If Tom is interested in the odder elements surrounding "No Name" Maddox, aka Charles Manson, he needs to read Peter Levenda's
Sinister Forces trilogy (2005-06). It is Levenda's belief that Manson had created a form of mind control by accident while the US government had spent years fruitlessly working through similar projects through the MK-ULTRA program, but in order to make it work you have to create a cult environment for it to function. Levenda does a deep study of where Manson came from (Ashland, Kentucky) in the first book (
The Nine), but he moves on to topics that don't look related at first glance but have similar elements: the rather odd back histories of Mark David Chapman and Jim Jones, questions about the Process Church* of the Final Judgement's contacts with the Manson Family and the possibility that they (or a faction) were involved with the Son of Sam killings, etc. Lavenda does go back to Charles Manson throughout the other two volumes because all three books work as a meta-history of the occult/political crimes running from 1963 to 2001. The nice thing about
Sinister Forces is that there are endnotes on each chapter and a huge biblography if you want to check sources.
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*
The Process as it was also known was founded by a young pair (Robert Moor, Mary Ann MacLean) of expelled Scientologists in 1964. The group was originally called "Compulsions Analysis", it became its own church after one of L. Ron Hubbard's threatening letters to anybody he thought was a Dianetics/Scientology spinoff (he possibly sent one to the Church of Satan in San Francisco); they got one for using an E-meter in their therapy sessions. The church developed a four-deity theology of Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ; writer Maury Terry believed that the darker elements of the Church had split off and gone underground, electing a new leader and name (the "Four P's", a reference to
the Process insignia), though he had no solid proof. Robert Moor (long out of the group and divorced from Mary Ann) was shocked at the allegations from Terry's 1987 book
The Ultimate Evil.