Helter Skelter

Bugliosi begins by recounting that five people were murdered between midnight and 3 o’clock in the morning on Saturday, August 9, 1969, at 10050 Cielo Drive, a house near the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Film director Roman Polanski was renting the house from talent manager Rudi Altobelli. Because the house was isolated, there were few witnesses to the murder. The nearest neighbors later reported gunshots and screams, but the incident was not reported at the time.

At 8 o’clock that morning, housekeeper Winnifred Chapman discovered the bodies of Sharon Tate (age 26), Jay Sebring (age 35), Abigail Folger (age 25), Voytek Frykowski (age 32), and Steven Parent (age 18). Tate was a rising actress married to Roman Polanski. She was eight months pregnant. Sebring was a well-known hair stylist and Tate’s former lover. Frykowski was a friend of Polanski who was dating Folger, a social worker and heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. She discovered Tate and Sebring in the house and the other two in the yard. When she attempted to call the police, she found the line dead. On her way to contact the nearest neighbor, Chapman discovered the body of Parent in a white rambler. Parent was a teenager with no connection to the other four victims. The terrified housekeeper was noted as yelling “Murder, death, bodies, blood!” (26) as she banged on the neighbor’s door.

Within the next two hours, representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department arrived to survey the house. They discovered an extraordinary crime scene. Initial forensic evidence showed that Parent had been shot four times with a .22 pistol. Sebring was stabbed seven times and shot. The pregnant Tate had been stabbed 16 times. Both were tied together with a length of nylon rope that had been slung across a ceiling beam. Folger and Frykowski evidently had attempted to escape, each receiving an extraordinary 28 and 51 stab wounds, respectively. The killers had cut four phone wires, stole little of value, and had scrawled the word “PIG” in blood on the porch-leading door.

There were problems with the way the crime scene was handled. The officers reported incompatible times of arrival and tracked blood through the crime scene. Small pieces of evidence moved from one place to another. According to Bugliosi, Forensic chemist Joe Granado took incomplete blood samples and ran subtypes on only 21 of the 45 he took. The officers found caretaker William Garretson (age 19) sleeping in the secluded guest house behind 10050 Cielo Drive. Initially, they treated him like a suspect. According to his testimony, Garretson said “the officers knocked him down, handcuffed him, yanked him to his feet, dragged him outside onto the lawn, then knocked him down again” (32).

On Sunday, August 10, several miles away at 3301 Waverly Drive, the killers murdered Rosemary and Leno LaBianca (ages 38 and 44, respectively). Friends and family members discovered them at 9:30 p.m., though they had probably been murdered sometime between 2 o’clock in the morning and dawn. The scene was equal in sadism to the scene a night earlier. The words “DEATH TO PIGS,” “RISE,” and the misspelled “HEALTER SKELTER” (a reference to a Beatles song) were written on flat surfaces in the couple’s home. Leno had a knife and fork sticking out of his body. Both had been stabbed repeatedly. A large team headed by Lieutenant Paul LePage headed the LaBianca investigation. As with the night before, evidence was contaminated by people investigating the scene. Granado took no subtypes of the blood taken from the scene in his investigation. 

Despite the crime scene similarities, no connection was made immediately between the two murder sprees. The detectives investigating the Tate scene found evidence of drug usage, and so were exploring those connections. They were also following up with Garretson, who was being held in custody. The separate investigative teams “had one thing in common, though that similarity widened the distance between them. Both were operating on a basic assumption: in nearly 90 percent of all homicides the victim knows his killer,” writes Bugliosi (80).

Three days later, William Garrettson, who claims to have been unaware of what was happening 500 yards away on the night of the murders, was released on lack of evidence. It was Garretson whom Parent was visiting that day in an attempt to sell him a clock radio. The press latched onto the story, and celebrities across Los Angeles feared they would be targeted next. Narrowing suspects became difficult, as so much crime scene evidence had been leaked to the press. A reward of $25,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killers by the Polanski family further diluted the pool of potential witnesses. As months passed, the detectives filed inconclusive reports, and little new evidence surfaced.