As my trust in Bugliosi faltered, I kept revisiting Helter Skelter, turning its pages in search of some detail that felt forced or wrong—especially where Terry Melcher was concerned. One day, a few sentences jumped out at me:
After Terry Melcher had moved out of the [Cielo Drive] residence, but before the Polanskis had moved in, Gregg Jakobson had arranged for a Dean Moorehouse to stay there for a brief period. During this time Tex Watson had visited Moorehouse at least three, and possibly as many as six, times.
Emphasis mine. Something about that offhand phrasing—“a Dean Moorehouse”—raised a red flag for me.
This was the only time Moorehouse was mentioned in the book. He had been a peripheral member of the Family. A wavering Protestant minister, insurance salesman, and married father of three, he was living in San Jose when he first encountered Manson, in 1967, when the ex-con was fresh out of federal prison and hitchhiking. Moorehouse pulled over to give him a lift, which turned into an invitation to dinner, which blossomed into a friendship of sorts. Moorehouse, who’d strayed from his ministry and was himself on probation for a forgery charge, was searching for something new and was eager to discuss spirituality; Manson was eager to ogle Moorehouse’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Ruth Ann.
Before long, Manson absconded with Ruth Ann on a trip up the California coast, prompting her mother to report her to the police as a runaway. Dean Moorehouse had left the marriage by then—he’d fallen under the spell of the sixties and grown a long white beard. By March 1968, he was in trouble with the law again, facing an arrest for contributing to the delinquency of a minor; police had found him when they raided a home in search of marijuana. Soon afterward, he was arrested again, this time for selling LSD. The legend is that Manson persuaded him to try it for the first time, after which he renounced his earthly possessions.
Moorehouse kept chasing his daughter, who’d remained with the Family; Manson had rechristened her “Ouisch.” When Moorehouse followed them to Dennis Wilson’s house in Pacific Palisades, Manson kneeled and kissed his feet, launching a charm offensive that effectively ended the conflict. Increasingly sympathetic to the Family’s philosophies, Moorehouse moved into the back cabin and lived there rent-free in exchange for maintaining the landscaping. Manson had converted a onetime Christian minister.
But when had Moorehouse taken up residence in the Cielo home? Melcher had told me he had no memory of it. Bugliosi wrote that it was after Melcher moved out, meaning in January 1969.
I found Moorehouse in the phone book and gave him a call. He was friendly, though spacey. Now seventy-nine, he was living in northern California under the name “Baba,” which Manson had given him. He’d had more than four hundred LSD trips between 1967 and 1972. “When I talk to you, I’m talking to myself,” he explained. “When you talk to me, you’re talking to yourself.”
Be that as it may, he had a sharp recall for his time with Manson, and what he told me didn’t vindicate Melcher or Bugliosi in the slightest. It was impossible that he’d moved into the Cielo house in January 1969, for one simple reason: he’d gone to prison then.
Moorehouse had been arrested on a drug charge in Ukiah, California. In the midst of his time with the Family, he had to head back north for his trial. “They convicted me in December of ’68,” he said. “I was due back there at the end of December for sentencing, and then on January 3 they hauled me off to Vacaville,” a correctional facility.
Moorehouse said he’d really lived at Cielo “off and on” throughout the summer of ’68, when Melcher lived there. “Terry was a good friend,” he explained, “and when I first met him at Dennis’s, he said, ‘If it’s okay with you I’ll send my chauffeur down one of these days and have you come up to my house.’” Melcher “took me in and showed me a bedroom and said, ‘This is your bedroom, you can stay here anytime that you want.’ So I was staying there off and on, whenever I felt like it.” He also confirmed a detail from Ed Sanders’s The Family: that Melcher had let him borrow his Jaguar for the long drive to Ukiah. “I drove the Jaguar up there with Tex Watson,” he said. Melcher “gave it to me to use on this trip and he gave me his credit card to use for gas and anything that happened to the car.”
I asked Moorehouse for written proof of his time in prison. With his permission, I got a copy of his parole record from the state of California. It showed that he entered the prison system on January 2, 1969.
So Bugliosi’s timeline was wrong, and Melcher had lied to me. I felt I had to talk to Melcher about this, though I knew it’d anger him—he might cut me off afterward. Still, I called him up and laid out the evidence as gingerly as I could. Melcher wasn’t having it. He stuck to the story as Bugliosi had told it in Helter Skelter and promptly got rid of me.
Not long after, I got a disturbing call from Rudi Altobelli, sounding more upset and angry than I’d ever heard him. He’d been in touch with Melcher for the first time in many years. Their conversations had left him feeling out of the loop. In Altobelli’s eyes, the Golden Penetrators—Jakobson, Wilson, Melcher—had always known that Manson had spent time up at the house. But they were too scared to say it on the stand. That task fell to Altobelli, who now felt he’d been pressured into talking about it under oath without understanding the full story.
Once they’d started talking again, Altobelli asked Melcher about Dean Moorehouse, with my reporting in mind. Melcher had snapped, saying he was going to call Bugliosi. “Vince was supposed to take care of all that,” he said, “and now it’s all resurfacing.”
Stephen Kay of the Los Angeles DA’s office told me to call another longtime employee there, Sandi Gibbons. She might be sympathetic to my aims. Before she worked for the DA, Gibbons had been a journalist, and her coverage of the Manson trial left her deeply skeptical of Bugliosi and his motives. She became one of several reporters who believed that Bugliosi was corrupt, arrogant, vain, even crazy; later, when he pursued elected office, she wrote a number of stories detailing his misconduct as a prosecutor.
I took Gibbons out to lunch and found her impressively forthright. Soft-spoken and direct, she was certain that Bugliosi had covered up for Terry Melcher during the trial. The two must have made some kind of deal: you testify to this and I’ll keep you out of that. She also confirmed that Bugliosi had stolen a bunch of the DA’s files for his book, knowing full well that it was illegal to remove them. It bothered her that he was always portrayed as upstanding and aboveboard—he was a snake. She could still recall the sight of a vein throbbing in his temple—if I ever saw that vein, she warned me, it meant that Bugliosi was about to blow his stack.
Once I’d earned her trust, she agreed to show me the DA’s Manson file. I could make photocopies of anything I wanted, though she would have to supervise me as I went through everything. She was under no obligation to show me any of these documents—and, though she never said it, I was under the impression that my visits weren’t exactly authorized.
Gibbons led me through the labyrinth of the DA’s office and unlocked a storage room. Long, narrow, and windowless, the room accommodated a row of cabinets with barely enough space for the two chairs that Gibbons and I carried in. I leafed through endless folders containing police reports, interview notes, investigation summaries, chronologies, photographs, rap sheets, mug shots, suspect lists—and, best of all, a half dozen or more faded legal pads of Bugliosi’s interviews with his most prized witnesses. I made notes and set aside any documents I wanted to copy—Gibbons had to clear them, but she approved everything at a glance. Several times she called my attention to folders that had nothing in them, telling me that Bugliosi or Bill Nelson had removed their contents. I spent hours in that room, returning four times in the next few weeks and several more times in the ensuing years.
On my third visit I struck gold: a long yellow legal pad with pages of notes scrawled in black ink, much of it crossed through but still legible. It was an interview of one of Bugliosi’s key witnesses, Danny DeCarlo, who testified for eight consecutive days, often under blistering cross-examination. A biker from Venice in a gang called the Straight Satans, DeCarlo began staying at the Spahn Ranch in the spring of ’69. He and his associates provided a degree of security that endeared him to Manson, who’d grown paranoid and embattled. DeCarlo’s father was in the firearms business and, although Danny was never a full-fledged member of the Family, he soon ran their arsenal, a cache of weapons that grew to include a submachine gun. In exchange, he and the other bikers got access to drugs and the Family’s girls. His testimony did a lot of heavy lifting for Bugliosi. He detailed Manson’s plan to ignite the Helter Skelter race war; he outlined the ways Manson dominated his followers; and he identified the weapons used in the murders.
In the crossed-out sections of Bugliosi’s notes, to my astonishment, DeCarlo described three visits by Terry Melcher to the Manson Family—after the murders.
I read them, reread them, and reread them again. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I took scrupulous, word-for-word notes, in case Gibbons looked too closely at the flagged pages and realized that they completely upended one of the most important cases in her office’s history. Luckily, she let me photocopy them without a second glance.
At home, I looked again. I hadn’t imagined it. In an interview on February 11, 1970, DeCarlo described Melcher’s two visits to the Spahn Ranch in late August and early September, 1969, and his third visit to the Barker Ranch—more than two hundred miles away—in mid-September.
According to Bugliosi’s notes, DeCarlo didn’t approach Melcher on any of these occasions, so he didn’t know what Melcher and Manson discussed—but he was certain, each time, that it was Melcher he saw. Bugliosi’s notes on the two visits to the Spahn Ranch read:
[DeCarlo] released 72 hours after the bust on 8-16-69. Went back to Venice for a few days & then went back to [Spahn] ranch. Week or week & a half later, went up to Barker with Tex & Bruce Davis in a flatbed truck. Manson & 4 or 5 girls left at same time in a car. Rest of family stayed at Spahn. Between time that Danny returned to the Ranch & time he left for Barker, definitely saw Melcher out at [Spahn] ranch. Heard girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher drove up in a Metro truck… by himself. Melcher stayed for 3 or 4 hours.
3 or 4 days later, saw Melcher in his same truck.
Then he writes of the third visit, which occurred in the canyon passageway to the Family’s hideouts in Death Valley:
1½ weeks later saw Melcher with Gypsy & Brenda at bottom of Golar Wash near Ballarat, sitting in a car with the girls. DeCarlo was with Sadie, Tex, Manson, Bruce & Dennis (w[itness]’s child) on foot. All of them got in Melcher’s car, everyone in the car. (Brenda had been the driver. Melcher only a passenger. Everyone called Melcher “Terry[.]”) Charlie took over the driver’s seat & drove to Ridgecrest & picked up a 1959 Buick. DeCarlo & rest then drove off leaving Melcher, Manson & Brenda in the car they had. That’s the last time W[itness] saw Melcher.
I cross-referenced this with the trial transcripts, which I’d photocopied at the California Court of Appeals. Pulling Melcher’s testimony from my filing cabinet, I saw that at the grand jury hearing in December 1969, Bugliosi had asked him whether he ever saw Manson after his May 1969 visit to the Spahn Ranch. “No, I didn’t,” Melcher replied under oath.
During the trial, Bugliosi asked him again: “After this second occasion that you went to the Spahn Ranch, which was a couple of days after May 18, 1969, did you ever see Mr. Manson thereafter?”
“No,” Melcher said—again under oath.
Next he was cross-examined by the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald: “Do you recall the last time you saw Charles Manson?”
“Yeah, just a few days after May 18… at the ranch.”
Three different times on the stand, always as a witness for Bugliosi, Melcher lied about not seeing Manson after May 1969. Next, I pulled out Danny DeCarlo’s testimony to see if Bugliosi had ever asked him about Melcher. It never happened.
This was a stunner, never before revealed. Without DeCarlo’s testimony, Bugliosi said he might never have gotten his convictions. Only Linda Kasabian, the member of the Family who testified in exchange for immunity, spent more time on the stand.
Clearly, this was information Bugliosi didn’t want before the jury. But why? Was it simply because any postmurder visits by Melcher undermined the Helter Skelter motive? Bugliosi argued that Manson chose the Cielo house to “instill fear” in Melcher, as Susan Atkins said. But if Melcher were with Manson after the murders, where was the fear? And, most important: What were these additional meetings about? Maybe Melcher knew that the Family was behind the murders but, for some reason, believed he was safe. Was this the secret Bugliosi was hiding, and, if so, to whose benefit?
As I read the DA’s file more carefully, I found that every single thing DeCarlo and Bugliosi had discussed that day was later repeated by DeCarlo on the witness stand—except the descriptions of Melcher’s visits after the murders. In his notes, Bugliosi had crossed out all of these references.
The defense should have received a copy of the DeCarlo interview. Bugliosi was legally required to turn over all his evidence to the other side.
As soon as I could, I scheduled a lunch with the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald, to see if he knew anything about this. We met at his favorite dim sum restaurant downtown, near the courthouse. Fitzgerald, an ex-boxer who was legendary in L.A. legal circles, was his usual animated self: loud, vulgar, slapping the table to make his points, already into his second martini before the first course arrived.
Wasting no time, I showed him the documents I’d copied at the DA’s, trying not to sway his reaction. His mouth dropped open. “This is Vince Bugliosi’s handwriting,” he said. “I never saw this before! Obviously [they] didn’t want to put on this evidence.” Fitzgerald and the defense team had paid a lot of attention to DeCarlo, thinking he might be an asset to them. “He was not a member of the Family, had a good relationship with truth, lived at the ranch, was an outsider—pretty straightforward guy in most ways, credible. I liked him. He didn’t embellish anything, told it the way it was.”
That made this document all the more legitimate, in Fitzgerald’s eyes, and more sensational. “I’m very shocked.” He argued that Bugliosi, who was “extremely deceitful” and “the robot he claimed his defendants were,” had written “a script for the entire trial,” getting witnesses to agree to his narrative in advance.
I was relieved by Fitzgerald’s astonishment—it convinced me that I wasn’t overreacting here. Wanting to eliminate any possible doubt, I tried for months to find Danny DeCarlo himself, but he seemed to have vanished. I did eventually track down a girlfriend of his, who told me that she’d gotten my interview request to him—he lived mainly in Mexico these days, she said. I never heard back from him.
I felt it was becoming nearly impossible to deny that Bugliosi had manipulated some of his witnesses—or that he’d conspired with at least two of his principals to conceal the facts of the case and shore up his motive. If Melcher and DeCarlo were tainted—and if Melcher had committed outright perjury, suborned by Bugliosi—then the veracity of the prosecutor’s entire case, including the extraordinary hippie/race-war motive that made him a bestselling author, was called into question.
As one of the biggest bands in the world, the Beach Boys employed a retinue of managers, roadies, engineers, and gofers—I wondered if any of them had any thoughts on Wilson and Melcher, or if they could fill in some blanks for me. (The band’s surviving members had all declined to speak to me.) I got in touch with John Parks, who’d been the band’s tour manager when Manson and the Family lived at Wilson’s place. He recalled that Melcher had not only met Manson but recorded him, too.
“Terry recorded him while we were on a fairly long tour,” Parks told me. That was something else Melcher had expressly denied on the stand, something hidden for all these decades. Bugliosi repeated it in his closing statement: “He did not record Manson.”
When Melcher moved to end his professional relationship with Manson, things took a dark turn. As Parks remembered it, Manson began calling Melcher and unloading on him, making death threats against him “to everybody he saw”; he was “yelling about it and stuff.” Parks could certainly understand, he said, how those threats could’ve influenced Melcher’s decision to move out of the Cielo house so suddenly.
After the murders, I asked, did Parks or any of his colleagues suspect Manson? Of course, he said. “I knew that Terry had kind of fired Charlie and stopped recording him, so my first thought was that Charlie had made a mistake and actually got Sharon Tate instead of Terry.” One of Manson’s girls, he explained, had already told him that the Family had murdered one of the caretakers at the Spahn Ranch—Donald “Shorty” Shea, whose body wasn’t found until 1977.
“You could look at these folks and see that they were totally drugged out,” Parks said. “After one of the girls told me that they killed the caretaker, then it got real serious for me.” Everyone in their scene suspected Manson right away, he said, even though it took the LAPD nearly four months to bring him to justice. “I have no idea why they didn’t arrest him right away because to me it was pretty obvious.” The Hollywood community knew that the Beach Boys had been wrapped up in Manson’s world, and it turned them into pariahs, for a time; nightclubs where they’d once been welcomed were suddenly turning them away. “We couldn’t go out because people didn’t want us at their place,” Parks said.
“So you’re saying a huge community of people knew before the world did that Charles Manson committed these murders?”
“Yeah.”
Parks went on to say something even more dizzying: he was positive that the FBI had sent agents to the Beach Boys’ office soon after the murders. “They were monitoring our phones, because they thought there was some connection with those guys,” he said. “They were sitting in my office picking up my telephone… I’m sure they had the phones tapped, but they weren’t sharing information with us.” He told the FBI about Manson “early on,” but they didn’t seem to act on his tip. “I didn’t know why they weren’t doing anything, and everybody else was just trying to stay out of the situation. For the Beach Boys, we didn’t want that kind of publicity. And neither did anybody else.”
Steve Despar, the Beach Boys’ recording engineer, remembered the ordeal that Manson had put him through during the recording sessions, when he’d show up with “about twelve girls, many underage, quiet, in a stupor.” The group smelled so foul that the studio’s management, at the behest of Brian Wilson’s wife, soon “installed a sanitary bathroom seat.” In the control room, Manson, reeking, would “pull out a knife and clean his fingernails, wave it around and gesture.” After three sessions, Despar was fed up. He called the Beach Boys manager and said, “I refuse to be alone with him. The guy is psychotic and scares the hell out of me.” Despar emphasized, “He was after Melcher… Melcher was not out of the picture at this point. He was part of the project. When I was recording Charles Manson, it was for Dennis and Terry Melcher.”
Melcher would never admit that, and I didn’t want to talk to him again until I’d done my due diligence. Fortunately, in the archives of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office (LASO), I soon stumbled on further proof that Melcher had visited Manson after the murders.
LASO had records of an interview with Paul Watkins, another key member of the Family who’d testified against Manson. He, too, saw Melcher at the Spahn Ranch, around the same time as Danny DeCarlo had—the first week of September 1969. What he told the unnamed interviewer was shocking to me:
Melcher was on acid. Was on his knees. Asked Manson to forgive him. Terry Melcher failed to keep an appointment. Called him a pig. They are all little piggies. Helter Skelter meant for everyone to die. Charlie gave Gregg [Jakobson] a 45 slug and said give Dennis [Wilson] this and tell him I have another one for him.
This was even more explosive than the files from the DA, I realized. Not only did it suggest that Melcher had some bizarre debt to Manson—it opened up Watkins to accusations of perjury. Just like DeCarlo, Watkins had omitted these details from his testimony. He made no mention of having seen Melcher at the Spahn Ranch in early September 1969—much less having seen him on acid, begging for forgiveness.
As much as the Watkins interview buttressed my case for a cover-up, it brought a host of new questions. Why did Melcher need Manson’s forgiveness? Did he know that it was he who was supposed to die that night—had Manson instilled much more fear in him than anyone had ever known? And what had compelled Bugliosi to believe that he could hide the true extent of their relationship? I wondered how many other stories like this had been kept secret. Now I felt I had a stronger shot at grabbing Melcher’s attention, maybe even at getting him to concede that he’d lied.
First, though, I had to contend with Bugliosi. As the summer faded into autumn in the first year of my reporting, I had a hunch that Vince was keeping close tabs on me, even monitoring my progress, in a way. Altobelli had suggested that Vince was always asking about me, trying to undermine my credibility; he thought I was only masquerading as a magazine journalist. When I heard about Melcher’s puzzling remark—“Vince was supposed to take care of all that”—I’d made a conscious decision to distance myself from Bugliosi. Although we’d once spoken on an almost weekly basis, I hadn’t been in touch with him since June. One day in October I came home to find that he’d left a message on my machine. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said, sounding unusually serious. This was it, I thought. I set up my tape recorder and called him back.
“How you doing, buddy?” he answered, sounding manic. “Listen, are you still working on this thing?” Then he added: “Someone, I don’t remember who, called me… If there’s something about my handling of the case—anything at all—that you had a question about, I would appreciate if you would call me to get my view on it… I think I did a fairly good job, and I can’t think of things that I would do differently. But for a layperson, they may look at it and say, He should not have done this, this is improper or what have you—and I’d like to at least be heard.”
I told him I would absolutely give him a chance to be heard, and that I did, in fact, have some questions—but I didn’t have them ready yet.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, call me, because there may be a justification or reason why I did something that, as a layperson, you would not know.”
Now I was positive that he had some notion of what I’d been researching, whom I’d been talking to. I mentioned that I’d made halting progress on the piece, which was still expected for Premiere, even if it was running behind schedule. The Melcher angle, I said—wondering if he’d take the bait—had been so impossible to get.
“Were you ever able to get in touch with Terry?” he asked.
I said I was.
“Oh, you have talked to him? You got him on the phone?” Vince’s surprise was evident, but I couldn’t tell if it was feigned or not. I felt like he was hoping to keep me talking, to feel out my progress. I got off the phone as soon as I could.
I didn’t hear from him again until December, just a few days before Christmas, when he left a phone message asking for my address. He said he wanted to send me a CD of some songs by Manson that “a guy playing Manson in a movie” had given him. When I didn’t return the call, he left another message the next day to make sure I understood that the music was “very rare and not otherwise available.” I didn’t return that call, either, but the same night I got a call from Altobelli, who said that Vince had called him twice that day “wanting to know what you’re doing.” Their second conversation ended in “a shouting match,” Altobelli said, after he started asking Bugliosi about some of the information I’d shared over the previous months.
That was enough for me. I wouldn’t speak to Vince again for seven years.
When my piece for Premiere was more than a year late, I knew I had to talk to Melcher again, and to put my full weight on him. I wanted this conversation to bring my reporting to a close. Then I could file my piece, finally.
Months of constant interviewing had honed my strategy. If I could get someone on the phone in a talkative mood, I’d suggest an in-person meeting that same day, which would minimize the chance that they’d get cold feet. I’d be ready to go at a moment’s notice: showered and dressed, with notes, questions, documents, and tape recorders in my bag by the door. Such was the case on the day I phoned Melcher—July 3, 2000. Surprisingly, he picked up; even more surprisingly, I caught him in a lively frame of mind; most surprising of all, he said he’d meet me on the roof of his apartment building in fifteen minutes.
I bolted out the door and drove over to his high-rise on Ocean Avenue, in Santa Monica, dwelling all the while on his choice of venue: his rooftop? I imagined some kind of bleak, desolate place, the sun beating down on us as ventilation fans whirred. Instead, I bounded into his lobby and took the elevator up to find a rooftop lounge with a bar, a pool, and a kingly view of the Santa Monica Bay.
Melcher lived in one of the penthouse suites, and there he was, sitting on a couch with a drink in his hand. Though it was a gorgeous day and anyone in these luxury suites could access the roof lounge, we were alone up there. He was wearing a gold shirt and aviator glasses that he didn’t take off until midway through our conversation. When I arrived, he disappeared into his kitchen to leave his drink there. I got the sense it wasn’t the first he’d had.
Considering how much time and energy I’d devoted to Melcher, I couldn’t believe I’d never laid eyes on him before. He had a pronounced abdomen but skinny legs. His long, wispy, blond-gray hair fell over his ears and across his forehead. His face was swollen and wet, with high cheekbones; his eyes, when the sunglasses came off, were puffy, and he stared at me unsmilingly. Around the mouth and chin, he resembled his mother, Doris Day. And he spoke in a kind of high-pitched, halting half-whisper.
We sat in the shade, where I took my papers out and told him I had reason to believe he’d visited the Spahn and Barker Ranches after the murders, and had spent time with Manson.
“The only reason I know the Barker Ranch name is because that’s where they arrested them and caught all those people,” he said. “Isn’t that right? Someplace out in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”
“Dennis and Gregg had been there,” I said.
“Well, I hadn’t. I had no idea where the Barker Ranch was. None.”
I started to read from Bugliosi’s interview with Danny DeCarlo, the one I’d gotten from the DA’s office. “‘Definitely saw Melcher out at ranch. Heard girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher drove up in a Metro truck similar to a bread or milk truck…’”
“It was actually a Mercedes Benz convertible.”
“This is after the murders,” I emphasized. “Between August 16 and the second week of September. Do you recall that?” I watched the frustration come over him as I explained.
“Look,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Obviously this is something that continues to haunt me whether I’d like it to or not, and I’m not exactly like a convicted felon running around doing bad things. But the only guy to talk to and ask questions about for me is Bugliosi. Vince Bugliosi knows everything that I had to do with this, everything!”
“I wanted to hear it from you first before I went to him,” I said.
“Well, you know, if you want to fuck with us and get something from him and something from me, you can do that, too, in which case I’ll put four law firms on Premiere magazine.”
I was floored. We’d barely begun, and already he was threatening to sue. The threats, as I was beginning to understand by then, were almost always a good thing. They didn’t happen unless you were onto something. “I just want the truth, Terry,” I said. “Can I just finish reading from this?”
“You certainly may, Tom. I have never misrepresented once what happened in this situation. I had nothing to do with this situation other than the fact that I was a great big, famous record producer at the time, period.”
Pressing ahead, I pulled out the LASO files, and soon reached the most damning lines: “Melcher was on acid, on his knees.”
“Not true!” he shouted. “Not real! Hey, I was a Columbia Records producer! I was the biggest Columbia Records producer on the West Coast! I had the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, all right? I was selling tonnage of product. I was simply looking at acts… I went out there to the Spahn Ranch, met them, I am awfully goddamned lucky to have gotten out of there alive.” He adamantly refuted the idea that he’d been to the Spahn Ranch more than the two times he’d testified to at trial, both in May 1969.
“Rudi [Altobelli] is one of my sources,” I said. “He called you and you said, ‘Vince was supposed to take care of all that and now it’s all resurfacing.’”
“No, I never told Rudi that… I like Rudi, we were friends, I hope there’s no rancor.” He scoffed and crossed his arms. “And Christ, what are you doing a thing like this for?”
“I’m just trying to get the truth about this story, and when I see this stuff from the DA’s files and combined with that comment from Rudi, which implies that Vince protected you—”
“Vince never protected me. Vince never protected anybody. Rudi was the guy—” But he cut himself off and sighed. “I got to use the men’s room,” he said, walking back toward his place.
He came back having collected himself. “I’m going to digress for a while,” he said, removing his sunglasses. “First of all, if you want my record as it relates to this, it is so squeaky clean—all I did was audition people for Columbia Records. Some of them I signed. Some of them I didn’t sign. I never once spent one second with these girls, although at one point, when they were in jail, like twenty-five of them said that I was the father of all their children, and that put me in bed for about three weeks. I mean, they were so ugly. To get the DA’s department off my ass in that one, I took Michelle Phillips”—his girlfriend at the time, during the trial—“down to headquarters and I said, ‘This is my girlfriend, do you think I’d want to be with any of these…’” He gestured, implying Manson’s “ugly” girls. “And they said, probably not.”
I reminded him of what Altobelli had said: “On the stand, he said that you wanted him to manage Manson.”
“That is total insanity… This is really my book, okay?… You know what? If I’m going to do this with you, then we should write this book together.” It was almost a bargaining chip, an under-the-table deal. I thought Melcher wanted me to read between the lines—why say all these nasty things about me in a silly little magazine piece when I can cut you in on the earnings from my book? He proposed that I coauthor his memoirs. People had been begging him for years to write a book. He was the “only American to produce the Beatles!” He seemed to suggest that I’d be a fool not to jump at his offer, even though I was the same writer who believed he’d been lying about one of the most transformative events of his life.
“I need to do this story, and I need the truth,” I said. “You were a powerful guy—”
“Was? Am.” He asked, “Is your interest in this purely journalistic or is it just to fuck someone over?”
I stressed, again, that I had no desire to smear him; I just wanted to know why these files told such a strikingly different story from the one Bugliosi had pursued.
“Dennis Wilson was the only one that really knew what was going on,” Melcher said. “He’s talked about it in various ways that sounds like he knew all about it, he was there.” Melcher seemed put upon by the effort of discussing Manson, as if it were a minor nuisance that he’d long ago put behind him. “After a while you get used to it, it’s a terrible thing to say, but you kind of get used to it.” And then, once more, he acted like he was ready to cut a deal. “So what’s the best thing that you and I can do about it?”
The interview suddenly had the air of a tense negotiation. “There has to be an explanation for this,” I said, turning the conversation back to the papers from the DA and LASO. “Why was this in the files? How was it suppressed, why? If they were lying”—DeCarlo and Watkins, I meant—“how did they testify to other significant factors?”
“I have no idea where that second ranch is,” Melcher said. “I have no idea in the world! It could be in Kuwait.” He rose to get a bottle of white wine, half-full, and poured himself a drink. “You’re welcome to share that, by the way,” he said. He’d brought only one glass.
“If it is true that you were at the ranch after the murders, it undermines the entire Helter Skelter motive for the prosecution,” I said.
“I’m curious why you would want to talk to me about this,” he said, almost muttering: “out to crucify me…”
“Because nobody’s ever had this information that I have, about you at the ranch afterward.”
At that point, Melcher dropped his lawyer’s name. “Joe Lavely. Do you know who he is? He can shut down everything. Networks, magazines. Anything.” He asked me to fax him a draft of my story. I told him I couldn’t do that.
Melcher leaned forward. “You know I like you,” he said, looking me in the eye. “If I didn’t like you, I’d take your briefcase and throw it off the balcony. Okay? I happen to like you, so I hope you’ll be fair.”
“That sounds like a threat,” I said. “But I will be fair with you.”
“That’s not a threat, it’s the truth.”
It was the truth, of course, that Melcher had the means to follow through. He could try to sue me or Premiere. He could leap up and toss my papers—all photocopies—off his rooftop. But I wondered what he would really do. As unnerving as it was to sit across from him, getting no admissions from him whatsoever, I stayed calm by wondering what form his antagonism could possibly take, considering I was confident I had solid reporting on him.
“I know you have money, resources, powerful lawyers,” I said, aware that the interview was next to over. “But that’s not going to stop me from writing my story, and there is no way you can shut it down with all of that, because it is the truth, and you can’t shut down the truth, Terry.”
And soon I was in the elevator and on the ground again, looking up at his building in the sun. I felt the mix of exhilaration and frustration that often followed my biggest interviews, when I felt I’d made headway in some unpredictable direction. No, I hadn’t cracked Melcher, but I had his bizarre behavior to report, his threats, his offer that I coauthor his life story, and, perhaps most important, the first on-the-record answers about Charles Manson he’d given since 1974. What I still didn’t know was when, or how, all of this was going to end.
I never saw or spoke to Melcher again. He died in 2004, at age sixty-two, of cancer. To my knowledge, he never gave another interview about Manson or wrote his memoirs.
His death foreclosed the possibility of learning so much about the Family: about their true motivations for the murders, their ties to the Hollywood elite, and their ability to go undiscovered for so many months after their grisly crimes. I remain convinced that Melcher had more of the answers than he let on, and that he cast himself as a bit player in Manson’s world when his role was much larger. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain the discrepancies in his story to my satisfaction.
After my confrontation with him that day, I turned my attention elsewhere—though even from a remove, Melcher and his cohort continued to pop up in my reporting. And because of how tantalizingly close I felt I’d been to unearthing something, I couldn’t stop from ruminating on some of the questions I’d had about him. Why had he moved out of 10050 Cielo Drive? Did he ever record Manson? What was his true relationship with Tex Watson and Dean Moorehouse? Most of all, was it possible he could have prevented the murders at the house through some kind of intervention with Manson, or by warning the victims—or just by calling the police?
With Melcher and Dennis Wilson both deceased, you might be wondering: Why not get some answers from that third and final Golden Penetrator, Gregg Jakobson? I did end up finding him. Actually, we spoke well before I ever got to Melcher, in the first months of my reporting—before I knew my way around the story well enough to push back on some of his claims.
In a sense, Jakobson is more mysterious than Melcher or Wilson. Unlike those two, he didn’t come from privilege. An orphan, he was adopted by the chief of police in St. Paul, Minnesota; when he was twelve, his adoptive father died, and he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he was soon rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of celebrities. He parlayed these connections into a career on the periphery of Hollywood, taking gigs as a stuntman, an actor, and a talent scout, and racking up a few arrests along the way. But it was his past that attracted Manson to him. As an orphan, Jakobson held a special place in the Family’s mythology. Manson loathed the influence of parents, and Jakobson, despite his adopted family, was held up as a parentless icon. “They used to call me an angel,” Jakobson told me, “because I came into the world without parents.”
Dennis Wilson’s biographer John Stebbins believed Jakobson “testified to protect Wilson from having to do the same.” Wilson gave Jakobson cowriting credits—and therefore a steady stream of royalties—on many of his songs, even though Jakobson “had no idea what he was doing” in the studio, where it seemed he “didn’t know a guitar string from a piano key.”
In 1999, Jakobson wanted one hundred bucks an hour to talk to me. When I made it clear that I wouldn’t pay him, he claimed that the passage of thirty years had fogged up his memory. Jakobson contradicted himself with nonchalance. Consider the theft of the green spyglass, for instance. This was a huge point in the trial: Jakobson testified that Manson had called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass” at his new address in Malibu. When Jakobson said yes, Manson responded, “He doesn’t anymore.” This proved that Manson knew that Melcher had moved out of the Cielo house. And yet, speaking to me, Jakobson dismissed the whole episode. “I don’t know how much of that is legend and how much of it is true,” he said about something he’d testified to under oath. “I think there was a good chance that [Manson] didn’t know that Melcher had even moved.” I’ve found dozens of discrepancies between his statements on the stand and his statements to me.
Sometimes, sorting through old news items, I’ll chance upon something that reminds me of how much remains unsaid here. I found a November 1970 bulletin from the Associated Press, headlined, “Defendant in Tate Trial Well Liked.” It noted the curious affection that Melcher and Jakobson held for the man who’d brought so much scrutiny on them. “Jakobson frequently smiled at Manson,” the report noted, “who, upon leaving the courtroom one day, said to Jakobson, ‘Come see me.’” What are we supposed to make of that friendliness, and of the insider knowledge it augurs? Why would Manson have wanted to commune with someone who’d just testified against him in a case that carried the death penalty? Manson’s lawyer Irving Kanarek chose not to cross-examine Terry Melcher. He infuriated the judge by saying that Manson and Melcher were “still good friends,” and that he wanted to “thank Mr. Melcher for his presence”—comments that earned him admonishment from the court, and were ordered stricken from the record.
Jakobson told me that he never really took Manson all that seriously. “There was so much bullshit,” he said. “I never tried to make sense out of it. I didn’t care.” He left open the possibility that there’d been some scheming to make the story more presentable at trial. “I wonder if Bugliosi was doing Melcher a favor,” he said to me, “or there was some reciprocity there… honest to God, I have no knowledge of it.” He was a little more willing to talk about Melcher’s attraction to the girls in the Family. “He might have been carrying on with one of the girls,” he told me, though Melcher had fiercely denied exactly that. “I had a soft spot for little Ruth Ann Moorehouse. He might have, too. She was the little gem of the group. Little sweet fifteen, sixteen.” Likewise, Jeff Guinn’s 2013 book Manson includes several references to Melcher’s having sex with Ruth Ann Moorehouse, all sourced to Jakobson.
Melcher always policed his image in regards to Manson, especially when others implied or wrote outright that he’d slept with the girls. Nothing made him more litigious. And he often subjected writers to the same kinds of legal threats he’d made to me. Barney Hoskyns, the author of the aforementioned Waiting for the Sun, told me that Melcher’s lawyers had ordered his publisher to pulp all existing copies of the first edition, and to delete “all and any references to Terry Melcher in connection with ‘Manson’s girls’ from any future editions.” His publisher complied.
But the most glaring example of Melcher’s interventions came from Stephen Kay, the attorney in the Los Angeles DA’s office who’d helped Bugliosi prosecute the case. He told me that Melcher’s lawyer approached him in the mid-1990s, requesting that he sign an official document certifying that Melcher’s connections with the Family didn’t extend beyond his three occasions in Manson’s presence: once at Wilson’s house, twice at the Spahn Ranch. Kay signed it, though he said he hadn’t retained a copy. At the time, he hadn’t seen the documents I had detailing Melcher’s relationship with the Family.
One of the most bewildering parts of reporting on a case like this is figuring out how much weight to give your findings. I spent years wondering if I was crazy to think that Terry Melcher was so important, indicative of some hollowness in Bugliosi’s motive.
Years later, in 2005, it was Kay who gave me a semblance of vindication. I met with him again and showed him the notes I’d found in Bugliosi’s hand. By that point, my obsession with the case had become a full-blown mania: my reporting had taken over my entire life, and I often wondered if there would be any end to it, any form of closure or consequence. I can still remember sitting in Kay’s Compton office and watching him shake his head as he looked over my photocopies.
“I do not believe that Terry Melcher was at the Spahn Ranch after the murders. I just don’t believe that,” he said. “If he was there at the Spahn Ranch, Manson would have harmed him, because Manson was very upset.”
But with the sheaf of papers in front of him, and the handwriting undeniably belonging to Bugliosi, Kay slumped in his chair. “I am shocked,” he said. “I am just shocked.” He was planning his retirement then, having boasted that he was leaving office “sixty and zero”: sixty court appearances opposite Family members, without a single one of them earning parole. With the evidence of Bugliosi’s corruption in his hands, Kay said, “This throws a different light on everything… I just don’t know what to believe now.” He went on: “This is egregious conduct if this happened. All of this should have been turned over to the defense.”
The fact that Paul Watkins and Danny DeCarlo told similar stories seemed to indicate that both men were telling the truth, impeaching Melcher’s testimony and, with it, much of the basis for the Helter Skelter motive. Looking at the heavy lines that Vince had drawn through the most damning parts of the interviews, Kay said, “I just don’t understand the cross-outs… it just doesn’t make any sense.”
His voice trailing off, he asked the question I’d so often asked myself. “If Vince was covering this stuff up,” he said, “if he changed this, what else did he change?”
I asked Kay whether this evidence would be enough to overturn the verdicts against Manson and the Family. Yes, he conceded—it could get them new trials, and it would mean big trouble for Bugliosi. If he were found guilty of suborning perjury, he would technically be eligible for the death penalty, since that was the maximum possible sentence in the Manson case.
I wasn’t on some crusade to prove Manson innocent, or to impugn Bugliosi’s name. I just wanted to find out what really happened. Kay, sitting across from me that day, seemed to be struggling with the same thing. Neither of us could grasp why Bugliosi had covered this up, or how Melcher and his friends had, for so many years, consigned the truth to the realm of rumor and hearsay.
I felt a familiar conflict welling up inside me. Part of me was convinced that if I kept pushing, if I were more tenacious and vigilant and hard-nosed than ever before, I could crack this case and figure it all out. The other part of me feared that I was too late. Powerful interests had aligned themselves against the truth.