The #1 bestselling crime book of all time has been revised with a new afterword by Vincent Bugliosi. In August of 1969, the nation was shocked to learn of the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate and six other innocent victims -- all shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned to death in a two-day rampage of terror. The murderers were young men and women from middle-class families, followers of the now-notorious serial killer Charles Manson. How did Manson convince his “family” to kill? What actually happened that fatal night at Sharon Tate’s Hollywood home? Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi takes readers behind the scenes of the longest trial in American history -- and inside the mind of one of America’s most compelling criminals.
Excerpts
From Chapter One...
Saturday, August 9, 1969
It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon.
The canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills play tricks with sounds. A noise clearly audible a mile away may be indistinguishable at a few hundred feet.
It was hot that night, but not as hot as the night before, when the temperature hadn't dropped below 92 degrees. The three-day heat wave had begun to break a couple of hours before, about 10 P.M. on Friday -- to the psychological as well as the physical relief of those Angelenos who recalled that on such a night, just four years ago, Watts had exploded in violence. Though the coastal fog was now rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles itself remained hot and muggy, sweltering in its own emissions, but here, high above most of the city, and usually even above the smog, it was at least 10 degrees cooler. Still, it remained warm enough so that many residents of the area slept with their windows open, in hopes of catching a vagrant breeze.
All things considered, it's surprising that more people didn't hear something.
But then it was late, just after midnight, and 10050 Cielo Drive was secluded.
Being secluded, it was also vulnerable.
Cielo Drive is a narrow street that abruptly winds upward from Benedict Canyon Road. One of its cul-de-sacs, easily missed though directly opposite Bella Drive, comes to a dead end at the high gate of 10050. Looking through the gate, you could see neither the main residence nor the guest house some distance beyond it, but you could see, toward the end of the paved parking area, a corner of the garage and, a little farther on, a split-rail fence which, though it was only August, was strung with Christmas-tree lights.
The lights, which could be seen most of the way from the Sunset Strip, had been put up by actress Candice Bergen when she was living with the previous tenant of 10050 Cielo Drive, TV and record producer Terry Melcher. When Melcher, the son of Doris Day, moved to his mother's beach house in Malibu, the new tenants left the lights up. They were on this night, as they were every night, adding a year-round holiday touch to Benedict Canyon.
From the front door of the main house to the gate was over a hundred feet. From the gate to the nearest neighbor on Cielo, 10070, was almost a hundred yards.
At 10070 Cielo, Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Kott had already gone to bed, their dinner guests having left about midnight, when Mrs. Kott heard, in close sequence, what sounded like three or four gunshots. They seemed to have come from the direction of the gate of 10050. She did not check the time but later guessed it to be between 12:30 and 1 A.M. Hearing nothing further, Mrs. Kott went to sleep.
About three-quarters of a mile directly south and downhill from 10050 Cielo Drive, Tim Ireland was one of five counselors supervising an overnight camp-out for some thirty-five children at the Westlake School for Girls. The other counselors had gone to sleep, but Ireland had volunteered to stay up through the night. At approximately 12:40 A.M. he heard from what seemed a long distance away, to the north or northeast, a solitary male voice. The man was screaming, "Oh, God, no, please don't! Oh, God, no, don't, don't, don't …"
The scream lasted ten to fifteen seconds, then stopped, the abrupt silence almost as chilling as the cry itself.
About the Author
Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964 from U.C.L.A. law school, where he was president of his graduating class. In his career as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, he successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including twenty-one murder convictions without a single loss. His most famous trial was the Charles Manson case, which became the basis of his true crime classic, Helter Skelter, the biggest-selling true crime book in publishing history. But even before the Manson case, in the television series The DA, actor Robert Conrad patterned his starring role after Bugliosi.
Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as a lawyer and an author. Three of his true crime books, Helter Shelter, And The Sea Will Tell, and Outrage, The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder, reached number one on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true crime author has ever had more than one book that achieved this ranking.
And as a trial lawyer, the judgment of his peers says it all. "Bugliosi is as good a prosecutor as there ever was," Alan Dershowitz says. F. Lee Bailey calls Bugliosi "the quintessential prosecutor." Harry Weiss, a veteran criminal defense attorney who has gone up against Bugliosi in court, says: "I've seen all the great trial lawyers of the past thirty years and none of them are in Vince's class." Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, says, "There is only one Vince Bugliosi. He's the best." Perhaps most telling of all is the comment by Gerry Spence, who squared off against Bugliosi in a twenty-one hour televised, scriptless "docutrial" of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the original key witnesses to the Kennedy assassination testified and were cross-examined. After the Dallas jury returned a guilty verdict in Bugliosi's favor, Spence said, "No other lawyer in America could have done what Vince did in this case."
Of the recent compilation CD he produced, Greatest Latin Love Songs Of The Century, which the incomparable Chilean, Lucho Gatica -- whom many believe to be the greatest singer of boleros Latin America has ever produced -- calls "the best album of Latin love songs I have ever heard," Bugliosi seems to be launching yet another career.
Bugliosi lives with his wife in Los Angeles and is working on a book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
