by Jeff Guinn
When they arrived back at the entrance to Spahn Ranch, Charlie was waiting with Family member Nancy Pitman. His first question was why they were back so soon. Tex told him that it had gotten messy, but everybody at Cielo was dead. Susan, eager as always for praise, bragged to Charlie that she’d killed for him, and Charlie replied that she’d done it for herself. Then Charlie wanted to know how much money they’d gotten, and was angry that the take was just $70. They should have gone into every house on Cielo, he snarled. Charlie asked how they’d left the murder site looking—was it just like Gary Hinman’s house? Did they write witchy words? The answers didn’t satisfy him. Brusquely, he asked if any of them felt remorse. When they assured him that they didn’t, Charlie told them to wipe off the gobbets of blood that were smeared on the inside and outside of the car. When that was done, Charlie got into the Ford and drove back to Cielo.
Charlie entered the house and wiped surfaces to eliminate stray fingerprints. He moved some things around, hauling the two steamer trunks that had been delivered earlier in the day out into the hall, and tossed a towel over Jay Sebring’s head. He placed in plain sight a pair of glasses he found somewhere. There was a large American flag on one side of the living room. Charlie draped it theatrically over the sofa near Sharon Tate’s crumpled, bloody body. The flag prominently displayed next to a pregnant woman’s corpse would surely shock investigators and get lots of media mention. Charlie was so preoccupied with perfectly setting the scene of the slaughter that he didn’t comb the house for cash, credit cards, or other valuables. He also didn’t check the guest cottage. When he felt that everything in the main house looked just right, he returned to Spahn and went to bed. Dawn wasn’t far away.
• • •
A few minutes before 5 A.M., the Los Angeles Times delivery boy shoved a newspaper into the mailbox outside the gate at Cielo. He noticed a cut wire dangling down from the telephone pole. Around 7:30 Seymour Kott, the closest neighbor down the hill, saw the cut wire, too, as he went out to pick up his paper.
Winifred Chapman arrived for work as usual shortly after 8 A.M. She saw the dangling wire and thought that it might be a downed power line. But the gate opened when she pushed the button outside the fence, so she walked up the driveway, passing the white Rambler without looking inside. Her employers had overnight guests all the time and they sometimes parked haphazardly. Instead of walking around the house to the main entrance past the lawn, Chapman entered the house through a servant’s entrance in the back. The first thing she noticed was that the steamer trunks were in a different place, and then she saw blood, at first some smears on the trunks and then pools of it seemingly everywhere. Chapman looked into the living room, over the top of the couch. The front door was open, and through it she could see a body on the lawn.
She fled down the driveway. As she ran past the Rambler she looked inside and saw another body. Neighbors heard her screaming “Murder, death, bodies, blood!” and called the police.
Two one-man patrol car units responded to a Code 2 “possible homicide” call at 9:14. A neighbor listed the people he believed lived at the hilltop house for Officer Jerry Joe DeRosa—movie director Roman Polanski and his wife, two of their friends, the property owner, Rudi Altobelli, but he was away on a trip, and a kid named William Garretson who was acting as caretaker. Mrs. Polanski was an actress named Sharon Tate.
Chapman showed DeRosa how to open the front gate; DeRosa saw the body in the Rambler but waited to go further down the driveway until fellow officer William Whisenhunt joined him. Weapons ready—DeRosa had a rifle, Whisenhunt carried a shotgun—they cautiously approached the house. As they inspected the other cars, a third cop, Robert Burbridge, arrived. The three crossed to the lawn and saw two bodies there. A window screen had been slit—that was apparently how the killer or killers entered the house. But the officers saw another cracked window without a screen, one that opened into the nursery. They raised that window and clambered inside. In what appeared to be the living room they found two more butchered bodies, a man and a woman. The corpses were tethered by nooses around their necks; the three-ply white nylon rope connecting them had been looped over a beam in the ceiling. Massive puddles of blood and smears of gore were everywhere.
There were no other bodies in the house, but the helpful neighbor had mentioned a guesthouse. As the officers eased up to the door of the cottage, they heard a dog bark and a male voice hissing, “Shhh, be quiet.” The cops kicked in the door and Altobelli’s Weimaraner attacked. Whisenhunt slammed the door on the dog’s head to trap it, and Garretson called the animal off. To the police, the nineteen-year-old seemed incoherent, perhaps from drugs. Garretson was hauled outside and marched past the bodies on the lawn. Abigail Folger was so mutilated and covered with blood that Garretson identified her as Winifred Chapman. He said Voytek Frykowski was Roman Polanski’s younger brother. Garretson swore to the officers that he’d been closed up in the guest cottage all night. He hadn’t seen or heard anything. They didn’t believe him—the guest cottage wasn’t that far from the main house, maybe a hundred feet. The officers read Garretson his rights and arrested him for murder. DeRosa pushed him down the driveway past the Rambler—Garretson said he didn’t recognize the body in it—and to the closed gate. DeRosa pushed the button with his finger, wiping away the bloody fingerprint carelessly left there by Tex Watson just hours earlier. DeRosa then called in to report five homicides and a suspect in custody at the Cielo address. Print reporters and TV crews in the city routinely listened to police band radio, and this announcement of a mass murder roused them into immediate action. Within minutes, members of the media began arriving at the scene, eventually so many that their cars and mobile production trucks lined the narrow road all the way to the bottom of the steep hill.
While the media clamored for information, more officers and LAPD investigative personnel streamed through the gate and into the house. They found various bits of possible evidence—the eyeglasses, scattered fingerprints, three pieces of a broken gun grip. There were bloody footprints all over the house, but some of these had been tracked in by the police. Forensic chemist Joe Granado took forty-five blood samples from various drying pools but missed many more.
At noon William Tennant, Polanski’s agent, arrived and identified everyone except the body in the Rambler. A police sergeant finally made a statement to the media hovering just outside the gate: “It’s like a battlefield up there.” The families of the four identified victims were notified. Steve Parent’s mother and father were left to spend the day wondering why their always reliable son hadn’t come home the night before or even bothered to call to say where he was. Amid the hubbub at the main house no one thought to check the plates on the Rambler.
The first wire bulletins flashed across the country: “Five Slain in Bel Air.”
Homicide detectives were assigned to the case, and the first of them arrived in the early afternoon. Sgt. Michael McGann noticed the word “PIG” scrawled in blood on the lower panel of the front door. The bodies had been left in place. McGann had been working homicide for five years, but his initial reaction was, “This [is] the worst.” Detective Danny Galindo was placed in charge of the evidence, preserving each item. Marijuana was found in Jay Sebring’s car, along with a gram of cocaine. A sex manual written in Chinese turned up in one of the bedrooms. A reel of film was discovered in the attic; when detectives viewed it back at the station it showed Polanski and Tate having sex. The film was discreetly returned to Polanski.
Susan Atkins’s lost buck knife was found under a sofa cushion. But of most immediate interest to investigators was what Galindo later described as “a goodly amount of narcotics” out in the open throughout the house. About seven grams of marijuana were found in a plastic baggie in a living room cabinet. Thirty grams of hashish were on the guest bedroom nightstand, as were ten capsules of the psychedelic drug MDA. Investigators found marijuana residue in an ashtray by Tate’s bed, a joint on a desk by the front door, and two more in the gue
sthouse. Even by the standards of the day it was a lot; if the teenage caretaker didn’t turn out to be the killer, McGann thought the carnage could very likely have resulted from some drug connection gone wrong. But Garretson remained the prime suspect. McGann’s regular partner was on vacation, so Sgt. Jess Buckles was assigned to work with him on the case. Lt. Robert Helder, LAPD’s supervisor of investigations, was in overall command. In all they were a very senior group—the murder of a movie star was going to get a lot of media attention, and Chief Ed Davis wanted the case brought to a swift, satisfactory conclusion.
Leaks to the media were inevitable. By early afternoon newscasts revealed four victims’ identities. The public learned that Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Jay Sebring were dead, and under almost any other circumstances TV, radio, and print coverage of the murders would have focused on the slayings of a coffee fortune heiress and the most famous hairdresser in America, with Frykowski getting only a mention. But from the first, attention focused on the bloody demise of a movie star. In death Sharon Tate instantly attained star status. From the afternoon of August 9 on, the slaughter at Cielo would simply be known as the “Tate murders.”
Charlie slept late, so he missed the first TV bulletins. But many other Family members gathered to watch, and Susan expressed particular glee in being part of something so newsworthy. There was no official announcement or explanation to those who weren’t there; instead, there were prideful, partial boasts on the parts of Susan and Tex, who wanted it known among their peers that they’d been selected to carry out a critical task and had come through for Charlie. The details were garbled; all most of them knew for certain was that five people had died. In the initial adrenaline rush of having made news, of having done something so spectacularly gruesome that it was all the TV talking heads could speculate about—who could have done such an awful thing, and why?—the Family members failed to notice that none of the newscasts mentioned possible Black Panther involvement or any possible connection between these slayings and Hinman’s murder. The stories were limited to the horrific murder of an actress and others.
• • •
William Garretson was questioned at the West Los Angeles jail. His responses still didn’t seem to make much sense. The teenager was assigned a lawyer and moved to LAPD headquarters at Parker Center. His story remained the same: He didn’t know much about the people who lived in the main house. Last night he had a visitor, a kid named Steve Parent, who tried to sell him a clock radio, but he wasn’t interested. He spent the night closed up in the guest cottage listening to music and writing letters. He didn’t hear or see anything.
Because Garretson hadn’t identified Parent at the scene, the police didn’t link his Cielo visit to sell the clock radio with the body found in the Rambler. But an enterprising reporter waiting outside the Cielo gates wrote down the car’s license number and checked it with a source at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The car was registered to Wilfred and Juanita Parent in the suburb of El Monte. They weren’t home when the reporter arrived in late afternoon, but he checked with neighbors and learned the name of their priest. The priest told the journalist all about Steve, who apparently knew everything about stereos and radios.
Steve Parent’s name was spreading among the press when the LAPD finally did its own license check. An officer came to the door of the Parent residence and asked Wilfred to call a number on a card. It was the county coroner’s office—there was a body waiting to be identified.
The LAPD announced to the media that autopsies would be performed on the victims, and that a press conference would be held the next day—Sunday, August 10. Garretson’s lawyer agreed to have his client take a lie detector test on Sunday; meanwhile, the nineteen-year-old remained in custody, so far the only official suspect.
Detective Danny Galindo was ordered to spend the night on guard at the murder scene. The place completely unnerved him. He wanted to lie down and get some rest, but there was sticky blood everywhere and he couldn’t find a clean spot in the whole living room. There was even blood splattered all over the walls. Finally he went into a back room and dozed as best he could.
• • •
Charlie got up in time to catch some of the late afternoon and early evening TV reports. He realized what the others had missed—there was no mention of the Black Panthers or Hinman’s murder. Famous people had died at Cielo—this actress’s picture was being broadcast all over—and there still wasn’t the reaction that Charlie needed. Bobby Beausoleil was no closer to being free. There were no stirrings of Helter Skelter. Charlie always had great confidence in his own ideas. Because Hinman was personally inconsequential, perhaps his murder was already forgotten by the cops, especially since it happened a couple of weeks earlier. Well, the actress was somebody they couldn’t forget, not with the news of her death so prominent. Maybe the whole copycat/Panther plan had to start with her, not Hinman.
That evening, Charlie went along with the general Family mood that there was something to celebrate. He had everybody smoke some weed, and then he pulled out his guitar and sang for a while. Only after everyone else had been sent off to bed did he call together Tex, Susan, Pat, Linda, and two additions—Clem and Leslie. Last night had been handled badly, Charlie told them. There was too much panic at the house. So they were going to go out again tonight and do it right. And just to make certain that there were no mistakes this time, Charlie was going to come along and show them how it was supposed to be done.
They all went to put on dark clothes while Charlie waited by the yellow Ford. More than forty years later Pat admitted, “The first night, we didn’t know. The second night, we did.” More people were about to die.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LaBianca and Shea
The oppressive L.A. heat wave broke on Saturday evening. The previous day’s temperatures hadn’t dipped below ninety, but now they dropped into the seventies, bringing a blessed coolness carried throughout the city by soft breezes. As darkness fell a little fog drifted in off the ocean, and its wavering tendrils extended into most of the suburbs. But there wasn’t enough fog to obscure vision along the roads. It was a very pleasant night to be driving around Los Angeles.
Seven people—Charlie, Tex, Clem, Linda, Susan, Pat, and Leslie—were too many to comfortably fit into Johnny Swartz’s Ford, but a larger crew than the previous evening’s was necessary. Charlie had in mind at least two separate slaughters; doubling the murder scenes made it that much more likely that the cops and media would buy into the copycat scheme and tie everything to the Hinman slaying. Three-member teams seemed about right. Once again, Charlie had no intention of doing the bloody work himself. Clem made a useful addition since he’d do whatever he was told. Leslie was smart enough to leave a murder scene just the way that Charlie wanted, with the right bloody words, Black Panther clues, and no fingerprints.
Charlie gave Tex a new handgun and also a military bayonet that the Family had acquired from an Army surplus store. Then they piled into the Ford, with Linda behind the wheel, Charlie beside her, Tex folded in beside Charlie, and Pat, Susan, Leslie, and Clem all wedged in the backseat. Beyond the physical discomfort of too many people jammed into too small a space, the atmosphere in the car was leaden with the knowledge of what they were about to do. No one suggested turning on the radio for some music. The only conversation was one-sided, with Charlie barking out orders for Linda to make various turns, often waiting to tell her until the turn was imminent. She missed some and had to turn around, and when that happened Charlie snarled. A few times he jabbed her with his elbow. He told her repeatedly how stupid she was.
Everyone had smoked weed that day. Tex and Susan also dipped back into their stash of Meth. Perhaps it was the effect of the drugs combined with the fact that Charlie never told them where they were driving to, but it seemed to everyone else in the car that they meandered down residential streets forever with no real sense of destination, stopping here and there for Charlie to get out and reconnoiter.
/> • • •
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca had just returned home from Lake Isabella, north of Los Angeles. They’d originally driven to the lake on Tuesday to drop off a speedboat to be used over the weekend by teenage Frank Struthers, Rosemary’s son by an earlier marriage. Their plan was to bring Frank and the boat back on Saturday.
The LaBiancas were upper middle class. Leno ran a chain of grocery stores, and Rosemary was co-owner of a boutique. After leaving the boat at Lake Isabella on Tuesday, they returned to their comfortable home on Waverly Drive in the neighborhood of Los Feliz, a very nice upscale area, quiet and safe. The LaBiancas had worked hard to make successes of themselves, Rosemary especially. She started out in an orphanage, worked as a carhop and a waitress, and eventually owned her own business and made good money in the stock market. Everyone liked her. Leno had a lot of friends, too, but he was also a chronic gambler who had more passion than skill at the racetrack. His other hobby was collecting rare coins. Rosemary and Leno seemed very close, the kind of people who had no enemies.
The LaBiancas had missed the first frenzied news reports about the Tate murders because, along with Rosemary’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Suzanne, they took Leno’s Thunderbird on the 150-mile trip to Lake Isabella to pick up Frank and retrieve their boat. But Frank didn’t want to leave yet. He had asked his mother and stepfather to let him stay over one more night—he’d come home with his friend’s family late Sunday. That was fine with Rosemary and Leno; they hitched the boat to the Thunderbird and started home with Suzanne.
The late Saturday afternoon traffic was thick and they didn’t reach the outskirts of L.A. until well after dark. The LaBiancas weren’t able to drop Suzanne off at her apartment until about 1 A.M. on Sunday. Once they’d taken Suzanne to her place, the LaBiancas stopped at an all-night newsstand to buy a newspaper. Leno liked to read the latest sports section before he went to bed. He wanted up-to-date information on the ponies. Leno always bought his paper from John Fokianos’s stand. Fokianos was on duty when Leno and Rosemary pulled up, still towing the big speedboat behind their Thunderbird. The LaBiancas were sociable people. Even though they were tired from their drive, they chatted with Fokianos for a few minutes, discussing the big news of the day, which was the Tate murders. The Los Angeles Times had put out a special short edition about them, just the few basic facts that were known and the LAPD’s promise of a news conference sometime on Sunday. Because Leno was such a good customer, Fokianos didn’t charge him for the Times special edition. When he was questioned later by the police, Fokianos said he was certain that the time was almost 2 A.M., because right after the LaBiancas left, all the bars closed and he had a lot of customers wanting to pick up the Times to read about the murder of Sharon Tate. That was all anybody wanted to talk about.
