The Tate–LaBianca murders were a series of murders perpetrated by members of the Manson Family during August 9–10, 1969, in Los Angeles, California, United States, under the direction of Tex Watson and Charles Manson. The perpetrators killed five people on the night of August 8–9: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her companions Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski, along with Steven Parent. The following evening, the Family also murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, at their home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.[1][2][3]
On the night of August 8–9, four members of the Manson Family – Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian – drove from Spahn Ranchto10050 Cielo DriveinBenedict Canyon, the home of Sharon Tate and her husband, film director Roman Polanski. The group murdered Tate (who was 8½ months pregnant), and guests Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairdresser; Abigail Folger, heiress to Folgers Coffee; her boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter; and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old visiting the guest house caretaker. Roman Polanski was not home as he was working on a film in Europe. Manson was a cult leader and aspiring musician who had tried to get a contract with record producer Terry Melcher, who had previously rented the house.
The following night, those four people, in addition to Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Steve "Clem" Grogan, committed two more murders. Manson had allegedly said he would "show them how to do it".[4]: 176–184, 258–269 [5] Linda Kasabian drove the group to 3301 Waverly Drive. [4]: 22–25, 42–48 Manson left with Atkins, Grogan, and Kasabian in the car and told the others to hitchhike back to the ranch. Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten killed the couple in the early morning hours of August 10.
| Tate murders | |
|---|---|
| Location | 10050 Cielo Drive Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Coordinates | 34°05′38″N 118°25′57″W / 34.09389°N 118.43250°W / 34.09389; -118.43250 |
| Date | August 9, 1969 (54 years, 10 months ago) |
| Target | Home invasion |
Attack type | Mass stabbing, shooting |
| Weapons | .22 caliber Hi-Standard "Buntline Special" revolver, clasp-type Buck knives |
| Deaths | 5 |
| Victims | Abigail Folger Wojciech Frykowski Steven Parent Jay Sebring Sharon Tate |
| Perpetrators | Susan Atkins Patricia Krenwinkel Tex Watson |
| Motive | Unknown |
On the night of August 8, 1969, Tex Watson took Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkelto10050 Cielo DriveinBenedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California. Watson claims Charles Manson had instructed him go to the house and "totally destroy" everyone in it, and to do it "as gruesome as you can".[4]: 463–468 [6] Manson told the women to do as Watson instructed them.[4]: 176–184, 258–269
The occupants of the house at Cielo Drive that evening were movie actress Sharon Tate, who was 81⁄2 months pregnant and the wife of film director Roman Polanski; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted celebrity hairstylist; Polanski's friend Wojciech Frykowski; and Frykowski's girlfriend Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune and daughter of Peter Folger.[4]: 28–38 Also present on the property were William Garretson, the caretaker, and his friend Steven Parent. Polanski was in Europe working on a film. Music producer Quincy Jones was a friend of Sebring who had planned to join him that evening but did not go.[7]
Watson and the three women arrived at Cielo Drive just past midnight on August 9, 1969. Watson climbed a telephone pole near the entrance gate and cut the phone line to the house.[8] The group backed their car to the bottom of the hill that led to the estate and walked back up to the house. They thought that the gate might be electrified or equipped with an alarm, so they climbed a brushy embankment to the right of the gate and entered the grounds.[4]: 176–184 Headlights approached them from within the property, and Watson ordered the women to lie in the bushes. He stepped out and ordered the approaching driver to halt. Steven Parent had been visiting the property's caretaker, William Garretson, who lived in the guest house. Watson leveled a .22 caliber revolver at Parent, who begged him not to hurt him, claiming that he would not say anything. Watson lunged at Parent with a knife, giving him a defensive slash wound on the palm of his hand that severed tendons and tore his watch off his wrist, then shot him four times in the chest and abdomen, killing him in the front seat of his white 1965 AMC Rambler. Watson turned off the car's ignition and pushed the car away from the gate. [4]: 22–25 [6]
Watson next cut the screen of a window, then told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate; she walked over to Parent's car and waited.[4]: 258–269 [4]: 176–184 [6] Watson removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.[4]: 176–184 He whispered to Atkins and awoke Frykowski, who was sleeping on the living room couch. Watson kicked him in the head,[6] and Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there. Watson replied, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business."[4]: 176–184 [6]
On Watson's direction, Atkins found the house's three other occupants with Krenwinkel's help[4]: 176–184, 297–300 and forced them to the living room. Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with a long nylon rope which he had brought, then slung it over one of the living room's ceiling beams. Sebring protested the murderers' rough treatment of the pregnant Tate, so Watson shot him. Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, and she gave the murderers $70. Watson then stabbed Sebring seven times.[4]: 28–38 [6]
Frykowski's hands had been bound with a towel, but he freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed at his legs with a knife.[6] He fought his way out the front door and onto the porch, but Watson caught up with him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times, stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.[6]
Kasabian had heard "horrifying sounds" and moved toward the house from her position in the driveway. She told Atkins that someone was coming in an attempt to stop the murders.[4]: 258–269 [6] Inside the house, Folger escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area.[4]: 341–344, 356–361 Krenwinkel pursued her and caught her on the front lawn where she stabbed her and tackled her to the ground. Watson then helped kill her; her assailants stabbed her a total of 28 times.[4]: 28–38 [6] Frykowski struggled across the lawn, but Watson continued to stab him, killing him. Frykowski suffered 51 stab wounds, and had also been struck 13 times in the head with the butt of Watson's gun, which bent the barrel and broke off one side of the gun grip, which was recovered at the scene.[4]: 28–38, 258–269 [6]
In the house, Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to give birth, and offered herself as a hostage in an attempt to save the life of her unborn child, but both Atkins and Watson stabbed Tate 16 times, killing her. The coroner's inquest found that Tate was still alive when she was hanged with the nylon rope, although the cause of her death was determined as a "massive hemorrhage",[9] while in Sebring's murder it was found that he was hanged lifeless.[4]: 28–38
According to Watson, Manson had told the women to "leave a sign—something witchy".[6] Atkins wrote "pig" on the front door in Tate's blood.[4]: 84–90, 176–184 [6] Atkins claims she did this to copycat the murder scene of Gary Hinman in order to get Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil out of jail, who was in custody for the murder;[4]: 426–435 Beausoleil had written "political piggy" in Hinman's blood on his wall after stabbing him to death.[4]: 35, 91–96, 99–113
| LaBianca murders | |
|---|---|
| Location | 3301 Waverly Drive Los Angeles, California |
| Date | August 10, 1969 (1969-08-10) |
Attack type | Mass Stabbing, shooting |
| Deaths | 2 |
| Victims | Leno LaBianca Rosemary LaBianca |
| Perpetrators | Tex Watson Patricia Krenwinkel Leslie Van Houten accomplices – Charles Manson Susan Atkins Clem Grogan Linda Kasabian |
| Motive | unknown |
The four murderers plus Charles Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan went for a drive the following night. Manson was allegedly displeased with the panic and flight of the victims in the previous night's murders. He told Kasabian to drive to a house at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, located next door to a home where Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year. [4]: 176–184, 204–210
According to Atkins and Kasabian, Manson disappeared up the driveway and returned to say that he had tied up the house's occupants. Then Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten went in.[4]: 176–184, 258–269 Watson claims in his autobiography that Manson went up alone, then returned to take him up to the house with him. Manson pointed out a sleeping man through a window, and the two entered through the unlocked back door.[5][10] Watson claims Manson roused the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint and had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. Rosemary was brought into the living room from the bedroom, and Watson covered the couple's heads with pillowcases which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, and Krenwinkel and Van Houten entered the house.[4]: 176–184, 258–269 [5]
Watson had complained to Manson earlier of the inadequacy of the previous night's weapons.[4]: 258–269 Watson sent the women from the kitchen to the bedroom, where Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, while he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet. The first thrust went into his throat.[5] Watson heard a scuffle in the bedroom and went in there to discover Rosemary LaBianca keeping the women at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. He stabbed her several times with the bayonet, then returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of 12 times.[5] He then carved the word "WAR" into his abdomen.[5] Watson returned to the bedroom and found Krenwinkel stabbing Rosemary with a knife from the kitchen.[5] Van Houten stabbed her approximately 16 times in the back and the exposed buttocks.[4]: 204–210, 297–300, 341–344 Van Houten claimed at trial[4]: 433 that Rosemary LaBianca was already dead during the stabbing. Evidence showed that many of the 41 stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem.[4]: 44, 206, 297, 341–42, 380, 404, 406–07, 433 Watson then cleaned off the bayonet and showered, while Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls and "Healter [sic] Skelter" on the refrigerator door, all in LaBianca's blood. She gave Leno LaBianca 14 puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach. She also planted a steak knife in his throat.[4]: 176–184, 258–269 [5]
Meanwhile, Manson drove the other three Family members who had departed Spahn with him that evening to the Venice home of the Lebanese actor Saladin Nader. Manson left them there and drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home.[4]: 176–184, 258–269 According to Kasabian, Manson wanted his followers to murder Nader in his apartment, but Kasabian claims she thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. The group abandoned the murder plan and left, but Atkins defecated in the stairwell on the way out.[4]: 270–273
In initial confessions to cellmates at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins said she killed Tate.[4]: 84–90 In later statements to her attorney, to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury, Atkins indicated Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.[4]: 163–74, 176–84
In his 1978 autobiography, Watson said that he had stabbed Tate and that Atkins had never touched her.[6] Since he was aware that the prosecutor, Bugliosi, and the jury, that had tried the other Tate–LaBianca defendants, were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified that he did not stab her.[11]
The five perpetrators – Atkins, Krenwinkel, Manson, Van Houten, and Watson – were each tried and convicted for their roles in the Tate–LaBianca murders. Originally, each defendant received a death sentence. However, in 1972, the Supreme Court of California ruled in People v. Anderson that the state's then-current death penalty laws were unconstitutional.[12] As a result, the Anderson decision spared the lives of 107[13] death row inmates in California, including Charles Manson and his four "family members".[14] Subsequently, the death sentences for each of the five perpetrators convicted in the Tate–LaBianca murders were commutedtolife in prison, which – by law – included the possibility of parole.
The Tate–LaBianca murders "profoundly shook America's perception of itself" and "effectively sounded the death knell of '60s counterculture". Additionally, the ritualistic nature of the murders laid a foundation for the rise of the Satanic panic.[1]
Some critics have claimed that it led to the proliferation of "darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America's seedy underbelly" by the movie industry, including films such as Dirty Harry (1971).[1] Film critic Erik Morse writes that the rapid recognition of Tate's murder and, soon after, the idolization of her murder, brought about a dark period of film in Hollywood, filled with "ultraviolence, gore, satanism and freakouts."[20] Morse cites Ian Cooper's 2018 book The Manson Family on Film and Television, where Cooper coins the term "Mansonsploitation", which he defines as the violent, disturbing genre that Hollywood grew fascinated in shortly following the Tate–LaBianca murders.[20][21]
Film scholar Reid Anderson believes that Tate's image has been substituted with "hyperreal" depictions of her at her death in films that have attempted to recreate the Manson family murders.[22] Aligning with Morse's description of the sudden emergence of gory film following the Manson family murders, Anderson claims that it was the "circulation of disingenuous information following the events of August 9th" that inspired Mansonsploitation.[22] Both critics agree it was the spread of misinformation directly following Tate's murder, Hollywood's near-immediate obsession with the details of her murder, and reimagined versions of Tate in Mansonsploitation films that resulted in the alteration of Tate's likeness among her audience, as they tried to process the reality of her murder by searching for the most authentic version of her last moments.[22][23]
In 1974, after leaving the DA's office, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, jointly with Curt Gentry, wrote a book about the Manson trial called Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders. The book won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best true-crime book of the year.[24] The book was twice adapted as a television film, first in 1976, then later in 2004. As of 2015[update], Helter Skelter was the bestselling true crime book in publishing history, with more than seven million copies sold.[25][24]
Several films recounted the Tate–LaBianca murders and the subsequent criminal trials:
In addition to Bugliosi's Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders (1974), these are the other books about the murders:
