Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  “I’m the Devil,” Watson chillingly announced, “and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.”27 According to Atkins, his tone was disturbing, “guttural.”28

  Watson told Atkins to look for something with which to tie up Frykowski. She looked through several rooms, finally grabbing a towel from the linen closet in the hallway. When she returned, Watson told her to tie Frykowski’s hands. “I did the best I could with the towel,” Atkins recalled, “but I knew it wasn’t very secure.”29

  Frykowski continued to question these invaders, but Watson cut him off, saying, “Another word and you’re dead!” He asked for his money, and Voyteck nodded toward the desk. In fact, his wallet contained only a few dollars.30

  Watson ordered Atkins to search the rest of the house. She walked into the small hallway leading to the bedrooms at the southern end of the house. The doorway to the corner bedroom shared by Abigail and Voyteck stood open. As Atkins came to a halt, she saw Abigail Folger perched on a pile of pillows against the headboard, reading a book. Noticing the motion in the hallway, Abigail looked up. Like her boyfriend in the living room, she did not express any alarm at seeing this strange girl, dressed all in black, wandering through the house in the middle of the night. Instead, she smiled, and waved. Atkins smiled and waved back. Abigail turned her attention back to her book.31

  Adjacent to Abigail’s bedroom was a half-closed door. Atkins opened it slowly, and peered through the crack. Sharon was lying on the bed, propped up against the headboard; Jay sat on the edge of the bed, his back to the door. Neither noticed the opened door, and continued to talk. Atkins pulled the door closed. As Atkins turned, Abigail again saw the motion, looked up, and smiled.32

  Standing in the living room, Krenwinkel suddenly realized that she had no knife. She walked out of the house and back up the driveway, where she found Kasabian kneeling in the bushes near the gate. She took Kasabian’s knife, whose broken handle had been wrapped in tape, and returned to the house.

  In the living room, Atkins told Watson that she had found three more people in the house. He grabbed the length of white nylon rope he had brought with him and handed it to Atkins, telling her to re-tie Frykowski’s hands. “I had him put his hands together in a crisscross fashion,” she later testified. “I have never been very good at tying knots, and I wrapped the rope around his hands a couple of times, and I was shaking and everything was happening so fast that I did a very poor job of tying him up.”33

  When she had finished, Watson told Atkins to go back and get the others.34 She walked down the hallway to the first bedroom and stepped inside. When Abigail looked up from her book, Atkins stood at the foot, a knife shining in her hand. “Get up and go into the living room,” she said. “Don’t ask any questions. Just do what I say.”35 Abigail did as told, entering the living room with Atkins following, knife held out before her. Krenwinkel stepped forward and cornered the heiress with her raised knife.

  Atkins returned to the closed door at the end of the hallway and flung it open. “Come with me,” Atkins said. “Don’t say a word or you’re dead.”36

  Sharon looked up, startled. The long-haired woman standing in her bedroom doorway, dressed in black and barefoot, held a knife. Without a word, Sharon and Jay rose from the bed and followed Atkins down the hallway. “She was very pregnant,” Atkins recalled, “and with the bikini panties and flimsy top she was wearing, it showed plainly.”37 Sharon, she later remembered, “couldn’t believe what was happening.”38

  As Sharon approached the door from the hallway into the living room, she stopped. She looked at Abigail, who stood in the corner by the fireplace, next to another unknown woman dressed in black who held a knife menacingly in front of her. Voyteck lay on the couch, a white rope around his arms. Her gaze finally landed on Watson, tall, wild-eyed, bushy-haired and bearded. She hesitated for a few seconds. Watson ran forward and grabbed her roughly by the arm, pulling her in to the room. As he did so, he brushed against the light switch, using his elbow to avoid leaving fingerprints, and throwing the hallway into darkness.39

  “What are you doing here?” Jay demanded.40 Jay began to protest against the rough treatment Sharon had received, but Watson told him that if he said anything further, he would die. From the couch, Voyteck mumbled, “He means it.”41

  Watson grabbed the coil of rope from the floor and threw one end over the long ceiling beam which ran the length of the room and supported the loft above. Once the rope dangled from the ceiling, he approached Jay and tied his wrists in front of him. He looped the rope round his neck, pulling it tight, then pushed him down into the lemon yellow armchair to the left of the couch.42

  Turning to Sharon, Watson took the end of the rope hanging from the beam and wrapped it tightly round her neck. When he had finished, Watson ordered the prisoners to lie down on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Terrified, Sharon began to cry. “Shut up!” Watson screamed at her.43

  “Can’t you see she’s pregnant!” Jay demanded, rising from the chair. “Let her sit down!”44 He began to move toward Sharon, in an attempt to place himself between her and the unknown man. His effort to protect Sharon proved fatal.

  “I told you, ‘One more word and you’re dead!’” Watson screamed. Without bothering to aim, he pulled out the .22 caliber Buntline revolver and fired at Jay.45 The bullet entered just beneath Sebring’s left armpit and angled down, smashing through his left fifth rib, puncturing his left lung and exiting out of his back midway down on the left side. Jay spun to the floor, collapsing atop the zebra skin rug before the fireplace. Watson ran over and kicked him viciously in the bridge of the nose.46 He did not move, but lay still on the floor, blood rapidly spreading across his dark blue shirt and black and white striped pants.

  Sharon and Abigail both screamed as Jay fell to the floor.47 This was no empty threat. These people were willing to kill them. For a few minutes, Sharon was hysterical sobbing loudly. Then, overcome with fear, she was silent again.48

  “I want all the money you’ve got here!” Watson barked out.49 Abigail, terrified, said that she had some money in her purse in her bedroom. Atkins, went with her, guarding her with a knife, as she walked back into the bedroom and grabbed her black canvas shoulder bag. She nervously handed Atkins seventy-two dollars—all of the cash she had. “I’ve got some credit cards,” she offered in a pleading voice.50 But Atkins shook her head. While they stood alone in the bedroom, Abigail, in a shaking voice, begged, “Please don’t hurt me. You can have everything.” Atkins’ only reply was a harsh, “Shut up!”51

  When they returned to the living room, Atkins handed Watson the seventy-two dollars. “You mean that’s all you’ve got?” he yelled.

  “How much do you want?” Frykowski asked from the couch.

  “We want thousands!” he answered.52

  But, if robbery was the motive, the murderous trio made some curious oversights. An expensive Cartier wristwatch remained on Jay’s wrist. His wallet was in his leather jacket, hanging over the back of a chair in the living room. On the nightstand next to Sharon’s bed was $18 in cash, lying in plain view. The trio ignored any number of expensive items in the house itself—a videotape machine, a television set, stereos and camera as well as the cars parked in the driveway.53

  Through her terror, Sharon managed to draw herself together to explain that, although they did not have any more money in the house, she could get them some if they just gave her some time. Watson merely yelled back at her, “You know I’m not kidding!” Sharon, numb with fear, sobbed softly, “Yes, I know.”54

  Watson grabbed Abigail and tied her hands with a loose strand of the rope with which he had bound Sharon. He then looped the other end of the rope a few more times around Jay’s neck as he lay bleeding on the floor. When he pulled on the free end dangling over the heavy beam above, Sharon and Abigail had to stand on their toes, to avoid being strangled.

  Suddenly, Jay began to stir. He was moaning, trying to crawl across the living room floor. Screaming, Sharon wat
ched as Watson ran over and stabbed him several times in the back and side with his double-edged knife, piercing his lungs. As he rose, he continually kicked Jay in the face until, finally, his movement ceased.55 Watson’s maniacal laugh filled the room, an evil grin across his face, his face, hands and shirt covered with blood. “In that flash,” Atkins later wrote, “I knew that Tex was not a human being. He was another creature.”56

  Watson told Krenwinkel to go through the house and turn off the lights.57 The only ones found on the following morning were the small table lamp on the desk in the living room, and the light in the hallway leading to the bedrooms.58

  “What are you going to do with us?” Sharon asked.

  “You’re all going to die,” Watson declared.59

  Sharon, Abigail and Voyteck began to plead for their lives. Within a few seconds, Voyteck was struggling with his bonds as he lay on the couch. Seeing him, Watson looked at Atkins and ordered, “Kill him!” She ran over to the couch and raised her knife, but, according to her own account, hesitated for a second.60

  It was all the time Frykowski needed. He managed to free his hands and jumped up against Atkins, who fell with him onto the floor in front of the fireplace. In the struggle, they knocked over the low trestle table before the hearth, rolling round in a jumble of books, movie scripts, candle stubs, flowers and a bowl filled with matchbooks. Atkins stabbed Voyteck several times in the leg before he rose and tried to crawl away. She was on him quickly, continuing to stab, but he reached round behind his back and, grabbing her long hair, pulled hard, sending them both sprawling back against the armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace from where Jay Sebring lay dying.61 In the struggle, she lost her knife. The police would later find it, blade up, lodged between the seat cushion and rear of the chair. They continued to roll round on the floor. “Blood was everywhere,” she would later remember. “Above everything, I could hear Sharon Tate crying, sobbing.”62

  Voyteck struggled down the side of the living room, toward the entrance hall and the open front door of the house. Atkins clung to him, beating at him with her fists. Watson had watched in silence. He wanted to use his gun, but was afraid, as Frykowski and Atkins were twisted round each other in their struggle. Instead, he jumped over Sebring’s body and tackled Frykowski. They knocked against the two blue steamer trunks standing by the arch to the entrance hall, sending them collapsing one on top of the other. Watson later recalled how “enormously powerful” Frykowski proved to be.63

  As Frykowski struggled on toward the open front door, Watson aimed his revolver and fired twice. The first bullet struck Voyteck just below his left armpit, lodging in his back. The second shot, badly aimed, penetrated Voyteck’s left right thigh. Still, Frykowski stumbled toward the entrance hall.

  Watson pulled the trigger a third time, but the gun, which had previously mis-fired when Manson used it to shoot Bernard Crowe, jammed. Instead, Watson turned the revolver wrong-way round and began to beat Frykowski relentlessly over the head, smashing away again and again. “I heard the crack of bone - Frykowski’s skull,” Atkins recalled.64 The wooden gun grip disintegrated under the heavy battering, its shattered pieces falling to the living room floor.65

  Voyteck was almost at a stop by the time he reached the entrance hall, but Watson held on, stabbing repeatedly now, each blow and swing casting an arc of blood across the walls and floor. Watson later recalled “the whole world spinning and turning, as red as the blood that was smearing and spattering everywhere.”66

  “Help me, O God, help me!” Voyteck screamed as he reached the open door.67

  Still kneeling in the shadows by the gate, Linda Kasabian suddenly heard “horrible sounds” coming from the house down the driveway. A man shouted, “No, no!” and a woman was screaming. She started running down the driveway. “There were no words,” she recalled, “it was beyond words, it was just screams.”68

  She ran across the flagstone walk on the front lawn. Just as she reached the porch, Frykowski staggered out of the front door, covered in blood. He leaned against the door frame for a second before stumbling a few steps across the porch, reaching out to one of the heavy posts for support. Through the blood pouring down his face, he looked Kasabian in the eye. “Oh God! I’m so sorry!” she cried as he finally lost his balance and spun round the post, falling into the hedge at the side of the porch.69

  Within seconds, both Watson and Atkins appeared in the door. While Watson ran over to Frykowski and began to stab him, Kasabian turned to Atkins, saying, “Sadie, please make it stop! People are coming!” It was not true, but Kasabian was desperate to put an end to the slaughter taking place. Atkins simply looked at her and said flatly, “It’s too late.”70

  In the living room, Sharon was screaming. While Krenwinkel watched the struggle with Frykowski, Abigail, who had not been tied well, managed to slip the bonds round her hands and stumble across the room. Shouting for help, Krenwinkel ran after her, trying to wrestle her to the floor. But Abigail, bigger and stronger, proved more than equal to the barefoot Krenwinkel, managing to grab hold of her long hair and pin her against the living room wall.

  Still on the porch, Watson heard Krenwinkel’s cries, and, with Atkins in hot pursuit, he ran back into the house. As Atkins watched, he cornered the heiress, who, seeing him approaching, raised knife in hand, loosened her grip on Krenwinkel. For a split second, there was a dreadful, silent anticipation. Abigail knew that it was over. She let her arms drop to her sides, looked at Watson, and said, “I give up, take me.”71 With a vengeance, Watson repeatedly swung his knife until Abigail, clutching her stomach, collapsed in the doorway from the living room to the bedroom hallway.72 “It was total chaos,” Atkins recalled.73

  “People were running everywhere,” Watson later admitted. “But I was perfect, like a machine..… I had no control, like an animal, making noises, happiness noises. They were saying things but sounds didn’t have meaning.… I was jumping around, perfection, like from space, making happiness noises.… I don’t remember any of the persons. Their faces were unreal. They didn’t look like people.”74

  On the porch, Voyteck somehow managed to struggle to his feet. He took a few uncertain steps, falling on the lawn as he left the flagstone walkway. As he crawled across the lawn, he began to scream, “Help me! O God! Help me!”

  His screams attracted Watson’s attention. Shouting at Atkins to watch Sharon, he ran out of the open door and across the bloodstained front porch. A few feet ahead of him, Voyteck, half-crawling, half running, made his way across the lawn, screaming down the canyon, “like a chicken with its head cut off,” Watson later gleefully declared.75

  Voyteck looked back for a moment and saw Watson running after him, knife in hand. “Oh God, no! Stop! Stop! Oh God, no, don’t!” he screamed.76 Watson jumped Frykowski, forcing him to the ground, stabbing him repeatedly in the back, the chest, the arms, and the legs, “until my wrist disappeared in the mess,” he later wrote.77 As he stood over the lifeless body, Watson violently kicked him in the head with his heavy cowboy boot.78

  Abigail Folger rose to her feet, staggering down the hallway and into Sharon’s bedroom. Krenwinkel saw the motion out of the corner of her eye and gave chase, catching Abigail just as she reached the French door opening to the swimming pool. Abigail clawed at the doors smearing the white louvers with blood, Krenwinkel stabbing her with a knife in one hand while, with the other, trying to hold the door closed. In spite of being wounded, however, Abigail managed to open the door. Running outside, she splattered blood across the flagstone walk, the shrubbery, and the coiled green garden hose at the side of the house.

  The Christmas lights sparkled against the split-rail fence separating the lawn from the steep cliff, and Abigail, her freedom within sight, stumbled on, Krenwinkel’s knife slicing her body. She had almost reached the fence. “She was running,” Krenwinkel recalled. “When I caught up to her, I stabbed her. I don’t know how many times. She fell immediately. She fell down, but she was still moving.”79
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  “Stop! Stop!” Abigail begged as Krenwinkel continued to stab.80 “I remember her saying, ‘I’m already dead,’ Krenwinkle later admitted.81

  Watson, standing over Voyteck’s body some thirty feet away, saw the struggle at the end of the lawn between the two women. In response to Krenwinkel’s cries for help, he jumped over the motionless Frykowski and sprinted toward them. Abigail lay at the edge of the lawn, near the base of a large pine tree. Krenwinkel held her down as Watson slashed, his knife slicing the left side of her face, and ripping her abdomen and chest. “I felt nothing,” he later wrote.82

  As he rose from Abigail’s bloodstained, lifeless body, Watson saw the lights of the guest house, a hundred feet across the lawn. He ordered Krenwinkel to search it, and kill whoever she found. She approached the silent building, following the ribbon of concrete walk past the swimming pool, beneath an open, roofed gateway to the closed glass door. “I just stood there and looked in,” she recalled. “I never saw anyone. I never went past the door. I just saw a lamp and I just stood there.”83 As she stood at the door, she later said, “I knew this is wrong. It was like an echo from way back that said, Wait a minute, this has finally gone into total madness.”84

  “I had no idea of even how to connect a thought together at that point,” Krenwinkel later declared. “I had absolutely no way to put together the kind of rational thinking, because there was no rational thought in my head. Everything was out of my control. I felt helpless, I felt hopeless to do anything. All I was doing was carrying through a macabre dance that was horrible and I never knew how to stop it.”85

  The house at 10050 Cielo Drive was silent. Blood was smeared across the living room’s cream-colored carpet; on the couch and nearby chairs; on the walls of the hallways; on the door leading from Sharon’s bedroom to the swimming pool; on the floor of the foyer; on the front porch. Voyteck Frykowski and Abigail Folger lay dead on the lawn, the latter stabbed so many times her white nightgown had turned red. Jay Sebring’s dead body was curled before the fireplace, his face battered and frozen in torment.