Rick Spence: evaluation

Transcript context

…So you think if he was an informer, you think there was still a connection between DEA, FBI, CIA, whatever with him throughout this until he committed murder? Well, the real question is… There is a book written on this by Tom O’Neill called Chaos. I’m not necessarily saying it’s the easiest thing to get through. There’s a lot of material there. I don’t think O’Neill necessarily knows what to make of some of the stuff he came up with, but he does a very good job of demolishing the whole Bugliosi narrative. One of the people he mentions is a name that I had run into elsewhere, and so I really paid attention to it when I saw it again. And the name is Reeve Whitson. Reeve Whitson shows up on the fringes, even though he has no judicial function. He hangs around Bugliosi in the prosecution. He’s just there. In the same way that he was one of these guys… He grew his hair long, wore bell-bottoms, hung around the music community and elsewhere in Hollywood, but no one could tell you exactly what he did. I know what he did later. A decade later, he shows up as a CIA officer in Central America. So Reeve Whitson, later in his career at least, is CIA. What was he in 1969? What is he doing in this? The other thing about it is he appears to have been the person who called… There’s a little question of when the bodies at Cielo Drive are discovered. So the general story is that Sharon Tate’s housekeeper shows up around 8:30 in the morning, finds the bloody scene and goes screaming next door. But there was another fellow who knew… I think the owner of the house is a photographer. Last name may be Hatami. He gets a call earlier in the morning saying that there’d been murders there, and the person he recalls calling him is Reeve Whitson. So someone had been at the house before the bodies were discovered, and they had not called the police. So I don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s a curious situation. And Manson in a lot of ways, self-immolates himself. I mean, his behavior at the trial is bizarre. It’s threatening, it’s disruptive. He’s got his girls out on the street carving X’s in their forehead, carrying knives. One of the attorneys, initially, his attorney, Ron Hughes, becomes Van Houten’s attorney. And he figures out that the three girls, supposedly on Charlie’s insistence, are going to confess. They’ll confess that it was all their idea and Charlie had nothing to do with it. Hughes doesn’t like this because his defense for her is that she was under his influence and therefore not responsible for her own actions. He was having psychic control, so he refuses to go along with it. There’s a break in the trial. He goes camping up in the mountains with some friends, disappears during a rainstorm, and then some months later, his decomposed remains are found. s to go along with it. There’s a break in the trial. He goes camping up in the mountains with some friends, disappears during a rainstorm, and then some months later, his decomposed remains are found. Rumors, always the rumors. What would history be without rumors? Members of the family, they were off at Ron Hughes because he messed up Charlie’s idea to get him off and so they killed him. Maybe they did. Maybe he drowned. That’s absolutely impossible to say. You’ve got that story. There’s a guy named Juan Flynn, who was an employee at the Spahn Ranch, didn’t like Manson, held Manson responsible for the murder of his boss. He would testify that Manson told him that he had ordered all the killings, and that Manson also admitted that he had killed 35 people. Maybe he did. On the other hand, Juan Flynn didn’t like him, and other than his word had no real proof of what he was saying. So please understand me in this case, is that unlike some people who argue that Charles Manson got a raw deal, I don’t think that’s the case. I think that he influenced tremendous influence over the people there through drugs. Sex was another frequent component in it. He had a real whammy over a lot of these people’s minds. I’m not sure how. That still puzzles me. He was a scrawny guy and he wasn’t physically intimidating. I mean, even a lot of women wouldn’t be physically intimidated by him. But he nevertheless had this real psychological power. And if you look around him, the male followers he had were fairly big guys. So he could get people to do what he wanted. And again, to me, the simplest explanation for this is that it began with the Hinman killing, and probably on Manson’s instigation the others were copycat killings to throw off what was going on. If I was a cop, that’s what I would focus on because that seems to make the most sense.…

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