Anatomy Of A Mass Murder In Hollywood
Night Of Horror
August 17, 1969
Los Angeles Times
By Dial Torgerson
Times Staff Writer
Cielo Drive ends in a cul-de-sac. The wire gate blocks the road. Beyond it
lies the home which Sharon Tate shared with her husband, Roman Polanski.
To the side of the road, on a waste high pipe, is a silver button.
On the night of August 8-9, someone pressed that silver button. The gate
swung open electronically. The home at 10050 Cielo Drive, secluded and
vulnerable, was open-ready to become a killing ground.
By dawn, five persons lay dead-stabbed and shot in a mass murder of
frightening barbarity.
In the latest development, it was learned Saturday that Los Angeles police
had requested the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver to watch for four
suspected narcotics violators. It is believed that these four persons are wanted
for questioning in the murders.
"We have been asked to locate four persons who may be traveling in Canada."
And RCMP spokesman told the times. "But we will not give out information that
might jeopardize the Los Angeles investigation."
Police believe that whoever committed the crime knew the street, the silver
button, the home, the people. There was something at the rustic, red-and- yellow
home which attracted a killer.
Motive A Mystery
Was it something in the home-or was it the people who died there? What
motive, police are seeking to learn, would a killer (or killers) having
murdering these five people?
1 - Sharon Tate.
She was 26, a few weeks from the birth of her first child. She was strikingly
beautiful, yet insecure, unsure, often lonely. She and her husband, director
Polanski, were called the members of the jet set, the "beautiful people";
neighbors called them "rich hippies" and said of the scene of the crime: "Live
freaky, die freaky."
2 - Jay Sebring.
Handsome, slight, 35, he was a men's hairdresser who proved his masculinity by
becoming one of Hollywood's best karate experts. Once engaged to Miss Tate, he
had become a friend of Polanski's too. In his car were marijuana and pills.
3 - Voyteck Frykowski.
Polish émigré, he was 37, tall, handsome, but powerful man. Once an assistant on
Polanski's films, he had apparently squandered his inherited wealth, and had
become a hangar-on in the Tate-Polanski circle. Like others in it, he smoked
marijuana; some said he also use cocaine.
4 - Abigail Folger.
Heiress to the Folger coffee family, she was 26 and pretty, less attractive than
the starlets spinning in and out of the Tate-Polanski orbit. "Gibby" Folger, an
honor graduate from Radcliff College, came to Los Angeles to do social work.
But, according to an informant being guarded by the police, she became the
mistress of Frykowski, financed his drug habit, and became increasingly
fascinated with his study of black magic.
5 - Steven Parent.
Two weeks before the murders, 18-year old Steven Parent of El Monte gave a ride
to William E. Garretson, caretaker of the the Tate-Polanski home, and Garretson
asked him to come by. Parent later did-and died seated in his car before he
could leave.
Police said the murders were committed by someone who planned the crime,
cutting the telephone lines beside the gate-opening button before entering the
property.
One theory is that the killer was after one of the victims because of a
dispute over narcotics. A man who suggested this and says he thinks he knows the
killer or killers-and provided names-has been under police guard for a week.
And, at least two informants-one now under police protection- told police the
target of the killer must have been Frykowski and possibly Miss Folger. The
reason: narcotics.
But there were reports that others may have lured a homicidal visitor to the
end of Cielo Drive. Among the reports:
Sebring, it was said was also mixed up in narcotics; there were the drugs in
his car, there was a report that he and Frykowski had recently beaten up a dope
pusher. One source said he had large gambling debts. Authorities investigated
the reports; friends denied them. Detectives weren't saying what they learned.
Members of the Tate-Polanski crowd had picked up tough strangers and brought
them to the home for the fun and games homosexuals sometimes call "rough trade"
- the kind of thing which has ended often, in brutal murders when the games get
outs of hand.
Garretson, 19 hired as caretaker by the absentee owner, often hitchhiked
himself. He invited strangers to the home, too, to his quarters in a guest house
just behind the swimming pool. Several had police records. Could someone he
brought there have returned with robbery in mind?
