I sort of came to this book backwards.
I had made it a point in life to learn as little about Charles Manson as possible. I knew he was some sort of specifically evil serial killer, responsible for the deaths of Sharon Tate and others. I knew what he did happened in the 60s. I knew he was considered the modern day boogeyman.
But when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood prepared to hit theaters five years ago, I decided it was time to learn more about the man and his crimes.
I tried Helter Skelter twice but I couldn’t get past Vincent Bugliosi’s self-aggrandizing style. I gave up my copy and went to Tom O’Neill’s Chaos, which is a book full of interesting conjecture but lacking real substance. Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast did a season on the crimes and the players and that more-or-less scratched the itch.
Yet I’ve been reading about Los Angeles a lot lately. And the Manson murders are very much an L.A. story, even as they garnered such widespread national attention. So I finally pushed through with this…
and I get it. I totally get it. It’s a helluva read.
The crime is fascinating in and of itself but Vincent Bugliosi’s focus on the shoe leather work of police and prosecution is what hooked me. Some complain about the details but I appreciated about 80-90% of them. He accurately painted the picture of how much strain the LAPD, LASO, and DA’s office were to solve these murders, how off base their initial investigations were, and how lucky they got that Susan Atkins had a big mouth.
The trial has moments of jaw dropping stunts and amazing encounters. It is here, however, that Bugliosi does get bogged down in detail. Parts of it were a grind to read and I was happy to be done. But overall, this is a smashing story.
Lastly, a part of the reason I put this off is the contention that Bugliosi fabricated or ignored certain evidence to present the shaky Helter Skelter motive. I admit that the motive never sat well with me but in reading the book, it’s not as much that I became convinced by Bugliosi but I can see what he did. A prosecutor’s job is not to tell the truth, it’s to make a case. Cases require narrative; you can’t just expect twelve people to listen context free for almost a year to minute details and expect them to put together the puzzle on their own.
This to me says less about Bugliosi and more about the criminal justice system. The pressure to get convictions was frantic and he needed a narrative. Even he didn’t seem convinced about it at times but I got why he rolled with it.
That doesn’t mean Bugliosi is off the hook here or that I’m an ardent defender. The prosecutor himself still has to be responsible and Bugliosi was apparently an abusive creep. But the book keeps into perspective what he was doing here: presenting a story. And that’s what he does with the book too.