For a while, I’ve been grappling with the question of whether to post about Charles Manson in general or Sharon Tate’s death specifically. Today I’ve made my decision: Sharon Tate. Why, you ask? Why, because her last meal was at El Coyote!
- The night was that of August 8, 1969.
- The house was rented: 10050 Cielo Drive.
- Sharon Tate, as I’m sure you know, was married to Roman Polanski and was 8 months pregnant with his child at the time of her murder.
- Polanski was away in London and his return home had been delayed.
- Charles Manson and his “family” were “crashing” at the Spahn Movie Ranch, owned by the legally blind geriatric, George Spahn.
- After dining at El Coyote, Sharon Tate hung at her house with hair stylist Jay Sebring (I feel like I just heard a story about him that I want to share, but I can’t remember from whom I heard it or what it regarded…), coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend (and Polanski’s close friend) Wojciech Frykowski.
- Around midnight, 4 members of Charles Manson’s family (3 girls, 1 guy) dropped acid and rolled up to Cielo Drive in a 1959 Ford.
- The 4 of them scaled the hill and Tex Watson cut the phone lines.
- The first person the crew encountered was Steve Parent, who was visiting the caretaker at Cielo Drive, William Garretson, and trying to sell him a radio.
- Tex ordered the girls to hide and halted Parent.
- 4 shots. They moved on.
- Tex cut a hole in a screen in the back of the house and the clan (minus one who was to keep watch) gained entry.
- Frykowski was asleep on the couch in the living room, Tate and Sebring were chatting in a bedroom, and Folger was reading a book in another bedroom.
- Here’s something creepy: one of the Manson girls was spotted by Folger outside the window. She waved, Folger returned the gesture.
- The Manson clan gathered the Tate clan in front of the fireplace and got to work.
- Tex tied a rope around Sebring’s neck, threw it up over a rafter in the living room and tied the other end around Tate’s neck.
- Sebring started to protest, pointing out that Tate was pregnant, so Tex shot him 2 times and stabbed him 7.
- One of the Manson girls tied Frykowski’s hands with a towel, only for him to break loose and start a fight. He managed to run to the front yard but was stabbed 51 times, shot and hit so hard with the gun that the handle broke on his skull.
- Folger tried to escape only to be killed as well, amassing 28 stab wounds.
- Sharon Tate was the only one left.
- She was stabbed 16 times, during which she pleaded for the killer (either Tex or a girl named Susan Atkins) to spare her baby’s life, to which the killer replied, “I don’t care about you or your baby.”
- The family wrote the word “PIG” on the front door in Tate’s blood.
- The maid, Winifred Chapman, discovered the horror the next morning.
- She ran down the road screaming, “Murder, death, bodies, blood!”
- Caretaker Garretson, who was only person on the premises at the time that wasn’t killed, was arrested under suspicion of murder but released shortly after, as he really did not know anything of the killings.
- Heavily sedated, Polanski returned to Los Angeles and proceeded to give an interview to Life magazine, which included the publication of controversial pictures such as the one posted above.
- NIN lived in the house and rumor has it that Trent Reznor took the “PIG” door before the house was demolished.
- The house was demolished and the address changed. Apparently the new owner had (is having?) a hard time selling it.
The next infamous Manson murder (Helter Skelter and War) occurred the very next night in Los Feliz. Los Feliz! Now that I live in Los Angeles, these places are so real to me!
Is this the kind of thing about which people want to know? I’ve got a whole lot of this kind of thing lined up to be written about. Forget the times when my future blog queue included Arbor Day, pupusas, terraforming Mars and Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m heading in a completely different direction – is the fact that my readership has decreased by 83% a reflection of my recent decisions? Like I said, I’m accepting guest posts.
