Vincent Bugliosi

Vincent Bugliosi received his law degree in 1964 from UCLA Law School. 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 21 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. Bugliosi has uncommonly attained success in two separate and distinct fields, as a lawyer and as an author. Three of his true crime books— Helter Skelter, And the Sea Will Tell, and Outrage: The Five Reasons why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder, reached #1 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. No other American true crime writer has ever had more than one book that has achieved this ranking. 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.” Robert Tanenbaum, for years the top homicide 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.”