Finishing the prologue and first chapter of Tom O'Neill's CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties which begins the book with his recounting of meeting and interviewing the case prosecutor and author of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi; automatically painting the man as an unpleasant character to interact from the interaction. The latter then springs into explanation how O'Neill himself was brought into investment in the case which had occurred when he had just entered into the double digits as a child. Going from there into detailing the nightly events of August 8-9 of 1969 Hollywood, California and the following the nine month trial which proceeded them once it officially broke into realisation on December first of that year; telling the usual tale and wrapping it up with a cliffhanger on the question of how this 35 year old lifelong criminal controlled this group over a decade his junior— and sure he was a pimp wrapped up in that criminality, but even in that it would seem difficult for pimps to convince one of their whores to go out and emotionlessly conduct a culling— and how the drug LSD may have played a major role in the Tate-LaBianca slaughters. With trace mentioning of governmental brainwashing, though none directly in reference to the MKUltra program yet, however laying the groundwork subtly for such a claim...
To that I am rather curious regarding the overview given which doesn't quite differ from any other standard recollection of the crimes as they were committed. Given the oft unreliability/debatability of witness testimony in of itself how truly the accounts of the case can be taken so seriously. Sure, there's a consistency with the lore given by perpetrators, as much they could have rehearsed it prior just in case as mind you, Manson himself was a criminal and likely would have known the necessity of a straight story; and wonder if these women, plus Tex Watson, were so out of their own minds from substances and hypnotic mind control and coercion, how can it be truly stated of what happened in such detail? As another example even in his historical-fiction rendition on the murders director Quentin Tarantino's movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood echoes verbatim what is said to have been said. I guess with the given testimony and matching it up with the respective crime scenes it lines up; however as much in being so supposedly dead in emotion and disassociated— with some exception too given Susan Atkins likening of the murderous act to that of an orgasm, which is an extreme form of emotional release, similar to some cops telling of having the best sexual intercourse of their life after killing someone on the job— how can such be seen as reliable? In a cold and mechanical, brainwashed fugue I can see more of a point in solid memory; but with that, in heightened states of emotion— like Atkins' reported orgasmic thrill— the mind can misinterpret or misremember what it's perceiving as much as it can enshrine the memory, as seen in cases of trauma like detailed in Bessel Van Der Kolk's seminal book The Body Keeps The Score. Memory is a funny thing, so I'm curious how much it can be truly relied upon, especially in cases like these where it's already a convoluted tale.
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