The prosecutor who sent Charles Manson to prison, Vincent Bugliosi, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 80. According to his wife and son, Bugliosi lost a long battle with cancer.
Bugliosi was a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County from 1964 to 1972. In that time, he won 105 out of 106 felony trials, including 21 murder cases. His most famous win, however, is the 1969 trial of Manson and three other members of his “Family”–Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Kreinwinkel–for the murders of Sharon Tate and four of her guests, as well as the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. He was originally the number-two prosecutor on the case, but inherited the lead role two months into the trial when the original lead prosecutor, Aaron Stovitz, got bounced for making public comments about the case.
Initially, Bugliosi had to work mostly with circumstantial evidence. However, he was able to glean evidence that Manson was not only the mastermind of these and several other murders by way of his near-total control of his “family,” but that they were committed in order to spark a race war called “Helter Skelter.” By trial’s end, he had amassed evidence that was so overwhelming that he was able to tell the jury in closing arguments that he had not only proven Manson and his “family” were guilty beyond reasonable doubt, “but we have proven it beyond all doubt.”
In 1971, Manson, Atkins, Van Houten, and Kreinwinkel were all convicted and sentenced to death. Just a year later, these sentences were commuted to life in prison when the California Supreme Court threw out the death penalty as it was then imposed. A year later, Bugliosi, a Democrat, made the first of two unsuccessful runs for district attorney.
Two years after ending his tenure as a prosecutor and going into private practice, Bugliosi wrote a book about the investigation and trial, “Helter Skelter.” It became the best-selling true crime book in history; at the time of his death it had sold over seven million copies. The success of “Helter Skelter” allowed Bugliosi to build a second career as a true crime writer. Probably his best-known work besides “Helter Skelter” was “Reclaiming History,” in which he argued that Lee Harvey Oswald had indeed killed John F. Kennedy alone. He spent 20 years writing that book; earlier, he had served as prosecutor in a mock trial of Oswald. Not surprisingly, he won a conviction.
I’ve managed to get my hands on two of Bugliosi’s other books, and I can see how he was so successful in the courtroom. In “Outrage,” a scathing critique of the prosecution of O. J. Simpson, Bugliosi argues that Simpson would have almost certainly been sent to prison for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had Marcia Clark and Chris Darden introduced a number of highly incriminating items into evidence. For instance, the jury never knew that Simpson had a change of clothes and a disguise in Al Cowlings’ Bronco.
I also managed to buy another of Bugliosi’s books, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder,” in which he argues that since Bush lied to the American people about the case for war in Iraq, the deaths of every American soldier and Iraqi civilian in that conflict amount at the very least to second-degree murder. Bugliosi even went as far to say that if he were the prosecutor in this case, he would argue for the death penalty. While I wouldn’t go that far, I did agree with his argument that it would be “a joke” to merely impeach a president who lied this country into a war.
It’s not often that a prosecutor who is known mostly for just one conviction gets this much acclaim. But in Bugliosi’s case, it’s very well deserved. After all, if you manage to win 105 out of 106 felony cases and don’t lose a single murder case, you have to be very persuasive.
