Bobby Beausoleil, Chaos: The Manson Murders, Charles Manson, documentaries, Errol Morris, Gregg Jakobson, Manson Family, movies, reviews, Stephen Kay, Tom O'Neill, true crime, TV
March 30, 2025
by Carla Hay
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Chaos: The Manson Murders” (based partially on the non-fiction book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties”) features an all-white group of people discussing the notorious August 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson’s cult, also known as the Charles Manson Family.
Culture Clash: The documentary delves into the conspiracy theory that the murders were the result of the U.S. government’s experiments in mind control that would allow the government to brainwash people into becoming murderers.
Culture Audience: “Chaos: The Manson Murders” will appeal primarily to people who like watching true crime documentaries about famous murder cases, but this documentary veers too far off into speculation with no evidence.
“Chaos: The Manson Murders” is less of a documentary and more of an infomercial for Tom O’Neill’s book and conspiracy theory that the U.S. government and Charles Manson used the same mind-control techniques to engineer the Manson Family cult murders. The documentary is rambling, sloppy and too reliant on O’Neill’s unproven theory to be completely credible. O’Neill, who has a background as an entertainment journalist, admits multiple times in the documentary that he has no proof of the theory’s central idea: According to O’Neill, Manson and his followers (a cult also known as the Manson Family) were under mind-control influence of the U.S. government, which was using hippies as experiments to see if people could be brainwashed into murdering on command.
Directed by Errol Morris, “Chaos: The Manson Murders” is based partially on the 2019 non-fiction book “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” written by O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring. The title of the book refers to the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, which was in effect from 1967 to 1975, with the purpose to uncover possible foreign influence on activism having to do with race relations, the anti-Vietnam War movements and other protests that often involved radical hippies. O’Neill began writing the book after he got an assignment in 1999 from Premiere magazine to do a story on the Manson murders.
Very few people are interviewed for the documentary, which uses a lot of archival materials, including O’Neill’s audio interviews that he did for the book. The people who were interviewed for the documentary do not reveal any new information. O’Neill is the interviewee who gets the most screen time in this documentary. Unfortunately, what he has to say in support of his conspiracy theory is based more on guesses than based on provable facts.
Most people who watch this documentary probably know the basic facts of convicted serial killer Manson and his role in the murders associated with the Manson Family. Manson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 12, 1934. At the age of 83, he died from colon cancer complications in prison in Bakersfield, California, on November 19, 2017. Manson spent more than half of his life in prison and had a long criminal record before he was arrested and convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders that took place in August 1969. These murders shocked the world, and still cause morbid fascination to this day. Manson was convicted of being the mastermind who ordered his followers to commit the murders.
Several people in the documentary describe Manson as very odd and manipulative but also highly charismatic with an uncanny way of drawing attention to himself that was hypnotic to many people who spent enough time with him. The fact that all of his most fanatical followers were heavy drug users also had a lot to do with how he was able to influence them. Manson was also known for having a loyal harem of young women.
On the night of August 9, 1969, four members of the Manson Family—23-year-old Charles “Tex” Watson, 21-year-old Susan Atkins, 21-year-old Patricia Krenwinkel and 20-year-old Linda Kasabian—drove from their isolated commune at Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth, California, to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles. Kasabian was the driver and did not physically commit the murders. Kasabian became a crucial witness for the prosecution.
The intruders went into the home, which was owned by Polish French filmmaker Roman Polanski (who was out of town on business) and his American actress wife Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-half months pregnant at the time. Polanski and Tate has been married just one year earlier, in January 1968. The couple had been expecting their first child together, and the unborn baby was later revealed to be a boy.
On this tragic nght, the Manson cult members murdered Tate and four other people who were visiting at the house: 35-year-old Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairdresser; 26-year-old Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune; 32-year-old Wojciech Frykowski, who was Folger’s screenwriter boyfriend; and 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting the house’s live-in caretaker because Parent was interested in selling a clock.
This review won’t go into the gruesome details of the murders. It’s enough to say that the murder victims were shot and/or stabbed. The documentary goes into explicit details about every killing in the Tate-LaBianca murders, including showing photos and illustrations of the crime scenes. In a very tacky filmmaking decision, sound effects are added to these visuals to replicate the sounds of stabbings.
The next night, on August 10, 1969, Manson and 19-year-old cult member Leslie Van Houten, 18-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, Kasabian, Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel drove to Los Angeles for another home-invasion murder rampage. This time, they went to 3301 Waverly Drive, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary LaBianca, who were at home and were brutally stabbed to death by Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkel. Just like in the previous night’s murders, Kasabian was the getaway driver.
Manson, Grogan, Atkins and Kasabian had dropped off Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkel at the LaBianca house to commit these murders, and Kasabian later drove back to the LaBianca house to to pick up Watson, Van Houten and Krenwinkel after those three had committed the murders. During the time in between, under Manson’s orders, Kasabian drove Manson, Grogan and Atkins to an apartment complex in Venice Beach because Manson wanted them to murder actor Saladin Nader. However, according to Kasabian, she thwarted that murder plan by intentionally leading them to the wrong apartment.
In November 1969, Atkins was in jail as a suspect for auto theft and the murder of musician Gary Himan when she bragged to her cell mates Virginia Graham and Veronica “Ronnie” Howard about the Tate-LaBianca murders. Graham and Howard reported this confession to authorities, resulting in the arrests of Manson Family members involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Kasabian was given immunity in exchange for her testimony for the prosecution. Manson, Watson, Van Houten, Atkins and Krenwinkel went on trial for first-degree murder. The trial lasted from November 1970 to January 1971 and included many disruptions from the defendants, who were eventually banned from the courtroom during the trial.
In January 1971, these five Manson Family members were convicted of first-degree murder and received the death penalty. However, in 1972, California abolished the death penalty. As a result, these Manson Family members had their death sentences commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole. But within a few months in 1972, California made the death penalty legal again. Due to some legal wranglings, California couldn’t enforce the death penalty law until 1979. However, anyone in California who had their death penalties removed during the few months in 1972 that the death penalty was abolished in California could not have those death penalties re-applied to them when the death penalty became legal in California again.
In 2009, at the age of 61, Atkins died of brain cancer in prison in Chowchilla, California. Van Houten was released on parole in 2023. At the time this documentary was released, Watson and Krenwinkel remained in prison and are unlikely to be released on parole because they were the two Manson Family members who physically murdered the victims on both nights. “Chaos: The Manson Murders” is so poorly made, it doesn’t even mention that Van Houten was released on parole.
The documentary is divided into six chapters but still comes across as a jumbled mess. Chapter 1, titled “Release,” chronicles Manson’s 1967 release from prison that resulted in assembling a group of followers in California that would become the Manson Family cult. Chapter 2, titled “Music,” gives well-known information of Manson’s ambitions to be a rock star and his association with Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys. Chapter 3, titled “Murder,” details the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Chapter 4, titled “Capture,” is about the Manson Family arrests for murder in November 1969. Chapter 5, titled “Trial,” is a summary of the trial. Chapter 6, titled “Mind Control,” puts forth the theory that the CIA, chiefly through psychiatrist Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, was somehow linked to the Manson murders because Manson used similar mind-control techniques to get his followers to carry out Manson’s orders.
De-classified government documents revealed that in the 1960s, Dr. West worked for the CIA to do mind-control experiments (primarily using LSD) on unsuspecting individuals. O’Neill says that Dr. West had a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad” in the San Francisco area. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco was reportedly a popular place to find hippies who were used in these experiments. CIA operatives reportedly went undercover and infiltrated many hippie communities to identify any radicals who might be a threat to the U.S. government.
Manson lived in the San Francisco Bay Area after his release from prison in 1967. That was the year that he began assembling followers who had a “free love”/polyamorous communal lifestyle that actually became very controlled by Manson, who used and supplied LSD and other drugs to his followers. He convinced his followers that he was a messiah, and he eventually dictated almost everything that his followers did. Manson met with his parole officer Roger Smith at Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, where some of Manson’s cult members were patients at the clinic. Manson and his cult later settled further south in the Los Angeles area.
O’Neill says in the documentary: “There were these research scientists who were working secretly for the government who were trying to do exactly what Manson did with the girls: create people who would kill without regret or remorse on command and not really recalling how or why they did it.” According to O’Neill, the CIA considered drug-using hippies to be ideal targets for these experiments because if they were caught being murderers, it would prove that hippies were dangerous.
Although it’s possible that some of Manson’s followers could have had unwitting participants in Dr. West’s experiments when the Manson Family cult lived in San Francisco, O’Neill admits in the documentary that there is no proof that Dr. West and Manson were ever in the same room, nor is there any proof that Manson was in contact with the CIA for these experiments. There’s also no proof that Manson, who was a control freak with a hatred for establishment authorities, would get caught up in anything where he could be used as a pawn for the U.S. government. His outlaw lifestyle and remote communes were too insular to be infiltrated by CIA operatives who could control Manson.
O’Neill mentions the Manson murders were indirectly affected by the FBI’s now-exposed COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) of the 1960s, which was aimed at thwarting activist groups that the FBI considered to be too radical, including but not limited to the Black Panther Party, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Ku Klux Klan. It’s very questionable to connect COINTELPRO to the Manson Family because the Manson Family was not a political group that wanted to influence government policies and laws. Manson indoctrinated into his followers the idea that they had to get ready for a race war between white people and black people in the United States, but the Manson Family operated more like a doomsday survivalist group that amassed weapons for self-defense, and they believed that they didn’t need to rely on the U.S. government to help.
Another big problem with the conspiracy theory touted by O’Neill is that it’s contradictory. On the one hand, O’Neill says that Manson was the controlling mastermind of the Manson cult. On the other hand, O’Neill says that Manson could have been puppet for the CIA, which sought to destroy the Black Panthers through COINTELPRO. Manson has to be one of the most investigated serial murders of all time. And yet, there isn’t a shred of evidence to show he was recruited or manipulated by any government to implement mind control on Manson’s followers. O’Neill seems resistant to accept the reality that many cult leaders like Manson develop this mind-control technique on their own.
Manson was a white supremacist who considered the Black Panthers to be enemies, but that doesn’t mean he was knowingly or unknowingly in cahoots with the CIA or FBI to destroy the Black Panthers. What has been proven—through court testimonies and other evidence from Manson Family members—is that the Tate-La Bianca murders were planned to look like the Black Panthers committed the murders. It’s why the murder scenes had the words “pig” or “piggies” written in blood because the word “pig” was a common term that the Black Panthers and other people used for law enforcement.
Vince Bugliosi, who was the lead prosecutor in the Manson Family murder trial, also believed that these crime scenes were staged to place the blame on Black Panthers. Bugliosi died in 2016, at the age of 83. He and Curt Gentry wrote a best-selling 1974 non-fiction book titled “Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders.” That book was made into two made-for-TV movies: one released in 1976, and the other released in 2004.
Manson reportedly made his followers become fixated on the Beatles’ 1968 self-titled album, which was nicknamed “The White Album,” because the entire album cover was white. Manson believed the album, which included the song “Helter Skelter,” had hidden messages about the supposed race war, This is a well-known fact about the case that gets repeated in the documentary. The Beatles, of course, had nothing to do with the Manson Family.
Bobby Beausoleil, a former Manson Family member, is interviewed in the documentary but only in an audio recording. Beausoleil is in prison for the July 1969 murder of musician Gary Hinman, who was killed because the Manson Family wanted money and cars from Hinman. Beausoleil, who has confessed to murdering Hinman under Manson’s orders, was arrested on August 8, 1969: the day before the first night of Tate-LaBianca murders happened. Beausoleil said he was ordered by Manson to also stage the murder scene to frame the Black Panters.
In the documentary, Beausoleil scoffs at the idea that any of the Manson Family murders were part of a conspiracy from anyone outside the Manson Family cult. He says that the murders were motivated by Manson’s fear of losing control over certain followers, and the murders were a way to test their loyalty to Manson. Beausoleil also points out that even with all of the planning that was done for these killings, all the Manson Family murderers were arrested and convicted because of what he calls their stupid blunders. In Beausoleil’s case, he was caught in Hinman’s stolen car, with the murder weapon inside the car.
The documentary then goes on an irritating and off-topic tangent by discussing conspiracy theories about Jack Ruby, the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was the official suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. O’Neill believes that Ruby could have been under government mind control to commit this murder, as a way to silence Oswald from telling conspiracy secrets about JFK’s assassination. What does this have to do with the Manson murders? Nothing that O’Neill can prove.
One of the people interviewed in the documentary is Gregg Jakobson, a former talent scout in the music business who worked with Beach Boys drummer Wilson and music producer Terry Melcher. Jakobson does not say anything that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere, such as the fact that Manson and several of the cult members were living rent-free at Wilson’s rented house in Pacific Palisades, California, for a several months in 1968.
Jakobson talks about how he and Wilson got Manson to record a demo of songs that Manson had written. “Cease to Exist” was one of those songs. It’s already been widely reported that “Cease to Exist” morphed into the Beach Boys song “Never Learn Not to Love,” which had Wilson (not Manson) credited as the songwriter and producer. Manson was reportedly bitter that the Beach Boys did not give Manson credit for this song.
Music producer Terry Melcher was a close friend of Wilson, who recommended that Melcher watch Manson perform to possibly sign Manson to a deal. And so, Melcher went to Spahn Ranch for this audition. According to Jakobson, Melcher rejected Manson and didn’t want anything to do with him. Melcher used to live at the house where Tate and the other victims were murdered. It’s believed that Manson sent his followers there because Manson thought that Melcher still lived at that house.
Another person interviewed in the documentary is Stephen Kay, who was on the prosecution team for the Manson Family murder trial. Kay has done numerous interviews about this murder case. In the documentary, he just retells facts of the story like he’s reading a book or news report. Manson Family members who were convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders occasionally did TV interviews in prison. Some archival clips from those interviews are included in the documentary. The documentary also includes audio archival interviews with music producer Melcher and Manson’s former parole officer Smith.
Morris appears in the documentary for a few of the interviews that he conducted. He seems skeptical of O’Neill’s conspiracy theory. And when he asks O’Neill to explain the rationale for his theory, O’Neill admits that a lot of the theory doesn’t make sense, which is why his book is called “Chaos.”
Morris’ skepticism might or might not be genuine. He still went ahead and did a documentary based on this conspiracy theory that doesn’t have any evidence (only speculation) to support the theory, with Morris doing no investigation of his own. And that’s why “Chaos: The Manson Murders” is a lazy documentary which just uses the notoriety of the Manson murders to get attention but doesn’t add anything substantial that people should know.
Netflix premiered “Chaos: The Manson Murders” on March 7, 2025.