Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (7 page)

I
n 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.

T
he 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.

T
welve 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.

F
rom 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.

I
n 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.”

A
bout 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.”

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.

A
t 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
.

Sharon Marie Polanski, 10050 Cielo Drive, female Caucasian, 26 years, 5-3, 135 pounds, blond hair, hazel eyes. Victim’s occupation, actress…

A
utopsy 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.

M
uch 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.
*
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.