Helter Skelter

After you read the book, you need to see Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood.

In the summer of 1969, in Los Angeles, a series of brutal, seemingly random murders captured headlines across America. A thin trail of circumstances eventually tied the Tate-LeBianca murders to Charles Manson, a would-be pop singer of small talent living in the desert with his "family" of devoted young women and men. What was the motivation behind such savagery?

The murders marked the end of the sixties and became an immediate symbol of the dark underside of that era. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney… show more.

I've seen lists where this book is the best-selling true crime book of all time and I've seen lists where In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is.

I've read them both and Helter Skelter is much more readable. Bugliosi, the man who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson despite the Los Angeles police's multiple missteps in the case, is also a gifted writer. He produced a real page-turner about the killings of pregnant actor Sharon Tate and six others on two nights in August 1967.

Bugliosi's job wasn't easy. Police smudged a fingerprint on the button that opened the gate. They walked… show more.

Joan Didion famously wrote that the 1960s ended at the precise moment the news of the Manson family murders began circulating around Los Angeles on August 9, 1969. To get a sense of the vertiginous horror wrought by the Tate-LaBianca killings, two books need to be read in tandem: the strait-laced, official account by LA county deputy district attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who investigated the case and prosecuted the perpetrators, and the tie-dyed street-level account by Ed Sanders, the underground journalist and founding member of the Fugs. One drops LSD, the other doesn’t, but both walk away from their excursions into… show more.

Access is one key to writing a good non-fiction book, though not at the expense of independence. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting lawyer who put Charles Manson and his gang of maniacs away, in the 1960s, allowing him, with his co-writer, to tell this sensational tale with an insider’s authority.

Charles Manson didn’t get his own hands bloody – instead, his extraordinary charisma, brainwashing, and liberal intakes of LSD led his large youthful following (the ‘Manson Family’) to carry out the slaughters on his behalf. Bugliosi had the inside track on the Manson killings, having been prosecuting counsel in the murder trials of 1970. The killers were, for the most part, young women from ‘good’ backgrounds, and the remorseless slayings, ordered by Manson for his own mysterious reasons, are as shocking as they are perverse. Bugliosi slowly builds up a terrifying portrait of the dark side of California’s flower-power movement.