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Vincent Bugliosi Inspired My Work in Journalism, InfoSec

Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson and his family and then detailed the case in his book Helter Skelter, has died at age 80. Indirectly, I owe some of my career trajectory to him.

Mood music: 

https://youtu.be/0rC3l3niTaE

I’ve chronicled my interest in the Manson case at length in this blog. Those posts capture the mental health issues that led to the crimes, as well as my own OCD-fueled obsession with the case. But Bugliosi’s influence on me is rooted in his best-selling book. I never met the man, though I’ve read Helter Skelter too many times to count and have even visited the scenes of the Tate-Labianca murders. Those who haven’t read it assume the book is all blood and gore.

Far from it.

Read my Manson-related posts in this anthology.

Yes, Bugliosi describes the murder scenes in chilling detail. But the book is mostly about him building the case against Manson and his followers. There’s a lot of rich detail about police and detectives clumsily tainting the crime scenes and working against each other to feed their egos, missing important clues that could have solved the case sooner.

He pieces together the gathering of evidence, the rounding up of witnesses and his uphill battle to convince the jury of the bizarre Helter Skelter motive. Along the way, there’s the endless display of disruptive tactics from defense attorneys and the occasional roadblocks tossed in by the judges, especially the one who presided over the separate trial for Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s lead killer.

The book has lessons on just about everything journalists need to know:

  • Police and detective work
  • Politics
  • Court procedure
  • Forensics
  • The importance of thorough research and investigation

I used to push the book on reporters when I was a newspaper editor, especially those covering the cops and courts. It fueled my passion for news gathering and had more than a little to do with my pursuing a writing career.

Even now, as someone working in the information security industry, I get a lot of use from the book. If you look closely at Bugliosi’s gathering of forensics and tireless research into what made the bad guys tick, you see many traits of a good security researcher.

I’m forever grateful to Bugliosi for inspiring me down this path. May he rest in peace.

Vincent Bugliosi On CSpan

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Tate-LaBianca, 45 Years Later: A Strange Society of Manson Watchers

This week marks the 45th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’m marking it first with a prayer for the victims and second by making note of some interesting people I’ve met as a result of this lifelong Manson obsession I have.

I’ve been to L.A. twice, and both times drove around to the two murder sites and other places.

Tate Home
Behind that gate, Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by minions of Charles Manson.

LaBianca Home
On the second night of terror, minions of Charles Manson went to this house and murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca

I’ve also read Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, a book written by Tate family friend Alisa Statman and Brie Tate, niece of Sharon Tate.

After reading it, I declared it “the most important book ever written” on the case because it showed the struggle of the Tate family in the decades after the murders better than any book up to that point. The day that post published, co-author Alisa Statman sent me a thank-you on Twitter. We then engaged in an extended back and forth about the case. Statman is an interesting woman.

She lived in the guesthouse at 10050 Cielo Drive — site of the Tate murders — in the early 1990s at the same time Nine Inch Nails set up a recording studio in the main house and recorded The Downward Spiral. She also went on to strike up a domestic partnership with Sharon Tate’s youngest sister, Patti, which lasted until cancer killed Patti in 2000.

Restless Souls is a compilation of the unfinished memoirs of Patti, her mom, Doris, and her dad, Paul. You really get to see how they struggled with all of the media attention and personal demons in the years after the murders, and that’s what I liked about it. Doris is a hero to me, because she picked up the pieces and became a tireless advocate for victim’s rights, even counseling convicts.

I heard from others after writing that post, including Brian Davis, host of an online Tate-LaBianca Radio Program, which airs on Sunday nights. I’ve listened to some episodes and they’re quite good.

Davis believes parts of Statman and Tate’s book is fabricated, something I’ll explore in a future post. There are a lot of blogs and other media on this case, including the Helter Skelter forum and Truth on Tate-LaBianca. CieloDrive.com has a comprehensive set of links to those sites at the bottom of its homepage. In visiting all these sites over the years, I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of fighting and disagreement between them.

People really rip into each other over what did and didn’t happen, and almost everyone claims to be an expert. It goes to show how much passion and obsession this case has generated over the years. It’s certainly been the object of my obsessiveness.

Along the way, I’ve learned that there are people so obsessed with the case that they try to make themselves part of the story. The most glaring example is the late Bill Nelson. This guy basically stalked members of the Manson family and befriended Doris Tate. There’s a great write-up about him on Eviliz’s Manson Family Blog. The Tate family had a falling out with Nelson after learning he was a convicted sex offender.

This interview he did with Doris probably didn’t help.

He asks her questions and mentions the most gory details of her daughter’s murder with no sensitivity or decency whatsoever. I admit that I’ve been obsessed with the case over the years. But, boy, am I grateful that I never got as bad as that guy.

Related Posts:

Helter Skelter

Slaying Old Fears in the Hollywood Hills

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The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ and Charles Manson

I’ve been listening to The Beatle’s White Album a lot lately. I played it relentlessly in my younger years, admittedly out of curiosity. I had just read Helter Skelter for the first time and wanted to hear the songs Charles Manson used, along with the Bible, to brainwash his followers.

Mood music:

It’s been several years since I listened to the album; most days I prefer classic heavy metal. But I’m currently reading Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn, and he spends quite a bit of time talking about this album and The Beatles in general.

As Guinn tells it, Manson first heard the band on a prison radio when he was serving one of his many jail sentences in the mid-1960s. Manson had an epiphany: Once released, he could take his singing and guitar-playing and make himself bigger than The Beatles. Later, he’d write songs with the express purpose of spreading his warped messages and cozied up to the likes of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in an attempt to land a record deal. Around that time, the White Album came out and Manson became obsessed with it. He told his followers The Beatles were predicting a coming war between blacks and whites, which he called Helter Skelter, named for one of the songs on the album.

The song “Blackbird,” Manson told his followers, was The Beatles telling African Americans to rise up against their oppressors. “Piggies” was about the white establishment and how they needed, as The Beatles sang, a “damn good whacking.” “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9” told of the coming apocalypse. Manson fused the lyrics with passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelations and painted a picture where the blacks would rise up, kill all the whites in a race war (Helter Skelter) and come out on top.

During the chaos, Manson told his followers, the family would hide in Death Valley. The blacks would eventually realize they couldn’t rule without the white man’s help and would come to Manson and his family for help. Then, they’d rule the world.

The murders that followed were Manson’s attempt to start Helter Skelter. A bloody paw print was left on the wall of murder victim Gary Hinman’s house in an attempt to make it look like the Black Panthers were responsible. At the Tate murder site, pig was scrawled on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood, pig being what the Panthers and other militant groups called police.

Against the backdrop of Guinn’s book, I’m listening to each song. The experience is different from when I listened to them in my teens. Back then, the songs scared the crap out of me. Today, they’re just a nice collection of songs, arguably The Beatle’s best. “Revelution 1” actually ridicules the militant revolutionaries of the day. “Helter Skelter” was about an amusement park ride.

It still sickens me to think about how Manson distorted beautiful music to brainwash young kids who were down on their luck and suffering from social discontent and varying degrees of mental illness into cold-blooded murderers.

LRs-White-Album