Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  When the officers kicked in the door to the guest house, they found William Garretson, holding Christopher, Rudi Altobelli’s Weimaraner. The police, according to Garretson, roughly handcuffed him, as he repeatedly asked what had happened. In answer, they dragged him out of the guest house and across the front lawn, from Abigail Folger to Voyteck Frykowski. Garretson thought that Abigail was actually Mrs. Chapman, and identified her as such, while he thought that Voyteck was, as he had told Steven Parent the evening before, Roman Polanski’s younger brother. By the time he reached the parking area, he apparently was in such a state of shock that he completely failed to recognize Parent.34

  Garretson, the only person found alive on the entire estate, at first seemed like the prime suspect. He was taken downtown for further questioning. Mrs. Chapman, suffering from the strain of discovering the bodies, was quickly placed in a police car and driven to UCLA Medical Center, where she was treated for shock and released later that day.35

  By mid-morning, the estate at 10050 Cielo Drive was swarming with police, special criminal investigators, and, beyond the gate, dozens of reporters and curious spectators. As soon as the word spread that a murder had been committed at the exclusive address in Hollywood, newsmen flocked to Cielo Drive, eager for a story. Throughout the morning and afternoon, they were fed details by police officers entering and leaving the premises.

  Throughout the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, investigators arrived. The crime scene photographer took a hundred color prints of the house, the bodies, the bloodstains and anything which the police thought looked suspicious. A fingerprint expert arrived and dusted the house. Blood specialists took samples from spots all over the house and grounds. The detectives, examining Sharon’s corpse, noted in their report: “There was dried blood smeared over the entire body. It appeared to investigating officers that someone had handled the victim, as in moving her from one location to another and the blood from the stab wounds had been smeared over other parts of the body.”36

  Indeed, the smeared blood pattern was consistent only with the actions of Manson and his trusted followers having moved Sharon’s body in the early morning hours. The evidence supporting this gruesome nocturnal visit was copious. On the front porch, police discovered a large blood spot of type O-M blood, which could only have come from Jay. A second pool of blood was typed as O-MN, Sharon’s blood group. In addition, her blood was found smeared on the door surround in the entrance hall. As none of those involved in her death—Watson, Atkins and Krenwinkel—placed her anywhere near the front door during the murder, the blood had to have come during the time her body was moved, as if it had been knocked against the door frame when in transit. The police also found that a mixture of types O-MN and O-M—Sharon’s and Jay’s blood—had dripped on to the two blue steamer trunks. The quantity of this sample, as well as the pools on the front porch and smears in the entrance hall, was such that it could only have come had the bodies been present in those locations for several minutes. Lastly, the towel found over Jay’s face had been carefully tucked beneath the rope round his neck; as Atkins had simply tossed it back into the house after using it to write “Pig” in Sharon’s blood on the front door, someone had to have come into the residence, as Manson later claimed, and placed the towel beneath the ropes as discovered by the detectives.37

  Investigating officers also discovered pieces of a broken wooden gun grip near the desk in the living room, which had fallen from the .22 caliber Buntline as Watson hammered repeatedly at Voyteck’s head the night before. A pair of eyeglasses, which belonged to no one in the residence, was found lying on the floor of the living room; it is likely that they belonged to either Manson or one of his accomplices, deliberately placed at the crime scene to cause confusion. Finally, the police saw the Buck knife which Atkins had lost in her struggle with Frykowski, blade up, wedged between the cushion and back of one of the living room’s overstuffed chairs.

  There was a considerable quantity of drugs found at Cielo. A gram of cocaine was found in Sebring’s Porsche, plus 6.3 grams of marijuana and a partially smoked joint. There were 6.9 grams of pot in a plastic baggie in a cabinet in the living room. In the Folger/Frykowski bedroom were 30 grams of hashish, plus ten capsules of MDA. There was also a partially smoked marijuana cigarette in the ashtray on the living room desk.38

  Mrs. Chapman, having recognized his Porsche parked in the driveway, mentioned Jay Sebring to the police. The police, in turn, apparently mentioned this fact in one of their reports which went out over the police radio. A reporter heard it and, recognizing the name, called Sebring’s house and asked his butler Amos Russell if he was at home. Alarmed, Russell called John Madden, President of Sebring International and Jay’s business manager and partner. Madden had not spoken with Jay since the previous afternoon.

  Madden rang Doris Tate. He mentioned that there were reports of some deaths on Cielo Drive. Mrs. Tate had not heard anything about a crime, and quickly hung up the telephone. “We got a call early in the morning that something had happened up on Benedict Canyon where Sharon lived,” Sharon’s sister Patti remembered. “We knew that something was wrong up there, but everything was very vague.”39 Heart sinking, Doris immediately dialed her daughter’s number. The telephone rang and rang, but there was no answer.40 Truly scared, Doris Tate called Sandy Tennant, wife of Roman’s business manager William Tennant. Sandy had spoken with Sharon the previous afternoon. Abigail and Voyteck, Sharon had told her, would be staying at 10050 Cielo Drive that night, and Jay would also be visiting. She had not heard from Sharon since. Sandy Tennant told Doris Tate that she would call her husband, and try to find out what was happening. With growing unease, Doris waited by her telephone all morning.41

  William Tennant was playing tennis at his club when his wife reached him. He immediately left and drove over to 10050 Cielo Drive, informing the police stationed at the gate that he was Roman Polanski’s business manager. They led him through the gate and down the driveway, to the first body in the white Ambassador. He did not recognize Parent, whom he had never met. On the front lawn, he identified Voyteck and Abigail, and was then led inside to the living room. Crying, he identified Sharon and, he thought, Jay, although the man’s face was so badly beaten and swollen that it was impossible for him to be sure. The sight of the bodies in the living room was too much for Tennant: he ran outside and vomited repeatedly.42

  The reporters were in a frenzy at the front gate as Tennant left. By now, everyone knew who lived in the house. He ignored the shouted questions: “Were they murdered?” “Is Sharon dead?” “Has anyone informed Roman Polanski?”43 They got better results from the incautious police. “It looked like a battlefield up there,” one officer declared.44 Another, unwittingly laying the basis for weeks of rumors to come, said, “It seemed kind of ritualistic.”45

  By mid-afternoon, after hours of nerve-shattering silence, the telephone finally rang in the Tate house in Palos Verdes. An LAPD spokesman had reached Paul Tate in San Francisco and told him the devastating news. Immediately, Paul rang his wife and told her that Sharon had been murdered the night before at Cielo Drive, along with Jay, Abigail, Voyteck and an unidentified young man. “I was never notified by the police,” Doris recalled, “and I’m not sure that I don’t thank God that I wasn’t notified first because I could have been.”46

  The shock was immediate. Eleven-year-old Patti recalled her mother appearing in the family room. “I remember her empty gaze and her anguished expression when she looked at me and my sister, when we were playing on the sofa.”47 Gripping both sides of the door, Doris cried, “My daughter’s dead!” and fell to her knees.48 “That’s how that day went,” Patti remembered. “Hell. And hell continued for years.”49 It was the beginning of a nightmare.

  Roman Polanski spent Friday, August 8, working on the script for the movie Day of the Dolphin in London. He had called Sharon around seven that evening from the Eaton Place mews, reassuring her that he would be returning home on Tuesday. He went out
to dinner that night with friend Victor Lownes and then to The Revolution in Bruton Place, a fashionable nightclub.50 According to Lownes, Roman picked up a girl he described as “a bimbo” and spent the night with her.51

  It was William Tennant who finally called Roman from Los Angeles around eight-thirty Saturday night, London time. The connection seemed bad to Polanski, and it was made worse by the fact that he could barely understand Tennant, who sounded as if he were crying. Finally, the horrible news came out.

  “There’s been a disaster at the house,” Tennant told his friend.

  “Who’s house?” Polanski asked.

  “Yours,” Tennant answered. “Sharon’s dead. Voyteck’s dead, too. And Gibby and Jay. They’re all dead.”

  “No, no, no!” Roman screamed. At first he thought he didn’t understand.

  “Roman, they were murdered,” Tennant said sadly. Roman dropped the telephone in shock and began wandering around his living room in circles. A friend happened to be with him and called Gene Gutowski, who rushed over to look after Roman. He found him moaning, “No, no!” and punching the walls of the flat. He cried all night long as Gutowski held him, whispering now and then through his sobs, “Did she know how much I loved her? Did she? Did she?”52

  Gene Gutowski, Victor Lownes and Warren Beatty were among those in London who took turns watching over the sedated Roman Polanski. “Roman was utterly devastated,” recalls Lownes. “He kept muttering things to himself, crying. I had to go to the American Embassy on Sunday and get a special Visa so that he could immediately return to the United States—he was in no condition himself to go.”53

  Still heavily tranquilized, he was escorted aboard a Pan Am flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles on Sunday, spending most of the flight sleeping or crying. A large contingent of the press knew of his imminent arrival and waited for him in the terminal in Los Angeles. The only glimpse they got of him, however, was a brief one as Roman, in dark glasses, was escorted off the plane and into a waiting car, which sped away rapidly into the night. “I was with Roman, holding his arm, trying to help push him through the crowd at the airport,” remembers Victor Lownes. “Reporters were shouting questions about Sharon, about their marriage—it was horrible.”54 He stayed in a small apartment on the Paramount Studio lot, away from all reporters. Aside from the telephone calls to Sharon’s parents and the constant company of a few friends who watched over him, Roman was left alone with his grief.55

  Earlier that Saturday, across Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills, in the quiet, middle-class suburb of El Monte, Juanita Parent had been nervously awaiting the return of her son Steven since the previous evening. After leaving his regular job earlier that Friday night, the eighteen-year-old had telephoned home, mentioning to his mother that he might be late, as he was going to visit a friend in Beverly Hills.

  Parent should have been home shortly after midnight. By one early that Saturday morning, according to Steven’s fifteen-year-old sister Janet, “My mom was in a panic. My brother always called if he was going to be late.”56

  When Saturday morning came, Parent had still not arrived home. His father Wilfrid telephoned his son’s friends, but no one knew where he had gone. “We were all upset,” Janet Parent remembers. “We knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what.”57

  At noon, Wilfrid and Juanita Parent drove down to their local church, where a Knights of Columbus meeting was taking place. The parish priest, Father Robert Byrne, was one of their son’s closest friends, and they thought he might have some idea where Steven had gone.

  Janet Parent was home with her two younger brothers when she heard a loud knocking. Two men stood at their front door. Both identified themselves as police reporters, and asked if her parents were at home.

  “No,” she replied, “you’ll have to come back.”

  “Well, we have a report that your brother’s car was stolen,” one of the men told her.

  When Janet tried to close the door, one of them men put his arm in, and pushed her back against the frame. “They both barged in,” she recalls, “and ran across the living room to the television set. On top of the set were a lot of photographs of our family, and they found one of Steve, taken at his prom earlier that year, and started to snap pictures of it.”

  Uncertain what to do, Janet telephoned her mother and father at the Parish Hall, asking them to return. When Wilfrid Parent arrived home, he quickly telephoned the El Monte Police Department, who told him that they had not sent anyone out to his house.

  The long hours of the afternoon passed in an agonized wait. The Parents still had no news of their son. “We sat down and watched television,” Janet remembers. “We saw the news reports about Sharon Tate, but it didn’t really mean anything to us. We were all so worried about Steve, and trying to figure out what had happened to him.”

  Juanita Parent called Father Byrne, and asked him to come to their house. A few minutes after the priest arrived, a policeman knocked on the door. When Juanita opened it, he simply handed her a business card, and told her to call the number at the bottom. It was a card from the Office of the Deputy Coroner of Los Angeles County. “That’s the morgue!” she screamed, and passed out in the middle of the open doorway.

  Wilfrid Parent picked up his wife and carried her to the couch. While Janet and Father Byrne looked after her, Parent dialed the Coroner’s Office. He was put on hold; after a few minutes, he was transferred, before being again being put on hold. Finally, his composure gave way. “If my son is lying up there dead,” he yelled, “by God, somebody is going to give me some information!”

  Father Byrne volunteered to drive down to the morgue and see if they had Steven’s body. Juanita went to the bedroom to lay down, and Wilfrid, Janet and her brothers turned on the television to watch the news. “We still hadn’t found out anything,” Janet remembers. “Then the news came on. They were showing footage from the Tate house. And we saw them pulling my brother’s body out of my dad’s car. We all looked at one another in shock, and just collapsed. That’s how we found out he was dead. Thank God my mom didn’t see it. I think if she had, it would have killed her.”58

  Sharon’s death made headlines around the United States and in Europe. The fame of the victims, and the gruesome manner in which they had been killed, guaranteed expansive media coverage. As reporters grasped for any information, gossip and innuendo were often repeated as truth. It was to become the one consistent factor in the aftermath of the tragedy.

  “There were odd things going on around town,” recalled Joan Didion. “There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us … A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in.… On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”59

  The Los Angeles Times devoted a large section of its front page to Sharon’s death. Even the staid New York Times reported the murders on its front page. They made every national newscast in America that evening. The early details of the tragedy were often erroneous: it was widely reported, for example, that Sharon’s unborn baby had been cut out of her womb; that her breasts had been cut off; that the victims had been sexually assaulted; that Jay Sebring had been found with a hood over his head.

  Sharon’s friend John Phillips later recalled how, that afternoon, he
went out and waited in line at a sporting goods store on Wilshire Boulevard to buy a handgun. He already had a Beretta at home. In his house on Bel Air Road, he hid knives underneath cushions, behind books, in drawers, ready to defend himself if the killers struck at his address next.60 Michelle Phillips also armed herself with a gun, which she carried in her purse whenever she left the house.61 “In the aftermath of the Tate murders, paranoia swept through Beverly Hills and Bel Air.… Everyone was terrified, waiting to see who would be sacrificed next. No one felt safe.”62

  Ken’s Sporting Goods Shop in Beverly Hills sold 200 guns in the two days following the murders, where previously they had sold three or four a day.63 The exclusive and private Bel Air Patrol hired dozens of additional men and added them to their nightly security patrols. John Phillips even recalled older Eagle Scouts being hired as extra watchmen.64 Guard dogs, which had sold for around $200 prior to the murders, now went for as much as $1,500, and locksmiths told customers that there was up to a two-week wait for additional security installations.65

  Celebrities were terrified that they might be next. There were rumors that Jerry Lewis had suddenly installed an expensive security system complete with cameras and monitors.66 Frank Sinatra was said to be in hiding, protected by bodyguards. Mia Farrow allegedly declared that she could not attend Sharon’s funeral, so fearful was she that the killers would be after her next. Connie Stevens spent thousands of dollars turning her Hollywood mansion into an armed fortress. Sharon’s friend Leslie Caron vividly remembers “the horror in Hollywood that day. No one knew why it had happened, why such horrible, bestial murders had taken place.”67 Fearful not only of the killers but also of police investigators, many celebrities rid themselves of illegal drugs. “Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills,” one actor said. “The entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned.”68