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The release of the book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 60s in 2019 kicked off a title wave of speculation about possible CIA involvement in the Charles Manson case. The author, Tom O'Neal, had discovered evidence which seemed to suggest the existence of a relationship between the cult leader Charles Manson and the MK Ultra Doctor, Jolly West, along with a mysterious alleged CIA spy named Reeve Witson. O'Neal implies that Manson hadn't just been subjected to MK Ultra techniques, but that he had somehow
learned the brainwashing process from the CIA and then used it on his followers, turning the so-called Manson family cult into mindcontrolled robots willing to kill at his command. And although O'Neal wasn't able to conclusively prove his thesis, many of his readers found the evidence of CIA involvement convincing.
What fewer people realize, however, is that conspiracy theories about mindcontrolled assassins actually have a long pedigree in modern American history, predating the release of chaos by several decades. After the revelations about the CIA's mind control experiments in the Church Committee hearings and the Rockefeller Commission, and especially with the release of the books, The Search for the Manurion Candidate and Operation Mind Control in 1978, some of the more paranoid sectors of American society began speculating about a possible link between the seeming epidemic of remorseless serial murderers stacking up
victims all over the country and the CIA's attempts to turn regular people into mindcontrolled assassins. And with the advent of independent publishing and the internet, this speculation has been broadened and democratized with some commentators eagerly combing through serial killers biographies looking for any gap, ambiguity, or interaction with the federal government that they can paper over with assertions of clandestine CIA interference and hypothetical black budget programs. One of the ironies of this rampant speculation is that there are a handful
of serial killers for whom a connection with MK Ultra and mind control research is not hypothetical. In a small minority of cases, there's actual objective evidence already in the historical record of a serial killer having been subjected to brainwashing experiments and even actual MK Ultral research projects in their early life before they ever became a serial killer.
In these cases, the connections between the killer and government sponsored mind control programs are not merely speculative. They're verified in long paper trails, published research, and even argued by defense lawyers in the killer's criminal trials. In this video, we'll examine the three strongest such cases with the best objective evidence pointing to a mind control hypothesis to see what remains when we pair back the paranoia and speculation and deal only with the facts as we find them.
But first, some quick caveats. The definition of the term serial killer is a point of ambiguity and criminology. Without getting lost in semantics, it's worth acknowledging that for the purposes of this video, I'll be using the broadest possible definition, meaning a killer with multiple victims who usually has a cooling down period in between murders.
So, to avoid wasting time explaining why each particular person in this video does or does not technically qualify as a serial killer, let's establish upfront that I'm using the term broadly to cover any killer with multiple victims spread out over time. Secondly, the Tom O'Neal chaos theory of the Tex Watson Charles Manson murders has been done to death on YouTube. And if you're watching this video, you're almost certainly already aware of the argument O'Neal makes in his book.
So to avoid retracing familiar ground for the audience, the Manson case has been left out of this video. In 1987, a US Army veteran named Gary Hidnik was living in a run-down section of North Philadelphia. Hidnik was a curiosity in the neighborhood. His house had bars on the windows and a yard filled with trash. Yet parked in his driveway was a Rolls-Royce and a Cadillac.
A sign on the front of the house read United Church of the Ministers of God. And on Sundays, the house hosted a church service where music and cries of praise the Lord could be heard from the street outside. The rest of the week, however, neighbors noticed a seemingly constant stream of female visitors going in and out of the front door.
Given what would later be revealed about Gary Hyneck, it was at first widely assumed that the church he'd incorporated was a fraud created solely to bill money from naive Christians or to dodge taxes. But the real story was somewhat more complicated. In 1971, Hidnik, who had been an atheist all his life, claimed to have had a religious experience while looking out over the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Malibu in California.
He said that God had told him to go to Philadelphia and open a new church which would reject donations and care for the mentally and physically disabled. A few months later, while under treatment in a mental hospital, Hidnik submitted the paperwork to incorporate the United Church of the Ministers of God, appointing himself bishop for life.
Over the following 15 plus years, Hidnik held services under the United Church banner wherever he happened to be living. On Sundays, a church member would take one of Hidnik's cars and drive around picking up congregants, delivering them to Hidnik's residents. After a short sermon and some gospel music, Hidnik would take the congregation composed primarily of mentally disabled people from the surrounding neighborhoods on trips to fast food restaurants or occasionally a local theme park.
It was against the church's constitution to collect donations, so a collection plate was never passed around. And if a congregant became homeless, Hidnick would allow them to stay at his house until they got back on their feet. Years later, after his arrest, even Hidnick's own lawyer admitted that he'd initially suspected that the church was just a front.
But eventually, quote, "After I took the case, people started calling me saying they'd been members and they wanted to know if someone was still holding services. I was amazed. The more I found out about it, the more I was convinced it wasn't a tax dodge. But there were other perks to appointing yourself bishop of your own church that Hidnick's lawyer failed to mention.
By the time of his final arrest in 1987, Hidnik hadn't held a job in at least 10 years. His only visible income was the $1,350 VA disability payments he received every month. That's over $46,000 a year in 2025 money. a result of qualifying as 100% disabled upon his discharge from the army, which was hardly enough to sustain Hidnik's lifestyle. It turned out that in 1975, Hidnik had opened an investment account with Meil Lynch in the name of the United Church of the Ministers of God and over the next 12 years parlayed an initial investment of around $20,000 into a portfolio worth almost $600,000, equivalent to roughly $1.5 million in
2025. Heck, who was judged to have above normal to superior intelligence according to his military records, was described by his broker as an astute investor who took an active part in managing his portfolio. And since the account was under his church's name, he avoided paying capital gains taxes and even got a discount on Meil Lynch's broker fees.
But this wasn't the only perk of being a bishop that Hidnick exploited. There's very little information in the public record describing the precise nature or theology of Haidnik's church, but there are indications that he was running it as a kind of polygamous cult with himself as the leader.
He began wearing a clerical collar and introducing himself to women as a minister while regularly seducing members of his congregation. At least five women became what Heidnik called his spiritual wives and gave birth to six children by him. His first spiritual wife, a woman named Joel Cron, continued associating with Hidnik even after he'd propositioned her daughter.
The daughter told Cron to watch out because Hidnik was becoming like, quote, "Another Jim Jones." Hidnik targeted developmentally delayed women, even camping out near a treatment center that serviced that population specifically for the purpose of finding new congregants to pray upon. An employee of the Elwin Institutes in West Philadelphia, a sheltered workshop program for the mentally disabled, told local media that Hidnick had approached her after work one day when she was getting food at the McDonald's next door and began engaging her in conversation.
She was holding a baseball card the restaurant had given her as part of a promotion, and Hyik asked her who the player on the card was. When she answered correctly, he asked a few more questions, and she answered those as well.
When it became clear that the woman was not mentally disabled, but rather was an employee of the Elwin Institutes, Hidnik lost interest completely and ended the conversation. He had been testing her, and the fact that she could answer simple questions correctly had apparently proved to Hidnick that her IQ was too high for a potential victim.
As one woman who knew Hidnik and his brother for seven years put it, he only liked women who had minds like a box of Jell-O. And this prediliction would come back to haunt him. In May of 1978, Heidik somehow convinced the staff at a mental hospital to let him take one of their patients, a 34year-old who had quote the mind of a 5-year-old out on a day trip. The woman was actually the cognitively impaired sister of Heidnik's living girlfriend.
And instead of returning the woman to the institution, he kept her locked in a storage room in his house, subjecting her to 10 days of horrific abuse. After the woman was rescued, Hidnik was convicted of crimes related to the incident in June the same year and sentenced to prison. Gary Hidnik and his brother Terry had both been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Gary had shown signs of severe mental illness from the earliest stages of his life. During his incarceration, he was repeatedly transferred to Farview State Hospital, a
state-run psychiatric prison, then called an institution for the criminally insane, to receive treatment before being parrolled in 1983. Terry Hidnik would later tell reporters about a conversation he had with his brother during this period.
Terry Hidnick said that after Gary's arrest in 1978, he offered to help Gary by taking him away from the city because he was living like a rat. He said his brother's reply made him sick. He said he got caught because the victim got to a telephone and knew where she was at. He said, "Next time they won't know where they're at, and I'm going to have a lock on their telephone.
" I said, "Wait, we're trying to get you better, and you're talking like you want to get better at not getting caught." Then he said, "I'm getting the drift of this thing." I went with a mentally disabled girl, but she could identify me. The next time she'll have to be blind, so she can't identify me. I walked away from him then.
Just 3 years after his release on parole, Gary Hidnik would make good on that promise. Heck was by this time regularly picking up prostitutes and other vulnerable women from the streets of Philadelphia to bring to his house at 3520 North Marshall Street. On November 25, 1986, Hidnik abducted Josephina Rivera, a 25-year-old sex worker, incapacitated her, and then trapped her in a pit he had dug in the floor of his basement.
Over the following months, Hinik would abduct five more women, subjecting them to horrific forms of torture while keeping them chained up in the basement dungeon. Josephina Rivera, the first and oldest of the captives, began exhibiting Stockholm syndrome like symptoms, participating in the beatings of the other victims and even suggesting new methods of torture for Hidnik to employ.
The other captives would later claim that Rivera had suggested using electrocution on one of the women, Deborah Dudley, for some perceived misbehavior. After Hidnik stripped the wires from an electrical cord and held the exposed ends against her chains, Dudley collapsed to the floor dead. In a panic, Hidnik forced Rivera to sign a confession, taking responsibility for the murder and made her participate in the disposal of the body.
But in the aftermath, he started allowing her more freedom during the day. He would take Rivera on shopping trips or out to restaurants. And when the two returned, they would laughingly torment the other victims with stories of the day's activities. At one point, the remaining women concocted a plan to bludgeon Hidnik with household items and make a break for it.
But Rivera told him about the plan before they could carry it out, leading to even more torture. Rivera was even allowed to drive Hidnik's car and helped him lure the last victim, Agnes Adams, to the house on North Marshall Street. By this time, Hidnik had begun digging a second pit in the basement next to the first one.
He told the women he planned to take them all to a plantation he supposedly owned in South Carolina, where they would live together as a polygamous family. And once he abducted five more women, the two groups would rotate between the plantation and the house in Philadelphia.
The day after the Agnes Adams abduction, Josephina Rivera convinced Hidnik that she might have more luck finding other victims to abduct if she searched the streets alone, and she set out by herself for the first time, agreeing to meet back up with Hidnik once she'd found another woman to bring home. Instead, she ran to an ex-boyfriend's house and called police.
The other three surviving captives were freed, and Hidnick was arrested on a litany of charges, including murder. A central element of Hidneck's original planned defense at trial revolved around his mental health. And suddenly, Gary Hyneck's psych history was of significant interest to the justice system and the media.
Hideneck's brother, Terry, said that when he heard about the charges, he quote believed it right off the bat. Gary was very capable of that. He said they had a family history of both brothers had attempted it themselves. Terry Hidnick said that Gary's personality seemed to radically change around the age of six or seven after he fell from a tree, suffering a massive head wound that deformed his skull so badly that other kids started calling him football head.
According to Terry, after the fall, Gary had become much more violent and began torturing animals and getting in frequent fights with his peers. Heck had spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals over the preceding years, and local media tracked down people who had interacted with him during his stints at various prisons and mental institutions.
One anonymous official from Greaterford Prison said that during Hyneck's term there, he was hospitalized twice because, quote, he talked to no one, neither inmates nor staff. We thought he had a serious problem and that's why we sent him to Farview, the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. A West Philadelphia man who said he'd spent time with Hidnik in a VA hospital in 1983 remembered Hidnik as someone who rarely spoke and mumbled when he did. I wasn't able to comprehend what he was saying.
Heck would shake his head, not speak in a whole sentence. Instead, he always carried a pad and pencil and would write if he wanted to communicate. But the most important part of Hnik's background for our purposes was the period he spent in the US Army. Hidnik enlisted in 1961 and was shipped off to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for training as a medic, where his conduct and efficiency were both rated as excellent by his superiors.
In May 1962, he was posted to the 46th Army Surgical Hospital in Land Stol, West Germany as an orderly. But just 3 months after arriving in Germany, Hidnik went on sick call. He asked to see a doctor after complaining of dizzy spells, headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and what would later be described as a nervous breakdown.
In October 1962, just 6 months after being posted to Germany, Hidnik was transferred back to the United States to a military hospital in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. A neurologist there noted that Hidnik seemed to be exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness. He was complaining of quote seeing things moving which the doctor thought suggested a hallucinatory experience possibly attributable to schizophrenia or a schizoid disorder.
Doctors recommended he be released from service and after 3 months in the hospital heck was honorably discharged on January 30th, 1963 with a disability rating of 10% soon increased to 100%. But after Hidnik's final arrest when his lawyer A. Charles Peruto tried to get the army to release his medical records for his criminal defense.
He found the army to be strangely resistant. To prepare for an insanity defense, Peruto had asked the army for any records related to Hidnik's hospitalization, typically a routine request in a criminal defense case, but the army refused to turn them over. Journalists started trying to track down more information about Hidnik's military service, but Army spokespeople refused to say why Hidnik had been sent back to the US from his posting in Germany or even the reason for his discharge, admitting only that, quote, "A person could be honorably discharged for being unsuitable for service or for a medical
reason." The judge in the case even had to help Heidi's lawyer obtain a federal court order from a different judge requiring the army to hand over the records. Years later, a Philadelphia psychologist, Dr. Jack Abshi, would spend months pouring over Hidenik's medical charts trying to piece together the history of his treatment by the army.
According to the book seller of horror by Ken Englade, Absi concluded that quote those initial symptoms the soldier Hidnick suffered pointed not so much towards psychosis as to the after effects of hallucinogens. While schizophrenics are noted for emotional fragidity, aloofness, and an inability to develop close relationships, Hynick's complaints were subtly different.
He admitted that he didn't respond well to authority and he also griped that others didn't like him because he performed his jobs better than they did. I was by far the best, he told one doctor and others pulled rank out of jealousy. Also, when Absi saw the drugs that were prescribed for Hidnik, an alarm went off.
His medication included Stellazine, which particularly attracted Api's attention. It's a major tranquilizer, not a Valium. Stellazine has kick. If one examines the adverse reaction of these drugs as listed in physicians desk reference, it would be questionable why someone would be placed on these without a diagnosis of severe psychosis or some other psychiatric definition, said Api.
It's obvious that they're drugs of choice for someone who's hallucinating. Either Hidnik was having a psychotic reaction visav the hallucination or he was responding to a hallucinatory agent. Since he was not a schizoid personality type, it's understandable that this diagnosis of schizophrenia was totally erroneous and that Hyeneck was having a hallucinatory experience.
Eventually, the reason for the army's hesitance became clear. Reporters have been trying to confirm a widely circulated speculation that Gary Hyneck's medical discharge and 100% disability from the military may have been the result of secret army experiments involving LSD. In a corridor outside a city hall courtroom where Hyneck's preliminary hearing was postponed for the second time, reporters peppered Hyneck's attorney, A.
Charles Peruto Jr., with questions regarding Hidnik's possible defense. It was reporters who asked Peruto whether Army LSD tests might have a bearing on the case. The Associated Press story included this paragraph. He mentioned a few things, but I won't tell what it was, Peruno said when asked about the LSD.
I can only say that I don't want to answer any questions along those lines because they may be extremely relevant at some later date. Over the following weeks, Arudo got more specific. Accused torture murderer Gary Hynik entered an army hospital in West Germany for stomach pains while stationed there 25 years ago, but emerged 10 months later as a cuckoo bird, his lawyer said yesterday. Attorney Charles Perudo Jr.
said he thinks the army drugged Hynik with LSD or measculine during the hospital stay in 1962 and 1963, but he said he's been unable to prove his suspicions. During a hearing yesterday, Perudo complained that the army has resisted requests for records of Hidnik's hospitalization. Outside the courtroom, Perudo said several of Hyneck's ex Army buddies have reported that Hyeneck was a little goofy when he entered the hospital for what the lawyer called bad stomach pains.
But the ex pals said Hidnik was absolutely bonkers when released 10 months later. Perudo said Heidik has told his lawyer he doesn't know whether he was drugged while in the hospital. But the suspect also said he sometimes stayed awake for 2 or 3 days while hospitalized, said Peruto. Sounds like it's probably measculine or LSD, said Peruto.
He was the perfect guinea pig for it. He was so wacky he didn't know if he was drugged or not. And eventually, Perudo claimed to have found proof of his suspicions. Perudo said that Army and VA documents show that Hineik was the subject of LSD tests between 1961 and 63. Although an Army spokesman said records didn't show such testing, Perudo's initial plan for Hidnik's trial was based on this line of defense.
It had been Perudo's intention to introduce testimony designed to link Hyeneck's treatment at the West German military hospital to army experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens. What he wanted was to create a circumstantial trail showing that Hyeneck may have been a guinea pig for drug tests and that the experiments irreparably fried his brain.
If my client were to testify, he would say he went into an army hospital where LSD experiments had been carried out, said Peruto. He would say he went in for a stomach problem and they gave him something that kept him up for three or four days. He was psychotic. That made him the perfect guinea pig. But the judge refused to allow it.
She said that because Perudo didn't have direct proof that Hidenik had been subjected to hallucinogen studies, he wouldn't be allowed to use the argument in his insanity defense. Of course, most proof would have been destroyed in 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MK Ultra files to be shredded.
almost 15 years before Hidnik's arrest. As to Perudo's contention that Heidnik would have been the perfect guinea pig for these experiments, it's true that most MK Ultra research and CIA backed hallucinogen studies occurred on military bases in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and colleges. And at least some of the doctors to whom MK Ultra work was subcontracted out intentionally targeted psychiatric patients for experimentation since they'd be easier to discredit if they blew the whistle on the project. The criteria for being
judged 100% disabled from a mental health condition as Hidnik was are extremely stringent. According to VA disability guidelines, in order to qualify as 100% disabled, a person must be judged quote so adversely affected as to result in virtual isolation in the community.
The person must demonstrate gross repudiation of reality with fantasy, confusion, panic, and explosions of aggressive energy resulting in profound retreat from mature behavior. And crucially, the conditions which caused the disability must be 100% attributable to the person's military service.
In other words, the disability has to have been directly caused by something that happened during the claimant's military service. It can't be a pre-existing condition. So, whatever caused Hyneck's mental illness, VA doctors were convinced that it happened during the 14 months he was enlisted. But if Hidnik's lawyer really had found records proving that he'd been experimented on in the army, it seems that he never produced them publicly.
After the hallucinogen defense was disallowed, Perudo had to abandon the LSD angle and pursue a more conventional insanity defense. But how plausible were Peruto's claims? Well, Fort Sam Houston, the Army base in Texas where Heidnik had undergone training, was a site for MK Ultra research. A project conducted there called Project White Coat lasted until 1973, but Perudo specifically claimed that Hidnik had been experimented on in a hospital, implying it must have occurred either during his stay at the Army Hospital in Lanstol, Germany, or at Valley Forge Military Hospital in Pennsylvania.
Now, there is substantial evidence indicating that Project Artichoke, one of the CIA's MK Ultra precursor programs, was implicated in the interrogation of returning Korean War PS at Valley Forge Hospital in the early 1950s. But that was nearly a decade before Hidnik arrived there. And there's no hard evidence that those interrogations involved hallucinogens.
There's no evidence that any MK Ultra experiments were taking place at Land Stol when Heidnik was there either. But the US Army was conducting parallel research on the use of hallucinogens for interrogation during the period of Hidenik's service.
And it turns out that at least one of the army's studies was using soldiers all over Europe as subjects. Between 1961 and 63, Project Third Chance examined LSD's potential as a truth serum for interrogations by dosing unwitting participants with acid. In one case in France, a private from South Carolina named James Thornwell, who was suspected of stealing classified documents, was subjected to sleep deprivation, starvation, hypnosis, and eventually surreptitious doses of LSD during over 3 months of confinement and interrogation.
The experience had a profoundly negative lifelong effect on his mental health. And in 1980, South Carolina's two senators shephered a bill through Congress granting Thornwell a payout of almost $700,000. Congress only identified 10 victims of Project Third Chance, but at least one of them was located in West Germany, where Hidnik had been hospitalized. Why would the army want to interrogate Hynik? It's hard to say, but according to his brother Terry, after Gary's discharge from the army, quote, "He never talked about what happened in Germany, but I think he got into a
fight. He was into all kinds of money-making schemes and loaning guys money, and something happened with all this, and they sent him back to the States." The CIA had conducted human experiments with hallucinogens in West Germany, starting in the early 1950s under the anesthesiologist Dr. or Henry Beecher.
But these took place near Frankfurt, some 80 mi away from Landtol Hospital, and it's not clear if these experiments were still ongoing by the time Hidnick entered the country in 1962. Ultimately, there isn't enough evidence to definitively say that Gary Hidnick was subjected to army or CIA mind control experiments during his time in the military, but given the massive gaps in the historical record, it can't be ruled out either.
Hidnik can be definitively connected to at least two sites, Fort Sam Houston in Texas and Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania, which provably conducted CIA backed mind control research. But at least according to the surviving records, neither site conducted hallucinogen experiments, and there's no proof that Highneck's time there overlapped with the CIA projects.
The fact that his lawyer, Charles Perudo, actually attempted to use government LSD induced insanity as a defense suggests that he must have believed he had fairly persuasive evidence of the connection. But he had access to a much greater share of Hyneck's records, which have never been released publicly.
So, if there was proof in those documents, we'll likely never know. Heck's insanity defense, minus the LSD claims, proved unsuccessful. And in 1988, he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, six counts of kidnapping, and numerous other offenses.
He was sentenced to death, and his lethal injection was ultimately carried out in July of 1999. Special thanks to my channel members. If you'd like to support the channel, please consider signing up. The algorithm has almost completely stopped recommending my videos to new people. Even if you can't become a channel member, please like, comment, and subscribe so I can keep making these videos.
Theodore Ted Kazinski was born to two workingclass Polish American parents in Chicago in May of 1942. A genius with a reputed IQ of 167, Kazinski skipped several grades, studying advanced math in his free time before graduating from high school at age 15 and enrolling in the math program at Harvard University in 1958 when he was 16 years old.
After earning his BA degree, Kazinski was accepted into some of the top graduate programs in the country for math, including UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, but ultimately enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Michigan, which had offered the most substantial scholarship and stipend.
Kazinsk's 1967 dissertation titled Boundary Functions was judged the best thesis the University of Michigan's math department had produced the year of his graduation. And a member of his dissertation committee remarked that there were maybe 10 or 12 men in the United States who could actually understand or appreciate the math work that Kazinski's dissertation was based on.
In 1967, after earning his PhD, Kazinski took a job teaching math at UC Berkeley, becoming at age 25 the youngest assistant professor in the university's history. Despite being disliked by students for his aloof manner and ineffective teaching style, Kazinski was by 1968 already on track for a 10-year job as a full professor of math at UC Berkeley. But then in 1969, the socially awkward and friendless Kazinski abruptly resigned his position and moved back in with his parents in the Chicago suburbs.
Two years later, in 1971, Kazinski moved to a cabin he'd constructed in rural Montana without electricity or running water. Living on money he earned from odd jobs or received from his family, Kazinski isolated himself almost completely, reading voraciously about philosophy, sociology, politics, and economics. One of the books he read during this period was the technological society by the French philosopher Jacqu Elul which greatly influenced his ideological outlook and according to Kazinski crystallized his thinking on the issue of man's relationship to technology. Alul's book was not about technology per se but rather focused on what Aul called
technique or the rationally derived methods of achieving absolute efficiency in all areas of human activity. Alo argued that technique and in turn technological advancement had become in a sense autonomous, self-directing, and irreversible, creating a system where humans were no longer truly in charge.
Rather than being a valueneutral tool wielded by humans to make themselves safer, richer, healthier, and so on, technological efficiency was being pursued for its own sake at the expense of freedom and autonomy for individuals and societies. Kazinski accepted that Aul had identified the central problem of modern society, the alienation and subjugation of humanity at the hands of a system which in practice valued technological efficiency above all else.
By 1975, Kazinski had begun engaging in acts of sabotage and arson to ward off development projects in the area surrounding his cabin. But in 78, he embarked on a bombing campaign targeting representatives of the technological society he sought to undermine. using explosive packages addressed to engineering and computer science professors, university departments, airlines, computer stores, and PR executives, among others. Kazinski kept diaries in which he wrote sometimes encrypted records of his crimes, noting
technical details of the bomb's construction and referring to the attacks as experiments. The FBI was only able to connect the bombings to each other because the bomber intentionally maintained a consistent design plan and left similar markings on all the explosive devices.
Eventually, they dubbed the attacker the Uni Bomber, meaning university and airline bomber. In 1995, Kazinski sent letters offering to end his terror campaign if one of a handful of media outlets he named would print his manifesto. On September 19, The Washington Post published Industrial Society and its future.
Kazinsk's 35,000word critique of technology and its effects on society, which Kazinski attributed to a fictitious group of his own invention called the Freedom Club. After reading the manifesto in the newspaper, Kazinsk's brother David noticed it contained ideas and arguments he'd been hearing from his brother Ted since at least 1971 and idiosyncratic terms of phrase which were unique to Kazinski.
Specifically, Ted had always been very particular about the wording of the idiom you can't have your cake and eat it too. Ted always reversed the verb order. You can't eat your cake and have it too, which is technically the correct form, though much rarer, because it's the order of the words which illustrates the impossibility. You can't eat a cake and then have it too.
In April 1996, Kazinski was arrested at his cabin where FBI agents discovered bomb-making materials, his journals, and early drafts of his manifesto. After rejecting his attorney's proposal to pursue an insanity defense, Kazinski plead guilty in January 1998 and began serving his life without parole sentences at ADX Florence Supermax in Colorado.
In the leadup to Kazinsk's trial, his defense lawyers and family had tried to paint a picture of Kazinski as a mentally ill psychotic with hallucinations and paranoia from a schizotypo disorder. Kazinski himself rejected these diagnosis, believing himself to be a rational actor engaged in direct action against the system he sought to overturn.
But there's one other data point in Ted Kazinsk's psychological history that's more relevant to our purposes here, and it involves an experiment he participated in as a sophomore at Harvard. In the year 2000, Kazinsk's fellow Harvard alum, the author and philosophy PhD Austin Chase, published an article in The Atlantic titled Harvard and the Making of the Uni Bomber, which he would later expand into the book Harvard and the Uni Bomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. Chase had begun corresponding with Kazinski in July of 1998 and discovered from Kazinski
himself that he'd participated in a three-year long psychological study as an undergrad at Harvard. Kazinski told him that during his trial, the Henry A. Murray Research Center at Harvard had released some of the study's raw data about him to his attorneys, but had refused to share the Murray team's analysis of that data.
Kazinski hinted darkly that the Murray Center seemed to feel it had something to hide, and one of his defense investigators reported that the center had told the psychologists who participated in the study not to talk with Kazinsk's defense team.
It turned out that in the fall of 1959, Kazinski had been selected as one of 22 subjects out of 70 volunteers to participate in a study being run by a team of psychologists headed by Henry A. Murray of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, a former Office of Strategic Services employee who had gone on to found the discipline of humanistic psychology, which sought to use the methods of psychology to expand human potential.
Each applicant was given a battery of psychological tests to screen them for certain attributes prior to participation in the study, which intended to measure how people react under stress and how they respond to interrogation. The researchers were looking for a few average individuals as well as those representing extremes, some who were highly alienated and others who were exceptionally welladjusted.
As the lead researcher, Henry Murray put it, they sought to enlist students who were quote at the extreme of a vowed alienation, lack of identity, pessimism, etc., as well as those at the opposite extreme, reporting nearly optimal physical, mental, and social well-being. Murray's preliminary screening identified Kazinski as the most alienated of the participants.
To anonymize the study, each subject was given a code name chosen by Murray which described some relevant aspect of the participants personality. Ironically, or perhaps as a dark joke, Kazinsk's code name was lawful. According to Chase's book, Harvard and the Uni Bomber, the centerpiece of the experiments was something Murray called alternatively stressful disputation, diatic interaction, stressful diatic episode, stressful diatic proceeding, diatic interaction of alienated subjects, or simply the diad. Whatever its name, it
was a highly refined version of the third degree. Its intent was to catch the student by surprise, to deceive him, bring him to anger, ridicule his beliefs, and brutalize him. As Murray explained in the only article he ever wrote about his experiment, first you're told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live.
Second, when you return with your finished composition, you're informed that in a day or two, you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies. When the subject arrived for the debate, he was escorted into a brilliantly lighted room and seated in front of a one-way mirror.
A motion picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body. Then the debate began, but the students were tricked. Contrary to what Murray claimed in his article, Murray had lied to the students.
He didn't tell him they would be debating a talented young lawyer. Rather, as Murray explained in an unpublished progress report, each student was led to expect he would confront another undergraduate subject like himself. So when they were confronted with what Murray called a law school student, our trained accomplice, they were caught completely by surprise and not prepared for what followed.
The law school student was carefully coached to launch an aggressive attack on his younger victim for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. As instructed, the unwitting subject attempted to represent and to defend his personal philosophy of life. Invariably, however, he was frustrated and finally brought to expressions of real anger by the withering assault of his older, more sophisticated opponent.
While fluctuations in the subject's pulse and respiration were measured on a cardio tachometer, not surprisingly, most participants found this highly unpleasant, even traumatic as the data sets record. We were led into the room with bright lights, very bright, one of the participants said. I could see shadowy activities going on behind the one-way glass. The psychologist started fastening things on me.
I had a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair with these electrodes. I really started getting hit real hard. Wham! Wham, wham! And me getting hotter and more irritated and my heartbeat going up and sweating terribly. There I was under the lights and with movie camera and all this experimentation equipment on me. It was sort of an unpleasant experience.
Right away, said another code named Trump, describing his experience afterward, I didn't like the interrogator. The psychologist came waling over and he put on those electrodes. But in that process, while he was doing that kind of whistling, I was looking over the room and right away I didn't like the room.
I didn't like the way the glass was in front of me through which I couldn't see, but I was being watched. And right away that puts one in a kind of unnatural situation. And I noted the big white lights. And again, that heightens the unnatural effect. There was something peculiar about the setup, too. It was supposed to look homey or look natural. Two chairs and a little table.
But again, that struck me as unnatural before the big piece of glass and the lights. And then another researcher who was bubbling over, dancing around, started to talk to me about how he liked my suit. The buzzer would ring or something like that. we were supposed to begin.
He was being sarcastic or pretty much of a wise guy and the first thing that entered my mind was to get up and ask him outside immediately, but that was out of the question because of the electrodes and the movie and all that. I kind of sat there and began to fume and then he went on and he got my goat and I couldn't think of what to say. And then they came along and they took my electrodes off. One subject, Hinge, thought he was being attacked.
Another Nazfield complained the lights were very bright. Then the things were put on my legs and whatnot and on the arm. I didn't like the feel of the sticky stuff that was on there being sort of uncomfortable. Before the diatic confrontation took place, Murray and his colleagues interviewed the students in depth about their hopes and aspirations.
During the same period, the subjects were required to write not only essays explaining their philosophies of life, but also autobiographies in which they were told to answer specific intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies.
After all this data was collected, the diatic confrontation took place. Over time, the participant would be called back for several recall interviews where he would sometimes be asked to watch and comment on the video of the confrontation.
By the end of the project, each student had spent about 200 hours being interrogated, degraded, tested, and measured. But in the end, no one involved could really tell what the point of the experiment had been. The data was never published or turned into a journal article. Murray claimed he was working on a book about his concept of the diad, but it was never produced.
Some of Murray's assistants believed he just took pleasure in seeing what happened when one person attacked another. But for all the ink that's been spilled over Ted Kazinsk's supposed ties to MK Ultra, there's no evidence in the historical record directly connecting the experiment in which he participated to MK Ultra in particular, or the CIA in general.
It's true that the study's lead architect, Henry Murray, had worked for the OSS during the World War II era, devising psychological screening tests for potential spies. And at least according to Timothy Liry, monitoring military experiments on brainwashing, but evidence of a direct intelligence link to this particular study is lacking.
On the other hand, one of the primary goals of MK Ultra research was to brainwash someone to such an extent that they'd be willing to commit acts which were totally against their moral convictions, like murder, for instance, without remorse or even remembering the event itself. In this sense, a study about breaking down an individual's personal philosophy and moral compass is at least conceptually totally consistent with the kinds of research the CIA was conducting into brainwashing and mind control.
And if the data collected during the study was never used for a book or research paper, then it's reasonable to wonder what Murray's intentions were in collecting all this extremely private information from Harvard students about their sexual habits, personalities, fears, and values.
Had the whole thing been a covert project to collect compromising material about Harvard undergrads for blackmail or CIA recruitment, obviously it would be extremely valuable to an intelligence agency to have such detailed private information about a group of people who, as Harvard graduates, were almost guaranteed to soon be assuming roles at the very top of American government, finance, and industry.
But whatever Murray's true motives were for conducting a study like this, there's no concrete proof of where the data ended up or what it was used for. So unfortunately, we are, at least for now, confined to speculation. For his part, Kazinski totally rejected the idea that the study had any influence on his thinking or personality. I've received plenty of letters from people who believe that in the course of the psychological study at Harvard directed by Henry A. Hurry.
I was subjected to psychological torture as part of an MK Ultra mind control experiment conducted by the CIA, but it's all [ __ ] There was one and only one unpleasant experience in the Murray study. It lasted about half an hour and could not reasonably have been described as torture. The Murray study consisted mostly of interviews and filling out paper and pencil personality tests. The CIA wasn't involved.
And even by the criteria used in the study, Kazinski was already highly alienated from others by the time he enrolled to participate. So that particular trait can hardly be blamed on the study itself. However, it's worth noting that descriptions of Kazinski from his teachers, relatives, friends, and acquaintances before he reached Harvard describe a relatively welladjusted genius who was quote honest, ethical, sociable, and easy to talk to, and seemed to be the ringleer in his friend group. One high school guidance counselor even said that Kazinski had
quote one of the greatest contributions to make to society. Austin Chase, the author who popularized the idea of the mindcontrolled uniomber, believed that it was his time at Harvard which precipitated Kazinsk's later violent acts, suspecting that Ted's philosophy was at least in part a reaction to the utopianism and worship of technological progress in Cambridge, which the Murray study only exacerbated.
Kazinski viewed himself as a revolutionary, a rational political actor seeking to wake up the populace to the truth he'd discovered through the only method accessible to him, violent direct action. Whether Kazinski was a born psychopath or purely a product of the mental conditioning he faced at Harvard, is up to you to decide.
Perhaps the single strongest case for an MK Ultra serial killer is someone who most people wouldn't actually think of as a serial killer at all, despite his high victim count, the Boston mobster, James Whitey Bulier. Bulier was the most powerful mafia dawn in Boston history, suspected of at least 19 murders, whose criminal enterprise was protected and even aided by the FBI for decades.
and his connections to MK Ultra are actually proven with a paper trail, names, locations, and dates, and extensive testimony from Bulier himself describing how the experiments transformed his life. Whitey Bulier was born into poverty, growing up in the Mary Ellen McCormack housing projects in South Boston.
Bulier's other five siblings, lived relatively conventional and even prosperous lives with one younger brother, William Bulier, eventually becoming a Massachusetts state senator and president of the University of Massachusetts. However, James Bulier, or Whitey as he was called, was a fighter and street criminal from a young age.
After serving a stint in a juvenile reformatory, Bulier enlisted in the Air Force, spending time in military prison for fights and going AWOL before being honorably discharged in 1952. In 1956, after a series of bank robberies in multiple states, Bulier was sentenced to 20 years in prison and sent to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. After nine years in Atlanta, Alcatraz, and Levvenworth, Bulier was parrolled in 1965, moving back to South Boston.
Over the next three decades, Bulier and his Winter Hill gang would come to dominate organized crime in the city, running lone sharking, gambling, drug trafficking, theft, and extortion operations throughout the metro area. Bulier had actually informally passed information to the FBI as early as his 1956 arrest on bank robbery charges. But in the mid 1970s, he established a connection to Boston FBI agent John Connelly that would go far beyond conventional informant work and create a symbiotic relationship between Bulger's criminal operation and the FBI.
Conny's initial proposal to Bulier was simple. Bulier would supply the FBI with information about his mafia rivals, mainly from the big New York Italian families, and Connelly would in turn provide Bulier with protection from local police while helping to dismantle other organized crime operations in the areas where the Winter Hill gang operated.
Connelly was Irish like Bulier, and they'd grown up in housing projects just a few doors down from each other. Although it's unknown exactly how the relationship began, by 1975 both Bulier and his top lieutenant Steven Flemmy were regularly meeting with Connelly. During his time as an FBI informant, Bulger was routinely importing and selling marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, ordering murders, and sometimes carrying them out himself, shaking down drug dealers and bookmakers, trafficking and weapons, and running large-scale theft operations while laundering money through a network of front companies, including liquor stores and nightclubs. Bulger's mob ties were wellknown, and he became something of a local celebrity,
handing out free turkeys at Thanksgiving and keeping order in the South Boston streets. But state and local police found that every investigation they opened into Bulger's activities seemed to go nowhere. One time, DEA agents placed a bug in Bulger's car door, but the sound of speech on their recordings was always drowned out by blasting music. Within days, Bulier had the door disassembled and the bug removed.
Massachusetts state police noticed that Bulier and his associates always seemed to use a specific bank of payones outside of a restaurant. Immediately after the lines were wiretapped, they stopped using the payoneses. When state troopers got a warrant to place listening devices in a garage Bulier was using as a headquarters, the gang suddenly stopped meeting there.
In 1983, the DEA, Massachusetts State Police, the Quincy Police Department, and the US Attorney's Office in Boston opened a joint investigation into the Winter Hill Gangs narcotics trafficking. But when Connelly learned of the operation, he leveraged Bulger's informant status to argue that any interference with the gang's drug operations could sabotage the FBI's larger investigations into organized crime. Once again, the investigation came to nothing.
Connelly began making flashy purchases with the bribes he was receiving from Bulier, including a boat, two condos, and a house. And it would have been nearly impossible for higherups in the FBI and other law enforcement agencies not to notice that every time the Boston FBI was looped in on an investigation targeting Bulier, he seemed to know about it immediately.
In fact, it appears that at least some in the DEA's Boston office grew suspicious of Connelly. And by 1989, DEA agents with personal connections to him were quietly removed from cases involving the Winter Hill gang. When Connelly retired from the FBI in 1990, he even circulated a memo claiming that Bulier had retired from organized crime activities and was now a legitimate businessman.
But with Connelly out of the bureau, Bulier no longer had his informant status to fall back on. And in 1994, the DEA, Boston police, and Massachusetts state police opened an investigation into Bulger's gambling operations. The FBI was by this time considered too compromised to participate.
So, they weren't informed of the investigation until indictments were about to come down. Connelly, out of the bureau, but still in contact with his former co-workers, told Bulier he was facing an imminent RICO indictment, and Bulier fled Massachusetts, taking his wife and millions of dollars with him.
During the trials of Bulger's associates, the FBI was forced to reveal his informant status, and some of his former lieutenants decided to cooperate against him for more lenient sentences. After 16 years on the run, Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica, California in 2011 after a tip from a woman in his neighborhood. He faced federal charges of raketeering, moneyaundering, drug trafficking, extortion, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder, among others, ultimately being convicted on 31 counts, including 11 murders. In 2013, Bulier was sentenced to two life terms plus 5
years, and was still facing several more indictments in other states. He was shipped to USP Coleman in Florida and despite his deteriorating health, multiple recent heart attacks, and imminent need for surgery, the 89year-old Bulier's medical status was downgraded and he was transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia in 2018.
The day after arriving at Hazelton, Bulier was beaten to death in his wheelchair in a murder orchestrated by an associate of the Genevese crime family, one of the mafia organizations Bulier had informed on. Bulier's family would sue the Bureau of Prisons, alleging that by fraudulently lowering the elderly and infirmed Bulier's medical status and transferring him into the general population at one of the federal systems most violent prisons, they had intentionally set up his murder. The lawsuit was later dismissed.
There had also been widespread speculation since well before his trial that Bulier would seek a deal with federal prosecutors to testify against the corrupt officials who had helped protect the Winter Hill Gangs operations in Boston.
But besides John Connelly and two of his co-workers at the Boston FBI office, no other government employees were ever prosecuted for their participation in Bulger's criminal empire. In 2009, Connelly was sentenced to 40 years in prison on a single charge of secondderee murder for informing Bulier that the FBI was investigating the victim's ties to the Winter Hill gang, thus directly implicating himself in the arrangement of the man's murder.
John Connelly was released from a Florida prison in 2021. After Bulier's trial, one of the jurors who'd convicted him wrote Bulier a letter and they began a lengthy correspondence. In one of his letters, Bulger wrote that back in the late 50s during his incarceration at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, he'd signed up for a medical experiment on whooping cough in exchange for a good time reduction in his sentence.
But then, while participating in the study, he was asked if he wanted to volunteer for a separate research project seeking a cure for schizophrenia. Bulier agreed and for the next 15 months, rather than receiving an antiscychotic medication, Bulier was injected with high doses of LSD three times a week, every week, and then subjected to repetitious questioning, including two questions which stuck with Bulger all his life.
Have you ever killed anyone? Would you ever kill anyone? It turned out that the study being run by the noted pharmarmacologist and researcher from Emory University, Dr. Carl Feifer was actually being sponsored by the CIA as part of the MK Ultra program. On August 6th, 1957, Whitey signed a contract affirming that he understood the hallucinatory effect of lysurgic acid dialomide LSD25 and that the potential benefits to humanity and the risks to my health of participation in the study have been explained to me,
and I hereby freely assume all such risks. 6 days later, he reported to the psychiatric ward, a large antiseptic room with bars and a locked steel door in the basement of the prison hospital where he was injected with his first dose of LSD.
It was a routine that would continue once a week for the next 15 months. Whitey got $3 for every injection and 54 days off his sentence in total, but it was a devastating compact. The hallucinatory effects of the LSD would last a lifetime. and Whitey would bitterly recall years later how he felt tricked into taking something that nearly drove him mad and would forever rob him of a good night's sleep. The hallucinations began within minutes of the injection.
Suddenly, blood seemed to explode from the walls and drown him. The bars on the windows morphed into writhing black snakes. He and the other test subjects became raving, totally out of control mental and psychological animals. Whitey felt depressed and suicidal after the sessions.
He said two inmates in the project became psychotic and were shipped off to the federal prison hospital in Missouri. Richard Sunday, an inmate who worked in the prison hospital with Whitey and became one of his closest friends, witnessed the effects of the experimental injections and was horrified. Whitey, he said, screamed wildly and babbled incoherently. His face was contorted. He was one crazy individual when he was on those drugs. Sunday said he was a lunatic.
A local news station obtained an undated journal Bulier had apparently written in the years after his first term in federal prison in which he described horrible LSD experiences followed by thoughts of and deep depression and wrote that he developed a quote morbid fear of LSD feeling that if he had any more of it, it would push him over the edge. We were injected with massive doses of LSD25.
In minutes, the drug would take over and about eight or nine men, Dr. Feifer and several men in suits who weren't doctors, would give us tests to see how we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state, total loss of appetite, hallucinating. The room would change shape.
Hours of paranoia and feeling violent, horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change under the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane. The men in suits would be in a room and hook me up to machines asking questions like, "Did you ever kill anyone? Would you kill someone?" Bulier soon found that he could sleep for only a few hours before inevitably waking up in a cold sweat.
He felt like his head changes shape and the only antidote is to look in the mirror to make sure his head was still the same. According to Bulger, two of the other men in the experiment, quote, "When psychotic, they had all the symptoms of schizophrenia. They had to be pried loose from under their beds, growling, barking, and frothing at the mouth.
They put them in a strip cell down the hall. I never saw or heard of them again. Declassified CIA documents would later confirm that at least two prisoners were transferred out of the program because of mental problems. For decades afterward, he refused to talk about his experience. Bulier feared that if I mentioned hearing voices or the seeming movement of calendar and cell, etc.
, that I'd be committed for life and never see the outside again. In his journal, Bulger wrote of having nightmares on a nightly basis and suspected the LSD had been responsible for years of allergies and stomach pains. He called the doctor administering the study a modern-day Mangala. I was in prison for committing a crime and feel they committed a worse crime on me.
Years later, Bulger was still so disturbed by the experience that he threatened to kill anyone caught selling LSD in South Boston and at one point planned to hunt down and murder Dr. Feifer. Incredibly, during his trial, Bulger's defense lawyers managed to not only avoid implicating any government officials besides John Connelly in any criminal activity, but they also failed to mention LSD, MK Ultra, or the CIA at all.
Questioned after Bulger's conviction, famed Boston defense attorney Anthony Cardinau said, "If I defended him, I would have got him off. It's a simple defense, two parts. a nearly two years of LSD testing fried his brain. You bring in expert witnesses, psychiatrists, and others who detail the history of how people who took part in this secret CIA program committed suicide or became institutionalized. I'd have Bulger sit there doodling and drooling.
He's a victim driven insane by his own government. Part B. He returns from prison in the early 1970s and the FBI gets a hold of him. They recruit him as an informant and enable him to the point where he delusionally believes there's no difference between right and wrong, that he can kill.
He believes that it's okay to do that because the FBI enabled him to the point he insanely believes he had the right to kill people. I'm telling you, I could have had a jury feeling sorry for Whitey Bulier. He's a victim, ladies and gentlemen, and they, the government, are the reason he did all this. He truly believed he could get away with it.
He didn't know the difference between right and wrong. They put all this in his head. They damaged and manipulated him to the point they turned him into a psychotic killer. Whitey Bulier was in many ways a creation of the federal government. And his may be the only case in the historical record of a serial killer with an objectively proven direct connection to the CIA's mind control experiments.
Bulier had a tested IQ of 118 and his brother William, just a few years as junior, received a BA and a law degree from the prestigious Boston College before becoming Senate Majority Leader for the state legislature of Massachusetts. If anything, Whitey Bulier clearly had enormous potential to live a productive and pro-social existence, at least in the years leading up to his incarceration.
The CIA ultimately maintained that their brainwashing program failed to create the remorseless Manurion candidate they'd hoped to produce. But it seems awfully coincidental that a man who would later be convicted of 11 murders and probably actually committed many more had spent months being relentlessly interrogated about his capacity to kill during a CIA experiment when he was still just a petty criminal years away from murdering anyone.
And unlike Ted Kazinski, Bulier not only acknowledged that he'd been left with extensive psychological damage from the experiment, but he began telling people about his prison LSD experiences way back in the 1970s or 80s after he read the search for the Manurion candidate. It wasn't like he was just playing it up for his criminal defense.
And then after the CIA treated Bulier like a disposable guinea pig, just like all the other convicts and metal patients who were injected with LSD to be interrogated and tortured, the FBI swooped in just a few years later to make him their designated mafia dawn for the city of Boston, protecting his criminal enterprise as he imported kilos of cocaine and heroin and murdered his way across Boston with impunity.
The fact that the CIA's mind control program seems to have produced a cult leader, a mad bomber, a serial killer, and the most powerful mobster in Boston history is incredible to say the least. But the Bulger story couldn't have been what it was without the direct complicity of the FBI and likely many more in Boston's local government.
The CIA's destruction of the MK Ultra records has created an information vacuum which conspiracy theorists have eagerly filled with the most wildeyed, circumstantial, and often baseless speculation about serial killers and their supposed connections to government mind control.
But as I hope we've proved today, there's enough true verifiable information in the historical record to examine the link between CIA brainwashing programs and serial killers without resorting to wild leaps of logic or hypothetical musings completely detached from the facts of history. I can't say with any degree of certainty that Gary Hidnik, Ted Kazinski, James Bulier, or Charles Manson, for that matter, would never have gotten involved in violence or murder without the mind control experiments to which they were apparently subjected. But if CIA brainwashing programs were directly
implicated in having turned these guys into serial killers, then this is probably what the evidence would look like.
