguments, all of your points, it's going to ruin you. They're going to cancel your deal because they're not stupid. So he wrote the letter. They got it in... I think it was June or July after February of that year, 2005. And I got a call from my editor. He said, you got to talk to our attorneys. He goes, we have a letter from Vince. I go, well, I told you it was coming. He goes, it's insane. It's 34 pages, single space with 50 pages of attachments. And he goes, I've never seen anything like this. So he said, talk to the attorney. So they sent me over to the attorney. And he said, my first question... I'd never met the guy before. He goes, my first question for you, O'Neill, is, is he suffering from dementia? He goes, I was a law student during the trial. And he goes, I follow that trial every day in the paper. I've read Helter Skelter. He was brilliant. He goes, I can't believe the person that wrote this letter wrote that book. So maybe you were dealing with somebody who was impaired. I said, he's mentally ill. And I have a lot of proof of that in the book. It's not dementia. I go, he's finishing his magnum opus, a 20-year effort to write a book rebutting the critics of the Warren Commission about the Kennedy assassination. I always got a book coming out, a tour. And sure enough, he wrote, I think, two or three more books after that. I go, he's just... I caught him. He goes, all of his arguments don't make sense. He's contradicting himself. The letter goes off in a direction that it sounds like it's written by a madman. And I go, is it going to inhibit us? He goes, oh, no, we're selling... We're opening the champagne here. I mean, he wouldn't write a letter like this unless you got him. Well, that's what makes sense, 50 pages of attachments? That was the first letter. Then about six months later, another letter, I think there were four total. I quote some of them in the book. It was nuts. And unfortunately, he passed away in 2015 or 2016. And I get a lot of criticism. I mean, you get it from all... How old was he when he died? I think 74 or five, it was cancer. I knew he was sick off and on for a couple of years. But I've been accused by my critics of not publishing the book until he died because of these threats of law. I wanted him to be alive. I wanted him to be accountable and have to answer to all this. The reason I didn't publish it when I was going to publish it was Penguin, my publisher, canceled my deal in 2011. The motive though, to get back to the motive. So the official motive was double. I mean, Bouliosi said in his closing arguments that the main motive was to ignite helter-skeletal race war. The sub motive was to instill fear in Terry Melcher because he had rejected Manson. So you're saying, well, then if it wasn't those, then what was it? If you look at the COINTELPRO objectives, which was to neutralize left-wing movement to make them look horrible, evil, bad, and this is what drugs are going to do to your kids. The kind of outcome that these murders had was to make the hippies the boogeyman. I mean, the biggest boogeyman in United States history, I don't know forever, but at least until the 70s, became Charlie Manson. When Manson and his family were identified as suspects the first week of December, 1969, I mean, it was like earthshaking because all of a sudden nobody knew who had committed the murders, that the case was open from August till first of December. You have photos on the front page of every paper in the world of these hippie women, nursing children living communally who are accused of these horrible, brutal slayings. And the argument was, and what the reporters were reporting was they had gone crazy on LSD and free love and the hippie ethic. And that was the same thing chaos and COINTELPRO were trying to do. They were trying to damage the youth revolution, the youth movement. Why do you think they targeted that house, though? So J. Edgar Hoover, when he had the COINTELPRO operation, he wrote a, no, excuse me, an LA agent wrote a memo to Hoover saying what we have to do, this is when they were mostly battling the panther, I mean, trying to neutralize the panthers in LA, was go after the whites, the elite whites, the Hollywood whites who were supporting the panthers. There was something called the White Panther Party that began in LA, 67 or 68. Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Cass Eliot, those three were actually under surveillance by the FBI. They were part of this group, Donald Sutherland, and they were basically a support, Leonard Bernstein. They supported the panthers. They raised money. So in this one memo, which I think it was the winter of 68, it's, I got the date in the book, said that what we have to make the whites think is that when the revolution finally happens, when the blacks rise up, they'll be lined up with everybody else and slaughtered. So if you look at that memo, that was part of their operation, which was to, they did it by sending letters, making the whites scared. So that, I hate to speculate, but I think people will draw that conclusion if you read the book, that this could have been a chaos or COINTELPRO operation to turn the world, the nation, the culture against hippies, the left wing, the Black Panthers. And they picked that house because it was high profile because Sharon Tate was in it? It actually, well not because Sharon Tate was there, her and Polanski, and that's one thing that Tarantino, I don't think he showed the parties at the house. They were like the social center of Hollywood. It wasn't just the movie people, it was the music people. Terry Melcher and Candy Bergen lived there for two years before. That was a party house. Everybody went in and out of there, kind of represented the elite of movies, music, Hollywood, white people. So that would have been a very high profile target. Because all the people in that community, in the Hollywood community, would then also be aware that that was a spot that they had been to. All these high profile people had been there. Yeah, it's like Joan Didion wrote in her book, The White Album, that the morning she learned about the murders and she knew most of the victims, she goes, it occurred, she goes, I knew that the 60s had ended, they were over. I mean, there was also Altamont and, I mean, not a whole lot else, but that was like a cultural watershed moment.