Fairly early in my reporting, I knew I could have wrapped up my Premiere story if I really wanted to. I had the guts of a great piece, even if it was too late for the milestone thirtieth anniversary of the murders. I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence. The thrust of my story was still mired in ambiguity. I worried that my reporting could be too easily dismissed, Lee Baca–style, as “Hollywood fluff.”
So I kept going, although in many ways I’ve come to regret it. A few of my interviews were especially tormenting—the ones that convinced me I couldn’t call it quits yet. I thought of Little Joe, Jay Sebring’s barber, who’d received an elliptical phone call from a mobster after the murders. And of the first suspects, Charles Tacot and Billy Doyle, who claimed to have intelligence connections. And of Preston Guillory, who alleged that police allowed Manson to remain free because they knew he planned to attack the Black Panthers. I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement or was even an informant. It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was. But this is where the reporting took me.
I started reading up on the use of informants. Perusing old editions of the two major Los Angeles papers of the era, the Times and the Herald Examiner, I learned that in the midsixties both the LAPD and LASO had infiltrated groups they considered a threat to the status quo: antiwar leftists, the Black Panther party, and other black militant groups like the US Organization, a fierce rival of the Panthers in Los Angeles. Posing as leftists, agents provocateurs would gain the trust of these groups from the inside, provoking them to commit crimes or do violence against rivals.
Even from a distance, this line of inquiry gave me pause. I’d never been interested in conspiracies. I wasn’t one to speculate about a second shooter in JFK’s assassination or faking the moon landing. For the first time, though, I saw the appeal of trafficking in murky secrets—it was an attractive option, as long as people believed you. If I found the plot, I could change the way people understood one of the seminal crimes, and criminals, of the twentieth century. If I got it wrong, or took too much on faith, I’d become someone who made people glaze over at parties, politely excusing themselves as I droned on about “the big picture.”
Even if it made me look crazy, I wanted to see whether the informant theory held water: if Manson had any credible connections to the government or law enforcement, and if I could link him to the police infiltrations of leftist groups I’d read about. Then, as if I’d conjured him from thin air, someone emerged who fit into the puzzle. He seemed to have wandered into Southern California from the pages of a spy novel, and not a very well written one, at that. His name was Reeve Whitson, and his intersections with the Manson investigation suggested a dimension to the Tate–LaBianca murders that had been wiped from the official record.
It started with Shahrokh Hatami, Sharon Tate’s friend and personal photographer. When I spoke with Hatami over the phone in 1999, he’d never given an interview about the murders. Sorting through his memories, he recalled something he’d never been able to explain.
At seven in the morning on August 9, 1969, Hatami got a frantic phone call from a friend. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he listened as the caller delivered the terrible news: Sharon Tate and four others had been murdered in her home on Cielo Drive. Afterward, in numb terror, he and his girlfriend switched on the radio and listened all morning for further reports. They had to wait a while. As Hatami later learned, that call came ninety minutes before the Polanskis’ maid had arrived at the house, discovered the bodies, and ran screaming to the neighbors, who called the police. Unwittingly, Hatami had become one of the first people in the world to hear about the murders—all because of his friend.
That “friend” was Reeve Whitson, whom Hatami characterized as “a mystery man”—a phrase I’d hear a lot as I researched him in earnest. A close friend of Tate and Polanski, Whitson had a talent for discretion. When people remembered him at all, he was usually on the periphery, coming and going, his purpose unknown, his motives inscrutable.
If Whitson’s involvement had been limited to that early phone call, I don’t know whether I’d have given him a second thought. It seemed entirely possible that Hatami had gotten the time wrong. To get some sense of Whitson’s role in the case, I looked his name up in the trial transcript. It appeared four times, all during Hatami’s testimony. It was Whitson, he confirmed on the stand, who brought him to Bugliosi during the investigation. And yet Whitson never appeared in Helter Skelter, which gave an otherwise detailed account of Hatami’s story.
As well it should. Hatami’s testimony was a dramatic high point. Before the packed courtroom, he explained that five months before the murders, he’d been visiting Sharon Tate when he noticed someone on the property. Hustling toward the front door, he found short, scraggly Manson standing there. Manson asked if Terry Melcher was around. Hatami, wanting to be rid of him, sent Manson around back. He knew that Rudi Altobelli lived in the guesthouse and could tell him where to find Melcher.
Hatami’s story proved that Manson knew where the house on Cielo Drive was, and how to get there. And it added some tragic foreshadowing: since Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski were in the room behind Hatami, this would be the one and only time Manson laid eyes on his future victims.
The problem, Hatami revealed to me, was that he’d never been confident that it was Manson he saw that day. His uncertainty meant nothing to Bugliosi and Reeve Whitson, who coerced his testimony anyway. “The circumstances I was put through to become a witness,” Hatami said, “I didn’t like at all.” Whitson told him, “‘Hatami, you saw that guy, Altobelli said so, we need another person to corroborate it.’” (Presumably, Bugliosi felt he needed two accounts of Manson’s visit to the house that day; it was such an important part of tying Manson to the murder scene.)
Hatami demurred, and Whitson turned the screws, effectively threatening him with deportation—he said he’d ensure that Hatami, an Iranian without U.S. citizenship, wouldn’t be able to get another visa. If he wanted to stay in America, all he had to do was say he’d seen Manson that day at Tate’s house. Not long after, Whitson brought Hatami to his car and showed him his gun. Although Hatami didn’t know Whitson too well, he took the threat seriously—he believed that Whitson really had the means to deport him.
“I was framed by Mr. Whitson,” Hatami told me. “I was never sure it happened that way. I had to save my ass.” Bugliosi and I were still speaking then, so I asked him if he knew Whitson at all. He didn’t recall the name, he claimed. Hatami thought that was “rubbish.” “Bugliosi knows him very well,” he said. “I could not have been a witness without Reeve.”
He was right. Because the defense suspected that Bugliosi and Whitson had, indeed, coerced Hatami’s story, they called on Bugliosi to explain himself at the trial. Under oath, but out of the presence of the jury, Bugliosi tried to answer for the fact that he’d interviewed Hatami without a tape recorder or a stenographer. Who was in the room when Hatami talked? “Just Reeve Whitson, myself, and Mr. Hatami,” Bugliosi replied. The judge decided that Hatami couldn’t testify to having seen Manson. The jury heard only that he was at the house when a man came to the door, and that he sent the man to the guesthouse.
But of course Bugliosi had forgotten that he’d supplied Whitson’s name under oath. Whitson wanted it that way. He served his purpose and then disappeared, Hatami said, like “a piece in a chess game.”
If Whitson was a chess piece, who was moving him around? He’d died in 1994, so I couldn’t ask him. Hatami gave me the names of people who might’ve known him. Almost invariably they told me the same thing: that Whitson had been an undercover agent of some kind. Some said he was in the FBI, others the Secret Service. The rough consensus, though, was that he was part of the CIA, or an offshoot special-operations group connected to it.
It seemed absurd, the first time I heard it: an undercover agent wrangling witnesses for the Manson trial. It seemed absurd the second and third times, too. But then I kept hearing it, dozens of times—Reeve Whitson belonged to an intelligence agency. As I talked to his confidants, a portrait emerged. Whitson had been serious, secretive, compartmentalized. He lived “about eight lives simultaneously,” as one friend put it. He had eccentric habits and an eidetic memory. What he did with that memory, and whom he did it for, remained the subject of feverish speculation.
Bill Sharman, a former NBA player and general manager of the Lakers, had known Whitson since 1980. He recalled his friend’s “photographic mind.” Sharman met me with his wife, Joyce. Both believed Whitson was connected to the Manson case. “He said he worked for the CIA… He told us he was involved in the investigation, but gave us no details,” Joyce said. “Reeve would tell us the most preposterous things and eventually we’d find out that they were true… we learned to start believing him. We loved him very much, but he was always a mystery to us.”
That word cropped up whenever I asked anyone about Reeve. Even those who’d known him well described him as a complete enigma, with a penchant for telling unbelievable stories that turned out to be true. Another friend, Frank Rosenfelt, the former president and chief executive of MGM, who’d known Whitson since ’75, called him “the strangest guy in the world.”
“He didn’t lie,” Rosenfelt told me. “He did not put himself in a position where he told you something and you could disprove it.” He was confident that Whitson “had some intel connection, no doubt about it.” Rosenfelt was one of a few people who remarked on Whitson’s odd tendency to call from pay phones. He “would call me for hours… I always wondered, who the hell is paying the bills? And always from a phone booth on the street!” And “Reeve knew a lot about the Manson situation,” Rosenfelt said. “He indicated that if they had listened to him that a lot of people may have not been killed. He was heavily involved.”
“If who had listened to him?” I asked.
“I think he meant whoever was looking into it. The federal people, law enforcement people. He implied he gave a lot of suggestions, he was involved and they didn’t listen to him… He was bitter about it.”
That implied Whitson had some advance knowledge of the Family’s plans. I wrote it off as a faulty memory until I heard it again. Richard and Rita Edlund, who met Whitson through Rosenfelt, described a “very cryptic” figure who took pains to avoid detection. “I knew he helped in the Manson investigation,” Richard, a special-effects cinematographer, said. “Reeve was among those, if not the one, who broke the Tate case.” But, like the others I’d spoken to, Richard couldn’t offer too many specifics, only beguiling memories: “He operated in the CIA—I believe he was on their payroll… Reeve was the kind of guy who, because of his background, he still would turn the inside light of his car out, so when he opened his door the light wouldn’t go on. Because he had it that you never know who’s looking.” He “used his thumbnail to tear the top-right-hand corner of every piece of paper he handled, to mark it. Can’t shake old ways, he used to say.”
With his “gift of gab,” Whitson had “anything but a military bearing.” A man who couldn’t be stereotyped, he “was infiltrating the town in his incredibly charming way. He was friends with Jay Sebring and Polanski was a buddy of his, and the Beach Boys—and he met Manson through all this.”
“Before the murders?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah!” Their encounter had come through Dennis Wilson, Edlund recalled, in the period when Manson was trying to break into the music business through the Beach Boys. “Reeve was the kind of guy who would meet everybody. He would create the infrastructure of the town in his mind—there was hardly anybody that he didn’t know.”
The likeliest story, I’d thought, was that Whitson was some kind of con man, or at least a slick liar—and that Shahrokh Hatami had simply misremembered or exaggerated the incidents culminating in his testimony. But Whitson’s friends had me more and more convinced that he’d been involved with Manson. Maybe the most compelling evidence came from Neil Cummings, a lawyer who’d known Whitson since ’84. Several people had told me he was among Reeve’s closest confidants, so I took him to lunch. I hadn’t told him about Hatami’s claim—that Whitson had called him before the bodies were even identified—but he corroborated it independently.
According to Cummings, Whitson was in a top-secret arm of the CIA, even more secretive than most of the agency. He talked a lot about his training in killing people, implying that he’d done it at least a few times. And when it came to Manson, he “was closer to it than anybody,” Cummings avowed:
He was actively involved with some sort of investigation when it happened. He worked closely with a law enforcement person and talked quite a bit about events leading up to the murders, but I don’t remember what they were. He had regrets for not stopping them, for doing something about it.
He had a reason to believe something weird was about to happen at the [Tate] house. He might have been there when it happened, right before or after—the regret was maybe that he wasn’t there when it happened. He told me he was there after the murders, but before the police got there. He said there were screw-ups before and after. I believe he said he knew who did it, and it took him a long time to lead police to who did it.
Whitson had the Tate house under surveillance, Cummings added, which is how he knew something was going to happen. On the night of the murders, he’d been there and left. As outlandish as it sounded, Cummings was confident about all of this. “He knew more than anyone else.”
I was flummoxed. For a year, I’d been hearing a rumor from people inside and outside the case: that Manson had visited the Cielo house after the murders, that he’d gone back with someone unknown to rearrange the scene. This would’ve accounted for discrepancies in the positions of the bodies: the killers left them one way, and the police found them in another. There were pools of Tate’s and Sebring’s blood on the front porch, splatters on the walkway and the bushes. But according to the killers, neither Tate nor Sebring had ever left the living room, where they died. The coroner described blood smears on Tate’s body, as if she’d been dragged—again, never mentioned by the killers. Those in the area, including a private security officer, had heard gunshots and arguing hours after the killers said they’d left. And Manson himself had claimed on a few occasions that he’d gone back to the house with an unnamed individual to “see what my children did.”
The mere mention of this claim made Bugliosi apoplectic. I’d seen a video in which another researcher had raised the possibility. An indignant Bugliosi asked: Why would Manson put himself at risk like that? He may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. And when I asked Bugliosi about it at our first meeting, he refused even to consider the possibility, despite all the discrepancies.
Now, though, here was Cummings, along with others, saying that Whitson had been at the Tate house after the murders but before the police. Here was Hatami, saying Whitson had called him that morning. Cummings said it was Whitson’s “biggest regret” that he hadn’t been able to prevent the slaughter. Maybe these were the words of a self-important liar, or maybe Manson was telling the truth about this return visit, and Whitson had been there, too. That seemed delusional to me. But Cummings and Hatami weren’t crazy. They were two independent, credible sources with the same story.
It seemed possible to me that Whitson was the fulcrum, the man who could connect everything. The strange omissions at the trial and in Helter Skelter; the blatant failures of LASO to follow up on good leads; the suspicion that Manson could be an informant; the murmurs about a narcotics deal gone south: if I wanted to construct a unified field theory, Whitson, linked to intelligence work by no fewer than a dozen sources, would have to be at the center. Knowing that a lot of what I had was circumstantial and speculative, I contained myself—I had a ton of work ahead of me. But, looking back, when I wonder how I let this case consume me for the better part of twenty years, I can point to Whitson as a major cause.
The vital records on Whitson were thin. Born in Chicago on March 25, 1931, he’d grown up in Kendallville, Indiana, and even his childhood had a whiff of the fanciful to it. His mother was a dancer, and his father was a world-renowned acrobat, part of a traveling family act. An only child, he developed a flair for the dramatic. At the University of Indiana, he was the lead in school plays, and he so enjoyed acting that he transferred to the Pasadena Playhouse, moving to L.A. and hoping, like so many before him, to become an actor or a singer. As a friend put it: “His great strength was his natural affinity for people… He could play all these roles. His life really was a series of theatrical productions.”
It’s not clear when that life swerved into espionage. According to a few people I spoke with, Whitson said that he’d had a mentor, Pete Lewis, who’d inducted him into undercover work. Lewis apparently met a tragic and deeply improbable end, like something out of a James Bond movie: he was killed by a poison dart hidden in an umbrella. Richard Edlund, one of several to mention the poison-dart story, saw it as a vital part of Whitson’s origin story; it was almost like Whitson thought he could avenge his friend’s death by working as a spy. Who could say how much of it was true? My hope was that Whitson’s family could separate fact from fiction.
A few of the people I’d met in California told me that he had a Swedish ex-wife, as well as a daughter. Their very existence was speculative, because he was so reluctant to disclose anything about them. The family had lived together in America briefly, until, in 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head, he’d sent them back to Sweden, certain that the United States was on the brink of nuclear war. All of this sounded far-fetched to me, too, but what didn’t, with Whitson?
Sure enough, I reached his ex-wife, Ellen Josefson (née Nylund), by phone in Sweden. Josefson didn’t beat around the bush.
“He was working for the CIA,” she said. “That is why I am worried to talk to you.”
Was she sure about that?
“Yes, I am sure.” She and Reeve had met in Sweden in ’61, she explained. They fell in love in an instant. Before the end of the year they’d married and moved to New York. In those days he was undercover as a journalist, producing pro-Communist pieces as a ploy to meet radicals. This, he seems to have hoped, would lead to more contacts in Russia. It was a scheme so elaborate that someone from the Polish embassy was involved, she remembered, and in due time Whitson was bringing Russians to their place.
“I got furious with him,” she said. “I was very anti-Communist.” How could she have married a pinko? That’s when Whitson felt he had to pull the curtain back. He explained that it was just part of his work for the agency—something he was otherwise ill inclined to discuss.
In October 1962, Josefson said, she gave birth to their daughter, Liza. By then, she had misgivings about her marriage; the bloom was off the rose. Reeve’s job jeopardized her life, and now her daughter’s, too. And it made him hard to love. He would be dispatched to remote areas of the world for months at a time, returning with no explanation for where he’d been or what he’d been doing. In 1962, he was always going off to Cuba, and after the missile crisis he decided it would be best to send his family back to Sweden. They returned to Ellen’s homeland sometime before JFK died, as she recalled. And then—radio silence.
“I didn’t hear anything from him,” Ellen said. When he did resurface, it was to demand a divorce. The legalities dragged on for two or three years. “I had to be nice,” she said. “He said that things could happen to me if I didn’t divorce him.”
After the divorce was finalized, neither she nor Liza heard from Whitson for some fifteen years. He reappeared in the late seventies or early eighties, saying that he’d retired and that he wanted to atone in some way for his absence. Although they spoke only a few more times, Ellen did remember his bringing up Manson and the Family.
“He said that his mother and Sharon Tate’s mother were close,” she said, “and that’s why he had to go back to it, to help… I never wanted to have any details. I was scared. He said, ‘It’s best for you to not know.’”
On Ellen’s advice, I got ahold of Liza, her daughter, who’d met Whitson for the first time since her infancy when she was eighteen. In several long phone calls, she filled in more biographical blanks about him. Now a married nurse living in Sweden, she had trouble reconciling her father’s intense secrecy with his role in her life. She found him inexplicable, opaque.
“I could never understand how he got to know all these important people,” she told me. “He told me that he worked within the Central Intelligence Agency. And he was in a part of the agency that was absolutely nonexistent. He did not exist.”
“Yes,” she said. “My existence was kept a secret to all his friends.” When she made a trip to California to see him, he told some friends that she was coming. They “were absolutely convinced that he was just making a practical joke, like he always did. When I came through the door, I had two people just staring at me! They were so stunned.” Whitson told her that he’d kept her at arm’s length for so long because “he lived his life in complete control over other people, and I was the only one that he could not control.” If people wanted to hurt him, “they could get me,” she said. “My mother and my grandparents in Sweden feared that I was going to be kidnapped because I was his daughter.” Even after her father retired, they had a difficult relationship. He still wouldn’t discuss his past, and his politics bothered her—he was an archconservative with a rabid disdain for leftists.
When Whitson died, Liza flew to Los Angeles to attend his funeral and was astonished to see how many powerful friends he had, and how few of them knew much about him beyond his or her personal experience. “He kept his friends apart,” she said. Hoping to recover any mementos, she went to his sparsely furnished apartment, finding nothing of any sentimental value. He did leave behind a few photos, which surprised her—Whitson had always refused to be photographed. One of them caught her off guard. It was a black-and-white picture of her father with long, flowing hair—not a wig, by all appearances—and bell-bottoms. “He looks like he could’ve been one of the Manson Family members,” she told me.
She sent me the photograph, which, sure enough, showed a grimacing Whitson dressed as a hippie, not flamboyantly, but plausibly, in blue jeans and a wide belt, his shirt open at the neck. Liza was convinced that it was from one of his undercover operations. My impression was that the photo dated to about the mid-1960s; the cars in the background were from that period. I wondered if the disguise could have been related to Manson at all. She couldn’t say. Although he’d told her that he played some role in the case, “I never figured out why he was involved,” she said. “He was a master of telling you things but not really spelling it out.”
Whitson had a large extended family. Many of his “cousins” weren’t even related by blood, but they’d bonded with him anyway. As Frank Rosenfelt told me, “He had a strange habit of getting in touch with people named Whitson and saying they were his cousins.”
Linda Ruby, however, was a real cousin of his—Liza had put me in touch—and she presented another side of Whitson’s activities during and after the Tate murders.
In August 1969, Ruby told me, Whitson was living with his parents in L.A. On the day the bodies were discovered at the Tate house, she said, he went missing. His father, her uncle Buddy, had told her this story. The morning after the murders—around the same time Whitson would’ve placed his call to Hatami—Buddy woke up and discovered that Reeve hadn’t come home that night. When news of the murders flashed on the radio, Buddy got nervous. He knew that Reeve had planned to visit the Cielo house the night before, and early reports said that one of the bodies there had yet to be identified. (It was Steven Parent, who wasn’t IDed until eight that night.)
Fearing that his son had been murdered, Buddy Whitson called the cops, who sprang into action. “The police set up a nerve center at their house,” Ruby said. They remained there, manning the telephones, until Reeve finally returned home late that night, at which point they eagerly debriefed him.
Ruby couldn’t understand why the police would set up a command center at the home of an anonymous Los Angeles resident. Why not just check to see if the unidentified body was his? Making things weirder still, Whitson himself was present when his father told her the story—he was sitting right there, she remembered, quietly refusing to clarify or contribute. He never even said where he was during the hours he was missing.
Another friend summed it up nicely: “He always wanted to go to restaurants that no one went to. He said, ‘I have to keep a low profile.’ It was so low that there was no profile.”
As usual, I was anxious to find some way to verify everything I’d heard. With Whitson, especially, my reporting had crossed the line into conspiratorial territory, and I would be hard-pressed to convert skeptics on the merits of my interviews alone. Of course, clandestine intelligence agents are exactly the sort of people who don’t leave a lot of paper behind, and Whitson, by all accounts, was so savvy that he didn’t need to take notes. I’d filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the CIA, asking for any information on him. Their response said that they could “neither confirm nor deny” Whitson’s connection to the agency. FOIA specialists told me that this is the closest one can get to confirmation that someone worked for the CIA.
I did, eventually, find corroboration in print, but it came in a strange form: a manuscript for an unpublished book called Five Down on Cielo Drive. Written around 1974 or ’75—before Helter Skelter, and thus before Bugliosi’s telling of the Manson story had ossified into the “official” narrative—the book had a tortured history, not least because it involved at least three authors. The most prominent was Lieutenant Robert Helder, who’d headed the LAPD’s investigation into the Tate murders. Another contributor was Sharon Tate’s father, Colonel Paul Tate. The third author was Roger “Frenchie” LaJeunesse, an FBI agent who’d “unofficially” assisted the LAPD.
It’s not hard to see the appeal of the book, especially before Helter Skelter. Here were three authorities on the case who could give a rich account of it when no such account existed. They secured a contract with a publisher. When too much time passed without a viable book, a ghostwriter came on board, but by the time the manuscript was ready, Bugliosi had beaten them to the punch, and Helter Skelter had claimed the mantle of “official” Manson book. The deal fell through. In the ensuing years, the Five Down manuscript gained a reputation among researchers and obsessives. It was exceptionally rare—hardly anyone other than its authors had read it—and even though it was apparently tedious, it was rumored to have the most complete account of the LAPD’s investigation, false leads and all.
Another journalist passed me a copy. I read the parts about Colonel Tate especially closely. A retired military intelligence officer, Tate had mounted his own inquiry into his daughter’s death, separate from but parallel to the LAPD’s. Many had told me that Whitson was under his wing. You wouldn’t think that LAPD detectives would have been so keen on two outsiders helping them, especially given those outsiders’ connections to intelligence—but a LASO detective told me that Colonel Tate “appeared to be running the LAPD.”
Then in his midforties, Tate had only recently left the army. To mount his “independent” investigation, he tried to masquerade as a laid-back Californian, growing a beard and long hair. But he retained the upright carriage of a military officer as he wandered into hippie clubs and drug dens in search of his daughter’s murderer, offering a lavish reward to anyone who would help.
How did Whitson play into this? The Five Down manuscript refers to a Walter Kern, “a somewhat shady character who can best be described as a ‘police groupie.’ Apparently he had been a friend of Jay Sebring… and wanted to help in any way he could.” “Kern” was always one step ahead of the other investigators. Helder wrote, “In this business, as you might imagine, a policeman gets to meet many strange people. Kern was among the strangest. No one knew what he did for a living, yet he always seemed to have money and knew just about everyone on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t like him but he was useful.”
And he kept popping up. When Helder arrived to interview Roman Polanski at the Paramount lot where he was sequestered with Witold Kaczanowski, Kern was there, “lurking in the shadows. He sure did get around.” Believing that Voytek Frykowski was involved with drug dealers who may have murdered him, Helder instructed Kern to cozy up to anyone who might know them, especially those in Mama Cass’s circle.
In another section of the manuscript, a “Hollywood hooker” is said to have spoken to Kern, “who by now was well-known as an amateur sleuth on the case.” Kern shared leads and took orders, and yet the man was so shrouded in mystery that Helder referred to him as “Mr. Anonymous.”
It seemed likely to me that there was more to “Mr. Anonymous” than Helder had shared. By that point, Helder had died, but I’d already spoken to Frenchie LaJeunesse, the FBI agent who’d contributed to Five Down. I called him again to ask whether Walter Kern was really Reeve Whitson.
His answer: “Yes.” In fact, the publishing deal couldn’t have happened without Whitson, LaJeunesse said. “Reeve Whitson was a part of putting the book together, the linchpin between all of us.”
It was Lieutenant Helder, the lead investigator for the LAPD, who’d assigned Whitson the pseudonym of Walter Kern, to protect his undercover status—hardly a step one would take with an ordinary “amateur sleuth.” “Reeve didn’t want his name associated with a book,” LaJeunesse said, even long after the Manson case had been solved. “Not on the jacket, not even in contracts—he didn’t even want money.”
In effect, I now had written proof from the LAPD’s head investigator, and from Sharon Tate’s own father, that Reeve Whitson was smack in the middle of the Manson investigation from the start. LaJeunesse didn’t know who Whitson worked for, just that he was an “astounding fellow” who’d been an informant of some kind. He “wanted to project an aura of mystery,” LaJeunesse said. But the heart of his motivation was an antidrug conservatism. He was “interested in keeping young people away from the curse of narcotics.”
Mike McGann, the LAPD detective whom I’d interviewed about the early days of the investigation, remembered Whitson’s involvement, too.
“He was heavily involved,” McGann said. “And he had no need for money.” McGann was nearly certain that Whitson was in the CIA, and found him “very credible.” Still, when I said that Whitson had reportedly believed he could’ve stopped the murders, McGann laughed. “Bullshit. He’d talk for three hours and never say anything. Typical government employee—a real good line of bullshit.”
If I could prove once and for all that Whitson was working for the CIA, even McGann might admit I had a story on my hands. The CIA wasn’t even supposed to operate on domestic soil. What could they have been doing messing around with an acid-soaked cult in Los Angeles? And if Whitson had been close enough to the murders to stop them, why didn’t he?
Everyone agreed that Paul Tate was the key to understanding Whitson. I knew that Tate was still alive, but getting him to open up would be a long shot.
His wife and Sharon’s mother, Doris, had been comfortable discussing the murder. She’d formed a national victims’ rights advocacy group and mobilized it whenever anyone from the Family was eligible for parole. Her friends said she believed there was something deeper than Helter Skelter behind the murders. Like her husband, she’d conducted her own investigation through the years, becoming convinced that the Cielo house was under surveillance by some type of law enforcement at the time of the murders. (Whether she knew that Reeve Whitson had claimed to be watching the house, we’ll never know.) She was also sure that her daughter wasn’t supposed to be home when the killers arrived that night. Whoever was watching the house, she believed, had noticed that Sharon’s red Ferrari wasn’t in the driveway—it was in the repair shop—and concluded that she wasn’t there. She’d planned to write a book about her theories, but she never got to: she was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1992.
Paul Tate, rumor had it, had never discussed the case with his wife. Before she died, they’d barely spoken to each other, having taken up in separate parts of their house. He hadn’t spoken publicly about Sharon’s death since Manson had been captured, and he’d already declined an interview with me once. But I phoned him again in May 2000, telling him I’d gotten a copy of Five Down on Cielo Drive and planned to quote it.
That got him to agree to meet with me. But as the date approached, he canceled on me; we rescheduled, and he canceled again. When he called to cancel yet another meeting, I tried to butt in with a question about Reeve Whitson before he could get off the phone. He was receptive—at first, anyway.
“Reeve was my main person to help me,” Tate said. “He’s been a friend of Roman Polanski and Sharon and mine and Jay Sebring… He was very, very helpful.”
Even so, Tate found it ridiculous that Whitson’s friends were going around saying that he could have prevented the murders. That simply wasn’t true, he said. Could he help me clear it up, having contributed so much to the investigation?
“I contributed, just—put in there I contributed nothing.”
“But you were involved in the investigation,” I said. “You wrote a book about it!”
“Yeah, well…”
“Did you ask Reeve to do the undercover work or did someone else?”
“I’m not gonna answer those questions,” he said, impatience creeping into his voice.
Could he at least tell me who Whitson worked for? He refused.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to tell you that!” he nearly shouted.
Out of desperation, I made a foolish mistake. Sometimes, when I sensed that someone was withholding something sensitive, I’d remind the person that, in all the speculation about Manson himself, the basic, brutal loss of human life was too often the first thing people stopped thinking about. So I said, “Just out of respect to the victims, don’t you think—”
Paul Tate sounded a million miles away to me, and he had a gruff, emotionally detached tone befitting his military background. But he was, first and foremost, Sharon Tate’s father: a man who’d lost a child to an unimaginable horror, who’d seen her death become a kind of shorthand for tabloid atrocities. I’d forgotten that truth, and my comment understandably upset him. I regretted it right away.
“Out of respect for the victims!” he shouted. “What kind of fuck do you think I am?” He laughed bitterly. “You go ahead and do whatever you want to do, but… if any son of a bitch ever had respect for the victims, it was me.”
“I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out.”
“Okay,” he said. “Bye, bye.” And that was the end of my relationship with Paul Tate, the man who knew better than anyone what Reeve Whitson was up to. He died in 2005.
Helder had written that Whitson “knew just about everyone on the wrong side of the tracks.” The opposite was true, too—he knew how to pull the levers of power. Colonel Tate was just one of his friends in high places. Usually, in the same breath, Whitson’s friends named another military bigwig: General Curtis LeMay.
As discussed earlier, LeMay was part of the unsettling story I’d heard from Jay Sebring’s barber, Little Joe. One of Sebring’s clients, the mobster Charlie Baron, had called Joe after Sebring’s murder, pledging that no harm would come to the barber. Charlie Baron was a friend of Curtis LeMay, too. Meetings between the two were noted by the FBI, who surveilled Baron for decades. LeMay, a former air-force officer nicknamed “Bombs Away LeMay,” had retired in ’65 and turned to defense contracting, where one critic feared that he “could be more dangerous than when he was air force chief of staff.” He moved to L.A. to become the vice president of a missile-parts manufacturer, but it fizzled, as did LeMay’s brief political career. After that, Mr. Bombs Away had spent his retirement roaming the city with Mr. Anonymous.
I added a few more connective arrows to the big whiteboard on my wall, realizing more than ever that its tangle of lines and circles made sense only to me. Though I never figured out what LeMay and Whitson got up to together, it was plausible that they were tied up in Charlie Baron’s cabal of right-wing Hollywood friends, the ones who, Little Joe told me, had “done terrible things to black people.” (George Wallace, who’d chosen LeMay as his running mate in his ’68 presidential bid, was among the nation’s most notorious racists.)
“I’m sure he knew Baron,” Whitson’s friend John Irvin told me. A British film director who himself claimed to have ties to MI5, Irvin said that Whitson got meetings “within minutes” at “the highest levels of the defense industry—it was amazing.” He was “on the fringes of very far-out research” for the government, “not discussed openly because it verges on the occult.” He added that Whitson “had very good connections with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office” and pull with immigration officials, as Shahrokh Hatami had said. But Irvin couldn’t elaborate on any of this.
Then came Otto and Ilse Skorzeny, the most sinister of Whitson’s friends. They were Nazis—genuine, German, dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. The United Nations listed Otto Skorzeny as a war criminal. He’d been one of Hitler’s most trusted operatives, leading the manhunt of one of the Führer’s would-be assassins and spearheading a secret mission to rescue Mussolini. After the Third Reich fell, Skorzeny safeguarded the wealth of countless Nazis and helped disgraced war criminals settle into new lives around the world. Brought to trial before a U.S. military court, Skorzeny was alleged to be “the most dangerous man in Europe”—but he was acquitted, having made himself an asset to U.S. intelligence. His wife, the Countess Ilse von Finkelstein, was once a member of the Hitler Youth; a shrewd businesswoman known for her beauty and charm, she negotiated arms deals and contracts for German engineering companies. Irvin had met Ilse many times through Whitson. When she got drunk, he said, “she was always doing Heil Hitler salutes!”
Whitson could look past any ideology, no matter how abhorrent, if someone proved useful to him. His friends construed him as the purest form of Cold Warrior, lifted from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He carried an outmoded fifties-era politics into the future, masquerading as a hippie, infiltrating an LSD cult, and befriending Nazis to eliminate the scourge of communism and narcotics—the latter being, to his mind, a direct extension of the former.
“He believed there was an operation to destabilize American youth,” one friend told me. “Russians were bringing drugs in to battle the American system from within.”
Having worked in South America, Whitson believed “we should kill the drug lords in Bolivia and their whole families… If there’s a baby, you kill the baby. I don’t think he would say something like that and not be capable of doing it. He didn’t believe in the individual, but in the larger picture.” Another acquaintance recalled, “The entire Manson situation, the Black Panther movement, and probably similar other movements… people like that were discredited by certain things that, according to Reeve, may have been staged or done by government authorities in order to make them look bad.”
If I could find out where Whitson’s money came from, I might be closer to understanding what he actually did. His résumé was scant from the fifties through the seventies, after which it covered more ground than seemed possible for a single life. He was the special advisor to the chairman of the board of Thyssen, among the largest corporations in Germany. He sank years into a scheme to construct a maglev monorail train stretching from Las Vegas to Pasadena. He wanted to build a Brigadoon theme park in Scotland. He was involved in weapons manufacturing, early iterations of the Miss Universe pageant, and a new variety of childproof medicine bottle. And he had a passion for race cars—building them, selling them, driving them—which may explain how he befriended Jay Sebring, another racing enthusiast.
These ventures had one thing in common: they fell through. The easiest explanation, of course, was that they were covers, and sometimes Whitson told his friends as much. So where did his money come from? No one knew. He always paid in cash—he stowed it in his freezer—and when he had it, he was quick to settle a tab. Whitson dressed in gabardine suits, but for much of his adult life, an ex-girlfriend recalled, he lived “like a hermit,” sleeping “on a cot in his parents’ kitchen.” The man who loved fast cars drove an economical Ford Pinto.
In his final years, Whitson was destitute and disgruntled, telling rueful stories of the “Quarry”—his term for the section of the CIA he worked for—and trash-talking the agency. Once you’re in, he told one friend, “You really are a pawn.” In his dying days, the government had said, “You didn’t even exist to us.” Even the movies were no reprieve, offering reminders of his glory days. About a year before he died, seeing the thriller The Pelican Brief, Whitson leaned over in the dark of the cinema and told a friend, “I wrote the yellow papers on everything that happened.” With a hint of nostalgia, he explained that “yellow papers” detailed interrogation techniques, including a procedure in which a man had a plastic tube inserted in his rectum, peanut butter smeared on his scrotum, and a rat dropped in the tube.
Whitson died at the relatively young age of sixty-three. With no health insurance, he left behind an enormous unpaid hospital bill, something to the tune of half a million dollars. A few of my sources felt there may have been foul play. He’d given conflicting explanations for his health problems: a heart attack, or a spider bite, or a brain tumor, or lymphoma. “I think he committed suicide,” his daughter told me. “His greatest fear was to be a vegetable.”
Reeve Whitson “was a walk-in,” as one of my sources put it, “an extraterrestrial.” Once he consumed me, I found myself fixating on possibilities that I would’ve dismissed as insane only months before. His life opened onto a vantage of intrigue, where Manson and the sixties counterculture were just one element in a political struggle that encompassed Nazis, Cuba, Vietnam, South America, military intelligence, and byzantine matters of national security.
But Whitson was too much the mystery man he was said to be. He brought my reporting to a standstill. At a certain point, I felt I’d learned everything I could about him without tapping official sources. I’d attempted to find his tax records and asked reporters with stronger connections at Langley if they could look him up. They never found anything. FOIAs to the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, and the military all got responses that said they’d had nothing to do with him. It was only the CIA that gave me the “neither confirm nor deny” response. Later, responding to my appeal, it wrote that Whitson had “no open or officially acknowledged relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
I worry that I’ll never know the truth about Reeve Whitson. There is, of course, the possibility that he was little more than an effective con artist, someone who weaseled his way into a minor role in the Manson investigation by sweet-talking people in power. Someone who’s constantly implying to his friends that he’s in the CIA might not be very effective as an undercover agent. If Whitson were truly a high-functioning member of the intelligence community, would anyone have had any idea?
On the other hand, maybe the stories I heard are fundamentally correct—Whitson was an intelligence agent who led a storied international career, and he wasn’t exaggerating when he said that he could’ve stopped the Manson murders. If that was true—what then? Why would the CIA, or any intelligence group, have had Whitson infiltrate the Family, and what did Manson know about it? The bottom line was that I’d learned just enough about Whitson to dwell on him. It was as his daughter said: “He gives a little and then he goes away.”