In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi grapples with this unfathomable riddle: How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year? Bugliosi conceded that he still didn’t have the answer. “All these factors contributed to Manson’s control over others,” he writes, but
