All language subtitles for Chaos.The.Manson.Murders.2025.1080p.WEBRip.x264.AAC5.1-LAMA.en

You wanted to know
how I met Charlie?

Not really much to tell.
I played music with Charlie.

Tried to help him get
a recording contract…

…by helping him to record
some good quality demos.

I was in that music community
in Los Angeles.

I was friends with Dennis Wilson
of the Beach Boys.

Charlie had some talent.

People thought that he should be able to

get his songs out there in the world.

Gregg Jakobson,
Dennis Wilson, and I…

were interested in
getting Charlie to settle down,

come into a studio,
just him and his guitar,

play and sing his songs.

And let's see if we can get
a decent recording to use as a demo.

I showed up at Spahn Ranch
just for a visit.

Charlie pulled me aside and he told me
that he had killed a Black Panther.

His name is Bernard Crowe,
he's a low-rent drug dealer in Los Angeles.

He was not a Black Panther.

He looked the part

because it was fashionable
in those days to be that.

Charlie assumed, wrongly,
that he had killed the guy.

He thought that he had killed
a Black Panther.

He said that he was expecting
a retaliation from the Black Panthers.

He asked me if I would stay and help

because there were not enough men
at the ranch.

That was part of my downfall.

Everybody was on the lookout
for a carload of Black Panthers.

Every car that came up was being examined.

Meanwhile, there just wasn't much going on

and there were bikers hanging out there.

I was building a motorcycle at that time,
so I sort of idolized these bikers.

I got involved in a drug deal with them.

I had a friend in Topanga Canyon,
Gary Hinman,

who had a batch of encapsulated mescaline
that he was selling.

The next day, the bikers came back
and wanted their money back.

The reason was
that they said they all got sick on it,

and they probably didn't like
the hallucinations.

They threatened me,
held a knife to my throat.

The only option

was to see if Gary would give me
the money back.

I pulled the gun on him.

And he said, "I don't have it anymore."

I said, "Look, Gary, I just need something
to get the bikers off my back."

He said, "You can have my cars."

Suddenly, Manson shows up at the door.

Gary says, "Hi, Charlie!"

Charlie steps in
and slashes him across the face.

My exact words.
"Charlie, why did you do that?"

Realizing his mistake,
Manson left me with the problem.

So I sat with Gary for a day,

trying to smooth everything over.

I used dental floss
and a needle to sew up his ear.

But it should have been stitched.
There's no question.

But if I took him to an emergency room,

I knew that he was going to tell
what happened.

It was gonna bring
the whole world down on top of me.

I called Charlie.

I said, "This is your problem."

"You need to come
and take care of what you created."

His response was I knew what to do
as well as he did.

And hung up the phone.

And I made this decision.

I had to kill him and get out of there.

I just ran at him, stabbed him twice.

He went down, and he died.

Because he would tell on me.

I don't remember who put the paw print,
"POLITICAL PIGGY" on the wall.

I remember that everybody had it
in their minds about the Black Panthers.

We'd been kind of absorbed in that
for a couple of weeks

since the Bernard Crowe shooting,

and what Charlie had said,
that the Black Panthers were the enemies.

There was an idea

to make it seem that the Black Panthers
were responsible for killing Gary.

Hence, the panther paw on the wall.

Was it the next day?

I don't really think that had a lot to do
with what happened.

In order to understand what happened,

you have to go back
to the Bernard Crowe shooting.

Remember, Charlie thought
that he had killed him.

He was afraid
somebody was going to snitch on him.

The person that he was
afraid of the most was Tex Watson.

He was part of Charlie's Family
living at Spahn Ranch.

Tex Watson was a disciple of Charlie.

He was worshipful.

Watson had orchestrated the drug deal
with Bernard Crowe that backfired

and put Charlie in the position
of having to kill Crowe.

He really didn't know the guy.

He just decided
he was going to save the day,

get in the middle of something
that Tex Watson had created.

Charlie's way
of protecting himself from Watson

was the typical convict way of insurance.

If someone is a potential snitch,

then you make that person complicit
in illegal activity.

You have something on them
just as they have something on you.

I don't know if he knew
that I was in jail.

There's no evidence of that.

I can see where you would have

thoughts about
the correlations of those things.

I think it's important

that the story be stripped down
to the bare bones.

The bare bones of the thing.

There's no doubt in my mind
what the motivation was. None. Zero.

Charlie had gotten paranoid
of his own people.

He wanted to bind them to him
through their committing bad crimes.

That was the true motive.

So he sent Tex Watson

to kill Terry.

Terry lived at Cielo Drive.

All the time that Charlie knew him,
he lived at Cielo Drive.

He didn't know that Terry had moved.

Watson asked,
"What if there's somebody else there?"

Charlie just told him
to kill whoever's there.

The ignorance of not knowing
that Terry had left that residence

meant that five other people got murdered.

Bugliosi knew what the truth was,
but didn't reveal it.

It was not to start a race war,
which was Bugliosi's theory.

He knew what the truth was.

He knew that Manson talked about
that kind of shit.

Stories told around the campfire
that really were just that.

But it had nothing to do with the murders.

His intention from the get-go

was to do exactly what he did.

Write a book,
make a bazillion dollars on that book,

and live on it for the rest of his life.

And sell the movie rights.

Which is what he did.

His writer was sitting in the courtroom

taking notes for the book
that they were already writing

while he was trying Charlie
and those three girls.

He had to get a conviction.

He wanted to portray himself in this book

as the white knight protecting
all the people of America.

How can I control your mind?
Can I make a robot out of you?

Can you control mine
or make a robot out of me?

People had Leslie van Houten
long before I had her.

Her mother had her first.

Her dad had her.
Her parents had her. Her school had her.

The TV had her. The movies had her.

And then you come up and say,
"Well, you had influence over her."

Certainly I had influence over her,

I have influence over everybody I meet.

But that doesn't mean
that I directed her to be herself.

I didn't set your house on fire.

Don't blame me for your children.

You raised your children,
you programmed your children,

and you made your children.

The problem
with this story in particular

is that people are very fond of their…

fantasy.

They don't want to hear
how mundane the story actually is,

how not a mastermind Charlie actually was.

In his paranoid delusions,

in his miscalculations,

it was just

blunder after blunder after blunder.

If you only knew
what I know now in terms of

the criminal mindset.

Yeah, they do.

They want it to be more complicated
than it is,

and it's so hard to disabuse people
from those fantasies.