Conspiracies Uncovered by Lee Mellor

Conspiracies Uncovered by Lee Mellor

Author:Lee Mellor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241518984
Publisher: Dorling Kindersley Ltd


Charles Manson lived in the Haight-Ashbury area from late-spring 1967 to June 1968. Here he recruited wayward teens into his so-called Family by plying them with psychotropic drugs, especially LSD, and admonishing them to forget every “lie” they had ever been told by society. The 32-year-old Manson had been released from LA county’s Terminal Island prison on March 21, 1967. A psychopathic criminal through-and-through, he had immediately violated parole by relocating 375 miles (600 km) to Berkeley, near San Francisco. Though Manson was required to remain in Los Angeles under threat of automatic reimprisonment, he simply called the San Francisco Federal Parole Office and was placed under the supervision of Roger Smith. Manson’s transfer into Smith’s care was facilitated by an experimental parole program which also received funding from the NIMH. While Smith at one time had a pool of 40 clients, in 1967 it was suddenly reduced to just one: Charles Manson. Smith’s research assistant at the time, Gail Sadalla, was certain that Manson and Roger Smith had known each other previously. Tom O’Neill offers this as evidence to explain Manson’s suspiciously seamless vault from LA to San Francisco. Rather than absconding, he had been sent into parole officer Smith’s care. Once Manson arrived in the San Francisco area, Roger Smith instructed him to move to Haight-Ashbury for a healthy dose of peace and love—a strange suggestion considering his own academic conclusions regarding the relationship between narcotics and violence.

Or was it?

Manson was frequently and repeatedly arrested while serving parole under Roger Smith. Time and time again he was mysteriously freed without conviction; almost as if someone was pulling strings for him behind the scenes. The same treatment was extended to members of his Family. According to Tom O’Neill, “Once I was absorbed in the Family’s origin story, I found evidence everywhere of a curious leniency, always helped by a hand from the outside.”13

In one of many examples, Manson had decided he needed to recruit more young men into the cult. He asked female members, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Ella Jo Bailey, Stephanie Rowe, and Mary Brunner—some of whom were already on parole—to find and seduce suitable candidates. Their MO was to lure boys into an all-girl orgy featuring a buffet of narcotics. The girls did as Charlie commanded, enticing three teenage males into a sex party in Ukiah where they gave them marijuana laced with LSD. Their plans quickly went south when one of the young men, the 17-year-old son of a Mendocino County Deputy Sheriff, fled the bacchanalia for home, hallucinating wildly. Though all five women were arrested and charged with felony drug possession along with contributing to the delinquency of minors, all it took was a phone call to Roger Smith and they walked free. Law enforcement officers all over California recalled similar events.

By this time, Manson had isolated his Family at Spahn Ranch, a set for the cowboy films of old in LA’s Santa Susana Mountains, and was no longer a client of Roger Smith. Nevertheless, the two men continued to see each other—with Smith affectionately referring to him as “Charlie.



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