In the middle of the night, Charles Manson's deranged gang broke in.
The police officers entered the property at 10050 Cielo Drive not knowing what was in store for them. They went through the gate and approached a car parked in the middle of the park. Through the window they saw a young man sprawled out in front, one arm hanging from the wheel. Sharon Tate had been shot several times. There was so much blood that it was difficult to determine what color the upholstery was.
The policemen continued advancing towards the house. Before, something caught their attention and they deviated a few steps. A brightly colored shirt glittered on the grass. It belonged to a man who was also dead. The grass in that sector was no longer green. The stab wounds he had received, dozens of them, had caused the blood to form a small red pool under his body.
A few meters away, face down, another lifeless body. In this case of a woman. All of them, apart from the shots and the stab wounds, had many blows. No one tried to check if they were still breathing. It was useless. No one could have survived such violence.
The men stopped at the front door of the house. His hands were shaking and could barely hold the service weapons. Pigs. pigs. That was written on the front door. The dripping letters. The ink had been blood. They did not know what they could find in those rooms. It was hard for them to imagine anything worse than what they had already seen.
In the living room, a woman on her side, in a fetal position, barely covered in a flowered bikini. The flowers in the print and the cheerful colors made the scene more macabre. When they turned to see her from the other side, they realized that the woman with a rope around her neck and riddled with multiple stab wounds was well advanced in pregnancy.
The enormous belly ended up taking the breath away from the researchers who continued advancing without thinking, almost without will, and without being alert to a possible attack. They were zombies walking through a landscape of death. Upon reaching the main room they found another corpse, the last one. Several bullets and stab wounds. The blood on the floor, the padding, in vast stains on the walls. Nausea again. Nobody gets used to so much horror.
The two men, the only ones alive in the middle of that horror festival, left the house. To get to his car and signal for reinforcements to be sent, one of them, Agent De Roza, pressed the button covered in blood that allowed the automatic entrance gate to be opened. There, obsessed by the sight, intoxicated by the stench of death, he left his fingerprints.
When a superior questioned his attitude, he told him that he had disabled a very important test, and he asked why he had done it.
De Rozas only managed to respond: "I had to get out of there."
Joan Didion recalls in her long article The White Album how she heard the news and in a paragraph summarizes the climate at the time: “On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's pool in Beverly Hills when she was called by a friend who had just found out about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. Over the next hour, the phone rang many times. Those first reports were confused and contradictory. One caller was talking about hoods and the next was about chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. People imagined black masses and chalked it up to bad acid trips. I remember very clearly all the misinformation from that day, and I also remember something else, and I wish I didn't remember it: I remember that no one was surprised.
The autopsy determined that Sharon Tate had received 16 stab wounds, five of which alone were fatal. She was 25 years old. In two weeks she was going to give birth.
