Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1969

It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon.

The canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills play tricks with sounds. A noise clearly audible a mile away may be indistinguishable at a few hundred feet.

It was hot that night, but not as hot as the night before, when the temperature hadn’t dropped below 92 degrees. The three-day heat wave had begun to break a couple of hours before, about 10 P.M. on Friday—to the psychological as well as the physical relief of those Angelenos who recalled that on such a night, just four years ago, Watts had exploded in violence. Though the coastal fog was now rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles itself remained hot and muggy, sweltering in its own emissions, but here, high above most of the city, and usually even above the smog, it was at least 10 degrees cooler. Still, it remained warm enough so that many residents of the area slept with their windows open, in hopes of catching a vagrant breeze.

All things considered, it’s surprising that more people didn’t hear something.

But then it was late, just after midnight, and 10050 Cielo Drive was secluded.

Being secluded, it was also vulnerable.

Cielo Drive is a narrow street that abruptly winds upward from Benedict Canyon Road. One of its cul-de-sacs, easily missed though directly opposite Bella Drive, comes to a dead end at the high gate of 10050. Looking through the gate, you could see neither the main residence nor the guest house some distance beyond it, but you could see, toward the end of the paved parking area, a corner of the garage and, a little farther on, a splitrail fence which, though it was only August, was strung with Christmas-tree lights.

The lights, which could be seen most of the way from the Sunset Strip, had been put up by actress Candice Bergen when she was living with the previous tenant of 10050 Cielo Drive, TV and record producer Terry Melcher. When Melcher, the son of Doris Day, moved to his mother’s beach house in Malibu, the new tenants left the lights up. They were on this night, as they were every night, adding a year-round holiday touch to Benedict Canyon.

From the front door of the main house to the gate was over a hundred feet. From the gate to the nearest neighbor on Cielo, 10070, was almost a hundred yards.

At 10070 Cielo, Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Kott had already gone to bed, their dinner guests having left about midnight, when Mrs. Kott heard, in close sequence, what sounded like three or four gunshots. They seemed to have come from the direction of the gate of 10050. She did not check the time but later guessed it to be between 12:30 and 1 A.M. Hearing nothing further, Mrs. Kott went to sleep.

About three-quarters of a mile directly south and downhill from 10050 Cielo Drive, Tim Ireland was one of five counselors supervising an overnight camp-out for some thirty-five children at the Westlake School for Girls. The other counselors had gone to sleep, but Ireland had volunteered to stay up through the night. At approximately 12:40 A.M. he heard from what seemed a long distance away, to the north or northeast, a solitary male voice. The man was screaming, “Oh, God, no, please don’t! Oh, God, no, don’t, don’t, don’t…”

The scream lasted ten to fifteen seconds, then stopped, the abrupt silence almost as chilling as the cry itself. Ireland quickly checked the camp, but all the children were asleep. He awoke his supervisor, Rich Sparks, who had bedded down inside the school, and, telling him what he had heard, got his permission to drive around the area to see if anyone needed help. Ireland took a circuitous route from North Faring Road, where the school was located, south on Benedict Canyon Road to Sunset Boulevard, west to Beverly Glen, and northward back to the school. He observed nothing unusual, though he did hear a number of dogs barking.

There were other sounds in the hours before dawn that Saturday.

Emmett Steele, 9951 Beverly Grove Drive, was awakened by the barking of his two hunting dogs. The pair usually ignored ordinary sounds but went wild when they heard gunshots. Steele went out to look around but, finding nothing out of place, returned to bed. He estimated the time as between 2 and 3 A.M.

Robert Bullington, an employee of the Bel Air Patrol, a private security force used by many of the homeowners in the affluent area, was parked in front of 2175 Summit Ridge Drive, with his window down, when he heard what sounded like three shots, spaced a few seconds apart. Bullington called in; Eric Karlson, who was working the desk at patrol headquarters, logged the call at 4:11 A.M. Karlson in turn called the West Los Angeles Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and passed on the report. The officer who took the call remarked, “I hope we don’t have a murder; we just had a woman-screaming call in that area.”

Los Angeles Times delivery boy Steve Shannon heard nothing unusual when he pedaled his bike up Cielo Drive between 4:30 and 4:45 A.M. But as he put the paper in the mailbox of 10050, he did notice what looked like a telephone wire hanging over the gate. He also observed, through the gate and some distance away, that the yellow bug light on the side of the garage was still on.

Seymour Kott also noticed the light and the fallen wire when he went out to get his paper about 7:30 A.M.

About 8 A.M., Winifred Chapman got off the bus at the intersection of Santa Monica and Canyon Drive. A light-skinned black in her mid-fifties, Mrs. Chapman was the housekeeper at 10050 Cielo, and she was upset because, thanks to L.A.’s terrible bus service, she was going to be late to work. Luck seemed with her, however; just as she was about to look for a taxi, she saw a man she had once worked with, and he gave her a ride almost to the gate.

She noticed the wire immediately, and it worried her.

In front and to the left of the gate, not hidden but not conspicuous either, was a metal pole on the top of which was the gate-control mechanism. When the button was pushed, the gate swung open. There was a similar mechanism inside the grounds, both being positioned so a driver could reach the button without having to get out of the car.

Because of the wire, Mrs. Chapman thought the electricity might be off, but when she pushed the button, the gate swung open. Taking the Times out of the mailbox, she walked hurriedly onto the property, noticing an unfamiliar automobile in the driveway, a white Rambler, parked at an odd angle. But she passed it, and several other cars nearer the garage, without much thought. Overnight guests weren’t that uncommon. Someone had left the outside light on all night, and she went to the switch at the corner of the garage and turned it off.

At the end of the paved parking area was a flagstone walkway that made a half circle to the front door of the main house. She turned right before coming to the walk, however, going to the service porch entrance at the back of the residence. The key was secreted on a rafter above the door. Taking it down, she unlocked the door and went inside, walking directly to the kitchen, where she picked up the extension phone. It was dead.

Thinking that she should alert someone that the line was down, she proceeded through the dining room toward the living room. Then she stopped suddenly, her progress impeded by two large blue steamer trunks, which hadn’t been there when she had left the previous afternoon—and by what she saw.

There appeared to be blood on the trunks, on the floor next to them, and on two towels in the entryway. She couldn’t see the entire living room—a long couch cut off the area in front of the fireplace—but everywhere she could see she saw the red splashes. The front door was ajar. Looking out, she saw several pools of blood on the flagstone porch. And, farther on, on the lawn, she saw a body.

Screaming, she turned and ran through the house, leaving the same way she had come in but, on running down the driveway, changing her course so as to reach the gate-control button. In so doing, she passed on the opposite side of the white Rambler, seeing for the first time that there was a body inside the car too.

Once outside the gate, she ran down the hill to the first house, 10070, ringing the bell and pounding on the door. When the Kotts didn’t answer, she ran to the next house, 10090, banging on that door and screaming, “Murder, death, bodies, blood!”

Fifteen-year-old Jim Asin was outside, warming up the family car. It was Saturday and, a member of Law Enforcement Unit 800 of the Boy Scouts of America, he was waiting for his father, Ray Asin, to drive him to the West Los Angeles Division of LAPD, where he was scheduled to work on the desk. By the time he got to the porch, his parents had opened the door. While they were trying to calm the hysterical Mrs. Chapman, Jim dialed the police emergency number. Trained by the Scouts to be exact, he noted the time: 8:33.

While waiting for the police, the father and son walked as far as the gate. The white Rambler was some thirty feet inside the property, too far away to make out anything inside it, but they did see that not one but several wires were down. They appeared to have been cut.

Returning home, Jim called the police a second time and, some minutes later, a third.

There is some confusion as to exactly what happened to the calls. The official police report only states, “At 0914 hours, West Lost Angeles Units 8L5 and 8L62 were given a radio call, ‘Code 2, possible homicide, 10050 Cielo Drive.’”

The units were one-man patrol cars. Officer Jerry Joe DeRosa, driving 8L5, arrived first, light flashing and siren blaring.[1] DeRosa began interviewing Mrs. Chapman, but had a difficult time of it. Not only was she still hysterical, she was vague as to what she had seen—“blood, bodies everyplace”—and it was hard to get the names and relationships straight. Polanski. Altobelli. Frykowski.

Ray Asin, who knew the residents of 10050 Cielo, stepped in. The house was owned by Rudi Altobelli. He was in Europe, but had hired a caretaker, a young man named William Garretson, to look after the place. Garretson lived in the guest house to the back of the property. Altobelli had rented the main residence to Roman Polanksi, the movie director, and his wife. The Polanskis had gone to Europe, however, in March, and while they were away, two of their friends, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, had moved in. Mrs. Polanski had returned less than a month ago, and Frykowski and Folger were staying on with her until her husband returned. Mrs. Polanski was a movie actress. Her name was Sharon Tate.

Questioned by DeRosa, Mrs. Chapman was unable to say which, if any, of these people were the two bodies she had seen. To the names she added still another, that of Jay Sebring, a noted men’s hair stylist and a friend of Mrs. Polanski’s. She mentioned him because she remembered seeing his black Porsche with the other automobiles parked next to the garage.

Getting a rifle from his squad car, DeRosa had Mrs. Chapman show him how to open the gate. Walking cautiously up the driveway to the Rambler, he looked in the open window. There was a body inside, in the driver’s seat but slumped toward the passenger side. Male, Caucasian, reddish hair, plaid shirt, blue denim pants, both shirt and pants drenched with blood. He appeared to be young, probably in his teens.

About this time Unit 8L62, driven by Officer William T. Whisenhunt, pulled up outside the gate. DeRosa walked back and told him he had a possible homicide. DeRosa also showed him how to open the gate, and the two officers proceeded up the driveway, DeRosa still carrying his rifle, Whisenhunt a shotgun. As Whisenhunt passed the Rambler, he looked in, noting that the window on the driver’s side was down and both lights and ignition were off. The pair then checked out the other automobiles and, finding them empty, searched both the garage and the room above it. Still no one.

A third officer, Robert Burbridge, caught up with them. As the three men reached the end of the parking area, they saw not one but two inert forms on the lawn. From a distance they looked like mannequins that had been dipped in red paint, then tossed haphazardly on the grass.

They seemed grotesquely out of place on the well-cared-for lawn, with its landscaped shrubbery, flowers, and trees. To the right was the residence itself, long, rambling, looking more comfortable than ostentatious, the carriage light outside the main door shining brightly. Farther on, past the south end of the house, they could see a corner of the swimming pool, shimmering blue green in the morning light. Off to the side was a rustic wishing well. To the left was a split-rail fence, intertwined with Christmas-tree lights, still on. And beyond the fence was a sweeping, panoramic view that stretched all the way from downtown Los Angeles to the beach. Out there life was still going on. Here it had stopped.

The first body was eighteen to twenty feet past the front door of the residence. The closer they came, the worse it looked. Male, Caucasian, probably in his thirties, about five feet ten, wearing short boots, multicolored bell bottoms, purple shirt, casual vest. He was lying on his side, his head resting on his right arm, his left hand clutching the grass. His head and face were horribly battered, his torso and limbs punctured by literally dozens of wounds. It seemed inconceivable that so much savagery could be inflicted on one human being.

The second body was about twenty-five feet beyond the first. Female, Caucasian, long dark hair, probably in her late twenties. She was lying supine, her arms thrown out. Barefoot, she was wearing a full-length nightgown, which, before the many stab wounds, had probably been white.

The stillness now got to the officers. Everything was quiet, too quiet. The serenity itself became menacing. Those windows along the front of the house: behind any a killer could be waiting, watching.

Leaving DeRosa on the lawn, Whisenhunt and Burbridge went back toward the north end of the residence, looking for another way to get in. They’d be open targets if they entered the front door. They noticed that a screen had been removed from one of the front windows and was leaning up against the side of the building. Whisenhunt also observed a horizontal slit along the bottom of the screen. Suspecting this might have been where the killer or killers entered, they looked for another means of entry. They found a window open on the side. Looking in, they saw what appeared to be a newly painted room, devoid of furniture. They climbed in.

DeRosa waited until he saw them inside the house, then approached the front door. There was a patch of blood on the walk, between the hedges; several more on the right-hand corner of the porch; with still others just outside and to the left of the door and on the doorjamb itself. He didn’t see, or later didn’t recall, any footprints, though there were a number. The door being open, inward, DeRosa was on the porch before he noticed that something had been scrawled on its lower half.

Printed in what appeared to be blood were three letters: PIG.

Whisenhunt and Burbridge had finished checking out the kitchen and dining room when DeRosa entered the hallway. Turning left into the living room, he found his way partly blocked by the two blue steamer trunks. It appeared that they had been standing on end, then knocked over, as one was leaning against the other. DeRosa also observed, next to the trunks and on the floor, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Burbridge, who followed him into the room, noticed something else: on the carpet, to the left of the entrance, were two small pieces of wood. They looked like pieces of a broken gun grip.

They had arrived expecting two bodies, but had found three. They were now looking not for more death, but some explanation. A suspect. Clues.

The room was light and airy. Desk, chair, piano. Then something odd. In the center of the room, facing the fireplace, was a long couch. Draped over the back was a huge American flag.

Not until they were almost to the couch did they see what was on the other side.

She was young, blond, very pregnant. She lay on her left side, directly in front of the couch, her legs tucked up toward her stomach in a fetal position. She wore a flowered bra and matching bikini panties, but the pattern was almost indistinguishable because of the blood, which looked as if it had been smeared over her entire body. A white nylon rope was looped around her neck twice, one end extending over a rafter in the ceiling, the other leading across the floor to still another body, that of a man, which was about four feet away.

The rope was also looped twice around the man’s neck, the loose end going under his body, then extending several feet beyond. A bloody towel covered his face, hiding his features. He was short, about five feet six, and was lying on his right side, his hands bunched up near his head as if still warding off blows. His clothing—blue shirt, white pants with black vertical stripes, wide modish belt, black boots—was blood-drenched.

None of the officers thought about checking either body for a pulse. As with the body in the car and the pair on the lawn, it was so obviously unnecessary.

Although DeRosa, Whisenhunt, and Burbridge were patrolmen, not homicide detectives, each, at some time in the course of his duties, had seen death. But nothing like this. 10050 Cielo Drive was a human slaughterhouse.

Shaken, the officers fanned out to search the rest of the house. There was a loft above the living room. DeRosa climbed up the wooden ladder and nervously peeked over the top, but saw no one. A hallway connected the living room with the south end of the residence. There was blood in the hall in two places. To the left, just past one of the spots, was a bedroom, the door of which was open. The blankets and pillows were rumpled and clothing strewn about, as if someone—possibly the nightgown-clad woman on the lawn—had already undressed and gone to bed before the killer or killers appeared. Sitting atop the headboard of the bed, his legs hanging down, was a toy rabbit, ears cocked as if quizzically surveying the scene. There was no blood in this room, nor any evidence of a struggle.

Across the hall was the master bedroom. Its door was also open, as were the louvered doors at the far end of the room, beyond which could be seen the swimming pool.

This bed was larger and neater, the white spread turned back to reveal a gaily flowered top sheet and a white bottom sheet with a gold geometric pattern. In the center of the bed, rather than across the top, were two pillows, dividing the side that had been slept on from the side that hadn’t. Across the room, facing the bed, was a TV set, on each side of which was a handsome armoire. On top of one was a white bassinet.

Cautiously, adjoining doors were opened: dressing room, closet, bath, closet. Again no signs of a struggle. The telephone on the nightstand next to the bed was on the hook. Nothing overturned or upset.

However, there was blood on the inside left side of the louvered French door, suggesting that someone, again possibly the woman on the lawn, had run out this way, attempting to escape.

Stepping outside, the officers were momentarily blinded by the glare from the pool. Asin had mentioned a guest house behind the main residence. They spotted it now, or rather the corner of it, some sixty feet to the southeast, through the shrubbery.

Approaching it quietly, they heard the first sounds they had heard since coming onto the premises: the barking of a dog, and a male voice saying, “Shhh, be quiet.”

Whisenhunt went to the right, around the back of the house. DeRosa turned left, proceeding around the front, Burbridge following as backup. Stepping onto the screened-in porch, DeRosa could see, in the living room, on a couch facing the front door, a youth of about eighteen. He was wearing pants but no shirt, and though he did not appear to be armed, this did not mean, DeRosa would later explain, that he didn’t have a weapon nearby.

Yelling “Freeze!,” DeRosa kicked in the front door.

Startled, the boy looked up to see one, then, moments later, three guns pointing directly at him. Christopher, Altobelli’s large Weimaraner, charged Whisenhunt, chomping the end of his shotgun. Whisenhunt slammed the porch door on his head, then held him trapped there until the youth called him off.

As to what then happened, there are contrary versions.

The youth, who identified himself as William Garretson, the caretaker, would later state that the officers knocked him down, handcuffed him, yanked him to his feet, dragged him outside onto the lawn, then knocked him down again.

DeRosa would later be asked, re Garretson:

Q. “Did he fall or stumble to the floor at any time?”

A. “He may have; I don’t recall whether he did or not.”

Q. “Did you direct him to lay on the ground outside?”

A. “I directed him, yes, to lay on the ground, yes.”

Q. “Did you help him to the ground?”

A. “No, he went down on his own.”

Garretson kept asking, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” One of the officers replied, “We’ll show you!” and, pulling him to his feet, DeRosa and Burbridge escorted him back along the path toward the main house.

Whisenhunt remained behind, looking for weapons and bloodstained clothing. Though he found neither, he did notice many small details of the scene. One at the time seemed so insignificant that he forgot it until later questioning brought it back to mind. There was a stereo next to the couch. It had been off when they entered the room. Looking at the controls, Whisenhunt noticed that the volume setting was between 4 and 5.

Garretson, meantime, had been led past the two bodies on the lawn. It was indicative of the condition of the first, the young woman, that he mistakenly identified her as Mrs. Chapman, the Negro maid. As for the man, he identified him as “the young Polanski.” If, as Chapman and Asin had said, Polanski was in Europe, this made no sense. What the officers couldn’t know was that Garretson believed Voytek Frykowski to be Roman Polanski’s younger brother. Garretson failed completely when it came to identifying the young man in the Rambler.[2]

At some point, no one recalls exactly when, Garretson was informed of his rights and told that he was under arrest for murder. Asked about his activities the previous night, he said that although he had remained up all night, writing letters and listening to records, he had neither heard nor seen anything. His highly unlikely alibi, his “vague, unrealistic” replies, and his confused identification of the bodies led the arresting officers to conclude that the suspect was lying.

Five murders—four of them probably occurring less than a hundred feet away—and he had heard nothing?

Escorting Garretson down the driveway, DeRosa located the gate-control mechanism on the pole inside the gate. He noticed that there was blood on the button.

The logical inference was that someone, quite possibly the killer, had pressed the button to get out, in so doing very likely leaving a fingerprint.

Officer DeRosa, who was charged with securing and protecting the scene until investigating officers arrived, now pressed the button himself, successfully opening the gate but also creating a superimposure that obliterated any print that may have been there.

Later DeRosa would be questioned regarding this:

Q. “Was there some reason why you placed your finger on the bloody button that operated the gate?”

A. “So that I could go through the gate.”

Q. “And that was intentionally done?”

A. “I had to get out of there.”

It was 9:40. DeRosa called in, reporting five deaths and a suspect in custody. While Burbridge remained behind at the residence, awaiting the arrival of the investigating officers, DeRosa and Whisenhunt drove Garretson to the West Los Angeles police station for questioning. Another officer took Mrs. Chapman there also, but she was so hysterical she had to be driven to the UCLA Medical Center and given sedation.

In response to DeRosa’s call, four West Los Angeles detectives were dispatched to the scene. Lieutenant R. C. Madlock, Lieutenant J. J. Gregoire, Sergeant F. Gravante, and Sergeant T. L. Rogers would all arrive within the next hour. By the time the last pulled up, the first reporters were already outside the gate.

Monitoring the police radio bands, they had picked up the report of five deaths. It was hot and dry in Los Angeles, and fire was a constant concern, especially in the hills, where within minutes lives and property could vanish in an inferno. Someone apparently presumed the five people had been killed in a fire. Jay Sebring’s name must have been mentioned in one of the police calls, because a reporter phoned his residence and asked his butler, Amos Russell, if he knew anything about “the deaths by fire.” Russell called John Madden, president of Sebring International, and told him about the call. Madden was concerned: neither he nor Sebring’s secretary had heard from the hair stylist since late the previous afternoon. Madden placed a call to Sharon Tate’s mother in San Francisco. Sharon’s father, a colonel in Army Intelligence, was stationed at nearby Fort Baker and Mrs. Tate was visiting him. No, she hadn’t heard from Sharon. Or Jay, who was due in San Francisco sometime that same day.

Prior to her marriage to Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate had lived with Jay Sebring. Though thrown over for the Polish film director, Sebring had remained friends with Sharon’s parents, as well as Sharon and Roman, and whenever he was in San Francisco he usually called Colonel Tate.

When Madden hung up, Mrs. Tate called Sharon’s number. The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer.

It was quiet inside the house. Though anyone who called got a ringing signal, the phones were still out. Officer Joe Granado, a forensic chemist with SID, the Scientific Investigation Division of LAPD, was already at work, having arrived about 10 A.M. It was Granado’s job to take samples from wherever there appeared to be blood. Usually, on a murder case, Granado would be done in an hour or two. Not today. Not at 10050 Cielo Drive.

Mrs. Tate called Sandy Tennant, a close friend of Sharon’s and the wife of William Tennant, Roman Polanski’s business manager. No, neither she nor Bill had heard from Sharon since late the previous afternoon. At that time Sharon had said that she, Gibby (Abigail Folger), and Voytek (Frykowski) were staying in that night. Jay had said he’d be dropping over later, and she invited Sandy to join them. No party was planned, just a quiet evening at home. Sandy, just over the chicken pox, had declined. Like Mrs. Tate, she had tried to call Sharon that morning but had received no answer.

Sandy assured Mrs. Tate that there was probably no connection between the report of the fire and 10050 Cielo Drive. However, just as soon as Mrs. Tate hung up, Sandy put in a call to her husband’s tennis club and had him paged. It was important, she said.

Sometime between 10 and 11 A.M., Raymond Kilgrow, a telephone company representative, climbed the pole outside the gate to 10050 Cielo Drive and found that four phone wires had been cut. The cuts were close to the attachment on the pole, indicating that the person responsible had probably climbed the pole too. Kilgrow repaired two of the wires, leaving the others for the detectives to examine.

Police cars were arriving every few minutes now. And as more officers visited the scene, that scene changed.

The horn-rimmed glasses, first observed by DeRosa, Whisenhunt, and Burbridge near the two trunks, had somehow moved six feet away, to the top of the desk.

Two pieces of gun grip, first seen near the entryway, were now under a chair in the living room. As stated in the official LAPD report: “They were apparently kicked under the chair by one of the original officers on the scene; however, no one is copping out.”[3]

A third piece of gun grip, smaller than the others, was later found on the front porch.

And one or more officers tracked blood from inside the residence onto the front porch and walk, adding several more bloody footprints to those already there. In an attempt to identify and eliminate the later additions, it would be necessary to interview all the personnel who had visited the scene, asking each if he had been wearing boots, shoes with smooth or rippled soles, and so on.

Granado was still taking blood samples. Later, in the police lab, he would give them the Ouchterlony test, to determine if the blood was animal or human. If human, other tests would be applied to determine the blood type—A, B, AB, or O—and the subtype. There are some thirty blood subtypes; however, if the blood is already dry when the sample is taken, it is only possible to determine whether it is one of three—M, N, or MN. It had been a warm night, and it was already turning into another hot day. By the time Granado got to work, most of the blood, except for the pools near the bodies inside, had already dried.

Within the next several days Granado would obtain from the Coroner’s Office a blood sample from each of the victims, and would attempt to match these with the samples he’d already collected. In an ordinary murder case the presence of two blood types at the crime scene might indicate that the killer, as well as the victim, had been wounded, information which could be an important clue to the killer’s identity.

But this was no ordinary murder. Instead of one body, there were five.

There was so much blood, in fact, that Granado overlooked some spots. On the right side of the front porch, as approached from the walk, there were several large pools of blood. Granado took a sample from only one spot, presuming, he later said, all were the same. Just to the right of the porch, the shrubbery appeared broken, as if someone had fallen into the bushes. Blood splatters there seemed to bear this out. Granado missed these. Nor did he take samples from the pools of blood in the immediate vicinity of the two bodies in the living room, or from the stains near the two bodies on the lawn, presuming, he’d later testify, that they belonged to the nearest victims, and he’d be getting samples from the coroner anyway.

Granado took a total of forty-five blood samples. However, for some reason never explained, he didn’t run subtypes on twenty-one of them. If this is not done a week or two after collection, the components of the blood break down.

Later, when an attempt was made to re-create the murders, these omissions would cause many problems.

Just before noon William Tennant arrived, still dressed in tennis clothes, and was escorted through the gate by the police. It was like being led through a nightmare, as he was taken first to one body, then another. He didn’t recognize the young man in the automobile. But he identified the man on the lawn as Voytek Frykowski, the woman as Abigail Folger, and the two bodies in the living room as Sharon Tate Polanski and, tentatively, Jay Sebring. When the police lifted the bloody towel, the man’s face was so badly contused Tennant couldn’t be sure. Then he went outside and was sick.

When the police photographer finished his work, another officer got sheets from the linen closet and covered the bodies.

Beyond the gate the reporters and photographers now numbered in the dozens, with more arriving every few minutes. Police and press cars so hopelessly jammed Cielo Drive that several officers were detailed to try and untangle them. As Tennant pushed through the crowd, clutching his stomach and sobbing, the reporters hurled questions at him: “Is Sharon dead?” “Were they murdered?” “Has anyone informed Roman Polanski?” He ignored them, but they read the answers on his face.

Not everyone who visited the scene was as reluctant to talk. “It’s like a battlefield up there,” police sergeant Stanley Klorman told reporters, his features grim with the shock of what he had seen. Another officer, unidentified, said, “It looked ritualistic,” this single remark providing the basis for an incredible amount of bizarre speculation.

Like the shock waves from an earthquake, news of the murders spread.

“FIVE SLAIN IN BEL AIR,” read the headline on the first AP wire story. Though sent out before the identity of the victims had become known, it correctly reported the location of the bodies; that the telephone lines had been cut; and the arrest of an unnamed suspect. There were errors: one, to be much repeated, that “one victim had a hood over his head…”

LAPD notified the Tates, John Madden, who in turn notified Sebring’s parents, and Peter Folger, Abigail’s father. Abigail’s socially prominent parents were divorced. Her father, chairman of the board of the A. J. Folger Coffee Company, lived in Woodside, her mother, Inez Mijia Folger, in San Francisco. However, Mrs. Folger was not at home but in Connecticut, visiting friends following a Mediterranean cruise, and Mr. Folger reached her there. She couldn’t believe it; she had talked to Abigail at about ten the previous night. Both mother and daughter had planned to fly to San Francisco today, for a reunion, Abigail having made a reservation on the 10 A.M. United flight.

On reaching home, William Tennant made what was, for him, the most difficult call. He was not only Polanski’s business manager but a close friend. Tennant checked his watch, automatically adding nine hours to get London time. Though it would be late in the evening, he guessed that Polanski might still be working, trying to tie up his various film projects before returning home the following Tuesday, and he tried the number of his town house. He guessed right. Polanski and several associates were going over a scene in the script of The Day of the Dolphin when the telephone rang.

Polanski would remember the conversation as follows:

“Roman, there’s been a disaster in a house.”

“Which house?”

“Your house.” Then, in a rush, “Sharon is dead, and Voytek and Gibby and Jay.”

“No, no, no, no!” Surely there was a mistake. Both men now crying, Tennant reiterated that it was true; he had gone to the house himself.

“How?” Polanski asked. He was thinking, he later said, not of fire but a landslide, a not uncommon thing in the Los Angeles hills, especially after heavy rains; sometimes whole houses were buried, which meant that perhaps they could still be alive. Only then did Tennant tell him that they had been murdered.

Voytek Frykowski, LAPD learned, had a son in Poland but no relatives in the United States. The youth in the Rambler remained unidentified, but was no longer nameless; he had been designated John Doe 85.

The news spread quickly—and with it the rumors. Rudi Altobelli, owner of the Cielo property and business manager for a number of show-business personalities, was in Rome. One of his clients, a young actress, called and told him that Sharon and four others had been murdered in his house and that Garretson, the caretaker he had hired, had confessed.

Garretson hadn’t, but Altobelli would not learn this until after he returned to the United States.

The specialists had begun arriving about noon.

Officers Jerrome A. Boen and D. L. Girt, Latent Prints Section, Scientific Investigation Division, LAPD, dusted the main residence and the guest house for prints.

After dusting a print with powder (“developing the print”), a clear adhesive tape was placed over it; the tape, with the print showing, would then be “lifted” and placed on a card with a contrasting background. Location, date, time, officer’s initials were noted on the back.

One such “lift” card, prepared by Boen, read: “8-9-69/10050 Cielo/1400/JAB/Inside door frame of left French door/from master bedroom to pool area/handle side.”

Another lift, taken about the same time, was from the “Outside front door/handle side/above handle.”

It took six hours to cover both residences. Later that afternoon the pair were joined by officer D. E. Dorman and Wendell Clements, the latter a civilian fingerprint expert, who concentrated on the four vehicles.

Contrary to popular opinion, a readable print is more rare than common. Many surfaces, such as clothing and fabrics, do not lend themselves to impressions. Even when the surface is such that it will take a print, one usually touches it with only a portion of the finger, leaving a fragmentary ridge, which is useless for comparison. If the finger is moved, the result is an unreadable smudge. And, as officer DeRosa demonstrated with the gate button, one print placed atop another creates a superimposure, also useless for identification purposes. Thus, at any crime scene, the number of clear, readable prints, with enough points for comparison, is usually surprisingly small.

Not counting those prints later eliminated as belonging to LAPD personnel at the scene, a total of fifty lifts were taken from the residence, guest house, and vehicles at 10050 Cielo Drive. Of these, seven were eliminated as belonging to William Garretson (all were from the guest house; none of Garretson’s prints were found in the main house or on the vehicles); an additional fifteen were eliminated as belonging to the victims; and three were not clear enough for comparison. This left a total of twenty-five unmatched latent prints, any of which might—or might not—belong to the killer or killers.

It was 1:30 P.M. before the first homicide detectives arrived. On verifying that the deaths were not accidental or self-inflicted, Lieutenant Madlock had requested that the investigation be reassigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division. Lieutenant Robert J. Helder, supervisor of investigations, was placed in charge. He in turn assigned Sergeants Michael J. McGann and Jess Buckles to the case. (McGann’s regular partner, Sergeant Robert Calkins, was on vacation and would replace Buckles when he returned.) Three additional officers, Sergeants E. Henderson, Dudley Varney, and Danny Galindo, were to assist them.

On being notified of the homicides, Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi asked the police not to touch the bodies until a representative of his office had examined them. Deputy Coroner John Finken arrived about 1:45, later to be joined by Noguchi himself. Finken made the official determination of death; took liver and environmental temperatures (by 2 P.M. it was 94 degrees on the lawn, 83 degrees inside the house); and severed the rope connecting Tate and Sebring, portions of which were given to the detectives so that they could try to determine where it had been manufactured and sold. It was white, three-strand nylon, its total length 43 feet 8 inches. Granado took blood samples from the rope, but didn’t take subtypes, again presuming. Finken also removed the personal property from the bodies of the victims. Sharon Tate Polanski: yellow metal wedding band, earrings. Jay Sebring: Cartier wristwatch, later determined to be worth in excess of $1,500. John Doe 85: Lucerne wristwatch, wallet with various papers but no ID. Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski: no property on persons. After plastic bags had been placed over the hands of the victims, to preserve any hair or skin that might have become lodged under the nails during a struggle, Finken assisted in covering and placing the bodies on stretcher carts, to be wheeled to ambulances and taken to the Coroner’s Office, Hall of Justice, downtown Los Angeles.

Besieged by reporters at the gate, Dr. Noguchi announced he would have no comment until making public the autopsy results at noon the following day.

Both Noguchi and Finken, however, privately had already given the detectives their initial findings.

There was no evidence of sexual molestation or mutilation.

Three of the victims—the John Doe, Sebring, and Frykowski—had been shot. Aside from a defensive slash wound on his left hand, which also severed the band of his wristwatch, John Doe had not been stabbed. But the other four had—many, many times. In addition, Sebring had been hit in the face at least once, and Frykowski had been struck over the head repeatedly with a blunt object.

Though exact findings would have to await the autopsies, the coroners concluded from the size of the bullet holes that the gun used had probably been .22 caliber. The police had already suspected this. In searching the Rambler, Sergeant Varney had found four bullet fragments between the upholstery and the exterior metal of the door on the passenger side. Also found, on the cushion of the rear seat, was part of a slug. Though all were too small for comparison purposes, they appeared to be .22 caliber.

As for the stab wounds, someone suggested that the wound pattern was not dissimilar to that made by a bayonet. In their official report the detectives carried this a step further, concluding, “the knife that inflicted the stab wounds was probably a bayonet.” This not only eliminated a number of other possibilities, it also presumed that only one knife had been used.

The depth of the wounds (many in excess of 5 inches), their width (between 1 and 1½ inches), and their thickness (¹/₈ to ¼ inch) ruled out either a kitchen or a regular pocketknife.

Coincidentally, the only two knives found in the house were a kitchen knife and a pocketknife.

A steak knife had been found in the kitchen sink. Granado got a positive benzidine reaction, indicating blood, but a negative Ouchterlony, indicating it was animal, not human. Boen dusted it for prints, but got only fragmentary ridges. Mrs. Chapman later identified the knife as one of a set of steak knives that belonged to the Polanskis, and she located all the others in a drawer. But even before this, the police had eliminated it because of its dimensions, in particular its thinness. The stabbings were so savage that such a blade would have broken.

Granado found the second knife in the living room, less than three feet from Sharon Tate’s body. It was wedged behind the cushion in one of the chairs, with the blade sticking up. A Buck brand clasp-type pocketknife, its blade was ¾ inch in diameter, 3¹³/₁₆ inches in length, making it too small to have caused most of the wounds. Noticing a spot on the side of the blade, Granado tested it for blood: negative. Girt dusted it for prints: an unreadable smudge.

Mrs. Chapman could not recall ever having seen this particular knife. This, plus the odd place where it was found, indicated that it might have been left by the killer(s).

In literature a murder scene is often likened to a picture puzzle. If one is patient and keeps trying, eventually all the pieces will fit into place.

Veteran policemen know otherwise. A much better analogy would be two picture puzzles, or three, or more, no one of which is in itself complete. Even after a solution emerges—if one does—there will be leftover pieces, evidence that just doesn’t fit. And some pieces will always be missing.

There was the American flag, its presence adding still another bizarre touch to a scene already horribly macabre. The possibilities it suggested ranged from one end of the political spectrum to the other—until Winifred Chapman told the police that it had been in the residence several weeks.

Few pieces of evidence were so easily eliminated. There were the bloody letters on the front door. In recent years the word “pig” had taken on a new meaning, one all too familiar to the police. But what did it mean printed here?

There was the rope. Mrs. Chapman flatly stated that she had never seen such a rope anywhere on the premises. Had the killer(s) brought it? If so, why?

What significance was there in the fact that the two victims bound together by the rope, Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, were former lovers? Or was “former” the right word? What was Sebring doing there, with Polanski away? It was a question that many of the newspapers would also ask.

The horn-rimmed glasses—negative for both prints and blood—did they belong to a victim, a killer, or someone totally unconnected with the crime? Or—with each question the possibilities proliferated—had they been left behind as a false clue?

The two trunks in the entryway. The maid said they hadn’t been there when she left at 4:30 the previous afternoon. Who delivered them, and when, and had this person seen anything?

Why would the killer(s) go to the trouble of slitting and removing a screen when other windows, those in the newly painted room that was to be the nursery for the Polanskis’ unborn child, were open and screenless?

John Doe 85, the youth in the Rambler. Chapman, Garretson, and Tennant had failed to identify him. Who was he and what was he doing at 10050 Cielo Drive? Had he witnessed the other murders, or had he been killed before they took place? If before, wouldn’t the others have heard the shots? On the seat next to him was a Sony AM–FM Digimatic clock radio. The time at which it had stopped was 12:15 A.M. Coincidence or significant?

As for the time of the murders, the reports of gunshots and other sounds ranged from shortly after midnight to 4:10 A.M.

Not all of the evidence was as inconclusive. Some of the pieces fitted. No shell casings were found anywhere on the property, indicating that the gun was probably a revolver, which does not eject its spent shells, as contrasted to an automatic, which does.

Placed together, the three pieces of black wood formed the right-hand side of a gun grip. The police therefore knew the gun they were looking for was probably a .22 caliber revolver that was minus a right grip. From the pieces it might be possible to determine both make and model. Though there was human blood on all three pieces, only one had enough for analysis. It tested OMN. Of the five victims, only Sebring had OMN, indicating that the butt of the revolver could have been the blunt object used to strike him in the face.

The bloody letters on the front door tested O-M. Again, only one of the victims had this type and subtype. The word PIG had been printed in Sharon Tate’s blood.

There were four vehicles in the driveway, but one which should have been there wasn’t—Sharon Tate’s red Ferrari. It was possible that the killer(s) had used the sports car to escape, and a “want” was broadcast for it.

Long after the bodies had been removed, the detectives remained on the scene, looking for meaningful patterns.

They found several which appeared significant.

There were no indications of ransacking or robbery. McGann found Sebring’s wallet in his jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair in the living room. It contained $80. John Doe had $9 in his wallet, Frykowski $2.44 in his wallet and pants pocket, Folger $9.64 in her purse. On the nightstand next to Sharon Tate’s bed, in plain view, were a ten, a five, and three ones. Obviously expensive items—a videotape machine, TV sets, stereo, Sebring’s wristwatch, his Porsche—had not been taken. Several days later the police would bring Winifred Chapman back to 10050 Cielo to see if she could determine if anything was missing. The only item she couldn’t locate was a camera tripod, which had been kept in the hall closet. These five incredibly savage murders were obviously not committed for a camera tripod. In all probability it had been lent to someone or lost.

While this didn’t completely eliminate the possibility that the murders had occurred during a residential burglary—the victims surprising the burglar(s) while at work—it certainly put it way down the list.

Other discoveries provided a much more likely direction.

A gram of cocaine was found in Sebring’s Porsche, plus 6.3 grams of marijuana and a two-inch “roach,” slang for a partially smoked marijuana cigarette.

There were 6.9 grams of marijuana in a plastic bag in a cabinet in the living room of the main residence. In the nightstand in the bedroom used by Frykowski and Folger were 30 grams of hashish, plus ten capsules which, later analyzed, proved to be a relatively new drug known as MDA. There was also marijuana residue in the ashtray on the stand next to Sharon Tate’s bed, a marijuana cigarette on the desk near the front door,[4] and two more in the guest house.

Had a drug party been in progress, one of the participants “freaking out” and slaying everyone there? The police put this at the top of their list of possible reasons for the murders, though well aware this theory had several weaknesses, chief among them the presumption that there was a single killer, wielding a gun in one hand, a bayonet in the other, at the same time carrying 43 feet of rope, all of which, conveniently, he just happened to bring along. Also, there were the wires. If they had been cut before the murders, this indicated premeditation, not a spontaneous flare-up. If cut after, why?

Or could the murders have been the result of a drug “burn,” the killer(s) arriving to make a delivery or buy, an argument over money or bad drugs erupting into violence? This was the second, and in many ways the most likely, of the five theories the detectives would list in their first investigative report.

The third theory was a variation of the second, the killer(s) deciding to keep both the money and the drugs.

The fourth was the residential burglary theory.

The fifth, that these were “deaths by hire,” the killer(s) being sent to the house to eliminate one or more of the victims, then, in order to escape identification, finding it necessary to kill all. But would a hired killer choose as one of his weapons something as large, conspicuous, and unwieldy as a bayonet? And would he keep stabbing and stabbing and stabbing in a mad frenzy, as so obviously had been done in this case?

The drug theories seemed to make the most sense. In the investigation that followed, as the police interviewed acquaintances of the victims, and the victims’ habits and life styles emerged into clearer focus, the possibility that drugs were in some way linked to the motive became in some minds such a certainty that when given a clue which could have solved the case, they refused even to consider it.

The police were not the only ones to think of drugs.

On hearing of the deaths, actor Steve McQueen, long-time friend of Jay Sebring, suggested that the hair stylist’s home should be rid of narcotics to protect his family and business. Though McQueen did not himself participate in the “housecleaning,” by the time LAPD got around to searching Sebring’s residence, anything embarrassing had been removed.

Others developed instant paranoia. No one was sure who the police would question, or when. An unidentified film figure told a Life reporter: “Toilets are flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is stoned.”

The headlines dominated the front pages of the afternoon papers, became the big news on radio and TV. The bizarre nature of the crime, the number of victims, and their prominence—a beautiful movie star, the heiress to a coffee fortune, her jet-set playboy paramour, an internationally known hair stylist—would combine to make this probably the most publicized murder case in history, excepting only the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Even the staid New York Times, which rarely reports crime on its front page, did so the next day, and many days thereafter.

The accounts that day and the next were notable for the unusual amount of detail they contained. So much information had been given out, in fact, that the detectives would have difficulty finding “polygraph keys” for questioning suspects.

In any homicide, it is standard practice to withhold certain information which presumably only the police and the killer(s) know. If a suspect confesses, or agrees to a polygraph examination, these keys can then be used to determine if he is telling the truth.

Owing to the many leaks, the detectives assigned to the “Tate case,” as the press was already calling the murders, could only come up with five: (1) That the knife used was probably a bayonet. (2) That the gun was probably a .22 caliber revolver. (3) The exact dimensions of the rope, as well as the way it was looped and tied. And (4) and (5), that a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a Buck knife had been found.

The amount of information unofficially released so bothered LAPD brass that a tight lid was clamped on further disclosures. This didn’t please the reporters; also, lacking hard news, many turned to conjecture and speculation. In the days that followed a monumental amount of false information was published. It was widely reported, for example, that Sharon Tate’s unborn child had been ripped from her womb; that one or both of her breasts had been slashed off; that several of the victims had been sexually mutilated. The towel over Sebring’s face became a white hood (KKK?) or a black hood (satanists?), depending on which paper or magazine you read.

When it came to the man charged with the murders, however, there was a paucity of information. It was presumed, initially, that the police were maintaining silence to protect Garretson’s rights. It was also presumed that LAPD had to have a strong case against him or they wouldn’t have arrested him.

A Pasadena paper, picking up bits and pieces of information, sought to fill the gap. It stated that when the officers found Garretson, he asked, “When are the detectives going to see me?” The implication was obvious: Garretson knew what had happened. Garretson did ask this, but it was as he was being taken through the gate, long after his arrest, and the question was in response to an earlier comment by DeRosa. Quoting unidentified policemen, the paper also noted: “They said the slender youth had a rip in one knee of his pants and his living quarters in the guest cottage showed signs of a struggle.” Damning evidence, unless one were aware that all this happened during, not before, Garretson’s arrest.

During the first few days a total of forty-three officers would visit the crime scene, looking for weapons and other evidence. In searching the loft above the living room, Sergeant Mike McGann found a film can containing a roll of video-tape. Sergeant Ed Henderson took it to the Police Academy, which had screening facilities. The film showed Sharon and Roman Polanski making love. With a certain delicacy, the tape was not booked into evidence but was returned to the loft where it had been found.[5]

In addition to searching the premises, detectives interviewed neighbors, asking if they had seen any strange people in the area.

Ray Asin recalled that two or three months before there had been a large party at 10050 Cielo Drive, the guests arriving in “hippie garb.” He got the impression, however, that they weren’t actually hippies, as most arrived in Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs.

Emmett Steele, who had been awakened by the barking of his hunting dogs the previous night, remembered that in recent weeks someone had been racing a dune buggy up and down the hills late at night, but he never got a close look at the driver and passengers.

Most of those interviewed, however, claimed they had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary.

The detectives were left with far more questions than answers. However, they were hopeful one person could put the puzzle together for them: William Garretson.

The detectives downtown were less optimistic. Following his arrest, the nineteen-year-old had been taken to West Los Angeles jail and interrogated. The officers found his answers “stuporous and non-responsive,” and were of the opinion that he was under the residual effect of some drug. It was also possible, as Garretson himself claimed, that he had slept little the previous night, just a few hours in the morning, and that he was exhausted, and very scared.

Shortly after this, Garretson retained the services of attorney Barry Tarlow. A second interview, with Tarlow present, took place at Parker Center, headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. As far as the police were concerned, it too was unproductive. Garretson claimed that although he lived on the property, he had little contact with the people in the main house. He said that he’d only had one visitor the previous night, a boy named Steve Parent, who showed up about 11:45 and left about a half hour later. Questioned about Parent, Garretson said he didn’t know him well. He’d hitched a ride up the canyon with him one night a couple of weeks ago and, on getting out of the car at the gate, had told Steve if he was ever in the neighborhood to drop in. Garretson, who lived by himself in the back house, except for the dogs, said he’d extended similar invitations to others. When Steve showed up, he was surprised: no one else ever had. But Steve didn’t stay long, leaving after learning that Garretson wasn’t interested in buying a clock radio Steve had for sale.

The police did not at this time connect Garretson’s visitor with the youth in the Rambler, possibly because Garretson had earlier failed to identify him.

After conferring with Tarlow, Garretson agreed to take a polygraph examination, and one was scheduled for the following afternoon.

Twelve hours had passed since the discovery of the bodies. John Doe 85 remained unidentified.

Police lieutenant Robert Madlock, who had been in charge of the investigation during the several hours before it was assigned to homicide, would later state: “At the time we first found the [victim’s] car at the scene, we were going fourteen different directions at once. So many things had to be done, I guess we just didn’t have time to follow up on the car registration.”

All day Wilfred and Juanita Parent had waited, and worried. Their eighteen-year-old son Steven hadn’t come home the previous night. “He didn’t call, didn’t leave word. He’d never done anything like that before,” Juanita Parent said.

About 8 P.M., aware that his wife was too distraught to cook dinner, Wilfred Parent took her and their three other children to a restaurant. Maybe when we get back, he told his wife, Steve will be there.

From outside the gate of 10050 Cielo it was possible to make out the license number on the white Rambler: ZLR 694. A reporter wrote it down, then ran his own check through the Department of Motor Vehicles, learning that the registered owner was “Wilfred E. or Juanita D. Parent, 11214 Bryant Drive, El Monte, California.”

By the time he arrived in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb some twenty-five miles from Cielo Drive, he found no one at home. Questioning the neighbors, he learned that the family did have a boy in his late teens; he also learned the name of the family priest, Father Robert Byrne, of the Church of the Nativity, and called on him. Byrne knew the youth and his family well. Though the priest was sure Steve didn’t know any movie stars and that all this was some mistake, he agreed to accompany the reporter to the county morgue. On the way he talked about Steve. He was a stereo “bug,” Father Byrne said; if you ever wanted to know anything about phonographs or radios, Steve had the answers. Father Byrne held great hopes for his future.

In the interim, LAPD discovered the identity of the youth through a print and license check. Shortly after the Parents returned home, an El Monte policeman appeared at the door and handed Wilfred Parent a card with a number on it and told him to call it. He left without saying anything else.

Parent dialed the number.

“County Coroner’s Office,” a man answered.

Confused, Parent identified himself and explained about the policeman and the card.

The call was transferred to a deputy coroner, who told him, “Your son has apparently been involved in a shooting.”

“Is he dead?” Parent asked, stunned. His wife, hearing the question, became hysterical.

“We have a body down here,” the deputy coroner replied, “and we believe it’s your son.” He then went on to describe physical characteristics. They matched.

Parent hung up the phone and began sobbing. Later, understandably bitter, he’d remark, “All I can say is that it was a hell of a way to tell somebody that their boy was dead.”

About this same time, Father Byrne viewed the body and made the identification. John Doe 85 became Steven Earl Parent, an eighteen-year-old hi-fi enthusiast from El Monte.

It was 5 A.M. before the Parents went to bed. “The wife and I finally just put the kids in bed with us and the five of us just held on to each other and cried until we went to sleep.”

About nine that same Saturday night, August 9, 1969, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and Suzanne Struthers, Rosemary’s twenty-one-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, left Lake Isabella for the long drive back to Los Angeles. The lake, a popular resort area, was some 150 miles from L.A.

Suzanne’s brother, Frank Struthers, Jr., fifteen, had been vacationing at the lake with a friend, Jim Saffie, whose family had a cabin there. Rosemary and Leno had driven up the previous Tuesday, to leave their speedboat for the boys to use, then returned Saturday morning to pick up Frank and the boat. However, the boys were having such a good time the LaBiancas agreed to let Frank stay over another day, and they were returning now, without him, driving their 1968 green Thunderbird, towing the speedboat on a trailer behind.

Leno, the president of a chain of Los Angeles supermarkets, was forty-four, Italian, and, at 220 pounds, somewhat overweight. Rosemary, a trim, attractive brunette of thirty-eight, was a former carhop who, after a series of waitress jobs and a bad marriage, had opened her own dress shop, the Boutique Carriage, on North Figueroa in Los Angeles, and made a big success of it. She and Leno had been married since 1959.

Because of the boat, they couldn’t drive at the speed Leno preferred, and fell behind most of the Saturday night freeway traffic that was speeding toward Los Angeles and environs. Like many others that night, they had the radio on and heard the news of the Tate murders. According to Suzanne, it seemed particularly to disturb Rosemary, who, a few weeks earlier, had told a close friend, “Someone is coming in our house while we’re away. Things have been gone through and the dogs are outside the house when they should be inside.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969

About 1 A.M. the LaBiancas dropped Suzanne off at her apartment on Greenwood Place, in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. Leno and Rosemary lived in the same neighborhood, at 3301 Waverly Drive, not far from Griffith Park.

The LaBiancas did not immediately return home but first drove to the corner of Hillhurst and Franklin.

John Fokianos, who had a newsstand on that corner, recognized the green Thunderbird-plus-boat as it pulled into the Standard station across the street, and while it was making a U-turn that would bring it alongside his stand, he reached for a copy of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Sunday edition, and a racing form. Leno was a regular customer.

To Fokianos, the LaBiancas seemed tired from their long trip. Business was slow, and they chatted for a few minutes, “about Tate, the event of the day. That was the big news.” Fokianos would recall that Mrs. LaBianca seemed very shaken by the deaths. He had some extra news fillers for the Sunday Los Angeles Times, which featured the murders, and he gave them one without charge.

He watched as they drove away. He did not notice the exact time, except that it was sometime between 1 and 2 A.M., probably closer to the latter, as not long after they left the bars closed and there was a flurry of business.

As far as is known, John Fokianos was the last person—excluding their killer(s)—to see Rosemary and Leno LaBianca alive.

At noon on Sunday the hall outside the autopsy room on the first floor of the Hall of Justice was packed with reporters and TV cameramen, all awaiting the coroner’s announcement.

They would have a long wait. Although the autopsies had begun at 9:50 A.M., and a number of deputy coroners had been pressed into service, it would be 3 P.M. before the last autopsy was completed.

Dr. R. C. Henry conducted the Folger and Sebring autopsies, Dr. Gaston Herrera those of Frykowski and Parent. Dr. Noguchi supervised and directed all four; in addition, he personally conducted the other autopsy, which began at 11:20 A.M.

Autopsy reports are abrupt documents. Cold, factual, they can indicate how the victims died, and give clues as to their last hours, but nowhere in them do their subjects emerge, even briefly, as people. Each report is, in its own way, the sum total of a life, yet there are very few glimpses as to how that life was lived. No likes, dislikes, loves, hates, fears, aspirations, or other human emotions; just a final, clinical summing up: “The body is normally developed…The pancreas is grossly unremarkable…The heart weighs 340 grams and is symmetrical…”

Yet the victims had lived, each had a past.

Much of Sharon Tate’s story sounded like a studio press release. It seemed she had always wanted to be an actress. At age six months she had been Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas, at sixteen years Miss Richland, Washington, then Miss Autorama. When her father, a career army officer, was assigned to San Pedro, she would hitchhike into nearby Los Angeles, haunting the studios.

In addition to her ambition, she had at least one other thing in her favor: she was a very beautiful girl. She acquired an agent who succeeded in getting her a few commercials, then, in 1963, an audition for the TV series “Petticoat Junction.” Producer Martin Ransohoff saw the pretty twenty-year-old on the set and, according to studio flackery, told her, “Sweetie, I’m going to make you a star.”

The star was a long time ascending. Singing, dancing, and acting lessons were interspersed with bit parts, usually wearing a black wig, in “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction,” and two Ransohoff films, The Americanization of Emily and The Sandpiper. While the latter film, co-starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was being filmed in Big Sur, Sharon fell in love with the magnificently scenic coastline. Whenever she wanted to escape the Hollywood hassle, she fled there. Scrubbed of makeup, she would check into rustic Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, often alone, sometimes with girl friends, and walk the trails, sun at the beach, and blend in with the regulars at Nepenthe. Many did not know, until after her death, that she was an actress.

According to close friends, though Sharon Tate looked the part of the starlet, she didn’t live up to at least one portion of that image. She was not promiscuous. Her relationships were few, and rarely casual, at least on her part. She seemed attracted to dominant men. While in Hollywood, she had a long affair with a French actor. Given to insane rages, he once beat her so badly she had to be taken to the UCLA Medical Center for treatment.[6] Shortly after this, in 1963, Jay Sebring spotted Sharon at a studio preview, prevailed upon a friend for an introduction, and, after a brief but much publicized courtship, they became lovers, a relationship which lasted until she met Roman Polanski.

It was 1965 before Ransohoff decided his protégé was ready for her first featured role, in Eye of the Devil, which starred Deborah Kerr and David Niven. Listed seventh in the credits, Sharon Tate played a country girl with bewitching powers. She had less than a dozen lines; her primary role was to look beautiful, which she did. This was to be true of almost all her movies.

In the film, Niven became the victim of a hooded cult which practiced ritual sacrifice.

Though set in France, the film was made in London, and it was here, in the summer of 1966, that she met Roman Polanski.

Polanski was at this time thirty-three, and already acclaimed as one of Europe’s leading directors. He had been born in Paris, his father a Russian Jew, his mother Polish of Russian stock. When Roman was three, the family moved to Cracow. They were still there in 1940 when the Germans arrived and sealed off the ghetto. With his father’s help, Roman managed to escape and lived with family friends until the war ended. Both his parents, however, were sent to concentration camps, his mother dying in Auschwitz.

Following the war, he spent five years at the Polish National Film Academy at Lodz. As his senior thesis, he wrote and directed Two Men and a Wardrobe, a much acclaimed surrealistic short. He made several other short films, among them Mammals, in which a Polish friend, Voytek Frykowski, played a thief. After an extended trip to Paris, Polanski returned to Poland to make Knife in the Water, his first feature-length effort. It won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and established Polanski, then only twenty-seven, as one of Europe’s most promising filmmakers.

In 1965, Polanski made his first film in English, Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve. Cul de Sac followed, which won the Best Film Award in the Berlin Film Festival, the Critics Award in Venice, a Diploma of Merit in Edinburgh, and the Giove Capitaliano Award in Rome. In the news stories following the Tate murders, reporters were quick to note that in Repulsion Miss Deneuve went mad and murdered two men, while in Cul de Sac the inhabitants of an isolated castle each meets a bizarre fate until only one man is left alive. They also noted Polanski’s “penchant for violence,” without adding that most often in Polanski’s films the violence was less explicit than implied.

Roman Polanski’s personal life was no less controversial than his films. After his marriage to Polish film star Barbara Lass ended in divorce in 1962, Polanski became known as the playboy director. A friend would later recall him leafing through his address book, saying, “Who shall I gratify tonight?” Another friend observed that Polanski’s immense talent was matched only by his ego. Non-friends, who were numerous, had stronger things to say. One, referring to the fact that Polanski was just over five feet tall, called him “the original five-foot Pole you wouldn’t want to touch anyone with.” Whether one was captivated by his gaminlike charm or repelled by his arrogance, he appeared to touch off strong emotions in nearly everyone whom he met.

It was not so with Sharon Tate, at least not at first. When Ransohoff introduced Roman and Sharon at a large party, neither was particularly impressed. The introduction was not accidental. On learning that Polanski was considering doing a film spoof of horror movies, Ransohoff had offered to produce it. He wanted Sharon for the female lead. Polanski gave her a screen test and decided she would be acceptable for the part. Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in the film, which eventually appeared as The Fearless Vampire Killers, but Ransohoff did the cutting, much to the displeasure of the Polish director, who disavowed the final print. Though the film was more camp than art, Polanski revealed another phase of his multi-faceted talent in his comic portrayal of the bumbling young assistant of a scholarly vampire hunter. Sharon, again, looked pretty and had less than a dozen lines. A victim of the vampire early in the picture, in the last scene she bites her lover, Polanski, creating still another monster.

Before the filming was over, and after what was for Polanski a very long courtship, Sharon and Roman became off-screen lovers too. When Sebring flew to London, Sharon told him the news. If he took it hard, he was careful not to show it, very quickly settling into the role of family friend. There were indications, asides made to a few associates, that Sebring hoped that Sharon would eventually tire of Roman, or vice versa, the presumption being that when this happened he intended to be around. Those who claimed that Sebring was still in love with Sharon were guessing—though Sebring knew hundreds of people, he apparently had few really close friends, and kept his inner feelings very much to himself—but it was a safe guess that although the nature of that love had changed, some deep attachment remained. After the breakup, Sebring was involved with many women, but, as revealed in the LAPD interview sheets, for the most part the relationships were more sexual than emotional, the majority “one night stands.”

Paramount asked Polanski to do the film version of Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby. The film, in which Mia Farrow played a young girl who had a child by Satan, was completed late in 1967. On January 20, 1968, to the surprise of many friends to whom Polanski had vowed never again to marry, he and Sharon were wed in a mod ceremony in London.

Rosemary’s Baby premiered that June. That same month the Polanskis rented actress Patty Duke’s home at 1600 Summit Ridge Drive in Los Angeles. It was while they were living there that Mrs. Chapman began working for them. In early 1969 they heard that 10050 Cielo Drive might be vacant. Though they never met in person, Sharon talked to Terry Melcher on the phone several times, making arrangements to take over his unexpired lease. The Polanskis signed a rental agreement on February 12, 1969, at $1,200 a month, and moved in three days later.

Though Rosemary’s Baby was a smash success, Sharon’s own career had never quite taken off. She had appeared semi-nude in the March 1967 issue of Playboy (Polanski himself took the photos on the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers), the accompanying article beginning, “This is the year that Sharon Tate happens…” But the prediction wasn’t fulfilled, not that year. Though a number of reviewers commented on her striking looks, neither this nor two other films in which she played—Don’t Make Waves, with Tony Curtis, and The Wrecking Crew, with Dean Martin—brought her much closer to stardom. Her biggest role came in the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, in which she played the actress Jennifer who, on learning that she has breast cancer, takes an overdose of sleeping pills. Not long before her death, Jennifer remarks, “I have no talent. All I have is a body.”

There were reviewers who felt that adequately summed up Sharon Tate’s performance. To be fairer, to date she hadn’t been given a single role which gave her a chance to bring out whatever acting ability she may have had.

She was not a star, not yet. Her career seemed to hesitate on the edge of a breakthrough, but it could easily have remained stationary, or gone the other way.

But for the first time in her life, Sharon’s ambition had slipped to second place. Her marriage and her pregnancy had become her whole life. According to those closest to her, she seemed oblivious to all else.

There were rumors of trouble in her marriage. Several of her female friends told LAPD that she had waited to tell Roman of her pregnancy until after it was too late to abort. If she was concerned that even after marriage Polanski remained the playboy, she hid it. Sharon herself often told a story then current in the movie colony, of how Roman was driving through Beverly Hills when, spotting a pretty girl walking ahead of him, he yelled, “Miss, you have a bea-u-ti-ful arse.” Only when the girl turned did he recognize his wife. Yet it was obvious that she hoped the baby would bring the marriage closer together.

Hollywood is a bitchy town. In interviewing acquaintances of the victims, LAPD would encounter an incredible amount of venom. Interestingly enough, in the dozens of interview sheets, no one who actually knew Sharon Tate said anything bad about her. Very sweet, somewhat naïve—these were the words most often used.

That Sunday a Los Angeles Times reporter who had known Sharon described her as “an astonishingly beautiful woman with a statuesque figure and a face of great delicacy.”

But then he didn’t see her as Coroner Noguchi did.

Cause of death: Multiple stab wounds of the chest and back, penetrating the heart, lungs, and liver, causing massive hemorrhage. Victim was stabbed sixteen times, five of which wounds were in and of themselves fatal.

Born Thomas John Kummer, in Detroit, Michigan, he had changed his name to Jay Sebring shortly after arriving in Hollywood, following a four-year stint as a Navy barber, borrowing the last name from the famous Florida sports-car race because he liked the image it projected.

In his personal life, as in his work, appearances were all-important. He drove an expensive sports car, frequented the “in” clubs, even had his Levi jackets custom-made. He employed a full-time butler, gave lavish parties, and lived in a “jinxed” mansion, 9860 Easton Drive, Benedict Canyon. Once the love nest of actress Jean Harlow and producer Paul Bern, it was here, in Harlow’s bedroom, that Bern had committed suicide, two months after their marriage. According to acquaintances, Sebring had bought the house because of its “far out” reputation.

It was widely reported that a motion-picture studio had flown Sebring to London just to cut George Peppard’s hair, at a cost of $25,000. While the report was probably as factual as another also current, that he had a black belt in karate (he had taken a few lessons from Bruce Lee), there was no question that he was the leading men’s hair stylist in the United States, and that more than any other single individual, he was responsible for the revolution in male hair care. In addition to Peppard, his customers included Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Peter Lawford, and numerous other motion-picture stars, many of whom had promised to invest in his new corporation, Sebring International. While keeping his original salon at 725 North Fairfax in Los Angeles, he planned to open a series of franchised shops and to market a line of men’s toiletries bearing his name. The first shop had been opened in San Francisco in May 1969, Abigail Folger and Colonel and Mrs. Paul Tate being among those at the grand opening.

On April 9, 1968, Sebring had signed an application for a $500,000 executive protection policy with the Occidental Life Insurance Company of California. A background investigation, conducted by the Retail Credit Company, estimated his net worth at $100,000, of which $80,000 was the appraised worth of his residence. Sebring, Inc., the original business, had assets of $150,000, with liabilities of $115,000.

The investigators also looked into Sebring’s personal life. He had married once, in October 1960, he and his wife, Cami, a model, separating in August 1963, their divorce becoming final in March 1965, the couple having had no children. The report also stated that Sebring had never “used drugs as a habit.” LAPD knew otherwise.

They also knew something else the credit company investigators had never discovered. There was a darker side to Jay Sebring’s nature that surfaced during numerous interviews conducted by the police. As noted in the official report: “He was considered a ladies’ man and took numerous women to his residence in the Hollywood hills. He would tie the women up with a small sash cord and, if they agreed, would whip them, after which they would have sexual relations.”

Rumors of this had long circulated around Hollywood. Now picked up by the press, they became the basis for numerous theories, chief among them that some sort of sadomasochistic orgy had been in progress on the night of August 9, 1969, at 10050 Cielo Drive.

LAPD never seriously considered Sebring’s odd sexual habits a possible cause of the murders. None of the girls interviewed—and the number was large, Sebring frequently dating five or six different girls a week—claimed that Sebring had actually hurt them, though he often asked them to pretend pain. Nor, as far as could be determined, was Sebring involved in group sex: he was too afraid his private quirks would subject him to ridicule. The mundane truth appeared to be that behind the carefully cultivated public image there was a lonely, troubled man so insecure in his role that even in his sex life he had to revert to fantasy.

Cause of death: Exsanguination—victim literally bled to death. Victim had been stabbed seven times and shot once, at least three of the stab wounds, as well as the gunshot wound, being in and of itself fatal.

Abigail “Gibby” Folger’s coming-out party had been held at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on December 21, 1961. The Italianate ball was one of the highlights of the social season, the debutante wearing a bright yellow Dior she had purchased in Paris the previous summer.

After that she had attended Radcliffe, graduating with honors; worked for a time as publicity director for the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley; quit that to work in a New York bookstore; then became involved in social work in the ghettos. It was while in New York, in early 1968, that Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski introduced her to Voytek Frykowski. They left New York together that August, driving to Los Angeles, where they rented a house at 2774 Woodstock Road, off Mulholland in the Hollywood hills. Through Frykowski, she met the Polanskis, Sebring, and others in their circle. She was one of the investors in Sebring International.

Shortly after arriving in Southern California, she registered as a volunteer social worker for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, and would get up at dawn each day for assignments that took her into Watts, Pacoima, and other ghetto areas. She continued this work until the day before she and Frykowski moved into 10050 Cielo Drive.

Something changed after that. Probably it was a combination of things. She became depressed over how little such work actually accomplished, how big the problems stayed. “A lot of social workers go home at night, take a bath, and wash off their day,” she told an old San Francisco friend. “I can’t. The suffering gets under your skin.” In May, black city councilman Thomas Bradley ran against incumbent Samuel Yorty for mayor of Los Angeles. Bradley’s defeat, after a campaign heavy with racial smears, left her disillusioned and bitter. She did not resume her social work. She was also disturbed about the way her affair with Frykowski was going, and with their use of drugs, which had passed the point of experimentation.

She talked about all these things with her psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Flicker. She saw him five days a week, Monday through Friday, at 4:30 P.M.

She had kept her appointment that Friday.

Flicker told the police that he thought Abigail was almost ready to leave Frykowski, that she was attempting to build up enough nerve to go it alone.

The police were unable to determine exactly when Folger and Frykowski began to use drugs heavily, on a regular basis. It was learned that on their cross-country trip they had stopped in Irving, Texas, staying several days with a big dope dealer well known to local and Dallas police. Dealers were among their regular guests both at the Woodstock house and after they moved to Cielo Drive. William Tennant told police that whenever he visited the latter residence, Abigail “always seemed to be in a stupor from narcotics.” When her mother last talked to her, about ten that Friday night, she said Gibby had sounded lucid but “a little high.” Mrs. Folger, who was not unaware of her daughter’s problems, had contributed large amounts of both money and time to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, to help in their pioneer work in treating drug abuse.

The coroners discovered 2.4 mg. of methylenedioxyamphetamine—MDA—in Abigail Folger’s system. That this was a larger amount than was found in Voytek Frykowski’s body—0.6 mg.—did not necessarily indicate that she had taken a larger quantity of the drug, but could mean she had taken it at a later time.

Effects of the drug vary, depending on the individual and the dosage, but one thing was clear. That night she was fully aware of what was happening.

Victim had been stabbed twenty-eight times.

“Voytek,” Roman Polanski would later tell reporters, “was a man of little talent but immense charm.” The two had been friends in Poland, Frykowski’s father reputedly having helped finance one of Polanski’s early films. Even in Poland, Frykowski had been known as a playboy. According to fellow émigrés, he had once taken on, and rendered inoperative, two members of the secret police, which may have had something to do with his exit from Poland in 1967. He had married twice, and had one son, who had remained behind when he moved to Paris. Both there and, later, in New York, Polanski had given him money and encouragement, hopeful—but knowing Voytek well, not too optimistic—that one of his grand plans would come through. None ever quite did. He told people that he was a writer, but no one could recall having read anything he had written.

Friends of Abigail Folger told the police that Frykowski had introduced her to drugs so as to keep her under his control. Friends of Voytek Frykowski said the opposite—that Folger had provided the drugs so as not to lose him.

According to the police report: “He had no means of support and lived off Folger’s fortune…He used cocaine, mescaline, LSD, marijuana, hashish in large amounts…He was an extrovert and gave invitations to almost everyone he met to come visit him at his residence. Narcotic parties were the order of the day.”

He had fought hard for his life. Victim was shot twice, struck over the head thirteen times with a blunt object, and stabbed fifty-one times.

He had graduated from Arroyo High School in June; dated several girls but no one in particular; had a full-time job as delivery boy for a plumbing company, plus a part-time job, evenings, as salesman for a stereo shop, holding down the two jobs so he could save money to attend junior college that September.

Victim had one defensive slash wound, and had been shot four times.

During the fluoroscopy examination that preceded the Sebring autopsy, Dr. Noguchi discovered a bullet lodged between Sebring’s back and his shirt. Three more bullets were found during the autopsies: one in Frykowski’s body, two in Parent’s. These—plus the slug and fragments found in Parent’s automobile—were turned over to Sergeant William Lee, Firearms and Explosives Unit, SID, for study. Lee concluded that all the bullets had probably been fired from the same gun, and that they were .22 caliber.

While the autopsies were in progress, Sergeants Paul Whiteley and Charles Guenther, two homicide detectives from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, approached Sergeant Jess Buckles, one of the Los Angeles Police Department detectives assigned to the Tate homicides, and told him something very curious.

On July 31 they had gone to 964 Old Topanga Road in Malibu, to investigate a report of a possible homicide. They had found the body of Gary Hinman, a thirty-four-year-old music teacher. He had been stabbed to death.

The curious thing: as in the Tate homicides, a message had been left at the scene. On the wall in the living room, not far from Hinman’s body, were the words POLITICAL PIGGY, printed in the victim’s own blood.

Whiteley also told Buckles that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the murder, one Robert “Bobby” Beausoleil, a young hippie musician. He had been driving a car that belonged to Hinman, there was blood on his shirt and trousers, and a knife had been found hidden in the tire well of the vehicle. The arrest had occurred on August 6; therefore he had been in custody at the time of the Tate homicides. However, it was possible that he hadn’t been the only one involved in the Hinman murder. Beausoleil had been living at Spahn’s Ranch, an old movie ranch near the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth, with a bunch of other hippies. It was an odd group, their leader, a guy named Charlie, apparently having convinced them that he was Jesus Christ.

Buckles, Whiteley would later recall, lost interest when he mentioned hippies. “Naw,” he replied, “we know what’s behind these murders. They’re part of a big dope transaction.”

Whiteley again emphasized the odd similarities. Like mode of death. In both cases a message had been left. Both printed. Both in a victim’s blood. And in both the letters PIG appeared. Any one of these things would be highly unusual. But all—the odds against its being a coincidence must be astronomical.

Sergeant Buckles, LAPD, told Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther, LASO, “If you don’t hear from us in a week or so, that means we’re on to something else.”

A little more than twenty-four hours after the discovery of the Tate victims, the Los Angeles Police Department was given a lead by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, which, if followed, could possibly have broken the case.

Buckles never did call, nor did he think the information important enough to walk across the autopsy room and mention the conversation to his superior, Lieutenant Robert Helder, who was in charge of the Tate investigation.

At Lieutenant Helder’s suggestion, Dr. Noguchi withheld specifics when he met with the press. He did not mention the number of wounds, nor did he say anything about two of the victims’ having ingested drugs. He did, again, deny the already much repeated reports that there had been sexual molestation and/or mutilation. Neither was true, he stressed.

Asked about Sharon’s child, he said that Mrs. Polanski was in the eighth month of her pregnancy; that the child was a perfectly formed boy; and that had he been removed by post-mortem cesarean within the first twenty minutes after the mother’s death, his life probably could have been saved. “But by the time the bodies were discovered, it was too late.”

Lieutenant Helder also talked to the press that day. Yes, Garretson was still in custody. No, he could not comment on the evidence against him, except to say that the police were now investigating his acquaintances.

Pressed further, Helder admitted, “There’s no solid information that will limit us to a single suspect. It could’ve been one man. It could’ve been two. It could’ve been three.

“But,” he added, “I don’t feel that we have a maniac running around.”

Lieutenant A. H. Burdick began the polygraph examination of William Garretson at 4:25 that afternoon, at Parker Center.

Burdick did not immediately hook up Garretson. In accordance with routine, the initial portion of the examination was conversational, the examiner attempting to put the suspect at ease while eliciting as much background information as possible.

Though obviously frightened, Garretson loosened up a little as he talked. He told Burdick that he was nineteen, from Ohio, and had been hired by Rudi Altobelli in March, just before Altobelli left for Europe. His job was simple: to look after the guest house and Altobelli’s three dogs. In return, he had been given a place to stay, thirty-five dollars a week, and the promise of an airline ticket back to Ohio when Altobelli returned.

He had little to do with the people who lived in the main house, Garretson claimed. Several of his replies seemed to bear this out. He still referred to Frykowski, for example, as “the younger Polanski,” while he appeared unfamiliar with Sebring, either by name or description, though he had seen the black Porsche in the driveway on several occasions.

Asked to relate his activities prior to the murders, Garretson said that on Thursday night an acquaintance had dropped by, accompanied by his girl. They had brought along a six-pack of beer and some pot. Garretson was sure it was Thursday night, as the man was married “and he brought her up there several other times, you know, on Thursday, when his wife lets him go out.”

Q. “Did they use your pad?”

A. “Yes, they did, and I drank some beer while they made out…”

Garretson recalled that he drank four beers, smoked two joints, took one dexedrine, and was sick all day Friday.

About 8:30 or 9 P.M. Friday, Garretson said, he went down to the Sunset Strip, to buy a pack of cigarettes and a TV dinner. He guessed the time of his return at about ten, but couldn’t be sure, not having a watch. As he passed the main house, he noticed the lights were on, but he didn’t see anyone. Nor did he observe anything out of the ordinary.

Then “about a quarter of twelve or something like that, Steve [Parent] came up and, you know, he brought his radio with him. He had a radio, clock radio; and I didn’t expect him or anything, and he asked me how I’d been and everything…” Parent plugged in the radio, to demonstrate how it worked, but Garretson wasn’t interested.

Then “I gave him a beer…and he drank it and then he called somebody—somebody on Santa Monica and Doheny—and he said that he would be going there, and so then he left, and, you know, that’s when—that’s the last time I saw him.”

When found in Parent’s car, the clock radio had stopped at 12:15 A.M., the approximate time of the murder. Although it could have been a remarkable coincidence, the logical presumption was that Parent had set it while demonstrating it to Garretson, then unplugged it just before he left. This would coincide with Garretson’s estimate of the time.

According to Garretson, after Parent left, he wrote some letters and played the stereo, not going to sleep until just before dawn. Though he claimed to have heard nothing unusual during the night, he admitted that he had been “scared.”

Why? Burdick asked. Well, Garretson replied, not long after Steve left, he noticed that the handle of the door was turned down, as if someone had tried to open it. And when he tried to use the phone, to learn the time, he found it was dead.

Like the other officers, Burdick found it difficult to believe that Garretson, though admittedly awake all night, heard nothing, while neighbors even farther away heard shots or screams. Garretson insisted, however, that he had neither heard nor seen anything. He was less sure on another point—whether he had gone out into the back yard when he let Altobelli’s dogs out. To Burdick he appeared evasive about this. From the yard, however, he couldn’t see the main house, though he might have heard something.

As far as LAPD was concerned, the moment of truth was now arriving. Burdick began setting up the polygraph, at the same time reading Garretson the list of questions he intended to ask.

This, too, was standard operating procedure, and more than a little psychological. Knowing a certain question was going to be asked, but not when, built tension, accentuating the response. He then began the test.

Q. “Is your true last name Garretson?”

A. “Yes.”

No significant response.

Q. “Concerning Steve, did you cause his death?”

A. “No.”

Facing forward, Garretson couldn’t see Burdick’s face. Burdick kept his voice matter-of-fact as he moved on to the next question, in no way indicating that the steel pens had jerked across the graph.

Q. “You understood the questions?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Do you feel responsible for Steve’s death?”

A. “That he even knew me, yes.”

Q. “Huh?”

A. “That he even knew me. I mean he wouldn’t have come up that night, and nothing would have happened in other words to him.”

Burdick relieved the pressure cup on Garretson’s arm, told him to relax, talked to him informally for a while. Then again the pressure, and the questions, only slightly changed this time.

Q. “Is your true last name Garretson?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did you shoot Steve?”

A. “No.”

No significant response.

More test questions, followed by “Do you know who caused Mrs. Polanski’s death?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Did you cause Mrs. Polanski’s death?”

A. “No.”

Still no significant response.

Burdick now accepted Garretson’s explanation, that he felt responsibility for Parent’s death, but had no part in causing it or the other murders. The examination went on for another half hour or so, during which Burdick closed off several avenues of investigation. Garretson was not gay; he had never had sex with any of the victims; he had never sold drugs.

There was no indication that Garretson was lying, but he remained nervous throughout. Burdick asked him why. Garretson explained that when he was being taken to his cell, a policeman had pointed at him, saying, “There’s the guy that killed all those people.”

Q. “I would imagine it would shake you up. But that doesn’t mean you’re lying?”

A. “No, I’m just confused.”

Q. “Why are you confused?”

A. “For one thing, how come I wasn’t murdered?”

Q. “I don’t know.”

Although legally inadmissible as evidence, the police believe in the polygraph.[7] Though uninformed of it at the time, Garretson had passed. “At the conclusion of the examination,” Captain Don Martin, commander, SID, wrote in his official report, “it was the examiner’s opinion that Mr. Garretson was truthful and not criminally involved in the Polanski homicides.”

Unofficially, though Burdick believed Garretson “clean” on participation, he felt he was a little “muddy” on knowledge. It was possible that he had heard something, then, fearful, hidden until dawn. This was just conjecture, however.

For all intents and purposes, with the polygraph William Eston Garretson ceased to be a “good suspect.” Yet that bothersome question remained: Every single human being at 10050 Cielo Drive had been slaughtered save one; why?

Because there was no immediate answer, and certainly in part because, having been the only warm body on the premises, he had seemed such a likely suspect, Garretson was held for another day.

That same Sunday, Jerrold D. Friedman, a UCLA student, contacted the police and informed them that the call Steven Parent made at approximately 11:45 on Friday night had been to him. Parent was going to build a stereo set for Friedman, and he wanted to talk over the details. Friedman had tried to beg off, saying it was late, but finally gave in and told Parent he could drop by for a few minutes. Parent had asked him the time and, when he told him, said he would be there about 12:30.[8] According to Friedman, “he never got there.”

That Sunday, LAPD not only lost their best suspect to date, another promising lead fizzled out. Sharon Tate’s red Ferrari, which the police had thought might have been used as a getaway car, was located in a Beverly Hills garage where Sharon had taken it the previous week for repairs.

That evening Roman Polanski returned from London. Reporters who saw him at the airport described him as “terribly crushed” and “beaten by the tragedy.” Though he refused to talk with the press, a spokesman for him denied there was any truth to the rumors of a marital rift. Polanski had remained in London, he said, because he hadn’t finished his work there. Sharon had returned home early, by boat, because of airline restrictions against travel during the last two months of pregnancy.

Polanski was taken to an apartment inside the Paramount lot, where he remained in seclusion under a doctor’s care. The police talked to him briefly that night, but he was, at that time, unable to suggest anyone with a motive for the murders.

Frank Struthers also returned to Los Angeles that Sunday night. About 8:30 P.M. the Saffies dropped him off at the end of the long driveway leading to the LaBianca residence. Lugging his suitcase and camping equipment up the driveway, the fifteen-year-old noticed that the speedboat was still on the trailer behind Leno’s Thunderbird. That seemed odd; his stepfather didn’t like to leave the boat out overnight. Stowing his equipment in the garage, he went to the back door of the residence.

Only then did he notice that all the window shades had been pulled down. He couldn’t recall ever seeing them that way before, and it frightened him just a little bit. The light was on in the kitchen, and he knocked on the door. There was no response. He called out. Again no answer.

Really upset now, he walked to the closest pay phone, which was at a hamburger stand at Hyperion and Rowena. He dialed the number of the house, then, getting no response, tried to reach his sister at the restaurant where she worked. Suzanne wasn’t working that night, but the manager offered to try her apartment. Frank gave him the number of the pay phone.

Shortly after nine she called. She hadn’t seen or heard from their mother and stepfather since they had dropped her off at her apartment the previous night. Telling Frank to remain where he was, she called her boy friend, Joe Dorgan, and told him Frank thought something was wrong at the house. About 9:30, Joe and Suzanne picked up Frank at the hamburger stand, the three driving directly to 3301 Waverly Drive.

Rosemary often left a set of house keys in her own car. They found them and opened the back door.[9] Dorgan suggested that Suzanne remain in the kitchen while he and Frank checked out the rest of the house. They proceeded through the dining room. When they got to the living room, they saw Leno.

He was sprawled on his back between the couch and a chair. There was a throw pillow over his head, some kind of cord around his neck, and the tops of his pajamas were torn open so his stomach was bare. Something was protruding from his stomach.

He was so still they knew he was dead.

Afraid Suzanne would follow and see what they had, they returned to the kitchen. Joe picked up the kitchen phone to call the police, then, worried that he might be disturbing evidence, put it back down, telling Suzanne, “Everything’s O.K.; let’s get out of here.” But Suzanne knew everything wasn’t O.K. On the refrigerator door someone had written something in what looked like red paint.

Hurrying back down the driveway, they stopped at a duplex across the street, and Dorgan rang the bell of 3308 Waverly Drive. The peephole opened. Dorgan said there had been a stabbing and he wanted to call the police. The person inside refused to open the door, saying, “We’ll call the police for you.”

LAPD’s switchboard logged the call at 10:26 P.M., the caller complaining about some juveniles making a disturbance.

Unsure whether the person had really made the call, Dorgan had already pushed the bell of the other apartment, 3306. Dr. and Mrs. Merry J. Brigham let the three young people in. However, they were so upset Mrs. Brigham had to complete the call. At 10:35, Unit 6A39, a black-and-white manned by officers W. C. Rodriquez and J. C. Toney, was dispatched to the address, arriving very quickly, five to seven minutes later.

While Suzanne and Frank remained with the doctor and his wife, Dorgan accompanied the two Hollywood Division officers to the LaBianca residence. Toney covered the back door while Rodriquez went around the house. The front door was closed but not locked. After one look inside, he ran back to the car and called for a backup unit, a supervisor, and an ambulance.

Rodriquez had been on the force only fourteen months; he had never discovered a body before.

Within a few minutes, Ambulance Unit G-I arrived, and Leno LaBianca was pronounced DOA—dead on arrival. In addition to the pillow Frank and Joe had seen, there was a bloody pillowcase over his head. The cord around his neck was attached to a massive lamp, the cord knotted so tightly it appeared he had been throttled with it. His hands were tied behind his back with a leather thong. The object protruding from his stomach was an ivory-handled, bi-tined carving fork. In addition to a number of stab wounds in the abdomen, someone had carved the letters WAR in the naked flesh.

The backup unit, 6L40, manned by Sergeant Edward L. Cline, arrived just after the ambulance. A veteran of sixteen years, Cline took charge, obtaining a pink DOA slip from the two attendants before they left.

The pair were already on their way down the driveway when Rodriquez called them back. Cline had found another body, in the master bedroom.

Rosemary LaBianca was lying face down on the bedroom floor, parallel to the bed and dresser, in a large pool of blood. She was wearing a short pink nightgown and, over it, an expensive dress, blue with white horizontal stripes, which Suzanne would later identify as one of her mother’s favorites. Both nightgown and dress were bunched up over her head, so her back, buttocks, and legs were bare. Cline didn’t even try to count the stab wounds, there were so many. Her hands were not tied but, like Leno, she had a pillowcase over her head and a lamp cord was wrapped around her neck. The cord was attached to one of a pair of bedroom lamps, both of which had overturned. The tautness of the cord, plus a second pool of blood about two feet from the body, indicated that perhaps she had tried to crawl, pulling the lamps over while doing so.

A second pink DOA slip was filled out, for Mrs. Rosemary LaBianca. Joe Dorgan had to tell Suzanne and Frank.

There was writing, in what appeared to be blood, in three places in the residence. High up on the north wall in the living room, above several paintings, were printed the words DEATH TO PIGS. On the south wall, to the left of the front door, even higher up, was the single word RISE. There were two words on the refrigerator door in the kitchen, the first of which was misspelled. They read HEALTER SKELTER.

MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1969

At 12:15 A.M. the case was assigned to Robbery-Homicide. Sergeant Danny Galindo, who had spent the previous night on guard duty at the Tate residence, was the first detective to arrive, at about 1 A.M. He was joined shortly after by Inspector K. J. McCauley and several other detectives, while an additional unit, ordered by Cline, sealed off the grounds. As with the Tate homicides, however, the reporters, who had already begun to arrive, apparently had little difficulty obtaining inside information.

Galindo made a detailed search of the one-story residence. Except for the overturned lamps, there were no signs of a struggle. Nor was there any evidence that robbery had been the motive. Among the items that Galindo would log into the County Public Administrator’s Report were: a man’s gold ring, the main stone a one-carat diamond, the other stones also diamonds, only slightly smaller; two woman’s rings, both expensive, both in plain view on a dresser in the bedroom; necklaces; bracelets; camera equipment; hand guns, shotguns, and rifles; a coin collection; a bag of uncirculated nickels, found in the trunk of Leno’s Thunderbird, worth considerably more than their $400 face value; Leno LaBianca’s wallet, with credit cards and cash, in the glove compartment of his car; several watches, one a high-priced stopwatch of the type used to clock race horses; plus numerous other easily fenced items.

Several days later Frank Struthers returned to the residence with the police. The only missing items, as far as he could determine, were Rosemary’s wallet and her wristwatch.

Galindo was unable to find any indications of forced entry. However, testing the back door, he found it could be jimmied very easily. He was able to open it with only a strip of celluloid.

The detectives made a number of other discoveries. The ivory-handled carving fork found protruding from Leno’s stomach belonged to a set found in a kitchen drawer. There were some watermelon rinds in the sink. There were also blood splatters, both there and in the rear bathroom. And a piece of blood-soaked paper was found on the floor in the dining room, its frayed end suggesting that possibly it had been the instrument used to print the words.

In many ways the activities at 3301 Waverly Drive the rest of that night were a replay of those that had occurred at 10050 Cielo Drive less than forty-eight hours earlier. Even to, in some cases, the same cast, with Sergeant Joe Granado arriving about 3 A.M. to take blood samples.

The sample from the kitchen sink wasn’t sufficient to determine if it was animal or human, but all the other samples tested positive on the Ouchterlony test, indicating they were human blood. The blood in the rear bathroom, as well as all the blood in the vicinity of Rosemary LaBianca’s body, was type A—Rosemary LaBianca’s type. All the other samples, including that taken from the rumpled paper and the various writings, were type B—Leno LaBianca’s type.

This time Granado didn’t take any subtypes.

The fingerprint men from SID, Sergeants Harold Dolan and J. Claborn, lifted a total of twenty-five latents, all but six of which would later be identified as belonging to Leno, Rosemary, or Frank. It was apparent to Dolan, from examining those areas where fingerprints should have been but weren’t, that an effort had been made to eradicate prints. For example, there was not even a smudge on the ivory handle of the carving fork, on the chrome handle of the refrigerator door, or on the enamel finish of the door itself—all surfaces that readily lent themselves to receiving latent fingerprints. The refrigerator door on close examination showed wipe marks.

After the police photographer had finished, a deputy coroner supervised the removal of the bodies. The pillowcases were left in place over the heads of the victims; the lamp cords were cut near the bases, so the knots remained intact for study. A representative of the Animal Regulation Department removed the three dogs, which, when the first officers arrived, had been found inside the house.

Left behind were the puzzle pieces. But this time at least a partial pattern was discernible, in the similarities:

Los Angeles, California; consecutive nights; multiple murders; victims affluent Caucasians; multiple stab wounds; incredible savagery; absence of a conventional motive; no evidence of ransacking or robbery; ropes around the neck of two Tate victims, cords around the necks of both LaBiancas. And the bloody printing.

Yet within twenty-four hours the police would decide there was no connection between the two sets of murders.

The headlines screamed from the front pages that Monday morning; TV programs were interrupted for updates; to the millions of Angelenos who commuted to work via the freeways their car radios seemed to broadcast little else.[10]

It was then the fear began.

When the news of the Tate homicides broke, even those acquainted with the victims were less fearful than shocked, for simultaneously came the announcement that a suspect had been arrested and charged with the murders. Garretson, however, had been in custody when these new murders took place. And with his release that Monday—still looking as puzzled and frightened as when the police “captured” him—the panic began. And spread.

If Garretson wasn’t guilty, then it meant that whoever was was still at large. If it could happen in places as widely separated as Los Feliz and Bel Air, to people as disparate as movie colony celebrities and a grocery market owner and his wife, it meant it could happen anywhere, to anyone.

Sometimes fear can be measured. Among the barometers: In two days one Beverly Hills sporting goods store sold 200 firearms; prior to the murders, they averaged three or four a day. Some of the private security forces doubled, then tripled, their personnel. Guard dogs, once priced at $200, now sold for $1,500; those who supplied them soon ran out. Locksmiths quoted two-week delays on orders. Accidental shootings, suspicious persons reports—all suddenly increased.

The news that there had been twenty-eight murders in Los Angeles that weekend (the average being one a day) did nothing to decrease the apprehension.

It was reported that Frank Sinatra was in hiding; that Mia Farrow wouldn’t attend her friend Sharon’s funeral because, a relative explained, “Mia is afraid she will be next”; that Tony Bennett had moved from his bungalow on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel to an inside suite “for greater security”; that Steve McQueen now kept a weapon under the front seat of his sports car; that Jerry Lewis had installed an alarm system in his home complete with closed circuit TV. Connie Stevens later admitted she had turned her Beverly Hills home into a fortress. “Mainly because of the Sharon Tate murders. That scared the daylights out of everyone.”

Friendships ended, romances broke up, people were abruptly dropped from guest lists, parties canceled—for with the fear came suspicion. The killer or killers could be almost anyone.

A cloud of fright hung over southern California more dense than its smog. It would not dissipate for months. As late as the following March, William Kloman would write in Esquire: “In the great houses of Bel Air, terror sends people flying to their telephones when a branch falls from a tree outside.”

In each case, written in the blood of one of the victims.

Sergeant Buckles still didn’t think it important enough to check further.

Deputy Medical Examiner David Katsuyama conducted the LaBianca autopsies. Before starting, he removed the pillowcases from the heads of the victims. Only then was it discovered that in addition to the carving fork embedded in his abdomen, a knife had been stuck in Leno LaBianca’s throat.

Since none of the personnel at the scene had observed the knife, this became one of the LaBianca polygraph keys. There were two others. For some reason, though the phrase DEATH TO PIGS had leaked to the press, neither RISE nor HEALTER SKELTER had.

Born in Los Angeles, son of the founder of the State Wholesale Grocery Company, Leno had gone into the family business after attending the University of Southern California, eventually becoming president of Gateway Markets, a Southern California chain.

As far as the police were able to determine, Leno had no enemies. Yet they soon discovered that he too had a secret side. Friends and relatives described him as quiet and conservative; they were amazed to learn, after his death, that he owned nine thoroughbred race horses, the most prominent being Kildare Lady, and that he was a chronic gambler, frequenting the tracks nearly every racing day, often betting $500 at a time. Nor did they know that he was, at the time of his death, some $230,000 in debt.

In the weeks ahead the LaBianca detectives would do a remarkable job of tracking their way through the tangled maze of Leno LaBianca’s complex financial affairs. The possibility that Leno might have been the victim of loan sharks, however, fell apart when it was learned that Rosemary LaBianca was quite wealthy herself, having more than sufficient assets to pay off Leno’s debts.

One of Leno’s former partners, also Italian, who knew of his gambling habits, told the police he thought the murders might have been committed by the Mafia. He admitted he had no evidence to support this; however, the detectives did learn that for a short time Leno had been on the board of directors of a Hollywood bank which LAPD and LASO intelligence units believed was backed by “hoodlum money.” They had been unable to prove this, though several other board members were indicted and convicted of a kiting scheme. The possibility of a Mafia link became one of a number of leads that would have to be checked out.

Leno did not have a criminal record; Rosemary had one traffic citation which dated back to 1957.

Leno left $100,000 in insurance, which, since it was to be divided equally among Suzanne, Frank, and the three children from his previous marriage, appeared to rule that out as a motive.

Leno LaBianca died in the same house in which he had been born, he and Rosemary moving into the family home, which Leno had purchased from his mother, in November 1968.

Cause of death: Multiple stab wounds. Victim had twelve stab wounds, plus fourteen puncture wounds made by a double-tined fork, for a total of twenty-six separate wounds, any one of six of which could in and of itself have been fatal.

It was probable that even Rosemary did not know a great deal about her early years. It was believed that she had been born in Mexico, of American parents, then orphaned or abandoned in Arizona. She remained in an orphanage there until the age of twelve, when she was adopted by a family named Harmon, who took her to California. She had met her first husband while working as a carhop at the Brown Derby Drive-In in Los Feliz in the late 1940s, while still in her teens. They were divorced in 1958, and it was shortly after this, while working as a waitress at the Los Feliz Inn, that she met and married Leno LaBianca.

Her former husband was polygraphed, and cleared of any involvement in the crime. Former employers, ex-boy friends, current business associates were interviewed; none could recall anyone who disliked her.

According to Ruth Sivick, her partner in Boutique Carriage, Rosemary had a good head for business; not only was the shop successful, Rosemary also invested in stocks and commodities, and did well. How well was not known until her estate was probated, and it was learned she had left $2,600,000. Abigail Folger, the heiress in the Cielo slayings, had left less than one-fifth that.

Mrs. Sivick had last seen Rosemary on Friday, when they went buying for the store. Rosemary had called on Saturday morning, telling her they planned to drive to Lake Isabella, and wondering if she could drop by that afternoon and feed the dogs. The LaBiancas had three dogs. All had barked loudly when she approached the house at about 6 P.M. After feeding them—taking the dog food out of the refrigerator—Mrs. Sivick checked the doors—all were locked—and left.

Mrs. Sivick’s testimony established that whoever wiped the refrigerator handle of prints had done so sometime after she had been there.

Rosemary LaBianca—carhop to millionairess to murder victim.

Cause of death: Multiple stab wounds. Victim had been stabbed a total of forty-one times, any one of six of which could in and of itself have been fatal.

All but one of Leno LaBianca’s wounds were to the front of his body; thirty-six of the forty-one inflicted on Rosemary LaBianca were to her back and buttocks. Leno had no defensive wounds, indicating that his hands had probably been bound before he was stabbed. Rosemary had a defensive slash wound on her left jaw. This wound, plus the knife in Leno’s throat, indicated that the placing of the pillowcases over the heads of the victims was a belated act, possibly even occurring after they had died.

The pillowcases were identified as the LaBiancas’ own, having been removed from the two pillows on their bed.

The knife found in Leno’s throat was also theirs; though it was from a different set than the fork, it matched others found in a kitchen drawer. The dimensions of its blade were: length, 4⁷/₈ inches; thickness, just under ¹/₁₆ inch; width at widest point, 1³/₁₆ inch; width at narrowest point, ³/₈ inch.

The LaBianca detectives later noted in their report: “The knife recovered from his throat appeared to be the weapon used in both homicides.”

It was a presumption, and nothing more, since for some reason Dr. Katsuyama, unlike his superior Dr. Noguchi, who handled the Tate autopsies, did not measure the dimensions of the wounds. Nor did the detectives assigned to the LaBianca case ask for these statistics.

The ramifications of this one presumption were immense. A single weapon indicated that there was probably a single killer. That the weapon used belonged in the residence meant that the killer had probably arrived unarmed, his decision to kill the pair occurring sometime after he entered the premises. This in turn suggested: (1) that the killer had arrived to commit a burglary or some other crime, then had been surprised when the LaBiancas returned home; or (2) that the victims knew the killer, trusting him enough to let him in at two in the morning or thereafter.

One little presumption, but it would cause many, many problems later.

As would the estimated time of death.

Asked by the detectives to determine the time, Katsuyama came up with 3 P.M. Sunday. When other evidence appeared to contradict this, the detectives went back to Katsuyama and asked him to recalculate. He now decided Leno LaBianca had died sometime between 12:30 A.M. and 8:30 P.M. on Sunday, and that Rosemary had died an hour earlier. However, Katsuyama cautioned, the time could be affected by room temperature and other variables.

All this was so indecisive that the detectives simply ignored it. They knew, from Frank Struthers, that Leno was a creature of habit. Every night he bought the paper, then read it before going to bed, always starting with the sports section. That section had been open on the coffee table, with Leno’s reading glasses beside it. From this and other evidence (Leno was wearing pajamas, the bed hadn’t yet been slept in, and so forth) they concluded that the murders had probably taken place within an hour or so after the LaBiancas had left Fokianos’ newsstand, or sometime between 2 and 3 A.M. on Sunday.

As early as Monday, police were minimizing the similarities between the two crimes. Inspector K. J. McCauley told reporters: “I don’t see any connection between this murder and the others. They’re too widely removed. I just don’t see any connection.” Sergeant Bryce Houchin observed: “There is a similarity, but whether it’s the same suspect or a copycat we just don’t know.”

There were several reasons for discounting the similarities. One was the absence of any apparent link between the victims; another the distance between the crimes. Still another, and more important in formulating a motive, drugs were found at 10050 Cielo Drive, while there were none at 3301 Waverly Drive.

There was one more reason, perhaps the most influential. Even before Garretson was released, the Tate detectives had not one but several very promising new suspects.

AUGUST 12–15, 1969

From William Tennant, Roman Polanski’s business manager, LAPD learned that in mid-March the Polanskis had given a catered party at Cielo with over a hundred guests. As at any large Hollywood gathering, there were crashers, among them +Herb Wilson, +Larry Madigan, and +Jeffrey Pickett, nicknamed “Pic.”[11] The trio, all in their late twenties, were reputedly dope dealers. During the party Wilson apparently stepped on Tennant’s foot. An argument ensued, Madigan and Pickett taking Wilson’s side. Irritated, Roman Polanski had the three men evicted.

It was a minor incident, in and of itself hardly cause for five savage murders, but Tennant had heard something else: “Pic” had once threatened to kill Frykowski. This information had come to him through a friend of Voytek’s, Witold Kaczanowski, an artist professionally known as Witold K.

Not unmindful of the similarity between “Pic” and the bloody-lettered PIG on the front door of the Tate residence, detectives interviewed Witold K. From him they learned that after the Polanskis had left for Europe, Wilson, Pickett, Madigan, and a fourth man, +Gerold Jones, were frequent visitors to the Cielo residence, Wilson and Madigan, according to Witold, supplying Voytek and Gibby with most of their drugs, including the MDA they had taken before they died. As for Jeffrey Pickett, when Gibby and Voytek took over Cielo, he moved into their Woodstock residence. Witold was staying there also. Once, during an argument, Pickett tried to strangle the artist. When Voytek learned of this, he told Pickett to get out. Enraged, Pic swore, “I’ll kill them all and Voytek will be the first.”

Numerous others also felt one or more of the men might be involved, and passed on their suspicions to the police. John and Michelle Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and Papas group and friends of four of the five Tate victims, said Wilson once drew a gun on Voytek. Various Strip habitués claimed Wilson often bragged that he was a hired killer; that Jones was an expert with knives, always carrying one for throwing; and that Madigan was Sebring’s “candy man,” or cocaine source.

More than ever convinced that the Tate homicides were the result of a drug burn or freakout, LAPD began looking for Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones.

For ten years Sharon Tate had sought stardom. Now she attained it, in just three days. On Tuesday, August 12, her name moved from the headlines onto theater marquees. Valley of the Dolls was rereleased nationally, opening in more than a dozen theaters in the Los Angeles area alone. It was quickly followed by The Fearless Vampire Killers and other films in which the actress had appeared, the only difference being that now she was given star billing.

That same day the police told reporters that they had officially ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Several officers indicated they were inclined to believe the second slayings were the work of a copycat.”

From the start, the two investigations had proceeded separately, with different detectives assigned to each. They would continue this way, each team pursuing its own leads.

They had one thing in common, though that similarity widened the distance between them. Both were operating on a basic assumption: in nearly 90 percent of all homicides the victim knows his killer. In both investigations the chief focus was now on acquaintances of the victims.

In checking out the Mafia rumor, the LaBianca detectives interviewed each of Leno’s known business associates. All doubted the murders were Mafia originated. One man told the detectives that if the Mafia had been responsible, he “probably would have heard about it.” It was a thorough investigation, the detectives even checking to see if the San Diego company where Leno had purchased his speedboat during their 1968 vacation was Mafia financed; it wasn’t, though numerous other businesses in the Mission Bay area were allegedly backed by “Jewish Mafia money.”

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.

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.

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)[12] 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.[13] 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 9½ 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.[14] 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 were 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.

The big story, Tate, commandeered the top spot, with its headline, “ANATOMY OF A MASS/MURDER IN HOLLYWOOD.”

Below it was a smaller story, its one-column head reading, “LA BIANCA COUPLE,/VICTIMS OF SLAYER,/GIVEN FINAL RITES.”

To the left of the Tate story, and just above an artist’s drawing of the Tate premises, was a much briefer, seemingly unrelated item, chosen, one suspected, because it was small enough to fit the space. Its headline read, “POLICE RAID RANCH,/ARREST 26 SUSPECTS/IN AUTO THEFT RING.”

It began: “Twenty-six persons living in an abandoned Western movie set on an isolated Chatsworth ranch were arrested in a daybreak raid by sheriff’s deputies Saturday as suspects in a major auto theft ring.”

According to deputies, the group had been stealing Volkswagens, then converting them into dune buggies. The story, which did not contain the names of any of those arrested but did mention that a sizable arsenal of weapons had been seized, concluded: “The ranch is owned by George Spahn, a blind, 80-year-old semi-invalid. It is located in the Simi Hills at 12000 Santa Susana Pass Road. Deputies said Spahn, who lives alone in a house on the ranch, apparently knew there were people living on the set but was unaware of their activity. They said he couldn’t get around and he was afraid of them.”

It was a minor story, and didn’t even rate a follow-up when, a few days later, all the suspects were released, it being discovered they had been arrested on a misdated warrant.

Following a report that Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones were in Canada, LAPD sent the Royal Canadian Mounted Police a “want” on the four men; RCMP broadcast it; alert reporters picked it up; and within hours the news media in the United States were heralding “a break in the Tate case.”

Although LAPD denied that the four men were suspects, saying they were only wanted for questioning, the impression remained that arrests were imminent. There were phone calls, among them one from Madigan, another from Jones.

Jones was in Jamaica, and said he would fly back voluntarily if the police wished to talk to him. They admitted they did. Madigan showed up at Parker Center with his attorney. He cooperated fully, agreeing to answer any questions except those which might tend to involve him in the use or sale of narcotics. He admitted having visited Frykowski at the Cielo residence twice during the week before the murders, so it was possible his prints were there. On the night of the murders, Madigan said, he had attended a party given by an airline stewardess who lived in the apartment below his. He had left about 2 or 3 A.M. This was later verified by LAPD, which also checked his prints against the unmatched latents found at the Cielo address, without success.

Madigan was given a polygraph, and passed, as did Jones, when he arrived from Jamaica. Jones said that he and Wilson had been in Jamaica from July 12 to August 17, at which time he had flown to Los Angeles and Wilson had flown to Toronto. Asked why they had gone to Jamaica, he said they were “making a movie about marijuana.” Jones’ alibi would have to be checked out, but after his polygraph, and a negative print check, he ceased to be a good suspect.

This left Herb Wilson and Jeffrey Pickett, nicknamed Pic. By this time LAPD knew where both men were.

The publicity had been bad. There was no disputing that. As Steven Roberts, Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times, later put it, “All the stories had a common thread—that somehow the victims had brought the murders on themselves…The attitude was summed up in the epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”

Given Roman Polanski’s affinity for the macabre; rumors of Sebring’s sexual peculiarities; the presence of both Miss Tate and her former lover at the death scene while her husband was away; the “anything goes” image of the Hollywood jet set; drugs; and the sudden clamp on police leaks, almost any kind of plot could be fashioned, and was. Sharon Tate was called everything from “the queen of the Hollywood orgy scene” to “a dabbler in satanic arts.” Polanski himself was not spared. In the same newspaper a reader could find one columnist saying the director was so grief-stricken he could not speak, while a second had him night-clubbing with a bevy of airline stewardesses. If he wasn’t personally responsible for the murders, more than one paper implied, he must know who committed them.

From a national news weekly:

“Sharon’s body was found nude, not clad in bikini pants and a bra as had first been reported…Sebring was wearing only the torn remnants of a pair of boxer shorts…Frykowski’s trousers were down to his ankles…Both Sebring and Tate had X’s carved on their bodies…One of Miss Tate’s breasts had been cut off, apparently as the result of indiscriminate slashing…Sebring had been sexually mutilated…” The rest was equally accurate: “No fingerprints were found anywhere…no drug traces were found in any of the five bodies…” And so on.

Though it read like something from the old Confidential, the article had appeared in Time, its writer apparently having some tall explaining to do when his editors became aware of his imaginative embellishments.

Angered by “a multitude of slanders,” Roman Polanski called a press conference on August 19, where he castigated newsmen who “for a selfish reason” wrote “horrible things about my wife.” There had been no marital rift, he reiterated; no dope; no orgies. His wife had been “beautiful” and “a good person,” and “the last few years I spent with her were the only time of true happiness in my life…”

Some of the reporters were less than sympathetic to Polanski’s complaints about publicity, having just learned that he had permitted Life to take exclusive photos of the murder scene.

Not quite “exclusive.” Before the magazine reached the stands, several of the Polaroid prints appeared in the Hollywood Citizen News.

Life had been scooped, by its own photographs.

There were some things Polanski did not tell the press, or even his closest friends. One was that he had agreed to be polygraphed by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Polanski’s polygraph examination was conducted by Lieutenant Earl Deemer at Parker Center.

Q. “Mind if I call you Roman? My name is Earl.”

A. “Sure…I will lie one or two times during it, and I will tell you after, O.K.?”

Q. “Well—all right…”

Deemer asked Roman how he first met his wife.

Polanski sighed, then slowly began talking. “I first met Sharon four years ago at some kind of party Marty Ransohoff—a terrible Hollywood producer—had. The guy who makes ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ and all kinds of shit. But he seduced me with his talk about art, and I contracted with him to do this film, a spoof on the vampires, you know.

“And I met Sharon at the party. She was doing another film for him in London at the time. Staying in London alone. Ransohoff said, ‘Wait until you see our leading lady, Sharon Tate!’

“I thought she was quite pretty. But I wasn’t at that time very impressed. But then I saw her again. I took her out. We talked a lot, you know. At that time I was really swinging. All I was interested in was to fuck a girl and move on. I had a very bad marriage, you know. Years before. Not bad, it was beautiful, but my wife dumped me, so I was really feeling great, because I was a success with women and I just like fucking around. I was a swinger, uh?

“So I met her a couple of more times. I knew she was with Jay. Then [Ransohoff] wanted me to use her in the film. And I made tests with her.

“Once before I wanted to take her out, and she was being difficult, wanting to go out, not wanting to go out, so I said, ‘Fuck you,’ and I hung up. Probably that was the beginning of everything, you know.”

Q. “You sweet-talked her.”

A. “Right. She got intrigued by me. And I really played it cool, and it took me long dating before—And then I started seeing that she liked me.

“I remember I spent a night—I lost a key—and I spent a night in her house in the same bed, you know. And I knew there was no question of making love with her. That’s the type of girl she was.

“I mean, that rarely happens to me!

“And then we went on location—it was about two or three months later. When we were on location shooting the film, I asked her, ‘Would you like to make love with me?’ and she said, very sweetly, ‘Yes.’ And then for the first time I was somewhat touched by her, you know. And we started sleeping regularly together. And she was so sweet and so lovely that I didn’t believe it, you know. I’d had bad experiences and I didn’t believe that people like that existed, and I was waiting a long time for her to show the color, right?

“But she was beautiful, without this phoniness. She was fantastic. She loved me. I was living in a different house. I didn’t want her to come to my house. And she would say, ‘I don’t want to smother you. I only want to be with you,’ etc. And I said, ‘You know how I am; I screw around.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to change you.’ She was ready to do everything, just to be with me.

She was a fucking angel. She was a unique character, who I’ll never meet again in my life.”

Deemer asked about his first meeting with Sebring. It had occurred in a London restaurant, Polanski said, describing how nervous he had been, and how Jay had broken the ice by saying, “I dig you, man. I dig you.” More important, “he seemed happy to see Sharon happy.” Roman had remained slightly uncomfortable through their next several meetings. “But when I came to Los Angeles, started living here, he came to our parties, etc. And I started liking Jay very very much. He was a very sweet person. Oh, I know of his hangups. He liked to whip-tie girls. Sharon told me about it. He tied her once to the bed. And she told me about it. And was making fun of him…To her it was funny, but sad…

“And he was more and more often a guest of ours. He would just hang around, hang around, and sometimes Sharon would resent his staying too long, because he was always the last to leave, you know.

“I’m sure in the beginning of our relationship there was still his love for Sharon, but I think that largely it disappeared. I’m quite sure.”

Q. “So there was no indication that Sharon went back to Sebring at any time?”

A. “Not a chance! I’m the bad one. I always screw around. That was Sharon’s big hangup, you know. But Sharon was absolutely not interested in Jay.”

Q. “Was she interested in any other men?”

A. “No! There was not a chance of any other man getting close to Sharon.”

Q. “O.K., I know you have to get on your way. We might as well start. I’ll tell you how this works, Roman.” Deemer explained the mechanics of the polygraph, adding, “It’s important for you to remain quiet. I know you talk a lot with your hands. You’re emotional. You’re an actor type person, so it’s going to be a little difficult for you…But when the pressure is on, I want you to remain quiet. When it’s off, you can talk and even wave your arms. Within reason.”

After instructing Polanski to confine his answers to “yes” and “no” and to save any explanations for later, Deemer began the interrogation.

Q. “Do you have a valid California driver’s license?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Have you eaten lunch today?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you know who took the life of Voytek and the others?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you smoke cigarettes?”

A. “Yes.” There was a long pause, then Polanski began laughing.

Q. “You know what you are going to do, with that screwing around? I’m going to have to start over again!”

A. “Sorry.”

Q. “Look at the increase in your blood pressure when you start to lie about your cigarettes. Boom, boom, boom, just like a staircase. O.K., let’s start over again…

“Are you now in Los Angeles?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did you have anything to do with taking the life of Voytek and the others?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Have you eaten lunch today?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you feel any responsibility for the death of Voytek and the others?”

A. “Yes. I feel responsible that I wasn’t there, that is all.”

Q. “From running this thing through your mind, repeatedly, as I know you must have, who have you come up with as the target? I don’t think it ever crossed your mind that Sharon might be the target, that anyone had that kind of mad on for her. Is there anyone else who was up there that you can think of who would be a target for this type of activity?”

A. “I’ve thought everything. I thought the target could be myself.”

Q. “Why?”

A. “I mean, it could be some kind of jealousy or plot or something. It couldn’t be Sharon directly. If Sharon were the target, it would mean that I was the target. It could be Jay was the target. It could be Voytek. It could also be sheer folly, someone just decided to commit a crime.”

Q. “What would Sebring be doing, for instance, that would make him a target?”

A. “Some money thing, maybe. I’ve also heard a lot about this drug thing, drug deliveries. It’s difficult for me to believe…” Polanski had always believed Sebring to be “a rather prosperous man,” yet he’d recently heard he had large debts. “The indication to me is that he must have been in serious financial trouble, despite the appearances he gave.”

Q. “That’s a hell of a way to collect debts. It’s no ordinary bill collector that goes up there and kills five people.”

A. “No, no. What I’m talking about is for this reason he might have got into some dangerous areas to make money, you understand? In desperation, he may have got mixed up with illegal people, you know?”

Q. “Eliminating Sharon and the kid, of the three remaining you think that Sebring would be the logical target, huh?”

A. “The whole crime seems so illogical.

“If I’m looking for a motive, I’d look for something which doesn’t fit your habitual standard, with which you use to work as police—something much more far out…”

Deemer asked Polanski if he had received any hate mail after Rosemary’s Baby. He admitted he had, surmising, “It could be some type of witchcraft, you know. A maniac or something. This execution, this tragedy, indicates to me it must be some kind of nut, you know.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the target. In spite of all this drug thing, the narcotics. I think the police like to jump too hastily on this type of lead, you know. Because it is their usual kind of lead. The only connection I know of Voytek with any kind of narcotic was he smoked pot. So did Jay. Plus cocaine. I knew he was sniffing. In the beginning I thought it was just an occasional kick. When I discussed it with Sharon, she said, ‘Are you kidding? He’s been doing it for two years, regularly.’”

Q. “Did Sharon mess with narcotics to any extent, other than pot?”

A. “No. She did take LSD before we met. Many times. And when we met we discussed it…I took it three times. When it was legal,” he added, laughing. Then, serious again, Polanski recalled the only time they had taken it together. It was toward the end of 1965. It was his third trip, and Sharon’s fifteenth or sixteenth. It had begun pleasantly enough, with them talking all night. But then “in the morning she started flipping out and screaming and I was scared to death. And after that she said, ‘I told you I couldn’t take it and this is the end.’ And it was the end, for me and for her.

“But I can tell you this, without question. She took no drugs at all, except for pot, and not too much. And during her pregnancy there was no question, she was so in love with her pregnancy she would do nothing. I’d pour a glass of wine and she wouldn’t touch it.”

Once more Deemer took him through the questioning, then ended the examination, satisfied that Roman Polanski had no involvement in, or any hidden knowledge of, the murder of his wife and the others.

Before leaving, Roman told him, “I’m devoted now to this thing.” He intended to question even his friends. “But I’m going to do it slowly, so they don’t get suspicious. No one knows I’m here. I don’t want them to know that I’m trying in any way to help the police, you know? I’m hoping in this way they’ll have more sincerity.”

Q. “You have to go on living.”

Polanski thanked him, lighted a cigarette, and left.

Q. “Hey, I thought you didn’t smoke cigarettes!”

But Polanski had already gone.

On August 20, three days after Peter Hurkos accompanied Roman Polanski to the Cielo residence, a picture of Hurkos appeared in the Citizen News. It was captioned:

Madigan and Jones had been eliminated as suspects. Wilson and Pickett remained.

Because of his familiarity with the case, it was decided to send Lieutenant Deemer east to interview the two.

Jeffrey “Pic” Pickett had been contacted through a relative, and a meeting was set up in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. The son of a prominent State Department official, Pickett appeared to Deemer to be “under the influence of some narcotic, probably an excitant drug.” He also had a bandaged hand. When Deemer expressed curiosity about it, Pickett vaguely replied that he had cut it on a kitchen knife. Though he agreed to a polygraph, Deemer found that Pickett couldn’t remain still or follow instructions, so he interviewed him informally. He claimed that on the day of the murders he had been working in an auto company in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Asked if he owned any weapons, he admitted he had a Buck knife, purchased, he said, in Marlboro, Massachusetts, on a friend’s credit card.

Later Pickett gave Deemer the knife. It was similar to the one found at Cielo. He also turned over a roll of videotape which he claimed showed Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski using drugs at a party at the Tate residence. Pickett didn’t say how he came into possession of the film or what use he had intended to make of it.

Accompanied by Sergeant McGann, Deemer went to Massachusetts. A check of the time cards at the auto company in Sheffield revealed that Pickett’s last workday was August 1, eight days before the homicides. Moreover, though two stores in Marlboro sold Buck knives, neither had ever stocked this particular model.

Pickett’s status as a suspect rose appreciably, until the detectives interviewed the friend he had mentioned. Going through his credit card receipts, he produced the one for the Buck knife. It had been purchased in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on August 21, long after the murders. The friend and his wife also recalled something Pickett had apparently forgotten. He had gone to the beach with them the weekend of August 8–10. Pickett was subsequently polygraphed, twice. Both times it was decided he was telling the truth and was not involved. Eliminate Pickett.

Flying to Toronto, Deemer interviewed Herb Wilson. Although initially reluctant to submit to a polygraph, Wilson consented when Deemer agreed not to ask any questions that might make him liable to Canadian prosecution on narcotics charges. He passed. Eliminate Wilson.

The fingerprints of both Pickett and Wilson were checked against the unmatched Tate latents, with no match.

Although the first Tate investigative report—covering the period August 9–31—concluded that Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones “have been eliminated at the time of this report,” in early September Deemer and McGann flew to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, to check out the alibis of Wilson and Jones. The pair claimed they had been there from July 8 until August 17, “making a movie about marijuana.”

Interviews with realtors, servants, and airline ticket agencies supported half their story: they had been in Jamaica at the time of the murders. And it was quite possible they did have something to do with marijuana. Their only regular visitor, excluding female friends, was a pilot who, a few weeks before, had without explanation quit his well-paying job with a leading airline to make unscheduled solo runs between Jamaica and the United States.

As for their moviemaking, however, the detectives evinced some skepticism, the maid having told them the only camera she ever saw in the house was a small Kodak.

The videotape Pickett gave Deemer was viewed in the SID lab. It was decidedly different from the one previously found in the loft.

Apparently filmed during the period the Polanskis were away, it showed Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Witold K, and an unidentified young lady having dinner in front of the fireplace of the Tate residence. The video machine was simply turned on and left to run, those present after a time seeming to forget it.

Abigail wore her hair tied back in a rather severe chignon effect. She looked both older and more tired than in her other photos; Voytek looked dissipated. Though what appeared to be marijuana was smoked, Voytek seemed more drunk than high. At first Abigail treated him with the exasperated affection one would accord a spoiled child.

But then the mood gradually changed. In an obvious attempt to exclude Abigail, Voytek began speaking Polish. Abigail, in turn, was playing the grand dame, responding to his crude jests with witty repartee. Voytek began calling her “Lady Folger,” then, as he became drunker, “Lady F.” Abigail talked about him in the third person, as if he wasn’t present, commenting upon, with some disgust, his habit of coming down off his drug trips by getting drunk.

To those viewing the tape it must have seemed nothing more than an overly long, exceedingly boring chronicle of a domestic argument. Except for two incidents, which, considering what would happen to two of those present, in this very house, gave it an eeriness as chilling as anything in Rosemary’s Baby.

As she was serving the dinner, Abigail recalled a time when Voytek, stoned on drugs, looked into the fireplace and saw a strange shape. He had rushed for a camera, hoping to capture the image, a blazing pig’s head.

The second incident was, in its own way, even more disturbing. The microphone had been left on the table, next to the roast. As the meat was being carved, it picked up, amazingly loud, over and over and over again, the sound of the knife grating on the bone.

Hurkos was not the only “expert” to volunteer a solution to the Tate homicides. On August 27, Truman Capote appeared on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” to discuss the crime.

One person, acting alone, had committed the murders, the author of In Cold Blood said authoritatively. He then proceeded to tell how, and why.

The killer, a man, had been in the house earlier. Something had happened “to trigger a kind of instant paranoia.” The man then left the premises, went home to get a knife and a gun, and returned to systematically assassinate everyone in the place. According to Capote’s deductions, Steven Parent was the last to die.

From the knowledge accumulated in over a hundred interviews with convicted murderers, Capote revealed that the killer was “a very young, enraged paranoid.” While committing the murders, he probably experienced a sexual release, then, exhausted, went home and slept for two days.

Although Capote had taken up the single-suspect theory, the Tate detectives had by now abandoned it. Their sole reason for adopting it in the first place—Garretson—was no longer a factor. Because of the number of victims, the location of their bodies, and the use of two or more weapons, they were now convinced that “at least two suspects” were involved.

Killers. Plural. But as to their identity, they had not the slightest idea.

At the end of August there was a summing up, for both the Tate and the LaBianca detectives.

The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—Tate” ran to thirty-three pages. Nowhere in it was there any mention of the LaBianca murders.

The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—LaBianca” was seventeen pages long. Despite the many similarities between the two crimes, it contained not one reference to the Tate homicides.

They remained two totally separate investigations.

Although Lieutenant Bob Helder had over a dozen detectives working full time on the Tate case, Sergeants Michael McGann, Robert Calkins, and Jess Buckles were the principal investigators. All were long-time veterans on the force, having worked their way up to the status of detective the hard way, from the ranks. They could remember when there was no Police Academy, and seniority was more important than education and merit examinations. They were experienced, and inclined to be set in their ways.

The LaBianca team, under Lieutenant Paul LePage, consisted, at various times, of from six to ten detectives, with Sergeants Frank Patchett, Manuel Gutierrez, Michael Nielsen, Philip Sartuchi, and Gary Broda the principal investigators. The LaBianca detectives were generally younger, better educated, and far less experienced. Graduates of the Police Academy for the most part, they were more inclined to the use of modern investigative techniques. For example, they obtained the fingerprints of almost everyone they interviewed; gave more polygraph examinations; made more modus operandi (MO) and fingerprint runs through the California State Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification (CII); and dug deeper into the backgrounds of the victims, even checking the outgoing calls Leno LaBianca had made from a motel while on vacation seven years ago.

They were also more inclined to consider “far out” theories. For example, while the Tate report didn’t attempt to explain that bloody word on the front door, the LaBianca report speculated as to the meaning of the writings found inside the residence on Waverly Drive. It even suggested a connection so remote it couldn’t even be called a wild guess. The report noted: “Investigation revealed that the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album, No. SWBO 101, has songs titled ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ and ‘Blackbird.’ The words in the song ‘Blackbird’ frequently say ‘Arise, arise,’ which might be the meaning of ‘Rise’ near the front door.”

The idea was just sort of tossed in, by whom no one would later remember, and just as promptly forgotten.

The two sets of detectives had one thing in common, however. Though to date the LaBianca team had interviewed some 150 persons, the Tate investigators more than twice that, neither was much closer to “solving” the case than when the bodies were first discovered.

The Tate report listed five suspects—Garretson, Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones—all of whom had by this time been eliminated.

The LaBianca report listed fifteen—but included Frank and Suzanne Struthers, Joe Dorgan, and numerous others who were never serious suspects. Of the fifteen, only Gardner remained a good possible, and, though lacking a palm print for positive elimination (one had been found on a bank deposit slip on Leno’s desk), his fingerprints had already been checked against those found in the residence with no match.

The progress reports were strictly intradepartmental; the press would never see them.

But already a few reporters were beginning to suspect that the real reason for the official silence was that there was nothing to report.

SEPTEMBER 1969

About noon on Monday, September 1, 1969, ten-year-old Steven Weiss was fixing the sprinkler on the hill behind his home when he found a gun.

Steven and his parents lived at 3627 Longview Valley Road in Sherman Oaks. Running parallel to Longview, atop the hill, was Beverly Glen.

The gun was lying next to the sprinkler, under a bush, about seventy-five feet—or halfway—up the steep hill. Steven had watched “Dragnet” on TV; he knew how guns should be handled. Picking it up very carefully by the tip of the barrel, so as not to eradicate prints, Steven took the gun back to his house and showed it to his father, Bernard Weiss. The senior Weiss took one look and called LAPD.

Officer Michael Watson, on patrol in the area, responded to the radio call. More than a year later Steven would be asked to describe the incident from the witness stand:

Q. “Did you show him [Watson] the gun?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did he touch the gun?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “How did he touch it?”

A. “With both hands, all over the gun.”

So much for “Dragnet.”

Officer Watson took the cartridges out of the cylinder; there were nine—seven empty shell casings and two live rounds. The gun itself was a .22 caliber Hi Standard Longhorn revolver. It had dirt on it, and rust. The trigger guard was broken, the barrel loose and slightly bent, as if it had been used to hammer something. The gun was also missing the right-hand grip.

Officer Watson took the revolver and shells back to Valley Services Division of LAPD, located in Van Nuys, and after booking them as “Found Evidence” turned them over to the Property Section, where they were tagged, placed in manila envelopes, and filed away.

Between September 3 and 5, LAPD sent out the first batch of confidential “flyers” on the wanted Tate gun. In addition to a photograph of a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver, and a list of Hi Standard outlets supplied by Lomax, Deputy Chief Robert Houghton sent a covering letter which asked police to interview anyone who had purchased such a gun, and to “visually check the weapon to see if the original grips are intact.” To avoid leaks to the media, he suggested the following cover story: such a gun had been recovered with other stolen property and the police wished to determine its ownership.

LAPD sent out approximately three hundred of the flyers, to various law-enforcement agencies in California, other parts of the United States, and Canada.

Someone neglected to mail one to the Valley Services Division of the Los Angeles Police Department in Van Nuys.

On September 10—one month after the Tate murders—a large advertisement appeared in newspapers in the Los Angeles area:

Persons wishing to remain anonymous should provide sufficient means for later identification, one method of which is to tear this newspaper page in half, transmit one half with the information submitted, and save the remaining half for matching-up later. In the event more than one person is entitled to the reward, the reward will be divided equally between them.

In announcing the reward, Peter Sellers, who had put up a portion of the money, together with Warren Beatty, Yul Brynner, and others, said: “Someone must have knowledge or suspicions they are withholding, or may be afraid to reveal. Someone must have seen the blood-soaked clothing, the knife, the gun, the getaway car. Someone must be able to help.”

Although unannounced in the press, others had already begun their own unofficial inquiries. Sharon’s father, Colonel Paul Tate, had retired from the Army in August. Growing a beard and letting his hair grow long, the former intelligence officer began frequenting the Sunset Strip, hippie pads, and places where drugs were sold, looking for some lead to the killer(s) of his daughter and the others.

The police were fearful Colonel Tate’s private investigation might become a private war, since there were reports he did not go on his forays unarmed.

Nor were the police happy about the reward. Besides the implication that LAPD wasn’t capable of solving the case on its own, such an announcement usually yields only crackpot calls, and of these they already had a surplus.

Most had come in following the release of Garretson, the callers blaming the murders on everyone from the Black Power movement to the Polish Secret Police, their sources imagination, hearsay, even Sharon herself—returned during a seance. One wife called the police to accuse her husband: “He was evasive as to his whereabouts that night.”

Hustlers, hairdressers, actors, actresses, psychics, psychotics—all got into the act. The calls revealed not so much the underside of Hollywood as the underside of human nature. The victims were accused of sexual aberrations as peculiar as the minds of the persons who called them in. Complicating LAPD’s task was the large number of people—often not anonymous, and in some cases very well known—who seemed anxious to implicate their “friends”—if not directly connecting them with the murders, at least involving them with the drug scene.

There were proponents of every possible theory. The Mafia did it. The Mafia couldn’t have done it because the killings were so unprofessional. The killings were intentionally unprofessional so the Mafia wouldn’t be suspected.

One of the most persistent callers was Steve Brandt, a former gossip columnist. Because he had been a friend of four of the five Tate victims—he had been a witness at Sharon’s and Roman’s marriage—the police ftook him seriously, at first, Brandt supplying considerable information on Wilson, Pickett, and their associates. But as the calls became more and more frequent, the names more and more prominent, it became obvious that Brandt was obsessed with the murders. Sure there was a death list and that he was next, Brandt twice attempted suicide. The first time, in Los Angeles, a friend arrived in time. The second time, in New York, he left a Rolling Stones concert to return to his hotel. When actress Ultra Violet called to make sure he was all right, he told her he had taken sleeping pills. She immediately called the desk man at the hotel, but by the time he reached the room Brandt was dead.

For such a well-publicized crime there were surprisingly few “confessions.” It was as if the murders were so horrible that even the chronic confessors didn’t want to become involved. A recently convicted felon, anxious to “make a deal,” did claim another man had bragged of involvement in the killings, but, after investigation, the story proved bogus.

One after another, leads were checked out, then eliminated, leaving the police no closer to a solution than when the murders were discovered.

Though almost forgotten for a time, by mid-September the pair of prescription glasses found near the trunks in the living room of the Tate residence had, simply by the process of attrition, become one of the most important remaining clues.

Early that month the detectives showed the glasses to various optical company representatives. What they learned was in part discouraging. The frames were a popular model, the “Manhattan” style, readily available, while the prescription lenses were also a stock item, meaning they didn’t have to be ground to order. But, on the plus side, they also learned several things about the person who had worn them.

Their owner was probably a man. He had a small, almost volley-ball-shaped head. His eyes were far apart. His left ear was approximately ¼ to ½ inch higher than his right ear. And he was extremely myopic—if he didn’t have an extra pair, he would probably have to replace the glasses soon.

A partial description of one of the Tate killers? Possibly. It was also possible that the glasses belonged to someone totally unconnected with the crime, or that they had been left behind as a false clue.

It was at least something to go on. Another flyer, with the exact specifications of the prescription, was sent to all members of the American Optometric Association, the California Optometric Association, the Los Angeles County Optometric Association, and the Ophthalmologists of Southern California, in hopes that it would yield more than had the flyer on the gun.

Of the 131 Hi Standard Longhorn revolvers sold in California, law-enforcement agencies had been able to locate and eliminate 105, a surprisingly large percentage, since many of the owners had moved to other jurisdictions. The search continued, but to date it hadn’t yielded a single good suspect. A second gun letter was sent to thirteen different gunshops in the United States which, in recent months, had ordered replacement grips for the Longhorn model. Though the replies to this one wouldn’t come back until much later, it too drew a blank.

Nor were the LaBianca detectives having any better luck. To date they had given eleven polygraphs; all had been negative. As a result of an MO run through the CII computer, the fingerprints of 140 suspects were checked; a palm print found on a bank deposit slip was checked against 2,150 suspects; and a fingerprint found on the liquor cabinet was checked against a total of 41,034 suspects. All uniformly negative.

At the end of September neither the Tate nor the LaBianca detectives bothered to write up a progress report.

OCTOBER 1969

October 10. Two months had passed since the Tate homicides. “What is going on behind the scenes in the Los Angeles Police investigation (if there is such a thing) of the bizarre murder of Sharon Tate and four others?” the Hollywood Citizen News asked in a front-page editorial.

Officially, LAPD remained silent, as they had since their last news conference on the case, on September 3, when Deputy Chief Houghton, while admitting that they still didn’t know who had committed the murders, said the detectives had made “tremendous progress.”

“Exactly what progress?” reporters asked. The pressure was building; the fear remained, if possible even increased, owing to the suggestion, less than subtly hinted at by a popular TV commentator, that perhaps the police were covering for a person or persons “prominent in the entertainment industry.”

Meanwhile the leaks continued. The media reported that narcotics had been found in several places at the Tate residence; that some of the victims had been on drugs at the time they died. By October it was also widely reported that the gun sought was a .22 (though it was identified as a pistol, rather than a revolver), and there was even one TV report—which the police quickly broke silence to deny—that pieces of the gun’s grip had been found at the crime scene. The TV station stuck by its information, despite the official denial.

A .22, with a broken grip. Several times Bernard Weiss got to wondering about that gun his son Steven had found. Could it be the Tate murder weapon?

But that was ridiculous. After all, the police themselves had the gun, and, had it been the weapon, would surely have returned by now to ask more questions and search the hillside. Since turning the weapon over to them on September 1, Weiss had heard nothing. When there was no follow-up, Steven had taken it on himself to make a search of the area. He’d found nothing. Still, Beverly Glen wasn’t all that far from Cielo Drive, just a couple of miles.

But Bernard Weiss had better things to do than play detective. That was LAPD’s responsibility.

On October 17, Lieutenant Helder and Deputy Chief Houghton told reporters that they had evidence which, if it could be traced, might lead to “the killers”—plural—of Sharon Tate and the four others. They refused to be more specific.

The press conference had been called in an attempt to relieve some of the pressure on LAPD. No solid information was released, but a number of current rumors were denied.

Less than a week later, on October 23, LAPD very hastily called another press conference, to announce that they had a clue to the identity of “the killer”—singular—of the five Tate victims: a pair of prescription eyeglasses that had been found at the scene.

The announcement was made only because several papers had that same day already printed the “wanted” flyer on the glasses.

Approximately 18,000 eye doctors had received the flyer from their various member associations; in addition, it had been printed verbatim in the Optometric Weekly and the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Monthly, which had a combined national circulation of over 29,000. What was surprising was not that the story had leaked, but that it had taken so long for it to do so.

Starved for solid news, the press heralded “a major breakthrough in the case,” overlooking the obvious fact that the police had had the glasses in their possession since the day the Tate victims were discovered.

Lieutenant Helder refused comment when a reporter, obviously with excellent connections inside the department, asked if it was true that to date the glasses flyer had yielded only seven suspects, all of whom had already been eliminated.

It was indicative of the desperation of the Tate detectives that the second, and last, Tate progress report, prepared the day before the press conference, stated: “At this time Garretson has not been positively eliminated.”

The Tate report, covering the period September 1–October 22, 1969, ran to twenty-six pages, most of which were devoted to closing out the cases against Wilson, Pickett, et al.

The LaBianca report, closed out on October 15, was a little shorter, twenty-two pages, but far more interesting.

In one section of the report the detectives mentioned their use of the CII computer: “A MO run on all crimes where the victims were tied is presently being run. Future runs will be made concentrating on the peculiarities of the robberies, used gloves, wore glasses or disabled the phone.”

Robberies. Plural. Wore glasses, disabled the phone. The phone at the LaBianca residence was not disabled, nor was there evidence that a LaBianca assailant wore glasses. These references were to Tate.

The conclusion is inescapable: The LaBianca detectives had decided—on their own, and without consulting the Tate detectives—to see if they could solve the Tate, as well as the LaBianca, case.

The second LaBianca report was interesting for still another reason.

It listed eleven suspects, the last of whom was one MANSON, CHARLES.