Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Cielo Drive

  The caretaker of the cottage at the Polanski residence, Bill Garretson, consumed a dexedrine, two marijuana cigarettes, and four cans of beer on Thursday night, August 7, which made him ill, so he stayed home all day Friday until the evening.

  It was near the close of Garretson’s employment at the Polanski property. Rudy Altobelli, the owner, was about to return after spending the summer in Europe. In addition to his salary of $35 a week, Garretson was to get a free airplane ticket back to his hometown, Lancaster, Ohio.

  Garretson tended to go to bed late and get up early in the afternoon and go check on his mail. The guesthouse lay up against a steep hill, at an angle to the main house. The swimming pool was between the two houses. The cottage had a back door, a door to the dogs’ room, a door to the backyard, and a front door, plus numerous windows, which made the guesthouse very easy to creepy-crawl.

  Garretson, in the company of unknown others, drove down the Canyon to the Sunset Strip around 8:30 in the evening. Garretson purchased a TV dinner, a Coca-Cola, and a pack of cigarettes at a drugstore, and then he strolled up and down the Strip. After the stroll, he hitchhiked back to Benedict Canyon Drive, then up Benedict to Cielo Drive. He walked up Cielo and up the hill to the back house, arriving around 10 p.m. He watched a movie, then put the TV dinner in the oven. While his dinner cooked, he ate potato chips and drank Coca-Cola. At around 11:45 p.m., a friend named Steven Parent arrived unannounced, with an AM/FM clock radio to sell. Parent asked Garretson who the two pretty young ladies were who were inside the main house.

  Garretson mistakenly thought that Wojtek Frykowski was Roman Polanski’s younger brother, so Garretson said that Abigail Folger was the “younger Polanski’s” girlfriend and the other one was Polanski’s wife, to which Parent replied, “You mean Polanski has a girlfriend and a wife?” Garretson answered, “No, the younger Polanski has a girlfriend and the other one was the older Polanski’s wife.”

  Around 11:45 or 11:55 Parent phoned a man in Hollywood, and Parent told him that he was at the home of a movie star, “somebody big.” Parent was asked if there was a party going on, and Parent said there was not. Parent was going to help the man build a stereo, so they made a date for Parent to come to his house in about forty minutes, which would have located Parent at his pal’s house around 12:30 a.m.

  As Garretson walked Parent to the door, Christopher the Weimaraner began barking and Steve asked, “What’s the matter with Christopher?” Garretson replied, “Oh, I don’t know. He usually barks.” According to Rudy Altobelli’s testimony at the trial, Christopher gave forth two types of barks, a generalized bark and something called a people bark when anyone approached the house. Probably Garretson was not able to distinguish between the two types of barks. The Weimaraner was not known for its gentleness. In fact, it had once taken a bite out of Rudy.

  Around 12:15 a.m., when Garretson said good-bye to his young friend, the dog was yipping and barking. Garretson stated that he only walked Parent to the door, and he never heard any shots or shrieks during the upcoming slaughter on the lawn, less than 150 feet from the house. He claimed that he enjoyed the rest of the night writing letters to a friend of his named Darryl Kistler and listening to the record player, which was turned up to medium volume. At one point, the Weimaraner began to bark and Garretson looked up from the couch in the living room and noticed that the bar-shaped door handle had been turned down by somebody. He walked to the bathroom and glanced out the window to see if anybody was trying to force the door. Garretson also noted that someone had cut loose the screen to one of the windows near the guesthouse kitchen.

  (Garretson was given a lie detector test on Sunday, August 10, and admitted that he may have gone out to the backyard at some point during the night. Patricia Krenwinkel told her attorney, Paul Fitzgerald, during the subsequent trial that they creepy-crawled the back house and found no one there. So maybe Garretson, hearing the shrieks and bullets, hid out back, then slinked back into the house at dawn, either fearing for his own life or that he would be charged with murder.

  Before Parent departed, just after midnight, he unplugged his unsold Sony AM-FM clock radio, taking it with him. When the police found it the next morning on the front seat of the Rambler Ambassador, the clock showed 12:15.

  Steven Parent walked away, past the redwood picnic table, past the small swimming pool set against the steep hillside, then along the walkway by the white split rail fence, then down the paved driveway past Sebring’s Porsche, Abigail’s yellow Firebird, and also the Camaro that Sharon had rented, then got into his car.

  Something may have startled him because he backed his car out of the driveway so quickly that he broke the split rail fence that borders the parking lot. The paint from the fence was found on the underside of his car the next morning by the police. He may been alarmed by the killers coming across the paved entranceway or cutting the communication wires. Or he may have heard the splat of the severed telephone cables. Parent never got as far as the button that activated the main gate. He never touched it. Bullets burst.

  The Arrival of Evil

  The backseatless white and yellow 1959 Ford arrived up the cliffside driveway to the top, facing a rattan fence, whereupon it turned around with its lights off. Tex parked facing downhill, away from the main gate and next to the telephone pole that jutted around eighteen feet up. Tex requested the bolt cutters from the back seat, then shimmied up the pole and cut two wires—one a telephone wire which did not fall and the other an old communications line from the days when musician Mark Lindsay and Terry Melcher first rented the property in 1966. That line fell and draped over the iron-framed wire electric gate.

  Watson slid back down to the road, got into the car, and coasted down the hill, lights off. At the bottom of the driveway, he twisted to the right and parked on Cielo Drive. All emerged from the Ford—Linda Kasabian, Tex Watson, Sadie Glutz/Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel.

  The entrance to 10050 Cielo Drive consisted of a wrought-iron fence and a gate. The gate was six feet high and twelve feet wide. On either side of the iron gate, rattan facing had been placed. To the left, a cliff fell away. On the right was a steep hillside.

  The electronic button opening the gate was never locked, so that a person could push the button and the gate would swing inward, with the gate automatically closing behind them.

  Tex wasn’t sure just what sort of line he had cut that had splatted across the electric-eye gate. It had fallen over the gate, and he was afraid it was some sort of utility cable, charged with electricity. They had nothing to fear, since the wire, which had once been connected to communication speakers, hadn’t been used since the Polanskis moved into the estate.

  Tex climbs the telephone pole outside 10050 Cielo Drive to cut the wires. Other marauders are still in the car.

  The four invaders scrambled up the hill, carrying their extra clothes, their weapons, and a rope. About ten feet up the embankment they climbed over the fence. Then, as they crept toward the driveway, they spotted the lights of a car that was moving down the driveway. Tex said, “Lie down and be still,” then he ran toward the vehicle, after setting aside the coils of rope from his shoulder, holding his revolver in his right hand.

  Parent spotted the four and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?” Luckily for Garretson, Watson thought that Parent was the caretaker. Tex ran up in front of the white, 1966 Ambassador sedan and yelled, “Stop! Halt!” Tex jammed his weapon up against Parent’s head—a weapon right out of the spirit of the American West, a .22-caliber, nine-shot, walnut-handled, blue steel, long-barreled, Buntline Special fifteen-inch revolver, loaded with .22 long rifle bullets. Parent reportedly said, “Please don’t hurt me. I won’t say anything.” Then bang bang bang bang.

  Parent’s Lucerne wristwatch was torn off, indicating Tex was jabbing him while he was shooting him. It was found in the back seat with a severed watchband. There was a defensive deep wound in Parent’s left hand cutting the tendons between h
is ring and little finger.

  The young man from El Monte, California, was wearing a white and blue plaid shirt, blue denim pants, black shoes, and white socks. His body slumped over toward the passenger’s seat when he was shot, his head leaning back and to the right, and his blood, bone chips, and bullet frags were spattered on the dashboard, on the rubber floormat, and on the front door.

  Tex switched off the lights and the engine, shoved the gear selector in neutral, pushed the car back out of the way. He picked up the coils of rope, and said, “Come on.” Why was Watson carrying about seven or eight coils of white, three-quarter-inch, three-ply nylon line, a total of forty-three feet, eight inches? The marauders’ plan, later abandoned in their haste, was to tie the victims up to the ceiling beams in the living room, then draw and quarter them (thus proving that at least Watson knew the inside of the house.)

  Watson had instructed the girls to hide their changes of clothing in the bushes. They walked by the trees that hovered over the edge of the front lawn, and up the walkway, where they paused near the house. Linda Kasabian was told to go around to the back of the house to check for any open windows or doors. Linda checked the back porch door, looked into the kitchen windows and through the back door into the living room, but there was nothing open. On her way back, evidently she spotted the bouquet of flowers on the table in the dining room. Returning, she found Tex standing by the fresh-painted window of the nursery room on the house’s far north end, where he was slitting the lower part of the screen with his bayonet.

  Tex ordered Linda to go down by the walkway and maintain a lookout, so she headed to the end of the parking lot, by the fence, and she knelt down, not far from where Steven Parent slumped in the Ambassador. Sadie and Katie crept along the elliptical sidewalk, which curved along to where it hooked into the covered flagstone-floored front porch.

  The temperature was hot, and the house and grounds were well lit. The poolside light was on. The two front porch lights were on.

  After Tex had removed the slashed window, he slithered into the house, encountering the smell of fresh paint in the nursery being prepared for the baby. The first coat of paint had been finished that very afternoon. Tex entered the kitchen walking south, through the dining room, into the entrance hall where he opened the front door and let the two slashomorphs in. They grabbed a left out of the entrance hall into the large, white-walled, cream-carpeted living room. Bordering the west side of the living room was a loft, carpeted and furnished with chairs and a telephone, reached by a redwood ladder, located adjacent to the left side of the large stone fireplace on the west wall of the living room. In the southeast corner of the living room, facing out into the room at a triangular position, was a baby grand piano with a metronome on the left side. On the music holder of the piano were two compositions, a song called “Straight Shooter” by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, a song off their first album, and on the other side of the stand was Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance.”

  The stereo, located inside the front hall closet beneath the shelves of film and videotapes, was blaring, which may have prevented the shooting of Steven Parent from being noticed. In the center of the wall was a large desk, which stretched into the living room. On the desk were a candelabra and flowers, plus a white push-button phone and various scripts.

  Jay’s blue leather jacket was hung up on the high-backed chair next to the desk, containing his wallet, with a hundred dollars, plus a tube of coke. Jay’s briefcase was nearby, with hair dryer, mirror, electric clippers, an address book, a pilot’s map, and various haircutting tools.

  The part of the living room that was to be the scene of the murders was a kind of enclosed section near the large stone fireplace on the west wall. In front of it was a large zebra-skin rug. Books and movie scripts lined the hearth. A large, three-cushioned, beige velvet sofa faced the fireplace, a few feet from the zebra skin.

  Left of the sofa was an end table and two cream-colored, stuffed chairs were set at angles on each side. A floor lamp and a brown, wide-reed basket for holding magazines sat near the chair on the right.

  Running the entire length of the living room, east to west, above the sofa, was an apparently solid, four-inch by twelve-inch beam, painted white, over which the killer Watson was soon to toss his nylon rope.

  A large American flag was draped over the back cushions of the beige sofa, turned upside down. In spite of the mutterings of the police about “ritual murders” a few hours later, the flag was about the only unusual element in the decor of the room. The flag had only been in the house about two weeks, according to the testimony of the housekeeper, Winifred Chapman.

  Sharon’s close friend, Sheilah Wells was asked about it not long after, replying, “Yes, it’s true, there was a flag draped over the back of the sofa. It had been there ever since Wojtek and Gibby (Abigail Folger) moved in. It belonged to them. Whenever I went over to Sharon’s and I’d see the flag there, I’d tell her it wasn’t right. She’d nod and say she knew, but that Gibby and Wojtek thought it was funny.

  “That was Sharon. She knew that the others were making fun of the flag, of the establishment. She didn’t go along with it, but felt she might hurt them if she took it away.”

  There’s a famous scene in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, where the novel’s narrator, Sal Paradise, accidentally puts an American flag upside down on a sixty-foot pole. One of his duties working as a guard in a military barracks was to raise the flag in the morning, and after a drunken night, he raises it incorrectly. “Do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag upside down on a government pole?” a colleague comments. ‘Upside down?’ I was horrified; of course I hadn’t realized it.” (On the Road, p. 66)

  In nautical terms, flying a flag upside down was a distress sign—and by the late 1960s was commonly used as an anti-Vietnam war statement. History is silent on whether the flag was draped upon the living room couch when Colonel Paul Tate and Doris Tate visited during the July Moon Landing.

  How I Learned the Details of the Murders

  How did I put together the course of the killings? First of all, I sent questions to two defendants during the subsequent murder trial through an attorney for one of the defendants, and I received very useful responses. I also sent detailed question lists to Manson, which is how I learned that he went to the murder scene, “to see what my children had done.” In addition, I obtained a copy of a large blueprint of the house, six feet wide by forty inches high, that listed each blood spot on the floor, the doorway, the door, the walkway, and so on. I got ahold of the official police reports listing the locations of all the blood found, plus both the lengthy first and second homicide investigation progress reports. I obtained a photocopy of Linda Kasabian’s handwritten description of the murders. Plus, I watched the trial as it unfolded for a number of months, taking notes—all of which enabled me to re-create, with fair accuracy, what happened on that horrible, hot night in Benedict Canyon.

  My description of the murders may be too shocking for some readers. I originally decided to write all its horrid details because there had been some favorable publicity for the Manson group in a few underground publications, so I was determined to describe for all time what these marauders had done. It stands as a testimony to the potential for evil among humans. Accordingly, the hesitant reader might well consider skipping the next few pages.

  Horror on Cielo Drive

  Wojtek Frykowski lay on the sofa, in front of the fireplace, dozing off, zonked under the apparently pleasant influence, MDA. The devil-minded Tex Watson stalked past the desk toward the back of the couch. Evidently he took position on the zebra skin, with his back to the fireplace, and aimed the long revolver at Wojtek’s head. He indicated with his knife hand where Katie and Sadie were to line up behind the sofa. Wojtek awakened, stretched and asked, “What time is it?”

  “Don’t move or you’re dead,” said Watson.

  “Who are you?” replied Frykowski.

  “I’m the
Devil. I’m here to do the Devil’s business. Give me all your money,” replied Tex Watson. Watson, a former high school track star in Texas, would later, in Death Valley, tell a young Manson follower, “it was fun” to kill those in Sharon’s residence.

  Attractive and elegant Abigail Folger was alone reading on the antique bed in her bedroom, wearing a full-length white nightgown. She was slightly stoned on the euphoric MDA. Though most of her and Wojtek’s belongings had been taken back to their house, she and Wojtek were staying with Sharon until Roman should return.

  In the living room, Wojtek Frykowski kept asking, over and over who the invaders were, what they wanted, saying “My money is in the wallet, on the desk.”

  Sadie went over to the desk and reported she couldn’t find it. Tex ordered Sadie to go get a towel in the bathroom to tie up Frykowski. Sadie brought a towel back to the couch by the fireplace and tied Wojtek’s hands behind his back with a loose knot.

  Frykowski was then forced to lie down on his back, thus trapping his hands behind him. Tex then told Sadie to scout the house looking for others. She climbed up the redwood ladder to search the loft, and then she walked toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. When she reached the one the left, Abigail Folger lay reading. When she saw Sadie, she waved! and smiled! and Sadie smiled back then walked away.

  Sadie crossed the hallway, and peeked into Sharon’s bedroom. A very tanned and very gravid Sharon was lying in bed, propped up on pillows, with her blonde hair over her shoulders, wearing matching blue-yellow, floral-patterned panties and bra. She was also adorned with her wedding ring and gold earpins. Lime green and orange sheets were pulled down. It was around 12:25 a.m. On the edge of the bed where the beautiful Sharon Tate was stretched out on pillows sat Jay Sebring in a blue shirt, black high-top boots, and white pants with black vertical stripes. On his wrist was an opulent Cartier watch. They were chatting and did not see Sadie.