Nov. 18 – Charles Manson, a name that will live in infamy, never mixes with the main population of Folsom Prison in California. One of his victims, Sharon Tate, was eight months pregnant, which makes other Folsom cons regard Manson with the loathing they reserve for child molesters.

“As long as he’s in prison he’ll be looking over his shoulder, aware that any con may put a shiv in his back,” said Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of the Manson murderers.

On the night of Aug. 9, 1969, the Manson “family” turned the fashionable Bel Aire home of Sharon Tate into a slaughterhouse, butchering five persons. Sharon’s husband, Roman Polanski was then in Europe. The next night the “family” savagely stabbed to death Polanski’s neighbors, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, leaving a fork protruding from Leno’s stomach. In both homes the murderers used the blood of their victims to smear on the walls “Helter Skelter,” the title of a Beatle song. It’s also the title of a book by Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, here to visit their publisher, W. W. Norton. The book, a full-fleshed account of the bizarre murders, contains considerable drama hitherto unrevealed.

“It took four years for Curt to write it,” said Bugliosi. “It wasn’t one of the quickies.”

Gentry is 43, an ex-newsman from Lamar, Colo., and a successful author. This is his 13th book.

Bugliosi, 40, from Hibbing, Minn., now lives in Glendale, Cal., with his wife and two children. His father was a grocer and railroad conductor. Bugliosi went to the University of Miami on a tennis scholarship, earned his law degree at UCLA in 1964, and then got a job as a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles county. To supplement his $600 a month salary he taught criminal law at The Beverly Law School. In 1969 he was selected to investigate and try the Manson case.

“It wasn’t a random choice,” said Gentry. “He had won 104 convictions in 103 felony jury trials.”

Bugliosi was appalled at the initial police bungling: A sheriff missed linking the “Helter Skelter” printed on the door of the Manson “family” house with the same bloody words in the LaBianca home. One policeman touched the gate control button of the Polanski home thereby erasing a bloody fingerprint. Another put his hands all over the murder gun, found by a ten year old boy who had the good sense to pick it up at the tip. And police headquarters in L.A., unaware that their Bel Aire unit had the gun, were sending out flyers about it all over the U.S.

“But that’s not what the Manson case is all about,” Bugliosi said. “They may have killed as many as 40 people. Manson didn’t do the killing. He ordered his ‘family’ to do them. Who were the murderers? Two of the girls once sang in church choirs. A boy was a track and football star. One girl had a semester at a Jesuit college. When Sharon Tate pleaded for her unborn baby, Susan Atkins, one of the church choir singers, said, ‘Look, bitch, I have no mercy for you,’ and stabbed her repeatedly until her screams ceased.”

“All of them were dropouts and deep into drugs before Manson recruited them,” said Gentry. “When he was released from his last jail two years before the mass murders he’d already spent half his life behind bars.”

All of them were vomited up by the sick ferment of the 60s.

“But Manson was unique,” Bugliosi insisted. “He was evil, charismatic. As a former pimp he knew how to manipulate people. He used fear, sex, drugs to control his disciples. When they dropped acid he always took less so he’d remain in command. He preached to them, sitting on a rock, reprogramming them, selling them that he was Christ restored, that they were the true Christians, and this time it would be the Romans on the cross. He would show the blacks how to start a revo-lution by murdering the white pigs, and at the end he would emerge as their leader. He called his revolution -Helter Skelter’.”

“Helter Skelter,” the book, discloses a few things the murderers had in common with their victims: Abigail Folger and her lover, Voytek Frykowski, liked their drugs. Marijuana was found in Sharon Tate’s bedroom; so was a film of her in bed with her husband. Jay Sebring, another victim, was a sex sadist.

The book will be a best-seller: 50,000 copies are already out, and it’s the main Book-of-the-Month selection for December, which guarantees another 100,000. Gentry and Bugliosi are discussing another firm offer they got for three 60 minute TV specials on the Manson murders. When the trial ended Bugliosi decided to leave the routine of the district attorney’s office for private law practice.

“What do you do after Manson?” he asked. “Go back to prosecuting burglars?”

By SIDNEY FIELDS