Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (39 page)

Tex was frustrated. Charlie told him to bring back money; they’d come to this house because rich people lived there, and now Tate was telling him that they didn’t have any. It made Tex furious, and just then Jay Sebring groaned as he lay on the floor. Tex crouched over him and began stabbing him, slamming the knife into Sebring again and again until he finally lay still enough to convince Tex that he was dead. Tate and Folger screamed during the entire assault. When Tex was finally finished and stood up, his knife dripping blood, one of the women asked plaintively, “What are you going to do with us?” although it was obvious. Tex’s reply was blunt: “You’re all going to die.”

Folger and Tate began begging for their lives. Ever since Tex had kicked him into semiconsciousness, Voytek Frykowski had slumped
on the couch. But hearing his death sentence pronounced, he suddenly jerked upright and began tugging his hands free from the towel Susan had clumsily knotted around his wrists. Tex yelled to Susan, “Kill him,” and she tried, but Frykowski got his hands loose and grappled with her, the two of them rolling around on the floor, Frykowski wrapping his hands in Susan’s long hair and Susan blindly stabbing with her knife, sinking the blade mostly into Frykowski’s legs. He screamed as he struggled. At some point Susan lost her knife.

Out near the gate, Linda heard Frykowski’s screams clearly. Instinctively, she began walking back toward the main house, stopping just outside.

While Pat held Folger at knifepoint and Tate watched helplessly, Tex tried to help Susan finish off Frykowski. He fired a couple shots into him and battered at his head with the grip of the Buntline. Frykowski still managed to struggle to his feet and stumble out onto the lawn, with Tex in hot pursuit. Frykowski went down and Tex leaped on him, pounding and stabbing until he was still. Just steps away, Linda looked on in horror. She was close enough to the living room to see Susan, and she shouted, “Please make it stop, people are coming,” a lie but the only thing she could think of. Susan said that there was nothing she could do. Linda ran back down the driveway, climbed over the fence, and stopped down the hill where Tex had parked Johnny Swartz’s yellow ’59 Ford.

Back at the Cielo main house Folger broke away, running out on the lawn, too. Pat raced after her and tackled her. Pat stabbed Folger several times, trying to kill her and unsure of whether she had. Tex, certain that he’d finished off Frykowski, was standing nearby, so Pat called him over and said she wasn’t sure whether or not Folger was dead. Tex said he would make sure; meanwhile, Pat was to go to “the back house”—he pointed in the direction of the guest cottage—and kill whoever was there.

Pat was shaking, equally afraid to follow Tex’s order and to disobey. She compromised by walking down the back alley between the main house and guest cottage until she was out of Tex’s sight. Then she waited for a few moments and returned. She told Tex that she had looked in a window and there was no one in “the back house.” He believed her, so William Garretson lived.

Tex had stabbed Folger several more times; he wrote later that she
was, in fact, alive when he reached her, and that she muttered, “I give up, you’ve got me,” just before he delivered the fatal blow. With Folger and Frykowski dead on the lawn, and Jay Sebring lifeless on the living room floor, only Sharon Tate remained. Susan was guarding her beside the sofa. Tex and Pat returned to the living room and Tate began pleading—not for her own life, but for her unborn child’s. They could take her with them, Tate begged, and kill her after the baby was born. But Charlie hadn’t said anything about postponing murders. He wanted maximum publicity right away.
Susan held Tate while Tex stabbed her. Sharon Tate sobbed for her mother as she died.

When it was over, Tex and Susan and Pat surveyed the scene. Was it sufficiently gruesome? The nylon rope was knotted around Sebring’s and Tate’s necks, looped up over the ceiling beam between them. Out on the lawn, Frykowski’s face was mutilated almost beyond recognition, and Folger’s once white nightgown was saturated with gore. They felt that ought to be enough. Tex thought they’d been careful not to leave fingerprints or any other clues. He took Folger’s $70 and prepared to lead Susan and Pat out of the house. There were other valuables there for the taking—Sebring wore an expensive watch and there was a little cash by the side of Tate’s bed—but in the aftermath of slaughter they wanted to leave. Just before they did, Tex remembered that Charlie told them to write something witchy in blood, something that would appear to be proof that the people who’d killed Gary Hinman were still at large. Tex told Susan to do it. She didn’t want to use her bare hand, so she dipped a towel in Tate’s blood and carefully wrote “PIG” on the outside of the front door.

Tex, Susan, and Pat were all dripping with blood. Their clothes were bloody, and Tex had some on his hands. He got careless on the way out; not feeling like scaling the fence again, he pressed the button to open the gate with his bloody index finger. The three of them walked through the Cielo gate and down the hill to the yellow Ford where Linda waited.

There had been little conversation in the car as the four drove to Cielo, but on the way back to Spahn everyone talked at once. Susan told Tex that she’d lost her knife back at the house and he shouted angrily at her. Pat complained that her hand ached—while stabbing Folger, her knife frequently struck bone, and the impact hurt her hand. All of them
were angry with Linda for fleeing the scene. As he drove down Benedict Canyon Drive, Tex squirmed out of his bloody clothes and into fresh ones while Linda held the wheel. Susan and Pat removed their gory garments, too, and put on the clean clothes they’d left in the car during the murders. Linda rolled all the discarded clothes into a bundle and, on Tex’s order, tossed them out of the car and down the steep slope by the side of the road. A little further along he had her throw out the knives, too, and then the .22 Buntline. Before they tossed it, they noticed that parts of the handle had broken off, undoubtedly when Tex bashed Frykowski with it. But they decided not to go back to Cielo to retrieve the handle fragments and Susan’s knife.

After a few miles, Tex steered off Benedict Canyon onto Portola Drive, a residential side street. He parked by the curb of a house at 9870 where a hose stretched out into the yard. Tex turned on the water tap and he, Susan, and Pat clustered around the hose, splashing water on their hands and faces to rinse away splatters of blood. It was about 1
A.M
. They tried to be quiet, but the running water and their hushed chatter roused Rudolf Weber, who hurried outside to see who was in his yard at such a late hour. Tex explained that they were out walking and wanted a drink, but the parked Ford was right behind him and Weber didn’t believe it. As Weber stalked toward them, Tex, Susan, and Pat jumped back in the car. Weber tried to reach in through the open driver’s side window to rip the key from the ignition, but Tex was too quick. The car sped away, but not before Weber noted its license number—GYY 435.

When they arrived back at the entrance to Spahn Ranch, Charlie was waiting with Family member Nancy Pitman. His first question was why they were back so soon. Tex told him that it had gotten messy, but everybody at Cielo was dead. Susan, eager as always for praise, bragged to Charlie that she’d killed for him, and Charlie replied that she’d done it for herself. Then Charlie wanted to know how much money they’d gotten, and was angry that the take was just $70. They should have gone into every house on Cielo, he snarled. Charlie asked how they’d left the murder site looking—was it just like Gary Hinman’s house? Did they write witchy words? The answers didn’t satisfy him. Brusquely, he asked if any of them felt remorse. When they assured him that they didn’t, Charlie
told them to wipe off the gobbets of blood that were smeared on the inside and outside of the car. When that was done,
Charlie got into the Ford and drove back to Cielo.

Charlie entered the house and wiped surfaces to eliminate stray fingerprints. He moved some things around, hauling the two steamer trunks that had been delivered earlier in the day out into the hall, and tossed a towel over Jay Sebring’s head. He placed in plain sight a pair of glasses he found somewhere. There was a large American flag on one side of the living room. Charlie draped it theatrically over the sofa near Sharon Tate’s crumpled, bloody body. The flag prominently displayed next to a pregnant woman’s corpse would surely shock investigators and get lots of media mention. Charlie was so preoccupied with perfectly setting the scene of the slaughter that he didn’t comb the house for cash, credit cards, or other valuables. He also didn’t check the guest cottage. When he felt that everything in the main house looked just right, he returned to Spahn and went to bed. Dawn wasn’t far away.

•  •  •

A few minutes before 5
A.M
., the
Los Angeles Times
delivery boy shoved a newspaper into the mailbox outside the gate at Cielo. He noticed a cut wire dangling down from the telephone pole. Around 7:30 Seymour Kott, the closest neighbor down the hill, saw the cut wire, too, as he went out to pick up his paper.

Winifred Chapman arrived for work as usual shortly after 8
A.M
. She saw the dangling wire and thought that it might be a downed power line. But the gate opened when she pushed the button outside the fence, so she walked up the driveway, passing the white Rambler without looking inside. Her employers had overnight guests all the time and they sometimes parked haphazardly. Instead of walking around the house to the main entrance past the lawn, Chapman entered the house through a servant’s entrance in the back. The first thing she noticed was that the steamer trunks were in a different place, and then she saw blood, at first some smears on the trunks and then pools of it seemingly everywhere. Chapman looked into the living room, over the top of the couch. The front door was open, and through it she could see a body on the lawn.

She fled down the driveway. As she ran past the Rambler she looked
inside and saw another body. Neighbors heard her screaming “Murder, death, bodies, blood!” and called the police.

Two one-man patrol car units responded to a Code 2 “possible homicide” call at 9:14. A neighbor listed the people he believed lived at the hilltop house for Officer Jerry Joe DeRosa—movie director Roman Polanski and his wife, two of their friends, the property owner, Rudi Altobelli, but he was away on a trip, and a kid named William Garretson who was acting as caretaker. Mrs. Polanski was an actress named Sharon Tate.

Chapman showed DeRosa how to open the front gate; DeRosa saw the body in the Rambler but waited to go further down the driveway until fellow officer William Whisenhunt joined him. Weapons ready—DeRosa had a rifle, Whisenhunt carried a shotgun—they cautiously approached the house. As they inspected the other cars, a third cop, Robert Burbridge, arrived. The three crossed to the lawn and saw two bodies there. A window screen had been slit—that was apparently how the killer or killers entered the house. But the officers saw another cracked window without a screen, one that opened into the nursery. They raised that window and clambered inside. In what appeared to be the living room they found two more butchered bodies, a man and a woman. The corpses were tethered by nooses around their necks; the three-ply white nylon rope connecting them had been looped over a beam in the ceiling. Massive puddles of blood and smears of gore were everywhere.

There were no other bodies in the house, but the helpful neighbor had mentioned a guesthouse. As the officers eased up to the door of the cottage, they heard a dog bark and a male voice hissing, “Shhh, be quiet.” The cops kicked in the door and Altobelli’s Weimaraner attacked. Whisenhunt slammed the door on the dog’s head to trap it, and Garretson called the animal off. To the police, the nineteen-year-old seemed incoherent, perhaps from drugs. Garretson was hauled outside and marched past the bodies on the lawn. Abigail Folger was so mutilated and covered with blood that Garretson identified her as Winifred Chapman. He said Voytek Frykowski was Roman Polanski’s younger brother. Garretson swore to the officers that he’d been closed up in the guest cottage all night. He hadn’t seen or heard anything. They didn’t believe him—the guest cottage wasn’t that far from the main house, maybe a hundred
feet. The officers read Garretson his rights and arrested him for murder. DeRosa pushed him down the driveway past the Rambler—Garretson said he didn’t recognize the body in it—and to the closed gate. DeRosa pushed the button with his finger, wiping away the bloody fingerprint carelessly left there by Tex Watson just hours earlier. DeRosa then called in to report five homicides and a suspect in custody at the Cielo address. Print reporters and TV crews in the city routinely listened to police band radio, and this announcement of a mass murder roused them into immediate action. Within minutes, members of the media began arriving at the scene, eventually so many that their cars and mobile production trucks lined the narrow road all the way to the bottom of the steep hill.

While the media clamored for information, more officers and LAPD investigative personnel streamed through the gate and into the house. They found various bits of possible evidence—the eyeglasses, scattered fingerprints, three pieces of a broken gun grip. There were bloody footprints all over the house, but some of these had been tracked in by the police. Forensic chemist Joe Granado took forty-five blood samples from various drying pools but missed many more.

At noon William Tennant, Polanski’s agent, arrived and identified everyone except the body in the Rambler. A police sergeant finally made a statement to the media hovering just outside the gate: “It’s like a battlefield up there.” The families of the four identified victims were notified. Steve Parent’s mother and father were left to spend the day wondering why their always reliable son hadn’t come home the night before or even bothered to call to say where he was. Amid the hubbub at the main house no one thought to check the plates on the Rambler.

The first wire bulletins flashed across the country: “Five Slain in Bel Air.”