LOS ANGELES — Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who gained worldwide fame for his successful prosecutions of Charles Manson and his followers for the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others, has died. He was 80.
Bugliosi, who went on to become a best-selling true crime writer, co-authoring the compelling account “Helter Skelter” about the Manson murders and the sensational trial that followed, died Saturday in a Los Angeles hospital.
He had had health issues in recent years and the cancer he had overcome three years ago recently had returned and metastasized, according to his wife, Gail.
Along with the crime and courthouse tales that were his biggest sellers, Bugliosi turned his literary attention to other topics. He excoriated George W. Bush in a 2008 book for the U.S. military deaths in Iraq, arguing the former president should be tried for murder. In another, published in 2011, the former prosecutor, a longtime agnostic, coolly evaluated the evidence for the existence of God.
Bugliosi was always aware, however, of his primary legacy.
“No matter what I do, I’ll be forever known as the Manson prosecutor,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.
The events leading to that prosecution began on the night of Aug. 8, 1969, when, acting on Manson’s orders, four of the cult leader’s followers drove to the Hollywood Hills, ending up around midnight at the secluded Benedict Canyon estate Tate shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski, who was out of the country.
Five people, including the pregnant Tate, would be stabbed or shot to death on the sprawling property. Tate, who begged for her life and that of her nearly full-term baby, also was hanged.
The other victims at the Tate residence or on the grounds were Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; Voytek Frykowski, 32, a friend of Polanski’s; Abigail Folger, 25, a coffee heiress and girlfriend of Frykowski; and Steven Parent, 18, who had been visiting the property’s caretaker.
Hours later, across town in Los Feliz, grocery chain owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were tied up, tortured and killed in a similar manner inside their home.
Breathtaking in their brutality, the multiple killings terrified Los Angeles and set the region on edge. Gun sales skyrocketed in Beverly Hills and nearby communities. Business boomed for security companies, and off-duty police were hired to patrol the homes of the wealthy.
Aided by a jailhouse tip, investigators eventually would link the murderous rampage to Manson and several of his followers living on a remote former movie ranch above Chatsworth in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.
Bugliosi had been in the L.A. County district attorney’s office just five years when he was asked to help build the case against Manson and those accused with him: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. Another defendant, Charles “Tex” Watson, would be tried separately.
Two months into what would become a nearly 10-month trial — a record length and, at $1 million, a record cost for its time — Bugliosi became the chief prosecutor on the Manson case after a more senior attorney was removed by the district attorney’s office for making public comments about it.
The courtroom proceedings were marked by the defendants’ bizarre behavior: Manson and the women known as his “girls” carving Xs in their foreheads and shaving their heads; other members of the Manson “family” holding vigil outside the downtown L.A. courthouse; Manson lunging at Judge Charles Older with a sharpened pencil.
Bugliosi argued before jurors that the motive for the murders was Manson’s bizarre plan to trigger a race war, called Helter Skelter, from a Beatles song of the same name. The prosecutor said the cult leader believed blacks would win the war but eventually would hand over power to Manson and his all-white followers, who planned to survive the carnage by hiding out in Death Valley.
In 1971, two separate juries found Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Watson guilty on seven counts of first-degree murder. Van Houten was convicted of two murders.
Bugliosi sought and won death sentences for all five defendants, but the sentences were reduced to life in prison after the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 1972. The Legislature later re-enacted the death penalty statute, but the life terms for the Manson defendants were unchanged. Atkins died in prison in 2009; the others remain behind bars.
Stephen R. Kay, a former Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who worked with Bugliosi on the Manson trial, said the chief prosecutor recognized the significance of the case from the beginning in a way Kay, then 27, and at least some others in the office did not.
“Another attorney had told me, ‘This is just another big case, and in five years everyone will forget about it,’” Kay said in a 2012 interview with the Times. “But Vince really understood the potential all along, that this was the case of a career.”
Kay also remembers Bugliosi’s meticulous trial preparation and ability to work effectively on very little sleep. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody to be as hard a worker as Vince,” Kay said. “He would go home after the trial every day, take a nap for an hour, get up and work until 3 or 4 a.m., sleep for a couple more hours and go back to work.
“And he always appeared fresh, never tired.”
In the course of the trial, Bugliosi also quietly engaged a writer, Curt Gentry, to work with him on crafting “Helter Skelter,” a detailed account of the murders and the complex court case, published in 1974.
Vincent T. Bugliosi was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, on Aug. 18, 1934, the son of Ida and Vincent Bugliosi Sr. His father ran a small grocery store and later was employed as a railroad conductor.
Bugliosi earned money as a youngster by mowing lawns, delivering newspapers and other small jobs. He also excelled at tennis, winning a state championship in Minnesota when he was 16. His family later moved to Los Angeles and Bugliosi graduated from Hollywood High School.
He attended the University of Miami on a tennis scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He later received a law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was president of his 1964 graduating class.
In 1956, he married Gail Talluto, whom he had met in college. Their daughter, Wendy, was born in 1964 and their son Vincent J. in 1966.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
After the Manson trial propelled him into the limelight, Bugliosi ran twice for Los Angeles County district attorney. In the first race, in 1972, he forced incumbent Joseph Busch into a runoff but lost; in 1976, Bugliosi was defeated by incumbent John Van de Kamp.
After leaving the district attorney’s office, Bugliosi became a defense attorney but accepted relatively few cases. “I just don’t want to defend the same kind of people I used to send to death row,” he told The Duluth News-Tribune in 2001.
Mainly, he wrote books, more than a dozen in all, sometimes with co-authors, and always the same way, in long-hand, on a yellow legal pad.
In 1996, he published “Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder,” in which he dug through the details of the case against Simpson for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Bugliosi castigated the prosecutors and judge who handled the case as all but incompetent.
The book he considered his best was “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” a 1,600-page volume published in 2007. In it, he examined the assassination and investigation in minute detail, scornfully dismissing the conspiracy theorists who questioned Lee Harvey Oswald had committed the crime and acted alone.
But he often said inevitably most conversations with him turned to the Manson case.
“Years ago, I spoke at a book convention in Richmond, Virginia,” Bugliosi told a Newsweek interviewer in 2009. “I arrived at the station at the same time as William Manchester and Arthur Schlesinger, both Pulitzer Prize winners. The whole cab ride, Manchester and Schlesinger are tossing me questions about Charles Manson: That’s all they wanted to talk about.”
He often was asked to explain the enduring interest.
“The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil,” Bugliosi told the Times in 1994. “He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason there is a side of human nature that is fascinated with ultimate evil.”
Trounson is a former Times staff writer.
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