Vincent Bugliosi, Manson prosecutor and ‘Helter Skelter’ author, dies at 80
Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor who won convictions against Charles Manson and several of his followers for a series of heinous murders in 1969 and who later wrote a best-selling true-crime book, “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson cult and the killings surrounding it, died June 6 in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 80. The cause was cancer, his wife, Gail Bugliosi, told the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Bugliosi (pronounced bool-YOH-see) was a deputy district attorney when he was asked to prosecute some of the most gruesome and unsettling killings in the country’s history.
“When you talk about the Manson case,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994, “you’re talking about perhaps the most bizarre murder case in the annals of crime.” In the early-morning hours of Aug. 9, 1969, several people entered a Los Angeles estate rented by the film director Roman Polanski, who was in Europe at the time. Polanski’s wife, 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate, was at the house with several friends. The next day, the body of Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was found stabbed and hanged. The four houseguests were also killed, along with a teenaged boy who was visiting the estate’s caretaker. The word “Pig” was scrawled on a door in the victims’ blood. The following night, grocery-chain owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were tied up and slain at their home. The phrases “Death to Pigs” and “Healter Skelter” — misspelled by the killers — were written in blood.
The two incidents were not linked by police until one of Manson’s followers, Susan Atkins, in jail on another charge, told fellow inmates about the killings. Manson was arrested at a ranch outside Los Angeles, where he presided over a band of drifters known loosely as the Manson Family. The Tate-LaBianca murders, as they became known, cast a pall of fear across Los Angeles and the country. “There were areas of the city where folks literally did not lock their doors at night,” Mr. Bugliosi told Newsweek in 2009. “That ended with the Tate-LaBianca murders. The killings were so terribly brutal and savage: 169 stab wounds, seven gunshot wounds. They appeared to be random, with no discernible conventional motive.”
By:Matt Schudel
Source: The Washington Post
