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Having taken time out to be dead since 2017, Charlie Manson is back among us once again, crazy as ever and maybe even creepier. You'll recall Charlie from his first incarnation as the charismatic whack-job who directed several of his lumpen-hippie followers -- the Manson Family -- to brutally slaughter seven innocent people in Los Angeles over the course of two nights in August of 1969. You may remember at least one of the victims -- actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski -- and possibly one or two of the killers (maybe the crazy-eyed knife girl Susan Atkins, or the affably insane Tex Watson).

Authorities got off to a slow start cracking this case, but in January 1971, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Manson and three of his acolytes were finally found guilty of the murders; and after a year of resisting extradition from Texas, so was Family member Tex Watson. (All were sentenced to execution, but when California's death penalty was struck down in 1972, the capital sentences were converted to life imprisonment.) The prosecutor in the case, the late Vincent Bugliosi, scored an enormous bestseller with his 1974 book about the Manson murders, "Helter Skelter," a monument of true-crime fan lit. So you may wonder what there could be left to learn about this familiar tale.

Let's ask Tom O'Neill. Tom is an old-school print reporter, so when he accepted a commission from Premiere magazine back in 1999 to write a piece about the Manson case -- to poke around in it in search of a fresh angle -- he started digging up more new material than he could pull together in time to meet his deadline. So he decided ... screw the deadline -- and he just kept on researching and interviewing and cobbling together a whole new take on the Manson story. This went on for 20 years, and by 2019 the project had grown into a book called "CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties," which O'Neill put together with a Paris Review editor named Dan Piepenbring. It's a wild and weighty tome, and now it's been turned into a Netflix documentary called "CHAOS: The Manson Murders," directed by true-crime movie god Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line"). As you'd expect, it's a picture with some new things on its mind.

First off, O'Neill is of the opinion that Manson, who died in 2017, was more than just a homicidal hippie nutcase. Before the Tate murders, he had already spent half his life behind bars, and when we take up his story here, in 1967, he has just been released from the federal lockup on Southern California's Terminal Island. It being the so-called Summer of Love, Manson naturally gravitates northward to San Francisco, where, as O'Neill discovered, he became a regular presence at the newly opened Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, sometimes bringing along female followers for various gynecological ministrations. (Manson seemed an unlikely chick magnet, even to himself. "They see somethin' in me that I don't see in me," he says in an old interview clip. "They see a nice guy. And I'm not a nice guy.")

A most interesting aspect of Manson's San Francisco sojourn is that the Free Clinic was also the semi-headquarters of a character named Louis Jolyon West -- "Jolly" to his associates - a CIA-financed psychiatric-research professor and hypnosis expert who was investigating the effectiveness of LSD and other psychotropic substances in creating false memories in human brains. Jolly may have recruited subjects for his experiments from the Free Clinic, and it's hard to ignore the possibility of a connection here to the notorious CIA brainwashing program called MKUltra, which ran for 20 years until all of its records were purposefully destroyed in 1973.

In a nutshell, O'Neill thinks Manson could have gotten sucked into Jolly's LSD mindfuck program, employed its techniques to mold the personalities of the pitiful young dropouts who put themselves at his service, and begun turning out "exactly what the CIA had been trying to create" all along: programmable assassins. To fan this flame, Morris includes a clip here from the classic 1962 brainwashing thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate." And to ratchet up the conspiracy meter another notch, he notes that, following the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, and the subsequent shooting of Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by local businessman Jack Ruby, it was Jolly West who was appointed to be Ruby's psychiatrist, and who diagnosed him as psychotic.

It clearly pains O'Neill to acknowledge that, despite the mountain of research he's compiled, he still can't put Charlie and Jolly together doing shadowy things in a room somewhere. Will the Manson murder perplex turn out to be another black hole of unknowing like the Kennedy assassination? "Frankly," says O'Neill, "I still don't know what happened. But I know that what we were told isn't what happened."

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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