Word: tate
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Bugliosi was not assigned to the case until mid-November 1969, but his troubles began the moment L.A. police arrived at the Tate residence. One officer unthinkingly obliterated a bloody fingerprint with his own. Physical evidence -broken pieces from the grip of a revolver, a pair of glasses-was scattered about as the parade of investigators swelled. Blood samples were gathered and tested haphazardly, leaving gaps in later reconstructions of the murders. During the LaBianca investigation the next day, a coroner's assistant failed to take the dimensions of the stab wounds...
Blood Scrawl. The gruesome similarities between the Tate and LaBianca killings were striking: "Pig" was printed in blood on the front door of the Tate house, "Death to Pigs" on a wall at the LaBiancas. Yet the separate teams of detectives assigned to the two cases chose to ignore each other. A day after the first murders, two members of the L.A. sheriffs office told a police department detective of a strange case in their territory: a murder and a message ("Political Piggy") scrawled in blood. Furthermore, the sheriff had a suspect in custody, a member of a roving group...
...link all three cases. Bugliosi writes that the detective did not "think the information important enough to walk across the autopsy room and mention the conversation to his superior." That was only one of many other examples of incompetence. Among them: the revolver used in two of the Tate killings, which had been found by a young boy and turned over to the police, was routinely filed away in a Van Nuys station house, where it remained unexamined for months. The L.A. police department, meanwhile, sent flyers to police across the country to keep an eye out for the Tate...
Manson was finally caught because one of his accomplices, Susan Atkins, boasted about the killings. Bugliosi then had to fill the gap between allegations and evidence. Detectives on the Tate case sloughed off his repeated requests to search for the bloody clothing that the killers had discarded. Using leads from a newspaper story, a TV crew found the evidence on the first...
Indeed, Bugliosi believes that family members have killed several times since. The horror of this possibility is exceeded by the fact that since California abolished the death penalty in 1971, the Tate-LaBianca murderers are now serving life terms and will be eligible for parole...