Tuesday, May 24, 2022

"The Merrick Connection Revisited"

 The Merrick Connection Revisited (rainercvk.blogspot.com)

This article (link above) was sent to the blog by its author, Rainer Chlodwig von k. 

Rainer is also the author of "Drugs, Jungles and Jingoism".


Have you ever watched the original "Matrix" movie? It took me 5 viewings of the "Matrix" before I had a good handle on the entire plot and story line. Such was my experience with this article. There's a LOT to unpack here. The article is very condensed. It weaves together Laurence Merrick, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski, RFK, Sirhan Sirhan, The Process Church, Vincent Bugliosi, The Jewish State, Ed Butler, Ed Sanders... and more. My head was literally spinning. I'm not saying the article is particularly bad or inaccurate. There's several accurate quotes and references included. But it moves quickly with several twists and turns. If you're a conspiracy theory junkie, you'll be pleased.

The article takes some liberties of presumption which are beyond my personal comfort level, but I'll allow you to formulate your own opinion.

 Without re-writing the entire article, here are some bullet points which best summarize the main thrust:

*Sylbert, with Frankenheimer, would volunteer to assist the Robert Kennedy presidential campaign. Tate, too, “had become very interested in the Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy,” relates The Official Sharon Tate Website: “She went to fund raising dinners in support of Kennedy and […] attended a dinner at the home of John Frankenheimer. At the dinner was Robert Kennedy and his wife Ethel. Sharon was thrilled to be able to spend some time with Kennedy and felt even more convinced that he would make a wonderful president.”

*Ed Sanders has indicated that Tate’s murder may have been carried out as part of the cover-up of the truth of the RFK assassination, revealing in Sharon Tate: A Life that Sirhan was reported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have been “attending parties on behalf of the Satanist English cult [the Process Church], including one at Sharon Tate’s place.” Sanders points to a possible motivation starkly at odds with Vincent Bugliosi’s propagation of the legend of Charles Manson’s apocalyptic “Helter Skelter” war: “INS criminal investigator Richard Smith’s report stated that an LA law enforcement agency had a female informant who averred that the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon Tate,” Sanders writes: “The reason for the contract […] was ‘something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan.’”

*Robert Hendrickson, Merrick’s collaborator on the 1973 Manson documentary – a production with which the prosecutor cooperated and in which he appears onscreen – stated in a 2012 interview that Bugliosi, Merrick, and Joan Huntington “all became close friends”, which invites speculation as to whether Merrick suggested or helped to shape Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” legend or if the premise of Merrick’s Black Angels movie furnished the inspiration for Bugliosi’s narrative. It was Merrick, Hendrickson reveals, who “arranged access for Manson to grab the newspaper and show the jury the headline, ‘Manson Guilty Nixon Declares’,” arguing that “Merrick was also being sucked into being, not just a filmmaker, but also a participant in a historical event.” Was Merrick, in helping to shape the public perception of the Tate-LaBianca killings, playing a part in the cover-up of the RFK assassination – perhaps as an agent of the state of Israel?

34 comments:

katie8753 said...

Thanks Lynyrd. I'm gonna need some time to read thru all that!

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

The Achilles heel of this article is that it relies heavily on quotes and opinions from Ed Sanders. Ed Sanders is not regarded favorably by many TLB researchers. That's a simple fact that this author will have to overcome when defending his work. As for myself, I find Sanders just as credible as many of the other "characters" who have thrown their hat in the ring. I'm not saying I agree with everything Sanders says, but I think to dismiss Sanders completely is a mistake.

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

I'm at a disadvantage because I know nothing about the Kennedys.

Dilligaf said...

Here is all you need to know. Their family fortune was made off bootlegging, family money helped to buy a presidency, JFK was an addict, his presidency accomplished little, and, unlike diamonds, none of the Kennedy’s were a girl’s best friend…

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Thanks Dilligaf.

I'm aware of only one Kennedy story, and it's also not flattering.

It's the one where Joe's daughter has mild behavior issues (like most teens her age), and Joe has her treated with a lobotomy. As a consequence, the girl spent the rest of her life as a vegetable.

Amazing father right there...

I read a hand-written diary entry written by the young girl (pre-lobotomy), and it clearly demonstrates that she had better writing skills than most bloggers.

The story is tragic.

katie8753 said...

Why would Merrick care if Manson was found guilty or innocent? If Sharon was the target because of something she overheard, why kill everyone else in the house? Why not just wait and kill her by herself? And why kill the LaBiancas? They didn't overhear anything.

That stuff just doesn't make any sense.

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

No sense makes sense.

rainercvk said...

Dilligaf, I didn't write the essay as a tribute to the Kennedy family. I don't have strong feelings about them one way or the other, but I don't think a person has to believe JFK and RFK were great men to consider it crucial to understand why they were killed.

Lynyrd, I would concede that I rely on Sanders for a few key details, but he actually wasn't my original source for the info on the RFK assassination's alleged relevance to the Tate murder. I first heard about it on Ed Opperman's podcast several years ago - I'm sorry, I don't have the date of the show. As I recall, Opperman said he had seen or had a copy of the INS report.

Katie, my suspicion is that Manson and the whole "Helter Skelter" phenomenon, the Family, their mysticism, eccentricities, etc., serve as one gigantic distraction. This isn't necessarily to say that they don't bear responsibility for the murders, but it could very well be that Manson had little understanding of the broader ramifications of what was happening. As a freakish, charismatic Christ-Satan figure, he served as the perfect lightning rod for the public's attention, ire, or even admiration, making the murders about drugs, fake revolution, and crazy hippies rather than anything that would really inconvenience the establishment if it found its way into the public discourse. As for why additional people were victims of the massacre, see the "Serial Killings, Specific Target" trope:

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Serial_Killings,_Specific_Target

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Hello Rainercvk!

Welcome to the blog!

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Rainer said:

"Lynyrd, I would concede that I rely on Sanders for a few key details, but he actually wasn't my original source for the info on the RFK assassination's alleged relevance to the Tate murder. I first heard about it on Ed Opperman's podcast several years ago - I'm sorry, I don't have the date of the show. As I recall, Opperman said he had seen or had a copy of the INS report".

Fair enough. No worries...

In reading your article, it struck me that the information contained could have easily spanned a 200-page book (to completely "flesh-out").

katie8753 said...

Thanks Rainer. I read the link you provided, and it still doesn't give enough information to explain these murders.

If Sharon Tate was killed because of something she overheard, why was Gary Hinman killed weeks before? Gary Hinman had NOTHING to do with Sharon Tate.

And killing a "bunch of people" to thwart the investigation of an intended victim's murder doesn't explain the killing of the Labiancas or Shorty Shea. Is the Government that sloppy???

I'll say again, it would be so easy to just kill Sharon Tate by herself and make it look like an accident. Wouldn't there have been MUCH LESS investigation of Sharon's death if she died of her brakes failing, or ingesting something that caused her to die during childbirth, or maybe falling off a cliff?

How would anyone know what Sharon overheard? Who was at the event with Sharon? Were they killed?

I'm sorry, this still doesn't make any sense to me. I need more information. Thanks!

rainercvk said...

Gary Hinman doesn't need to have anything to do with Sharon Tate for the "Serial Killings, Specific Target" thesis to work. The killers could have had a separate, unrelated beef with Hinman and so decided to include him in the "Helter Skelter" spree in order to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. The LaBiancas could have been randomly selected or chosen for reasons with which I'm not acquainted, but killed at least partially in order to reinforce the "Helter Skelter" premise. The seeming randomness of the selection of victims also contributes to the terror factor as far as public consumption of the narrative.

To be clear, I'm not equating the Manson Family with "the government". I think it's possible, however, that they might have been hired to do a gig by some state-sponsored entity. I would say that Bruce Davis, as a Process Church connection, is a person of interest in this regard.

Don't forget that you also have to answer some questions if my thesis is to be discarded. What accounts for the timely presence of the Process Church in these sites of relevance to the Kennedy assassinations? What accounts for their interest in Kerry Thornley, and was the fact that they hired an attorney who was employed by Oswald handler Guy Banister just a coincidence? Is it just a coincidence that the detectives assigned to Tate-LaBianca just happened to be among those previously assigned to the RFK case? There's quite a pile of such coincidences for which you have to account.

There's a lot about the sixties that doesn't make obvious sense to the average person. I don't pretend to know everything about these matters, and anybody who reads this site or other Manson-related blogs is guaranteed to know more about Charles Manson and the Family than I do. I'm just an amateur movie critic, a person who's trained himself to notice patterns of meaning, and I've picked up on patterns in the Tate-LaBianca case that I think my theory at least plausibly explains.

katie8753 said...

To think that the Government thought that much of Charles Manson that he could pull off this "massive hoax" is really silly.

A guy who was a convicted felon who was on parole, who didn't have a job, who lured girls to follow him for his "music and nonsense", who enticed girls & guys to take drugs and not be functional human beings, who trained them to dig thru dumpsters for food, to steal with stolen credit cards, to steal cars and sell parts, to break into houses for "creepy crawls", to move into people's houses and "be bums" for as long as they could get away with it, who was a permanent "leech" on people he could put that over on until they figured it out.

This is the guy that the Government thought could get away with killing Sharon Tate???

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

rainercvk said...

It worked, didn't it?

Again, I'm not really comfortable attributing Tate-LaBianca to "the government". For one thing, there's the question of which country's government we're discussing. I would probably content myself with calling those who commissioned the murder an interested faction or set of factions with significant state connections, and very possibly connections to more than one state.

katie8753 said...

Gary Hinman doesn't need to have anything to do with Sharon Tate for the "Serial Killings, Specific Target" thesis to work.

I'm sorry Rainer but that's not correct. You have to include Gary Hinman in the TLB murders. There is no other way.

That's what started it.

To be clear, I'm not equating the Manson Family with "the government". I think it's possible, however, that they might have been hired to do a gig by some state-sponsored entity. I would say that Bruce Davis, as a Process Church connection, is a person of interest in this regard.

If you are harnessing this to Bruce Davis, good luck! That guy is a loser!

Don't forget that you also have to answer some questions if my thesis is to be discarded. What accounts for the timely presence of the Process Church in these sites of relevance to the Kennedy assassinations? What accounts for their interest in Kerry Thornley, and was the fact that they hired an attorney who was employed by Oswald handler Guy Banister just a coincidence? Is it just a coincidence that the detectives assigned to Tate-LaBianca just happened to be among those previously assigned to the RFK case? There's quite a pile of such coincidences for which you have to account.

Oswald handler???? Now you're getting into another arena. If you want to debate the Kennedy assassination, just say so, because you're backing into that.

I don't have to answer any of those questions. I never heard of those folks!

There's a lot about the sixties that doesn't make obvious sense to the average person. I don't pretend to know everything about these matters, and anybody who reads this site or other Manson-related blogs is guaranteed to know more about Charles Manson and the Family than I do. I'm just an amateur movie critic, a person who's trained himself to notice patterns of meaning, and I've picked up on patterns in the Tate-LaBianca case that I think my theory at least plausibly explains.

Congrats Rainer! You're learning!! It takes a while but you'll get there!!! I have faither in you!!

rainercvk said...

My thesis, actually, is that the Kennedy assassinations and the Tate-LaBianca murders constitute the same arena, or at least an overlap of the two arenas. Both, as I point out, are joined in the person of Vincent Bugliosi.

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Katie,

Why must Rainer's theory explain Gary Hinman's death to be valid?

katie8753 said...

Rainer, how is Vincent Bugliosi involved in the JFK assassination? You said Kennedy assassinations. Are you talking about both of them?

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

The Manson Family were criminals.

I don't believe Shorty Shea's death had anything to do with Hinman's death (in terms of motive).

Where is it written that every crime "The Family" committed must share the same motive?

katie8753 said...

Lynyrd he said that Sharon was killed because of something she overheard. Hinman was killed weeks before that. Why would he be involved because of something Sharon overheard?

katie8753 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
rainercvk said...

The two Kennedy assassinations are related and were commissioned and covered up by the same forces, I'm convinced. Bugliosi's connection to the Kennedy assassinations is his professional association with a law firm that also worked with Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby's attorney, and the fact that Bugliosi exploited his celebrity status to weigh in on the JFK assassination in a very public way.

katie8753 said...

The two Kennedy assassinations are related and were commissioned and covered up by the same forces, I'm convinced. Bugliosi's connection to the Kennedy assassinations is his professional association with a law firm that also worked with Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby's attorney, and the fact that Bugliosi exploited his celebrity status to weigh in on the JFK assassination in a very public

So what forces are the 2 Kennedy assassinations commissioned by?

katie8753 said...

Well I'm going to bed.

Tomorrow. I'm watching Hogan's Heros on METV.

LynyrdSkynyrdBand said...

Katie,

First you implied that Rainer's theory lacked credibility, because it was incapable of explaining the motive for Hinman's death:

If Sharon Tate was killed because of something she overheard, why was Gary Hinman killed weeks before? Gary Hinman had NOTHING to do with Sharon Tate.

Rainer replied:

Gary Hinman doesn't need to have anything to do with Sharon Tate for the "Serial Killings, Specific Target" thesis to work. The killers could have had a separate, unrelated beef with Hinman.

Then, you doubled-down and stated that the Cielo Drive and Hinman incidents CANNOT be viewed as separate events:

I'm sorry Rainer but that's not correct. You have to include Gary Hinman in the TLB murders. There is no other way.

===============================================

Then, you did a complete turn-around, and explained that Hinman's death is not connected to Sharon Tate and Cielo drive at all. That Hinman's death had a completely separate motive:

ARE YOU KIDDING? Gary Hinman was killed by Bobby because he wouldn't give his money to him.

rainercvk said...

My thesis is ultimately inspired by the work of the late journalist Michael Collins Piper, whose book Final Judgment argues that Israel and its supporters in the US had a strong interest in eliminating JFK and installing LBJ. James Jesus Angleton, counterintelligence chief at the CIA, was in Israel's pocket, and the line between CIA and Mossad operations can get pretty blurry. Likewise, the infamous organized crime elements that tie into the JFK assassination also intersect with the CIA and Israel. Moe Dalitz, whom I mention in the essay, is a perfect example of a figure straddling the worlds of Zionism and organized crime - as is Jack Ruby, or Mickey Cohen, whose Santa Anita racetrack employed Sirhan Sirhan. Meyer Lansky, the head of the National Crime Syndicate, lent his organization's security services to the Office of Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, and these sorts of connections persisted over succeeding decades. Frank Sinatra, who had famous mafia associations, was employed as a CIA courier according to his daughter Tina, and he also facilitated smuggling for the Haganah during the conquest of Palestine. These sorts of relationships can be enumerated endlessly. The point is that, wherever a Kennedy assassination connection can be identified, a Zionist connection is always lurking just around the corner. I wouldn't necessarily suggest that Roman Polanski is some kind of secret James Bond figure, but through Gutowski and probably others, he was tied into an international intelligence milieu, and it isn't so far-fetched to posit that he might have been privy to inconvenient details of the RFK assassination, which pretty clearly inspired his interest in the abandoned Day of the Dolphin project. Don't forget that Polanski's Hollywood crowd was embedded with the RFK presidential campaign in 1968. My suspicion is that people like Frankenheimer, Sylbert, and Beatty were being used to monitor RFK during the period leading up to the assassination - and it's almost funny that Frankenheimer by his own account switched places "at the last moment" with Paul Schrade, who ended up getting shot in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen with RFK. Arthur Krim, an ultra-Zionist Kennedy advisor who hoped to be appointed Ambassador to Israel, was also head of United Artists during the period when Frankenheimer made The Manchurian Candidate and constitutes another figure tying together Israel, Hollywood, and the Kennedy assassinations. People who find all of this overwhelming and want a simple introduction to the theory that Israel was ultimately behind the JFK assassination can skip ten minutes into the following presentation by Michael Collins Piper:

https://archive.org/details/MichaelCollinsPiperLectureFinalJudgmentTheMissingLinkInTheJFKAssassinationConspiracyKeyJewishRole

grimtraveller said...

rainercvk said:

I'm just an amateur movie critic, a person who's trained himself to notice patterns of meaning, and I've picked up on patterns in the Tate-LaBianca case that I think my theory at least plausibly explains

Ultimately, you simply can't argue with Rainer. Or George. Or Nick. Or Tom. Or Ghostdancer. Or Ed. Or Robert H. Or anyone else that wants to discredit Helter Skelter and/or Vincent Bugliosi. There exist myriads of connections that anyone with certain pieces of knowledge can make.
I'll give you an example of one I've made myself.
The LaBianca murder has been foxing people for over half a century. So much so that all kinds of theories have been floating in the ether, ranging from Mafia hits and black books to Suzan LaBerge {Rosemary's daughter} hooking up with Tex {or sometimes, Charlie} to have her mum 'offed', complete with phone calls in the middle of the night to determine whether or not the LaBiancas had returned from Lake Isabella.
But if one happens to know that Manson, by his own admission, was familiar with the inside of the LaBianca house, that he had wanted to move into the house next door, when Harold True was moving out, but had been rebuffed by his room mates, that Aaron Stovitz understood, while the investigation was ongoing, that the killers, at Charlie's direction, had headed to Harold True's on Aug 10th and that Manson, who stated that on the night in question, he'd gone to see Harold, knew that Harold had moved out 10 or 11 months previously {long before the LaBiancas even moved in next door}, then it's not a wild leap, given Manson's penchant for vengeance, to conclude that actually, his real targets on that night were True's former room mates. Susan Atkins, in her private interview with her lawyers certainly was of the opinion that Charlie had some axe to grind with the people in that house. That they had also long moved out doesn't matter ~ he wouldn't have known that because his connection was Harold True, not the room mates and once Harold had moved, and he'd he'd been rebuffed, there would have been no reason for him to go back to that house.

grimtraveller said...

2/2

Unless, perhaps, on a night when he's supposed to be showing others how to kill, his 5 attempts have come to nothing and he doesn't know these guys have moved so he figures that they'd make an easy target. After all, he has a gun, he has knives, he has a back-up of 6 people and the house he's thinking of is isolated...
So yeah, I think that True's 3 housemates were the targets. All the pieces fit. And they make sense. Manson had the killings happen in places he knew. He knew Gary's. He knew the area where Shorty was to be offed. And Tex knew Rosina's place where Lotsapoppa was holed up. He knew both the former True house and the LaBiancas because he used to go into it when it was empty.
Now, I can't prove the housemates were the target. But the pieces do fit and are plausible. It's worth making the point that this is an attempt to get into someone's head on one specific occasion 53 years ago, going by their actions, past and present.
So I'm aware of the ways in which someone might feel that their theory is plausible. Connections exist all over the place. Of course, it doesn't mean that those connections, even when they crop up repeatedly, mean anything that makes whatever theory being proposed to be correct and true.
I've also noticed a pattern among researchers and commentators ¬> Helter Skelter cannot be true. People have been picking it apart from when it was first mooted. Even some of those prosecuting it or having to subsequently defend it are on record as thinking it is suspect or won't {or wouldn't} say they actually think it to have any credence. I understand, to some extent, the desire to attach all kinds of theories to these crimes. In many ways, that very attachment becomes the specific theory's own greatest weakness.
They could all well be true, yet they can't all be true !

katie8753 said...

Lynyrd what I meant was, that was one of the "reasons" for the TLB murders, to do "copy cat killings" and to get money to get Bobby out of jail. That's why I think the Hinman murder led to the TLB killings.

Doug said...

Grim - SYLBERT! He (or, his twin brother)was married to your good friend Sharmagne Leland-St. John

OOO-EEE-OOO

grimtraveller said...

katie8753 said:

what I meant was, that was one of the "reasons" for the TLB murders, to do "copy cat killings" and to get money to get Bobby out of jail

Except that that is not true. The copycat {or Gabooj, as I like to call it} has more holes than a hobo's socks.

Doug said:

Grim - SYLBERT! He (or, his twin brother)was married to your good friend Sharmagne Leland-St. John

Aaahh, dearest Sharmagne. Last I caught up with her, she was hoping my kids didn't turn out like me. Me too !

rainercvk said...

A follow-up, in which I analyze Polanski's Macbeth in support of my thesis that Tate-LaBianca and the Kennedy assassinations are related:

https://rainercvk.blogspot.com/2022/05/temple-macbeth-israel-shakespeare.html

Doug said...

😬

mbowers said...

I agree with the jfk,rfk , assassination connections. Also the manson murders were a huge distraction off the black panther cointelpro happening at the same time.The intelligence cia and mossad connections jump out. Sharon tate' agent and acting coach had big time connections to both. And there are so many more as pointed out in the book chaos and the previous post about michael piper collins book.