In the official account of the crimes, Sharon Tate’s home was chosen as a murder site in order to send a message to its former resident, Terry Melcher: a music producer who had declined to give Manson a record deal.

Yet O’Neill found evidence (in the handwriting of prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi) that this was untrue. Melcher had lied about his testimony – he’d been on good enough terms with Manson to visit the Family after the murders – and appeared to do so in collaboration with Bugliosi.

Bugliosi himself had been compromised before taking the case. He had reportedly got himself in trouble twice: once for stalking, once for a savage assault.

It appears that the D.A.’s office had every reason to disbar Bugliosi; instead, they handed him the biggest case in L.A.’s history. If authorities wanted leverage over the prosecutor, they had it.

O’Neill also discovered that Family member Tex Watson had given the first account of the murders, long before any official narrative had formed, across 20 hours of recorded interviews with his lawyer. (The attorney-client privilege was later violated, making the tapes fair game.)

O’Neill managed to track the tapes down – but the LAPD stepped in and made sure that they would not be heard publicly, despite numerous freedom of information requests. Why?

While interviewing Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer friend of Sharon Tate, O’Neill discovered that he had been informed of the murders 90 minutes before the bodies were found – by a mutual associate of Manson named Reeve Whitson. This sent O’Neill down a rabbit hole.

According to Whitson’s friends and family, he worked as a spy for the CIA or a similar government agency. The CIA informed O’Neill that they could neither confirm nor deny this.

The oddities and inconsistencies kept mounting up. When O’Neill presented his research to Stephen Kay, Bugliosi’s co-prosecutor, he was shocked – claiming the information was strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders.

Bottom line: The official account of the Manson murders was clearly bogus. At best, Bugliosi acted unethically to make the case fit his own theory. At worst, it was a major cover-up – for what, O’Neill cannot say for certain... until the remaining pieces of the puzzle can be found.