Actress Sharon Tate was murdered, along with four other people, by the Manson family clan when she was just weeks away from giving birth. Different fables arose around the mysterious crime, which attributed the motivation to drugs, orgies, and satanic rites of the group of fatalities
Chance has something macabre. To think, for example, that the actress Sharon Tate could survive the siege of some hippies if they had been better informed, she only certifies how capricious fate is. And her unforeseen. Hollywood still remembers that August 9, 1969. five corpses appeared at 10050 Cielo Drive. Tate, wife of Roman Polanski and eight and a half months pregnant; her ex-boyfriend, hairdresser Jay Sebring; actor Wojtek Frykowski; her girlfriend, wealthy heiress Abigail Folger, and young Steven Parent were murdered by the Charles Manson "family."
Both investigators and Polanski believe that the bloody massacre targeted Terry Melcher and his girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, former owners of the house where Polanski and his wife lived, for refusing to record an album "with the mediocre compositions » by Manson, as the Polish filmmaker explains in his memoirs. The probable mistake, however, did not prevent the massacre.
Tate, who was pleading for her son's life, was stabbed sixteen times, five of which would have been fatal on their own, as evidenced by the forensic report. "Sharon looked like a dummy, she begged and begged and begged and asked, and I got sick of hearing her, so I stabbed her," Susan Atkins, the person in charge of ending the actress's life, declared before the judge without any remorse.
Another banal coincidence was the filming of "The Day of the Dolphin" in London, which led to continuous delays in Polanski's return to Los Angeles. Overwhelmed with guilt, he confesses in his autobiography, now republished by Malpaso: "I still think that if I had been there when the group made up of three women and a man climbed the fence and broke into the house, Frykowski and I would have been able to confront each other." them and throw them out between the two of them. Frykowski's multiple injuries showed that he had put up a strong resistance.
The film industry's fear of the tragic event contributed to the spread of all kinds of infamy in which, in the absence of victims -it took about three months to find those responsible for the macabre murder-, the dead were blamed. A series of publications, each one more morbid, contributed to this.
They blamed the deceased for tempting fate with their wild parties, their flirtation with black magic, and their submission to drugs. But in reality, it was all an excuse: Hollywood, accustomed to dealing with all kinds of plots in its films, was overwhelmed by the events that occurred off the screen and feared that it would be confirmed that a murderer, or several, were on the loose in Los Angeles.
That August 9, Winny Chapman, the house cleaning woman, raised the alarm after discovering the bodies at eight in the morning. The police had already sealed off the compound when Sandy Tennant, who spoke daily with Sharon Tate, warned her husband Bill of her that something strange was going on. He approached Cielo Drive and identified the bodies of Tate, Wojtek, Jay, and Gibby. Later, Bill "got dizzy and threw up over the garden fence," says Roman Polanski, who reproduces the conversation in which he learned the news.
"There's been a disaster in the house," Bill said.
"What house?" Polanski asked from London.
"In yours," Bill answered, "Sharon is dead." Wojtek is dead, and so are Gibby and Jay. They have all died.
"No, no, no," the Polish director repeated, unable to assimilate the news. "What has happened?"
"Roman, they've been murdered," he managed to say to his friend.
Sedated for days by a Paramount doctor, Polanski drifted. He was lost, not fully aware of what had happened. "He constantly experienced the feeling that Sharon had not died, that everything was a nightmare and that, suddenly, she was going to appear," the filmmaker writes in his memoirs.
Gripped by the terror of the mass murder, Hollywood came down to earth and realized that their star status didn't make them any less vulnerable. Despite the latent fear, all the stars attended the funeral. Or almost. "The only one absent was Steve McQueen, one of Sharon's oldest friends. I will never forgive him, "acknowledges Polanski, who admits his confusion in the homily, unable to remember anything during the ceremony other than the scar his wife had on her left knee. A scar he would never see again.
