Charles Manson and the CIA (Part 2)
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to redacted, declassified mysteries early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In the library basement of UCLA on a June afternoon in 2001, time suddenly slowed to a crawl for journalist Tom O'Neill. For more than two years, O'Neill had been searching for the truth about the notorious cult leader and murderer Charles Manson in dusty archives just like this. He was convinced that Manson did not act alone when he sent his followers to slaughter Hollywood actress Sharon Tate and six others in August of 1969. Manson and members of his so-called family all went to prison for the shocking crimes. But O'Neill thought other people had blood on their hands, too. He had begun to suspect that the CIA might somehow be involved. So, what started out as an assignment to write a magazine article had become an obsession, and O'Neill had missed his deadline by more than two years.
Now, he was determined to write a book that exposed a potentially massive government cover-up, if, that is, he could prove it happened. Standing over a box of old government documents in the UCLA basement that day in 2001, O'Neal felt the rush of a eureka moment. Finally, all the pieces of his exhaustive research seemed to fall together. In O'Neal's hand was a 1963 letter from a CIA psychiatrist requesting to examine an infamous murderer. The letter was written just two days after Jack Ruby had shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald the man who was suspected of assassinating President John F. Kennedy. And the psychiatrist, Dr. Jolly West, was eager to learn more about Ruby's state of mind. Eventually, Dr. West was permitted to visit Ruby in prison. It was a one-on-one meeting. No witnesses, cameras, or recordings. And then, something strange happened. The very next morning, news broke that Ruby had suffered an acute psychotic breakdown. Overnight, Ruby had gone insane. Doctors declared the condition unfixable.
As a result, Ruby could not testify before the commission investigating JFK's assassination. His mind was too scrambled to explain why he killed the man who killed the president. To O'Neill, who thought it seemed conspiratorial, the implications were clear. Dr. West, an early researcher in mind control techniques, had visited Ruby with the deliberate intention of ruining his mental state. The goal was to ensure Ruby wouldn't be able to provide more information on why he killed President Kennedy's assassin. It was a brazen act, derailing the investigation into a presidential assassination. As O'Neill dug deeper into the box of Dr. West's papers, he found letters describing the doctor's larger role in CIA-backed experiments using drugs and hypnosis to control people's minds.
By 1967, Dr. West was doing mind control research with LSD and other drugs at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, where many of the city's hippies hung out. And curiously, that was also the year that one man became a favorite patient at the clinic, Charles Manson. At last, O'Neill thought, he might just have his smoking gun.
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