Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  In the midst of this carnage, Sharon remained untouched in the living room. Atkins had forced her on to the couch, the rope still looped round her neck, trailing over the beam and down to Jay. She held Sharon’s arms, preventing escape. Terrified, Sharon pleaded for her life. “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me! I don’t want to die! I want to live! I want to have my baby! I want to have my baby!” But Atkins, who had left her own ten-month-old son in the care of others back at Spahn Ranch, had no mercy.

  “Look, bitch,” she sneered, looking Sharon straight in the eye, “I don’t care about you! I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby! You had better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”86 Sharon, Atkins later told a fellow Manson Family member, “was the last to go because she had to watch the others die.”87

  “I didn’t relate to Sharon Tate as being anything but a store mannequin,” Atkins admitted. “She just sounded like an IBM machine.… She kept begging and pleading and pleading and begging, and I got sick of listening to her.”88

  Watson and Krenwinkel re-entered the living room.89 The chaos of the evening had thwarted their plans. They had intended, according to Atkins, to rip out their victims’ eyeballs and smash them against the walls, cut off their fingers, mutilate them. The excitement of the slaughter, the screams down the canyon and gunshots shattering the night, however, brought with them the fear of being caught.

  Knowing that the trio were about to turn on her, Sharon again begged for her life, repeating that she was pregnant and she wanted to have her baby. Watson told her to shut up. Sharon then asked them to take her with them when they left, to keep her until she gave birth, then they could kill her. Watson said nothing. Finally, realizing that she was about to die, Sharon pathetically begged the killers to take the baby from her, so that it might have a chance to live.90 Her composure finally gave way, and she began to sob. She was, according to Atkins, “out of her mind.”91

  “Kill her!” Watson yelled at Atkins.92

  Atkins hesitated. “If you’re going to kill her, then do it, for God’s sake,” Krenwinkel finally said. “I mean, we have already killed everyone else here. What’s the point? Either do it, or let her go, or just bring her with us and let her have her fucking baby.”93

  Sharon was silent as the murderous trio continued to argue. Finally, Watson lunged forward. He would later torment his mother “by going on and on about how beautiful Sharon’s face had been as she was pleading for her life, just before I cut her.”94

  She screamed out as the knife struck her.95 Although Watson stabbed first, Atkins later recounted how she, too, had joined in. “I got sick of listening to her, so I stabbed her,” she chillingly declared.96

  “It felt so good the first time I stabbed her,” Atkins gushed to a cellmate, “and when she screamed at me it did something to me, sent a rush through me, and I stabbed her again.… I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.… It was just like going into nothing, going into air.… It’s like a sexual release. Especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a climax.”97

  The pair continued to slash out at Sharon. Sixteen times, their sharp knives pierced her body: through her pregnant stomach, through her breast, through her heart, her back, her lungs. The knives caught her arms as she raised them in a vain effort to protect herself from the blows. Finally, her resistance weakened. Moaning “Mother, mother!” Sharon fell forward and collapsed onto the floor in front of the couch, covered in blood.98

  Standing over Sharon’s body, Atkins noticed that she had blood on her hands. She lifted her fingers to her mouth and licked it off. “To taste death and yet give life,” she told a friend. “Wow, what a trip!”99

  Watson ordered Atkins and Krenwinkel from the house. As they left, he ran from Sharon to Jay, stabbing repeatedly at their bodies. He did the same with Voyteck and Abigail on the lawn, unwilling to take any chance that they might survive the wounds already inflicted upon them. The trio, their dark clothes covered in blood, were halfway up the driveway when Watson turned to Atkins and told her to go back to the house and leave a message in blood. “Write something that will shock the world,” he said.100

  Atkins approached the silent house. She grabbed the beige towel with which she had tied up Frykowski’s hands, and walked round the couch. Sharon, she recalled, “seemed to have been cut up a lot more than when I had last seen her. I never actually saw her face. Her hair was covering her face and there were sounds coming from her body … like blood flowing into the body out of the heart.”101

  She reached down and touched the towel to Sharon’s chest. The blood, she noted, was “still warm.”102 Once the towel was saturated, Atkins returned to the front porch. The white Dutch door stood open. Kneeling down, she wrote “Pig” in Sharon’s blood across its bottom half. She threw the bloody towel back into the living room and ran up the driveway to her friends, leaving behind five dead bodies littered with seven gunshots and 104 stab wounds. “I felt so elated,” she would later declare; “tired, but at peace with myself.”103

  Chapter 30

  “That’s How the Day Went … Hell.”

  The slaughter at 10050 Cielo Drive took just over half an hour. When the murderous trio arrived at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, they found Linda Kasabian cowering in the 1959 Ford. When she tried to start the car, Watson pushed her aside. “What do you think you’re doing?” he yelled. “Get over on the passenger side. Don’t do anything unless I tell you to do it.”1

  Watson drove the car down Cielo and took a left onto Benedict Canyon Road. Along the way, the killers changed out of their clothing and into the second sets they had brought with them. Kasabian steered the car as Watson pulled his black turtleneck and jeans off. The girls and Watson handed the wet, bloody clothes to Kasabian, who rolled the black tee shirts, denim shirts and jeans into a ball and pushed them beneath her seat.

  The killers’ faces, hands and arms, however, were still spattered and smeared with blood. A little over a mile up the canyon from the scene of the murders, Watson took a right on Portola Drive, just one block north of Easton Drive, where Jay had lived. He stopped the car before a house perched against a steep hillside to the right, using a garden hose he spotted to wash off any blood which remained. The noise woke the occupants, Rudolph and Myra Weber, who angrily confronted the foursome. Watson and the girls explained that they had merely wanted a drink of water, and hurriedly retreated to their car. Weber, after attempting to reach through the open car window and grab the keys from the ignition, quickly wrote down the license plate as Watson stepped on the gas and fled into the night.

  Turning right off Portola, Watson drove up Benedict Canyon, following the road as it twisted and turned along the crest of the mountains. When he reached a wide shoulder, he eased the car to a temporary stop and Kasabian took the bundle of bloody clothes and flung it over the hillside. Watson continued along Mulholland and Beverly Glen, pausing briefly as Kasabian tossed the knives and the gun from the open car window down the sides of embankments. Throughout the ride, Kasabian listened as the trio complained about the murders. Atkins said that her hair hurt, from where Voyteck had repeatedly pulled it in an effort to win his struggle with her. Watson had hurt his leg, and Krenwinkel said that, as she had stabbed Abigail Folger, she had repeatedly struck bone, bruising her hand.2

  Watson followed Beverly Glen down into the San Fernando Valley. He pulled the car into a gas station, where the killers took turns checking for bloodstains in the bathroom.3 As he stood before the mirror, Watson later recalled thinking: “I wasn’t anyone. I wasn’t Charles Watson. I was an animal. The end of the world was there. I was the living death.”4

  Charles Manson and Nancy Pitman were dancing naked in the moonlight on the boardwalk in front of the Longhorn Saloon when Watson and the car of killers pulled into Spahn Ranch.5 Manson was surprised to see them so soon. “What’re you doing home so early?” he demanded.6

  Watson explained that th
ey had gone to Terry Melcher’s former house. There had been a lot of panic, and that had caused the killers to panic. But everyone in the house was dead. “Boy, it sure was Helter Skelter!” he added, a grin on his face.7

  But Manson was beside himself with anger. “Man!” he yelled as Watson described the scene, “I told you to go to every house on that street! Now we’ll have to go back!”8 Watson just shrugged. Manson then faced each of the four and, in turn, asked if they felt any remorse. “I felt no remorse for the murders,” Watson later wrote, “no revulsion at the incredible brutality of the killings.”9 And Atkins added: “I felt as though I, too, were dead. I wasn’t alive anymore.”10 Krenwinkel alone seemed shaken, looking at Manson and saying quietly, “Charlie, they were so young.…”11

  Manson, accompanied by at least one other member of his Family, apparently hopped in the car and drove off to Cielo Drive. “I went back to see what my children had done,” he told a lawyer at his trial.12 This seems to have been an open secret among members of the Family; Watson has recently confirmed Manson’s return to the crime scene.13 They entered the grounds as the killers had, climbing over the fence to the right of the gate. Fearing fingerprints, Manson wiped down the car where Steven Parent lay dead, before continuing on to the main house.

  Once he had surveyed the carnage, Manson apparently decided to create an even more nightmarish scene. He and his followers moved through the darkened, bloodstained house, carrying the battered, lifeless bodies of Sharon and Jay out onto the front porch. Here, Manson seems to have intended to enact one of his darker fantasies: hanging his victims upside down, like pigs in a slaughterhouse, and slicing them to pieces.14

  By this time, however, daylight was approaching. The police would later log reports of a loud argument coming from the direction of 10050 Cielo Drive which filtered through the canyon early that morning, and it is possible that the voices came from Manson and his comrades, engaged in a heated discussion concerning the scenario.15 In the end, they were unwilling to risk discovery. The bodies were carried back into the living room and placed in approximately the same positions in which they had died. Sebring’s face was carefully covered with the blood-soaked beige towel Manson had found lying on the living room floor where Atkins had thrown it a few hours earlier, tucked beneath the strands of white nylon rope looped round his neck.16 Once again, 10050 Cielo Drive was silent.

  Early on the morning of Saturday, August 9, 1969, Los Angeles Times delivery boy Steve Shannen rode his bike up the steep cul-de-sac to the gate of 10050 Cielo Drive. He immediately noticed the cut communication wires hanging over the gate.17 As he looked further on, down the drive and past the white Ambassador which was parked at an odd angle, he saw that the yellow bug light on the side of the garage was still on; this in itself was hardly unusual, for it was just beginning to get light. Noticing nothing else out of the ordinary, he pedaled his bike back down the road.18 A few hours later, Seymour Kott, the neighbor at 10070 Cielo Drive, also noticed both the downed wires and the bug light shining in the distance.19

  Just after eight that morning, Mrs. Winifred Chapman, the Polanskis’ housekeeper who had turned down Sharon’s invitation to stay at 10050 Cielo Drive the previous evening, left her bus at the corner of Santa Monica and Canyon Drive, at the end of Benedict Canyon Road. She was already late for work, although, under normal circumstances, it was unusual for anyone to be up that early at the house. But Abigail Folger had mentioned the day before that she would be flying to San Francisco at 10AM to visit her mother. Mrs. Chapman considered calling a cab for the rest of the journey, but, just then, a friend saw her, pulled his car over and gave her a ride to the gate of 10050.

  As her friend drove off, Mrs. Chapman turned to the gate to get the newspaper out of the mailbox. She immediately noticed the fallen wires across the gate. At first, she thought that the electricity might be out but, when she pushed the control button at the right side of the gate, it swung open. She walked down the driveway as the gate automatically closed behind her. Mrs. Chapman saw three cars in the driveway. One was Jay Sebring’s black Porsche, which she knew by sight. Next to it was Abigail Folger’s Firebird. But, farther up the driveway, halfway to the gate, was an unfamiliar car, a white Ambassador, which was parked at a curious angle in the middle of the road.20

  Mrs. Chapman entered the house by the rear door, using a key secured on the rafter above. She did not see the front lawn, which was hidden both by the angle of the estate, and by the split-rail fence and the shrubbery lining the end of the parking area. After setting her purse down in the kitchen, she picked up the telephone. It was dead.21

  Wondering if any of the residents knew that the phone was out of order, she walked through the dining room and into the entrance hall. Then she abruptly stopped. The fieldstone floor was covered with pools of blood. There was blood on the stone surrounding the opening to the living room, blood on the walls, a trail of blood across the cream-colored living room carpet. The front door stood half open. As Mrs. Chapman looked out, she saw that the front porch, too, was covered with pools of blood. Farther out, halfway across the lawn, she saw a body.22

  She ran back through the house the same way in which she had come in, grabbing her purse on the way out. As she ran up the driveway, she crossed to the left hand side of the gate, so that she could push the gate control button and flee from the property. This time, she saw that there was a body in the white Ambassador as well.

  Once out of the gate, she ran to 10070 Cielo Drive, banging on the door and screaming at the top of her lungs. When no one answered, she ran further down the cul-de-sac, to 10090, shouting, “Murder! Death! Bodies! Blood!”23

  Fifteen-year old Jim Asin was standing outside the house, waiting for his father to drive him to the West Los Angeles Division of the LAPD, where he was to work the desk as part of his involvement with the Law Enforcement Unity of the Boy Scouts. He rushed to get his parents when Mrs. Chapman appeared, but they had already heard her screams and run to the door themselves. While they tried to calm her down, Jim Asin called the LAPD emergency number.24

  When Officer Jerry De Rosa arrived, he tried to talk with Mrs. Chapman, but she was too hysterical to do more than repeat her story about seeing the blood and the bodies. She did, however, calm herself enough to tell him how to work the electronic gate control button so that he could gain access to the estate.25

  Taking his rifle from his squad car, De Rosa nervously approached the white Ambassador, where, through the open driver’s side window, he saw Steven Parent, slumped toward the space dividing the bucket seats in front. His jeans and red and blue plaid shirt were soaked with blood.26

  As De Rosa straightened up, a second police car, this one driven by Officer William Wisenhunt, arrived. Wisenhunt carried a shotgun as he joined De Rosa in searching the other cars at the end of the paved parking area and the garage. They found nothing. As they were about to approach the main residence, a third officer, Robert Burbridge, joined them, and together, the trio cautiously walked on to the front lawn.27

  They could see the two bodies which lay ahead. As they approached Voyteck, they noted the terrible condition of his body. He lay on his right side, his head against his outstretched right arm, his left hand still clutching a clump of lawn. Not only was his clothing covered in blood, but his neck and arms had been stabbed repeatedly, and his head and face were battered, scarcely recognizable. Abigail Folger lay on her back, beneath a pine tree some twenty-five feet beyond her lover. She had been stabbed so many times that her once white nightgown was red.28

  The officers did not know if the killers were still inside the house. Two of them went around back while the third stayed on the front lawn. The two officers found a raised window in the nursery, and carefully entered, guns drawn. They made their way to the entrance hall, where they were joined by their partner from the front lawn. Aside from the pools and spatters of blood covering the front porch, they saw the ugly epithet “Pig,” scrawled in Sharon’s blood on the lower half of the
white Dutch door.29

  The living room had spots of blood on the carpet, blood on the steamer trunks which had been knocked over in the struggle the night before, and blood near the doorway leading to the rear hallway, where Abigail had first fallen. A length of white nylon rope still hung looped over the long beam crossing the underside of the loft. As the police made their way around to the side of the couch, they saw Jay. He lay on his right side, his legs tucked up toward his stomach, and his still-bound hands bunched near his face. His face itself was covered with the beige bath towel, and the rope had been twisted round his neck several times. When the officers removed the towel, they saw that his face was horribly battered, his nose broken, flattened and swollen, large hematomae across his forehead where Watson had repeatedly kicked him.30

  One end of the rope crossed from Jay’s body, up around the ceiling beam, and then down again to Sharon. She lay on her left side in front of the fireplace, her back against the couch. Her legs were drawn up toward her round stomach in a fetal position. Her left arm rested next to her body, bent at the elbow as if in death she had clutched at the noose around her neck. Her right arm crossed her head, partially obscuring her features. A few wisps of blood-caked blonde hair fell across her face where it had escaped from the rope around her neck. Blood had poured from the ugly gashes in her chest and stomach, soaking the carpet onto which she had fallen, surrounding her in a large pool of crimson.31 “It was very quiet,” De Rosa later said, “and the only thing that I can recall hearing was the sounds of the flies on the bodies.”32

  The discoveries shocked the three policemen, but they continued with their search, noting bloodstains and signs of a terrible struggle. As they exited the house by the blood-smeared French doors leading from Sharon’s bedroom to the swimming pool, they saw the guest house. Thinking that there might be further bodies, they cautiously approached. They heard a dog barking, and then, unbelievably, a male voice, whispering loudly, “Be quiet!”33