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CHAPTER 1
The Prosecutor
"People say I'm an extremely opinionated person. If opinionated means that when I think I'm right I try to shove it down everyone's throat, they are correct. ... As for arrogant, I am arrogant and I'm kind of caustic. ... The great majority of people I deal with are hopelessly incompetent, so there's an air of superiority about me."
— Vincent Bugliosi, Playboy Magazine, April 1997
Vincent Bugliosi was born in 1934 in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing. He attended a Catholic school, played sports in high school, and became quite proficient at tennis. He eventually became Minnesota's State High School Champion and Northwest Junior Champion. He was good enough at tennis to win a scholarship to the University of Miami, Florida. After graduating from Miami, Bugliosi entered the service. He rose to the rank of captain in the army. After leaving the service, he then attended UCLA Law School. He graduated in 1964 as president of his class.
Shortly after passing the bar exam, Bugliosi joined the Los Angeles District Attorney's office. In a relatively short amount of time, Bugliosi became one of its busiest and most efficient prosecutors. In the little less than nine years he was there, Bugliosi lost only one felony case, while winning more than one hundred.
One case in particular would rocket Bugliosi into the stratosphere of lawyer-celebrities: the one known as the Tate/LaBianca Murders. On the morning of Saturday, August 9, 1969, the housekeeper for film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate, discovered the first of five corpses in the Polanski home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. The police eventually discovered four more bodies at the site. In addition to Sharon Tate, there was mens' hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Victor Frykowski, and recent high school graduate Steve Parent, who had been visiting his acquaintance, caretaker William Garretson.
The very next evening, the bodies of Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were found in their home in the Hollywood district of Los Feliz. These two gruesome discoveries formed the beginning of the infamous Tate/LaBianca murder cases. Since both homes were in the city of Los Angeles, the local DA's office handled the cases. Aaron Stovitz, the head of the Trials Division, picked the thirty-five-year-old Bugliosi to aid him. Forgetting about both the Charles Lindbergh child kidnapping case and the assassination of President Kennedy, assistant Bugliosi was quick to ordain the multiple homicides as "the case of the century."
Due to the huge amount of publicity the murders generated, the first judge, David Keene, placed a gag order on the attorneys. During the trial, the DA felt that Stovitz violated that order. Stovitz was therefore removed from the proceedings. Bugliosi now became the lead prosecutor in the case.
Susan Atkins was already in jail due to suspicion in another homicide. While at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins told inmates about being present inside the Tate home and being driven to the LaBianca home on the nights the killings occurred. She allegedly admitted this not once, but twice, to two different detainees: Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham. In November, through Howard, news of her confession eventually got back to the authorities. A few days later, Graham got in contact with the Los Angeles Police Department. The police then taped Graham's testimony about her conversation with Atkins. A couple of hours later, LAPD began to question other people who had been involved with Charles Manson, a name Atkins had revealed to Howard and Graham.
Atkins's lawyer arranged to have his client tape her confession for him. On December 3rd, he then presented this to Stovitz, Bugliosi, and the police. Caballero allowed this evidence to be entered to the grand jury. In return, Atkins's testimony could not be used against her in court. Based on this grand jury testimony, Manson and others who had been named by Atkins were charged with the murders. Manson was not that difficult to find since he had just been charged with arson and auto theft in Inyo County, a desolate place about 175 miles northeast of Los Angeles. But, as Stovitz later said, if Manson had not set fire to a bulldozer, they might never have found him up in the deserted Death Valley.
After many weeks of pretrial motions, attorney juggling, and jury selection, the trial began on July 24, 1970. Including its penalty phase, the joint trial went on for nearly nine months. Judge Charles Older sentenced the convicted defendants to death on murder and conspiracy charges on April 19, 1971. In 1972, in the case of People v. Anderson, the California Supreme Court voted to eliminate the death penalty. Therefore, the death sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Already in the limelight because of the deluge of publicity about the trials, Bugliosi decided to write a book about his experiences on the case. A major publisher, W. W. Norton — the same publisher that released Reclaiming History — teamed the first-time author with an experienced writer, Curt Gentry. The book was published in 1974. Entitled Helter Skelter, it quickly became a bestseller, and it stayed on the bestseller list a long time because a much watched two- night television film, broadcast in April 1976, kept it there when the book was released as a mass-market paperback. Helter Skelter eventually sold over seven million copies, becoming the number one bestselling true crime book ever.
Looking Back at Helter Skelter
I had never read Helter Skelter prior to preparing this book, but after reading it, I decided to do some supplementary research on that case. I was rather surprised by what I found. The spectacular success of the book and TV film seems to have blinded many people to some central issues about both that book and the case itself. In this discussion of Bugliosi as author/prosecutor, it seems appropriate to, however belatedly, review those issues in this setting.
In light of the attitude taken in Reclaiming History, it seems important to note that Bugliosi and the DA's office achieved the convictions of Manson and the others on the vicarious liability clause of the criminal conspiracy statute. In a conspiracy trial, this means any member of the conspiracy can be held liable for the crimes committed by his coconspirators in furtherance of the plot, even if the final act did not actually include certain members of the plot. It was on this legal ground that Manson was convicted of the murders in Tate/LaBianca. This was necessary since Manson was not present at the scene during either set of murders. (On the second night, he had been on the scene but left before the murders took place.) Therefore, as shown at this trial, Bugliosi thoroughly understands this concept in law, for he himself used it quite pointedly in this case. For instance, during his summation to the jury, the prosecutor said, "Manson thought he would get off by not killing anyone. Well, it's not that easy ... The law of conspiracy has trapped these murderers even as the killers trapped their victims." Therefore, demeaning the generic idea of conspiracy as a "theory" — as Bugliosi does throughout Reclaiming History — reveals a rather short memory on his part.
Another interesting aspect of Helter Skelter to note in comparison to Reclaiming History is this: Bugliosi spends page after page criticizing the police work in the Tate/LaBianca cases. At times, he actually names the people he thinks are responsible for the errors or delays in the investigation. Yet, in Reclaiming History, he does not even note, let alone complain about, the delay that the Warren Commission had in deposing Sylvia Odio after her first contact with the FBI. And Odio is an important witness to a pre-assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. One who Bugliosi himself tends to believe.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi complains throughout the first hundred or so pages about the failure of the police to link the two cases — Tate and LaBianca — even though there were signs they were related. In Reclaiming History, he refuses to see any relationship between the failed attempt to kill President Kennedy in Chicago in early November with the successful attempt three weeks later to kill him in Dallas.
In Helter Skelter, the prosecutor looks with skepticism on what he considers a questionable judgment of accidental death in the case of Manson follower John Philip Haught. Yet, in Reclaiming History, he displays no such skepticism over the questionable death scenes of any number of important witnesses such as Gary Underhill, George de Mohrenschildt, and FBI domestic intelligence chief William Sullivan.
In Helter Skelter, the prosecutor notes that although the firearms weapon used by one of the murderers was actually discovered by a bystander and sent to a San Fernando Valley police station, it took a while for the weapon to get downtown. Yet, in Reclaiming History, he makes no complaint about how long it took the Dallas police to send three bullets recovered from patrolman J. D. Tippit's shooting scene to the FBI to be tested. Or that, on the original police report, there was no mention at all of recovered cartridges. Yet six days later, four were entered.
Although we could go on much longer in this vein, let us note one last comparison example. In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi is at pains to show how difficult it was for Ronnie Howard to relay information about the Atkins confession to the authorities even though she was in jail at the time. Yet, in Reclaiming History, he is nonplussed by the failure of the Dallas Police to accept an offer to speak to Rose Cherami, a witness who had potentially explosive evidence about two Cubans planning to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas.
To anyone familiar with the two cases, it would appear that the prosecutor had a healthy sense of disdain for professional incompetence and negligence back in 1969. To be charitable, it appears that the quality left him as he aged.
Former New York homicide prosecutor Robert Tanenbaum termed the Tate/LaBianca trial a "motion picture case." That is, one in which you have an eyewitness (in this case, two of them) plus you have the forensic exhibits to corroborate what that eyewitness says. It is hard for the defense to surmount this kind of case. And, in fact, as author George Bishop notes in his book on the trial, the defense attorneys felt the case was a "lost cause" from the start. As Bishop stated it, "under the present circumstances, the scales of justice seemed heavily tipped in favor of the people." So it would seem that in this regard, Bugliosi and Gentry were indulging themselves in a bit of literary license for the purpose of building drama in Helter Skelter. Once Atkins started talking to Ronnie Howard, the case, as Bugliosi himself said, was broken. From there, it was not uphill, but downhill.
Even though Bugliosi tried to make the case sound difficult, that downhill "slalom run" was greatly aided by the negative publicity surrounding the events. To give just one example, well in advance of the trial, on December 14, 1969, with the help of journalist Lawrence Schiller, the Los Angeles Times published the Atkins confession. Then, just five days later, Life Magazine featured Manson on its cover with a maniacal glare in his eyes, the caption reading: The Love and Terror Cult. This was months before jury selection took place, therefore it was well-nigh impossible to find anyone who had not been exposed to the deluge of advance publicity, yet the judge would not allow a change of venue. The grounds being that the publicity was so omnipresent it was unlikely any city in the USA was unaffected by it.
Bugliosi's Motive for Murder: The Beatles
Today, one of the most controversial aspects of the Tate/LaBianca trial is the motive put forth for the crimes. Let us detail that motive here so the reader can examine it in the full and vivid scope of its grandiosity.
As author Ed Sanders notes, in prison Manson learned to play the guitar and proved to be an adept student with a pleasant voice. When he was released in March 1967, Manson was interested in developing a musical career. In fact, he had developed some leads in prison to help him in this pursuit. In 1968, the Beatles recorded Paul McCartney's song "Helter Skelter." The title came from a London amusement park ride. That song, which would be a strong influence on the heavy metal movement, was released on the White Album. Let us try and follow Bugliosi's attempt to fit that song into a motive for the murders.
Revelation 9:15 refers to four angels being let loose for an indeterminate amount of time to "slay the third part of men." According to Bugliosi, Manson follower Paul Watkins and Gregg Jakobson (who along with his friend Terry Melcher was trying to promote Manson's musical career) said Manson interpreted this to mean that one third of mankind, the white race, would die during this apocalypse. Bugliosi said Manson somehow related this slaughter of the white race to the amusement park song "Helter Skelter" and thought it was also signaled on the White Album through songs like "Blackbird" and "Revolution Number 9." After an apocalyptic race war, the Black Muslims would be the only faction standing. However, they would not be able to make order out of chaos and would turn to Manson and his followers, who would now come out of a bottomless pit mentioned in the first verse of Revelation 9. By this time, they will have multiplied into the tens of thousands and now Manson and his followers would retire the Black Muslims and rule the world. Bugliosi was apparently convinced of this theory by the fact that one of the attackers had written the words "Healter Skelter" in blood on the refrigerator at the scene of the LaBianca murder. Even though it was spelled wrong, and even though what happened there was not Paul McCartney's amusement ride and therefore could not have connoted these wild images of a race war, let alone the Book of Revelation — Bugliosi now had his overall paradigm.
As the reader contemplates this mind-numbing Bible/Beatles concoction he or she should recall this fact: Bugliosi is the man who cannot find one credible conspiracy theory in the JFK case.
The motive was pure Bugliosi. To his credit, Aaron Stovitz, who was technically the lead lawyer, never bought the idea of "Helter-Skelter." In fact, he stayed skeptical about it until his death. But Stovitz looked at the case differently than Bugliosi. To Stovitz, it was another murder case and it was to be treated as such; Bugliosi did not see it that way. In fact, when he heard Stovitz interviewed on the radio saying just that, he came into work the next day in a state of bewilderment. He explained to his colleague that Tate/LaBianca was not just any other case; that it was unlike any other crime ever committed in "the whole history of mankind." When Stovitz resisted this, Bugliosi would not let up: "This has got to be the biggest murder case that ever happened." His brow furrowed in a state of agitation, he then walked out.
After this confrontation, Stovitz's superior, J. Miller Leavy, walked into the room. Having overheard some of the conversation, he had a revealing colloquy with Stovitz. "Vince getting excited?" he asked. Stovitz pointed up to a discolored acoustic tile in the ceiling, "He was just up there," he said. "Sticking to the ceiling," said Leavy. "Like a pizza," Stovitz replied. This is an important anecdote for the reader to remember. Although both men appreciated Bugliosi's skills as a prosecutor, they understood his innate excitability and flair for hyperbole.
Which would later come in handy. For as trial chronicler George Bishop wrote, Bugliosi appeared to believe in the Helter Skelter theory more than Manson did. To Bishop, Manson was essentially a con man who sold bits and pieces of his half-baked ideas to different people he thought could help him or he needed to frighten so he could control them. As Bishop noted, the idea that the wily ex-con actually could or meant to put it all together into a cohesive philosophy, this was something beyond Manson. For instance, why on earth would the Muslims ever turn to Manson, and why were there never any further home invasions? Shouldn't Manson have ordered attacks on at least one African American home? But, as Bishop also points out, selling this wild phantasmagoria was not beyond Bugliosi. The prosecutor had a fine sense of theater and was very much at home, stage center in a courtroom. Therefore, the seasoned lawyer could make this fantastic scenario saleable to a jury. And as the prosecutor pointed out to that jury, motive may be considered evidence of guilt. What worse motive could there be than the creed he was reciting?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reclaiming Parkland"
by .
Copyright © 2013 James DiEugenio.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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