Associated Press
LOS ANGELES – Vincent Bugliosi, a prosecutor who parlayed
his handling of the Charles Manson trial into a career as a bestselling author,
has died, his son said Monday night. He was 80 years old.
Bugliosi, who had struggled
with cancer in recent years, died Saturday night at a hospital in Los Angeles,
his son, Vincent Bugliosi Jr., told The Associated Press.
Bugliosi Jr. said his father
had "an unflagging dedication to justice" in everything he did.
As an author, Bugliosi Sr. was
best known for "Helter Skelter," which was his account of the Manson
Family and the killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others by
followers of the cult leader, Charles Manson.
Bugliosi had prosecuted Manson
and his female followers, winning convictions in one of America's most
sensational trials.
He was an unknown Los Angeles
deputy district attorney on Aug. 9, 1969, when the bodies of Tate, the
beautiful actress wife of Roman Polanski, and four others were discovered
butchered by unknown assailants who left bloody scrawlings on the door of her
elegant home.
The victims included members of
Hollywood's glitterati: celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring; coffee heiress
Abigail Folger; Polish film director Voityck Frykowksi; Tate, who was 8
1/2-months pregnant; and Steven Parent, the friend of a caretaker.
A night later, two more
mutilated bodies were found across town in another upscale neighborhood. The
crime scene was marked with the same bloody scrawlings of words including,
"Pigs" and "Rise" and "Helter Skelter." The
victims were grocers Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, who had no connection to Tate
and her glamorous friends.
Bugliosi was one of those
assigned to the team of prosecutors while the case was being investigated. When
members of the rag tag Manson Family were caught and charged with the crimes
months later, a more veteran prosecutor, Aaron Stovitz, was named head of the
district attorney's team and Bugliosi was assigned the second chair. But before
long, a dispute arose between Stovitz and his boss over a remark he made to the
media. He was summarily removed from the case and the intense, ambitious
Bugliosi stepped into the role of a lifetime.
The trial of Manson and three
female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten,
lasted 9 1/2 months and became a courtroom drama that rivaled any cinematic
trial. It cost Los Angeles County $1 million.
Bugliosi set the tone in his
opening statement and closing argument, denouncing Manson as a murderous cult
leader and his followers as young killers willing to do his bidding. He called
the women "robots" and "zombies," manipulated by Manson --
"a dictatorial maharajah of a tribe of bootlicking slaves."
He first proposed the theory
that Manson was inspired to violence by the Beatles song "Helter
Skelter," which the cult leader thought predicted a race war that Manson
and his followers would foment.
Determined to show the breadth
of the Manson Family's reach, Bugliosi called 84 witnesses, most of them a
parade of disaffected young people who joined up with Manson and fell under his
sway.
The trial became an exploration
of the cult and its drug and sex fueled adoration of Manson whom members
venerated as Jesus. He introduced 290 pieces of evidence.
At times, the defendants sought
to taunt the prosecutor, jumping up and singing in court or grabbing at his
papers on his lectern. The trial went on for so long that a defense lawyer
disappeared and was found dead in the woods. Bugliosi maintained there was foul
play but none was found.
Bugliosi was born in 1934 in
Hibbing, Minn. He attended the University of Miami at Coral Gables, Fla., on a
tennis scholarship and graduated from the law school of the University of
California, Los Angeles.
After the Manson trial, he
wrote "Helter Skelter" with collaborator Curt Gentry, and it became
one of the bestselling crime books of all time.
He tried running for public
office and lost, tried his hand on practicing defense law but ultimately
returned to writing books. He wrote a dozen books, including the true-crime
books, "Till Death Do Us Part," and "And The Sea Will
Tell."
His non-fiction efforts, which
took on controversial subjects, included "Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.
J. Simpson Got Away With Murder," and "The Prosecution of George W.
Bush for Murder."
Bugliosi Jr. said his father
was most proud of his nearly 2,000-page examination of the Kennedy
Assassination, "Reclaiming History," which took over 20 years to
write.
But Bugliosi remained most
associated with the Manson case for the rest of his life. Reflecting on it 40
years later, he said, "These murders were probably the most bizarre in the
recorded annals of American crime. ... Evil has its lure and Manson has become
a metaphor for evil."
Bugliosi and his wife of 59
years, Gail, had two children, Wendy and Vince Jr.