Prosecutor Bugliosi awaits the verdict in the Palliko-Stockton double murder trial.

VINCENT BUGLIOSI received his law degree in 1964 from UCLA 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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.”

Bugliosi lives with his wife in Los Angeles and is working on a book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

KEN HURWITZ was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A graduate of Harvard University, he is the author of Marching Nowhere and The Line of David, and co-author with Vincent Bugliosi of the novel Shadow of Cain. He is married with two children.