Helter Skelter

by Vincent Bugliosi

Autopsy reports are abrupt documents. Cold, factual, they can indicate how the victims died, and give clues as to their last hours, but nowhere in them do their subjects emerge, even briefly, as people. Each report is, in its own way, the sum total of a life, yet there are very few glimpses as to how that life was lived. No likes, dislikes, loves, hates, fears, aspirations, or other human emotions; just a final, clinical summing up:

Yet the victims had lived, each had a past.

“The primary duty of a lawyer engaged in public prosecution is not to convict, but to see that justice is done…”