A journalist's twenty-year obsession with the Manson murders leads to shocking new conspiracy theories about the FBI's involvement in this fascinating reevaluation of one of the most infamous cases in American history. In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a piece by Premiere magazine about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he was intrigued by the opportunity to revisit a hallmark of American pop culture, one deeply embedded in our nation's conscience. It was indisputable: Charles Manson made them do it. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept noticing details that contradicted prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative. To his fascination and shame, the Manson murders became a total obsession and swallowed up almost 18 years of his career. Bugliosi, in Tom's mind, was not telling the whole truth. Through extensive research, O'Neill discovered evidence of a wild conspiracy theory-one that suggested Mason and the Manson Family had likely been manipulated through government operatives working undercover in a Haight-Ashbury based public health clinic in and around the Summer of Love. Could it be that our own government transformed The Family from fun-loving hippies into hypno-programmed killers? What role did the CIA domestic surveillance experiment called CHAOS play in the murders? Could the Tate/La Bianca murders simply be a CIA test drive gone wrong? Joan Didion famously said, "the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969." The Manson murders would forever change the country-but O'Neill argues that perhaps this ending started long before those two dark nights in Los Angeles. Riveting, candid, and including a never-before-published conversation with Manson himself, CHAOS is a story readers won't soon forget.