HELTER SKELTER: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (502 pages; Norton; $10)

In his novel “The Third Man,” Graham Greene has the British intelligence officer who narrates the story make a statement that is very applicable to the continuing round of books dealing with the Manson gang and the so-called Tate-LaBianca murders of August, 1969:

“One’s file, you know, is never quite complete: a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead.”

Oh how true that is, especially when one considers the Charles Manson case, which even four years after his arrest for murder has grim, sinister aspects that can keep one awake late at night pondering, in the darkness.

At least five books have been written about the Manson gang, the latest being “Helter Skelter” by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. There are several more books in the works, including one by Col Paul Tate, Sharon Tate’s father, which is rumored to have some new and startling information regarding the motives behind these butcherous crimes.

Bugliosi was the chief prosecutor of the Manson “Family” for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and conducted much of the courtroom activities in the trial which lasted from June, 1970, until the jury brought in the death penalty verdict March 29, 1971.

During the trial, which I covered for the Los Angeles Free Press, I read some of Bugliosi’s investigation reports detailing his interviews with witnesses, and I could see in them the seeds of a book. Compared with the usual dry, unbending police writing style, Bugliosi’s reports were vigorous and well written.

Bugliosi also had that great advantage of an insider who could wander at will over to Parker Center, the Los Angeles police headquarters, and rummage through the “tubs,” as the raw police data files are called, for information later used in his book. There is, therefore, new and previously undisclosed material in the book, including Roman Polanski’s lie detector test transcript which, during the trial, the prosecutor reportedly assured the defense attorneys did not exist.

Bugliosi also had a team of Los Angeles Police Department homicide investigators assigned full time during the trial to assist the prosecution. In this regard it is interesting to note that, Bugliosi, with considerable justification, soundly deprecates the investigative efforts of the L.A.P D., particularly the team of officers who investigated the murders at the Polanski residence, implying that L.A.P.D. was slow, uncreative and even stupid in its investigations.

Even so Bugliosi did not hesitate to use L.A.P.D. homicide investigators as research assistants for his book, liberally borrowing from the numerous interview sheets and official Homicide Investigation Progress Reports to flesh out his research. He even included, without credit given to the officers involved, a slightly tasteless collection of the police photos of the victims taken inside the Tate and LaBianca residences, with the stab-scarred bodies, thankfully, painted out. He did, however, include in the extensive photo section what appears to be one staring photo of a dead person, that of Christopher Zero, Manson Family member who died under suspicious circumstances around that time the police were breaking the case.

”Helter Skelter” is written in a blunt, chatty prose style, not unlike Bugliosi’s oral courtroom style, delivered directly, without irony and with heavy moral indignation. Trial account buffs will find his account of the Manson trial extremely interesting, depicting as it does the various prosecution plans and schemes to gain conviction.

Bugliosi tells his story strictly from the point of view of the prosecution and is very heavy-handed in almost sneering at the defense attorneys, who were stuck for almost a year in a death-suffused whirlwind. The case still is under appeal, however, and the defense attorneys are as yet not free to describe their side of the trial.

But if you want to dip vicariously into a temporary hell of death-freaks and gore, this book is an ideal vehicle in which to dip. Bugliosi, to his credit, has not swerved away from the Manson case data-overload problem. That is there was a cast of hundreds who populated the land of Helter Skelter, and Bugliosi includes all the salient details that could be stuffed into 502 pages, so be prepared for a blizzard of names, dates and death-data.

Bugliosi describes in detail the horrifying climate of fear that suffused the Manson trial and tinged every utterance. Even for someone who was there it is difficult to describe the aura of demise that captured that trial. There were more death threats a minute during the Tate-LaBianca trial than in a botched Mafia heroin caper.

One defense attorney was told by the Manson Family to let his hair grow a little bit longer so that when they cut his head off they would have a hand-hold. “Look into our eyes,” the killer girls still free would say. “What do you see?” they asked. And they answered the question right away for you, “Death, death, death.”

I remember that once Manson was angry at me for calling him a racist in an article, and after that, as I sat in the courtroom, occasionally he would rivet me with his unusual staring eyes, and then sometimes at the same time his fingers would venture beneath his chin onto his neck, making slight sawing motions there, as if indicating a possible Manson-style tracheotomy was in store for me.

It was the sort of situation where paranoia bounded around like a basketball. “My God, he’s looking right at me!” the well-dressed wife of one of the prosecutors breathed out loud one afternoon, sitting behind the press section at the trial. I looked up, and sure enough Manson had her riveted with his famous eyes.

I remember that, while covering the trial, I stayed at the Tropicana Motel, where many rock groups reside while in Los Angeles. There was a great concern among the residents that I would bring members of the Manson Family around the motel for a swim or a chat. Everybody from Kris Kristofferson to Janice Joplin’s band threatened to move out of the motel forthwith if I brought a single Helter-Skelterette in for a visit. Such was the climate of fear.

“Helter Skelter,” the title of the Bugliosi book, is taken from the Beatles’s double white-covered album. The song was interpreted by Manson to be a master plan for a huge black-white racial battle that would result in the death of America and the temporary emergence of the blacks as rulers. After a while, so Manson believed, the blacks would decide to turn the reins of government over to Manson and his squads of choppers (who would be hiding out in a secret underground cave-world beneath Death Valley, California.) and then the slight buckskin-clad schizophrenic would rule America at last.

It was for the purpose of triggering off Helter Skelter that the Manson Family killed Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger. Voityck Frykowski, Steve Parent and the LaBiancas? So Bugliosi contends.

After four years of research on this case I cannot believe that Helter Skelter was the motive for these murders. There were indications at one time that perhaps the Manson Family had knowledge that Sharon Tate was not supposed to be at home that night and that the murder target had been someone else in the house. I no longer believe that.

I believe that someone contracted Manson to kill Sharon Tate. Manson may have thought that if he could raise enough money he could buy freedom for Bob Beausoleil, who had just been arrested for the Hinman murder and could have spilled the beans on the entire group.

Colonel Tate is working on a book, reportedly in conjunction with an ex-FBI officer and a former investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department. Perhaps his book will in fact, as is rumored, provide some startling new data about these crimes. In any case the last book on the Tate-LaBianca murders most certainly has not been written. And the filing cabinets keep filling up with new information.

Bugliosi does not mention anything about the private investigations that I believe that the district attorney’s office undertook, hiring top-level private investigators to act as special data-collectors, looking into the possibility that the Manson Family might have been contracted to commit the murders and might have hidden some money in a bank in Texas or in the Kansas City area. Other investigations reportedly dealt with possible friendly connections between the Manson group and one or more of the deceased.

People who were close to this case, whether prosecutors, writers or defense attorneys, have had their lives permanently altered by it. Bugliosi, for instance, has left the prosecutor’s office and has been an unsuccessful Democratic candidated for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office. He was defeated again this year in the Democratic primary for the California state attorney general’s office.

By ED SANDERS