Gruesome Mass Murders Spread Fear Across L.A.

Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album,” her book on the era, that “many people I know in Los Angeles believed the ‘60s ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969.”

Sketchy details began emerging that day from a gruesome murder scene in exclusive Benedict Canyon. The fenced estate had been the home at various times of Henry Fonda, Candice Bergen and, more recently, Roman Polanski, the hot young director of the previous year’s film sensation “Rosemary’s Baby.”

A housekeeper discovered the carnage: Four victims fiendishly sliced and slaughtered, two of them in the living room and two outside on the front lawn. A fifth victim had been shot in a car in the driveway. On the front door of the house, a single word was scrawled in blood: PIG.

The blood belonged to 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate, Polanski’s wife, who was eight months pregnant. She had a recurring part as a comely bank secretary in the TV hit “Beverly Hillbillies,” had posed in Playboy and had gotten her movie break as a blond starlet in “Valley of the Dolls.” She and Polanski lived in Europe but she was staying at the Cielo Drive home with friends, awaiting the birth.

Tate’s body was sprawled beside a sofa, a rope looped around her neck. She had been stabbed 16 times in the chest and back. She was the last of the victims to be tortured, as she pleaded for her baby. The unborn child, Paul Richard Polanski, was also dead.

Lying near Tate’s body was that of Jay Sebring, her former boyfriend and hairstylist to Hollywood stars. Outside on the lawn were the bodies of Abigail Folger, a volunteer social worker and heiress to the Folger’s Coffee fortune, and her boyfriend, Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski.

The couple outside had been chased down and knifed dozens of times. Both men had also been shot. The victim in the car, Steven Parent, had been visiting an acquaintance in the estate’s guest house.

The gory details seized Los Angeles with fear. It was worst in the Hollywood colonies, where stars went into hiding. That night, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were stabbed to death in Los Feliz; written in blood at the scene was the phrase “Helter Skealter,” a misspelling of a Beatles song.

The next Sunday, The Times ran follow-up stories on both murder scenes and on the same page reported--in a small, seemingly unrelated story--the arrest of members of an armed car theft ring at an old movie ranch in the Chatsworth hills. Left unexplored was the odd detail that most of the two dozen suspects were young women.

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Not until months later did police connect the horrible murders to each other, and then to the Spahn Ranch women. Many were suburban girls-turned-hippies who went by nicknames such as Sexy Sadie and Squeaky and hung out with some interesting friends, among them Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.

The women called themselves a family and called their leader Charlie. A lifelong thief and con man, Charles Manson was older, in his 30s. He was fresh out of Terminal Island prison when he acquired his first follower, Mary Brunner, in Berkeley. As more women joined him, they competed to sleep with him. Brunner had his child.

Manson was, among his other evils, a racist who preached that a coming race war would throw the world into disarray he called “helter skelter.” The car thefts were of Volkswagens that the family modified as desert vehicles--Manson intended to wait out the war deep in the Mojave.

He had already tried to make the killing of a Topanga musician, Gary Hinman, look like the work of Black Panthers. On the night of Aug. 8, he sent four followers--Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and a newcomer, Linda Kasabian--into the city to commit a crime so heinous that whites would rise up against blacks.

Manson waited back at the Spahn Ranch, but he knew the house on Cielo Drive. He had tried to interest a former resident, music producer Terry Melcher, in making his record, but Manson was spurned.

For the LaBianca killings, Manson rode along and tied up the victims, then left Watson, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten to finish the murders and hitchhike back to Spahn Ranch.

Manson was finally arrested in December in a remote desert valley, and convicted of murder in a circus trial. When he shaved his head and carved an X in his forehead, so did the women co-defendants and other group members, including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, later convicted of trying to shoot President Gerald Ford. One of the family’s attorneys, Ron Hughes, vanished during the Manson trial and turned up dead.

Manson will turn 65 in prison on Nov. 12, his original death sentence commuted to life in 1972. Parole is regularly rejected for him as well as for Watson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Atkins.