Rick Spence
speaker
498 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Rick Spence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Now, there's one guy that's at the center of this. It's Charles Manson. He ordered all of this done. to ignite a race war, even though, how would any of that do it?
Okay. Okay. Which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots of it floating around. Some descriptions of the family at Spahn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis, which by the way, was also a potential problem with Linda Kasabian's testimony since she also admitted to being high most of the time and also thinking she was a witch. All right.
So you want to put her... Okay. Where do you want to go with that? See, if Manson wasn't Manson, if he hadn't acted like such a complete, if he hadn't actually acted like the crazed hippie psycho goofball that Bugliosi painted him as being, then Kasabian's testimony wouldn't have been as strong because you could, I mean, the first thing against her is you've got an immunity to
for telling the story the prosecution wants. That's a little iffy. And we won't even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby Bosley. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and tie, and behaved himself and spoken normally, this isn't to say that he wasn't guilty as hell.
So what he supposedly did was to inspire all of these killings.
And I think that's probably, you know, sort of beginning with the Hinman killing. He told them to go over there and get the money, one way or the other. I don't know whether it's clear whether he told them, if you don't get the money, kill him. But Hinman's dead. And then... You might also have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other kind of blame.
The other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at the Cielo house where Sharon Tate was before was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract.
He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal, and Manson wanted to get revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house. Which, again, doesn't make much of a sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn't living there anymore. He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn't that difficult to do.
It's not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house, so if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would throw It would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing. Then you might pick some place you knew of. You knew the place was running out. There would be someone there and you really didn't care.
In the same way that the LaBianca seemed to have been. Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is when you sneak into somebody's house at night while they're there asleep or when they're not there, and you move things around.
So when they get up in the morning or they come home, they'll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out, which is the whole point of that.
So Manson set up a kind of base, I think, called the Spahn Movie Ranch, which was an old movie ranch out on the northwest edge of L.A. And they just kind of camped out there. He used the girls, in particular Squeaky Frome, to get the owner or operator out. I think George spawned to let them hang out there. And basically, she slept with him and he was perfectly happy to let them hang out.
They also had a place out in the desert that they had. They dealt in credit card fraud, stolen cars. It was kind of a chop shop that they ran out of the place. So... He had a fairly good little criminal gig going, which with the protection he had, probably would have... The one thing they couldn't cover him on was murder.
Well, the real question is, there is a book written on this by Tom O'Neill called Chaos. I'm not necessarily saying it's the easiest thing to get through. There's a lot of material there. I don't think O'Neill necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with. But he does a very good job of sort of demolishing the whole Bugliosi narrative.
And one of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere. And so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson. Reeve Whitson... shows up on the fringes, even though he has no judicial function. He sort of hangs around Bugliosi in the prosecution. He's some sort of advice. He's just kind of there.
In the same way that he was one of these guys, you know, he grew his hair kind of long, wore bell bottoms, hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could tell you exactly what he did. I know what he did later.
But a decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America. Hmm. So, Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he in 1969? What is he doing in this era?
Uh, the other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called. There's no question of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered. So the general story is that Sharon Tate's housekeeper shows up around 830 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew, I think the owner of the house, he's a photographer.
Last name may be Hatami.
He gets a call earlier in the morning saying that there'd been murders. And the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered and they had not called the police.
Showing 381–400 of 498 · page 20 of 25
← Previous
Next →