Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

They even questioned Leno’s mother, who told them, “He was a good boy. He never did belong to the association.”

  The elimination of a possible Mafia link, however, did not leave the LaBianca detectives without a suspect. In questioning neighbors of the pair, they learned that the house to the east, 3267 Waverly Drive, was vacant, and had been for several months. Prior to that it had been a hippie hangout. The hippies didn’t interest them, but another former tenant, +Fred Gardner, did, very much.

  From his rap sheet and from interviews they learned that Gardner, a young attorney, “has had mental problems in the past and claims he blacks out for periods of time and is not responsible for his actions…” During an argument with his father, he “grabbed a knife from the kitchen table and chased his father, stating that he would kill him…” In September 1968, after being married only two weeks, “for no apparent reason [he] administered a vicious beating to his wife, then grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer and attempted to kill her. She warded off the blows and managed to escape and call the police.” Booked for attempted murder, he was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who found he had “uncontrolled aggressions of maniacal proportions.” Despite this, the charge had been reduced to simple assault. He was released on probation, and returned to the practice of law.

  Since then Gardner had been arrested a number of times, on drunk or drug charges. Following his last arrest, for forging a prescription, he was released on $900 bail, and promptly skipped. A warrant for his arrest had been issued on August 1, nine days before the LaBianca murders. He was believed to be in New York.

  When the officers questioned Gardner’s ex-wife, she told them she could recall seven separate occasions when Gardner visited the LaBiancas, each time returning with either money or whiskey. When she’d asked him about this, he’d allegedly replied, “It’s O.K. I know them and they had better give it to me or else.”

  Had Gardner, with his penchant for kitchen knives, again tried to put the bite on the LaBiancas, this time the couple saying no? The officers contacted an FBI agent in New York to see if he could determine Gardner’s present whereabouts.

  Beloved Wife of Roman

  Sharon Tate Polanski

  1943 1969

  Paul Richard Polanski

  Their Baby

  Wednesday was a day of funerals. More than 150 persons attended Sharon Tate’s last rites at Holy Cross Cemetery. Among those present were Kirk Douglas, Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, John and Michelle Phillips. Roman Polanski, wearing dark glasses and accompanied by his doctor, broke down several times during the ceremony, as did Sharon’s parents and her two young sisters, Patricia and Deborah.

  Many of the same people, including Polanski, later attended the services for Jay Sebring, at Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, Forest Lawn. Additional celebrities included Paul Newman, Henry and Peter Fonda, Alex Cord, and George Hamilton, all former Sebring clients.

  There were fewer people, and fewer flashbulbs, as, across the city, six of his high-school classmates carried Steven Parent’s body from the small El Monte church where his services had taken place.

  Abigail Folger was buried near where she had grown up in Northern California on the San Francisco Peninsula, following a requiem mass in Our Lady of the Wayside Church, which had been built by her grandparents.

  Voytek Frykowski’s body remained in Los Angeles until relatives in Poland could arrange for it to be returned there for burial.

  While the Tate victims were being interred, the police were attempting to re-create their lives, in particular their last day.

  Friday, August 8.

  About 8 A.M. Mrs. Chapman arrived at Cielo. She did what dishes there were, then commenced her regular household chores.

  About 8:30 Frank Guerrero arrived, to paint the room at the north end of the residence. This was to be the nursery. Before starting, Guerrero removed the screens from the windows.

  At 11 A.M. Roman Polanski called from London. Mrs. Chapman overheard Sharon’s side of the conversation. Sharon was worried that Roman wouldn’t be home in time for his birthday, August 18. He apparently assured her that he would be back on August 12 as planned, as Sharon later told Mrs. Chapman this. Sharon informed Roman that she had enrolled him in a course for expectant fathers.

  Sharon received several other calls, one of them having to do with a neighbor’s kitten that had strayed onto the property; Sharon had been feeding it with an eyedropper. When Terry Melcher had moved out, he’d left behind a number of cats, Sharon promising to look after them. They had since multiplied, and Sharon was caring for all twenty-six, plus two dogs, hers and Abigail’s.

  Most of the day Sharon wore only bikini panties and a bra. This, according to Mrs. Chapman, was her usual at-home attire in hot weather.

  Shortly before noon Mrs. Chapman, noticing that there were paw prints and dog splatters on the front door, washed down the whole exterior with vinegar and water. A small detail, which later would become extremely important.

  Steven Parent had lunch at his home in El Monte. Before returning to work at the plumbing supply company, he asked his mother if she would lay out clean clothes so he could make a quick change before going to his second job, at the stereo shop, later that afternoon.

  About 12:30 two of Sharon’s friends, Joanna Pettet (Mrs. Alex Cord)* and Barbara Lewis, arrived at Cielo for lunch. Mrs. Chapman served them. It was all small talk, the women would later recall, mostly about the expected baby. Sharon showed the two women the nursery, and introduced them to Guerrero.

  About 1 P.M. Sandy Tennant called Sharon. As previously noted, Sharon told her she wasn’t planning a party that evening, but did invite her to drop by, an invitation Sandy declined.

  (If one believed all the subsequent talk, half of Hollywood was invited to 10050 Cielo Drive for a party that night, and, at the last minute, changed their minds. According to Winifred Chapman, Sandy Tennant, Debbie Tate, and others close to Sharon, there was no party that night, nor was one ever planned. But LAPD probably spent a hundred man-hours attempting to locate people who allegedly attended the non-event.)

  Having finished the first coat of paint, Guerrero left about 1:30. He didn’t replace the screens, since he intended to return Monday to give the room a final coat. The police later concluded the killer(s) either didn’t notice they were off or feared entering a freshly painted room.

  About 2 P.M. Abigail purchased a bicycle from a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, arranging for it to be delivered later that afternoon. About the same time David Martinez, one of Altobelli’s two gardeners, arrived at 10050 Cielo and began work. Voytek and Abigail arrived not long after this, joining Sharon and her guests for a late lunch.

  About 3 P.M. the second gardener, Tom Vargas, arrived. As he came in the gate, Abigail was driving out in her Camaro. Five minutes later Voytek also left, driving the Firebird.

  Joanna Pettet and Barbara Lewis departed about 3:30.

  At about that same time Sebring’s butler, Amos Russell, served Jay and his current female companion coffee in bed.* About 3:45 Jay called Sharon, apparently telling her he would be over earlier than expected. He later called his secretary, to pick up his messages, and John Madden, to discuss his visit to the San Francisco salon the next day. He didn’t mention to either his plans for that evening, but he did tell Madden he had spent the day hard at work on a crest for the new franchise shops.

  Just after Sebring called Sharon, Mrs. Chapman told her she had finished her work and was leaving for the day. Since it was so hot in the city, Sharon asked her if she would like to stay over. Mrs. Chapman declined. It was undoubtedly the most important decision she ever made.

  David Martinez was just leaving, and he gave Mrs. Chapman a ride to the bus stop. Vargas remained behind, completing his work. While gardening near the house, he noticed Sharon asleep on the bed in her room. When a deliveryman from the Air Dispatch Company arrived with the two blue steamer trunks, Vargas, not wishing to
disturb Mrs. Polanski, signed for them. The time, 4:30 P.M., was noted on the receipt. The trunks contained Sharon’s clothing, which Roman had shipped from London.

  Abigail kept her 4:30 appointment with Dr. Flicker.

  Before Vargas left, about 4:45, he went back to the guest house and asked Garretson if he would do some watering over the weekend, as the weather was extremely hot and dry.

  Across the city, in El Monte, Steven Parent hurried home, changed clothes, waved to his mother, and was off to his second job.

  Between 5:30 and 6 P.M. Mrs. Terry Kay was backing out of her driveway at 9845 Easton Drive when she observed Jay Sebring driving down the road in his Porsche, seemingly in a hurry. Perhaps because her car was blocking his progress, he did not wave in his usual genial manner.

  Sometime between 6 and 6:30 P.M. Sharon’s thirteen-year-old sister Debbie called her, asking if she could drop by that evening with some friends. Sharon, who tired easily because of her advanced pregnancy, suggested they make it another time.

  Between 7:30 and 8 P.M. Dennis Hurst arrived at the Cielo address to deliver the bicycle Abigail had purchased in his father’s shop earlier that day. Sebring (whom Hurst later identified from photographs) answered the door. Hurst saw no one else and observed nothing suspicious.

  Between 9:45 and 10 P.M. John Del Gaudio, manager of the El Coyote Restaurant on Beverly Boulevard, noted Jay Sebring’s name on the waiting list for dinner: party of four. Del Gaudio didn’t actually see Sebring or the others, and it is probable that he was off on the time, as waitress Kathy Palmer, who served the four, recalled they waited in the bar fifteen to twenty minutes before a table was available, then, after finishing dinner, left about 9:45 or 10. Shown photographs, she was unable to positively identify Sebring, Tate, Frykowski, or Folger.

  If Abigail was along, they must have left the restaurant before ten, as it was about this time that Mrs. Folger called the Cielo number and talked to her, confirming that she planned to take the 10 A.M. United flight to San Francisco the next morning. Mrs. Folger told the police that “Abigail did not express any alarm or anxiety as to her personal safety or the situation at the Polanski house.”

  A number of people reported seeing Sharon and/or Jay at the Candy Store, the Factory, the Daisy, or various other clubs that night. None of the reports checked out. Several persons claimed to have talked by phone with one or another of the victims between 10 P.M. and midnight. When questioned, they suddenly changed their stories, or told them in such a way that the police concluded they were either confused or lying.

  About 11 P.M. Steve Parent stopped at Dales Market in El Monte and asked his friend John LeFebure if he wanted to go for a ride. Parent had been dating John’s younger sister Jean. John suggested they make it another night.

  About forty-five minutes later Steve Parent arrived at the Cielo address, hoping to sell William Garretson a clock radio. Parent left the guest house about 12:15 A.M. He got as far as his Rambler.

  The police also interviewed a number of other girls rumored to have been with Sebring on the evening of August 8.

  “Ex-girl friend of Sebring, was supposed to have been with him on 8-8-69–not so—last slept with him 7-5-69. Cooperative, knew he used ‘C’—she does not…”

  “…dated him steady for three months…knew nothing of his way-out bedroom activities…”

  “…was to go to a party at Cielo that night, but went to a movie instead…”

  It was no small assignment, considering the number of girls the stylist had dated, yet none of the detectives was heard to complain. It wasn’t every day they got the chance to talk to starlets, models, a Playboy centerfold, even a dancer in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

  There was another barometer to the fear: the difficulty the police had in locating people. To have suddenly moved a few days after a crime would, in ordinary circumstances, be considered suspicious. But not in this case. From a not untypical report: “Asked why she had moved right after the murders, she replied that she wasn’t sure why, that like everyone else in Hollywood she was just afraid…”

  AUGUST 16–30, 1969

  Though the police told the press there had been “no new developments,” there were some that went unreported. After testing them for blood, Sergeant Joe Granado gave the three pieces of gun grip to Sergeant William Lee of the Firearms and Explosives Unit of SID. Lee didn’t even have to consult his manuals; one look and he knew the grip was from a Hi Standard gun. He called Ed Lomax, product manager for the firm that owns Hi Standard, and arranged to meet him at the Police Academy. Lomax also made a quick ID. “Only one gun has a grip like that,” he told Lee, “the Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver.” Popularly known as the “Buntline Special”—patterned after a pair of revolvers Western author Ned Buntline had made for Marshal Wyatt Earp—the gun had the following specifications: capacity 9 shots, barrel 9 ½ inches, over-all length 15 inches, walnut grips, blue finish, weight 35 ounces, suggested retail price $69.95. It was, Lomax said, “rather a unique revolver” introduced in April 1967, only 2,700 had been manufactured with this type grip.

  Lee obtained from Lomax a list of stores where the gun had been sold, plus a photograph of the model, and LAPD began preparing a flyer which they planned to send to every police department in the United States and Canada.

  A few days after the Lee-Lomax meeting, SID criminalist DeWayne Wolfer went to 10050 Cielo to conduct sound tests to see whether he could verify, or disprove, Garretson’s claim that he had heard neither screams nor gunshots.

  Using a general level sound meter and a .22 caliber revolver, and duplicating as closely as possible the conditions that existed on the night of the murders, Wolfer and an assistant proved (1) that if Garretson was inside the guest house as he claimed, he couldn’t possibly have heard the shots that killed Steven Parent; and (2) that with the stereo on, with the volume at either 4 or 5, he couldn’t have heard either screams or gunshots coming from in front of or inside the main residence.* The tests supported Garretson’s story that he did not hear any shots that night.

  Yet despite Wolfer’s scientific findings, there were those at LAPD who still felt that Garretson must have heard something. It was almost as if he had been such a good suspect they were reluctant to admit him blameless. In a summary report on the case made up at the end of August, the Tate detectives observed: “In the opinion of the investigating officers and by scientific research by SID, it is highly unlikely that Garretson was not aware of the screams, gunshots and other turmoil that would result from a multiple homicide such as took place in his near proximity. These findings, however, did not absolutely preclude the fact that Garretson did not hear or see any of the events connected with the homicides.”

  The evening of Saturday, August 16, Roman Polanski was interviewed for several hours by LAPD. The following day he returned to 10050 Cielo Drive for the first time since the murders. He was accompanied by a writer and a photographer for Life and Peter Hurkos, the well-known psychic, who had been hired by friends of Jay Sebring to make a “reading” at the scene.

  As Polanski identified himself and drove through the gate, the premises still being secured by LAPD, he commented bitterly to Thomas Thompson, the Life writer and a long-time acquaintance, “This must be the world-famous orgy house.” Thompson asked him how long Gibby and Voytek had been staying there. “Too long, I guess,” he answered.

  The blue bedsheet that had earlier covered Abigail Folger was still on the lawn. The bloody lettering on the door had faded, but the three letters were still decipherable. The havoc inside seemed to take him aback for a minute, as did the dark stains in the entryway, and, once inside the living room, the even larger ones in front of the couch. Polanski climbed the ladder to the loft, found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present. On climbing back down, he walked from room to room, here and there touching things as if he could conjure up the past. The pillows we
re still bunched up in the center of the bed, as they had been that morning. They were always that way when he was gone, he told Thompson, adding simply, “She hugged them instead of me.” He lingered a long time at the armoire where, in anticipation, Sharon had kept the baby things.

  The Life photographer took a number of Polaroid shots first, to check lighting, placement, angles. Usually these are thrown away after the regular pictures are taken, but Hurkos asked if he might have several of them, to aid in his “impressions,” and they were given to him, a gesture the photographer, and Life, would very soon regret.

  As Polanski looked at objects once familiar, now turned grotesque, he kept asking, “Why?” He posed outside the front door, looking as lost and confused as if he had stepped onto one of his own sets to discover everything immutably and grossly changed.

  Hurkos later told the press: “Three men killed Sharon Tate and the other four—and I know who they are. I have identified the killers to the police and told them that these men must be stopped soon. Otherwise they will kill again.” The killers, he added, were friends of Sharon Tate, turned into “frenzied homicidal maniacs” by massive doses of LSD. The killings, he was quoted as saying, erupted during a black magic ritual known as “goona goona,” its suddenness catching the victims unawares.

  If Hurkos did identify the three men to LAPD, no one bothered to make a report on it. All publicity to the contrary notwithstanding, those in law enforcement have a standard procedure for handling such “information”: listen politely, then forget it. Being inadmissible as evidence, it is valueless.

  Also skeptical of Hurkos’ explanation was Roman Polanski. He would return to the house several times over the next few days, as if looking for the answer no one else had been able to give him.

  There was an interesting juxtaposition of stories on the B, or lead local news, page of the Los Angeles Times that Sunday.