Beloved Wife of Roman

Sharon Tate Polanski

1943 1969

Paul Richard Polanski

Their Baby

Wednesday was a day of funerals. More than 150 persons attended Sharon Tate’s last rites at Holy Cross Cemetery. Among those present were Kirk Douglas, Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Lee Marvin, Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, John and Michelle Phillips. Roman Polanski, wearing dark glasses and accompanied by his doctor, broke down several times during the ceremony, as did Sharon’s parents and her two young sisters, Patricia and Deborah.

Many of the same people, including Polanski, later attended the services for Jay Sebring, at Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, Forest Lawn. Additional celebrities included Paul Newman, Henry and Peter Fonda, Alex Cord, and George Hamilton, all former Sebring clients.

There were fewer people, and fewer flashbulbs, as, across the city, six of his high-school classmates carried Steven Parent’s body from the small El Monte church where his services had taken place.

Abigail Folger was buried near where she had grown up in Northern California on the San Francisco Peninsula, following a requiem mass in Our Lady of the Wayside Church, which had been built by her grandparents.

Voytek Frykowski’s body remained in Los Angeles until relatives in Poland could arrange for it to be returned there for burial.

While the Tate victims were being interred, the police were attempting to re-create their lives, in particular their last day.

Friday, August 8.

About 8 A.M. Mrs. Chapman arrived at Cielo. She did what dishes there were, then commenced her regular household chores.

About 8:30 Frank Guerrero arrived, to paint the room at the north end of the residence. This was to be the nursery. Before starting, Guerrero removed the screens from the windows.

At 11 A.M. Roman Polanski called from London. Mrs. Chapman overheard Sharon’s side of the conversation. Sharon was worried that Roman wouldn’t be home in time for his birthday, August 18. He apparently assured her that he would be back on August 12 as planned, as Sharon later told Mrs. Chapman this. Sharon informed Roman that she had enrolled him in a course for expectant fathers.

Sharon received several other calls, one of them having to do with a neighbor’s kitten that had strayed onto the property; Sharon had been feeding it with an eyedropper. When Terry Melcher had moved out, he’d left behind a number of cats, Sharon promising to look after them. They had since multiplied, and Sharon was caring for all twenty-six, plus two dogs, hers and Abigail’s.

Most of the day Sharon wore only bikini panties and a bra. This, according to Mrs. Chapman, was her usual at-home attire in hot weather.

Shortly before noon Mrs. Chapman, noticing that there were paw prints and dog splatters on the front door, washed down the whole exterior with vinegar and water. A small detail, which later would become extremely important.

Steven Parent had lunch at his home in El Monte. Before returning to work at the plumbing supply company, he asked his mother if she would lay out clean clothes so he could make a quick change before going to his second job, at the stereo shop, later that afternoon.

About 12:30 two of Sharon’s friends, Joanna Pettet (Mrs. Alex Cord)[12]and Barbara Lewis, arrived at Cielo for lunch. Mrs. Chapman served them. It was all small talk, the women would later recall, mostly about the expected baby. Sharon showed the two women the nursery, and introduced them to Guerrero.

About 1 P.M. Sandy Tennant called Sharon. As previously noted, Sharon told her she wasn’t planning a party that evening, but did invite her to drop by, an invitation Sandy declined.

(If one believed all the subsequent talk, half of Hollywood was invited to 10050 Cielo Drive for a party that night, and, at the last minute, changed their minds. According to Winifred Chapman, Sandy Tennant, Debbie Tate, and others close to Sharon, there was no party that night, nor was one ever planned. But LAPD probably spent a hundred man-hours attempting to locate people who allegedly attended the non-event.)

Having finished the first coat of paint, Guerrero left about 1:30. He didn’t replace the screens, since he intended to return Monday to give the room a final coat. The police later concluded the killer(s) either didn’t notice they were off or feared entering a freshly painted room.

About 2 P.M. Abigail purchased a bicycle from a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, arranging for it to be delivered later that afternoon. About the same time David Martinez, one of Altobelli’s two gardeners, arrived at 10050 Cielo and began work. Voytek and Abigail arrived not long after this, joining Sharon and her guests for a late lunch.

About 3 P.M. the second gardener, Tom Vargas, arrived. As he came in the gate, Abigail was driving out in her Camaro. Five minutes later Voytek also left, driving the Firebird.

Joanna Pettet and Barbara Lewis departed about 3:30.

At about that same time Sebring’s butler, Amos Russell, served Jay and his current female companion coffee in bed.[13]About 3:45 Jay called Sharon, apparently telling her he would be over earlier than expected. He later called his secretary, to pick up his messages, and John Madden, to discuss his visit to the San Francisco salon the next day. He didn’t mention to either his plans for that evening, but he did tell Madden he had spent the day hard at work on a crest for the new franchise shops.

Just after Sebring called Sharon, Mrs. Chapman told her she had finished her work and was leaving for the day. Since it was so hot in the city, Sharon asked her if she would like to stay over. Mrs. Chapman declined. It was undoubtedly the most important decision she ever made.

David Martinez was just leaving, and he gave Mrs. Chapman a ride to the bus stop. Vargas remained behind, completing his work. While gardening near the house, he noticed Sharon asleep on the bed in her room. When a deliveryman from the Air Dispatch Company arrived with the two blue steamer trunks, Vargas, not wishing to disturb Mrs. Polanski, signed for them. The time, 4:30 P.M., was noted on the receipt. The trunks contained Sharon’s clothing, which Roman had shipped from London.

Abigail kept her 4:30 appointment with Dr. Flicker.

Before Vargas left, about 4:45, he went back to the guest house and asked Garretson if he would do some watering over the weekend, as the weather was extremely hot and dry.

Across the city, in El Monte, Steven Parent hurried home, changed clothes, waved to his mother, and was off to his second job.

Between 5:30 and 6 P.M. Mrs. Terry Kay was backing out of her driveway at 9845 Easton Drive when she observed Jay Sebring driving down the road in his Porsche, seemingly in a hurry. Perhaps because her car was blocking his progress, he did not wave in his usual genial manner.

Sometime between 6 and 6:30 P.M. Sharon’s thirteen-year-old sister Debbie called her, asking if she could drop by that evening with some friends. Sharon, who tired easily because of her advanced pregnancy, suggested they make it another time.

Between 7:30 and 8 P.M. Dennis Hurst arrived at the Cielo address to deliver the bicycle Abigail had purchased in his father’s shop earlier that day. Sebring (whom Hurst later identified from photographs) answered the door. Hurst saw no one else and observed nothing suspicious.

Between 9:45 and 10 P.M. John Del Gaudio, manager of the El Coyote Restaurant on Beverly Boulevard, noted Jay Sebring’s name on the waiting list for dinner: party of four. Del Gaudio didn’t actually see Sebring or the others, and it is probable that he was off on the time, as waitress Kathy Palmer, who served the four, recalled they waited in the bar fifteen to twenty minutes before a table was available, then, after finishing dinner, left about 9:45 or 10. Shown photographs, she was unable to positively identify Sebring, Tate, Frykowski, or Folger.

If Abigail was along, they must have left the restaurant before ten, as it was about this time that Mrs. Folger called the Cielo number and talked to her, confirming that she planned to take the 10 A.M. United flight to San Francisco the next morning. Mrs. Folger told the police that “Abigail did not express any alarm or anxiety as to her personal safety or the situation at the Polanski house.”

A number of people reported seeing Sharon and/or Jay at the Candy Store, the Factory, the Daisy, or various other clubs that night. None of the reports checked out. Several persons claimed to have talked by phone with one or another of the victims between 10 P.M. and midnight. When questioned, they suddenly changed their stories, or told them in such a way that the police concluded they were either confused or lying.

About 11 P.M. Steve Parent stopped at Dales Market in El Monte and asked his friend John LeFebure if he wanted to go for a ride. Parent had been dating John’s younger sister Jean. John suggested they make it another night.

About forty-five minutes later Steve Parent arrived at the Cielo address, hoping to sell William Garretson a clock radio. Parent left the guest house about 12:15 A.M. He got as far as his Rambler.

T he police also interviewed a number of other girls rumored to have been with Sebring on the evening of August 8.

“Ex-girl friend of Sebring, was supposed to have been with him on 8-8-69–not so—last slept with him 7-5-69. Cooperative, knew he used ‘C’—she does not…”

“…dated him steady for three months…knew nothing of his way-out bedroom activities…”

“…was to go to a party at Cielo that night, but went to a movie instead…”

It was no small assignment, considering the number of girls the stylist had dated, yet none of the detectives was heard to complain. It wasn’t every day they got the chance to talk to starlets, models, a Playboy centerfold, even a dancer in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.

T here was another barometer to the fear: the difficulty the police had in locating people. To have suddenly moved a few days after a crime would, in ordinary circumstances, be considered suspicious. But not in this case. From a not untypical report: “Asked why she had moved right after the murders, she replied that she wasn’t sure why, that like everyone else in Hollywood she was just afraid…”

AUGUST 16–30, 1969

Though the police told the press there had been “no new developments,” there were some that went unreported. After testing them for blood, Sergeant Joe Granado gave the three pieces of gun grip to Sergeant William Lee of the Firearms and Explosives Unit of SID. Lee didn’t even have to consult his manuals; one look and he knew the grip was from a Hi Standard gun. He called Ed Lomax, product manager for the firm that owns Hi Standard, and arranged to meet him at the Police Academy. Lomax also made a quick ID. “Only one gun has a grip like that,” he told Lee, “the Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver.” Popularly known as the “Buntline Special”—patterned after a pair of revolvers Western author Ned Buntline had made for Marshal Wyatt Earp—the gun had the following specifications: capacity 9 shots, barrel 9½ inches, over-all length 15 inches, walnut grips, blue finish, weight 35 ounces, suggested retail price $69.95. It was, Lomax said, “rather a unique revolver”; introduced in April 1967, only 2,700 had been manufactured with this type grip.

Lee obtained from Lomax a list of stores where the gun had been sold, plus a photograph of the model, and LAPD began preparing a flyer which they planned to send to every police department in the United States and Canada.

A few days after the Lee-Lomax meeting, SID criminalist DeWayne Wolfer went to 10050 Cielo to conduct sound tests to see whether he could verify, or disprove, Garretson’s claim that he had heard neither screams nor gunshots.

Using a general level sound meter and a .22 caliber revolver, and duplicating as closely as possible the conditions that existed on the night of the murders, Wolfer and an assistant proved (1) that if Garretson was inside the guest house as he claimed, he couldn’t possibly have heard the shots that killed Steven Parent; and (2) that with the stereo on, with the volume at either 4 or 5, he couldn’t have heard either screams or gunshots coming from in front of or inside the main residence.[14]The tests supported Garretson’s story that he did not hear any shots that night.

Yet despite Wolfer’s scientific findings, there were those at LAPD who still felt that Garretson must have heard something. It was almost as if he had been such a good suspect they were reluctant to admit him blameless. In a summary report on the case made up at the end of August, the Tate detectives observed: “In the opinion of the investigating officers and by scientific research by SID, it is highly unlikely that Garretson was not aware of the screams, gunshots and other turmoil that would result from a multiple homicide such as took place in his near proximity. These findings, however, did not absolutely preclude the fact that Garretson did not hear or see any of the events connected with the homicides.”

T he evening of Saturday, August 16, Roman Polanski was interviewed for several hours by LAPD. The following day he returned to 10050 Cielo Drive for the first time since the murders. He was accompanied by a writer and a photographer for Life and Peter Hurkos, the well-known psychic, who had been hired by friends of Jay Sebring to make a “reading” at the scene.

As Polanski identified himself and drove through the gate, the premises still being secured by LAPD, he commented bitterly to Thomas Thompson, the Life writer and a long-time acquaintance, “This must be the world-famous orgy house.” Thompson asked him how long Gibby and Voytek had been staying there. “Too long, I guess,” he answered.

The blue bedsheet that had earlier covered Abigail Folger was still on the lawn. The bloody lettering on the door had faded, but the three letters were still decipherable. The havoc inside seemed to take him aback for a minute, as did the dark stains in the entryway, and, once inside the living room, the even larger ones in front of the couch. Polanski climbed the ladder to the loft, found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present. On climbing back down, he walked from room to room, here and there touching things as if he could conjure up the past. The pillows were still bunched up in the center of the bed, as they had been that morning. They were always that way when he was gone, he told Thompson, adding simply, “She hugged them instead of me.” He lingered a long time at the armoire where, in anticipation, Sharon had kept the baby things.

The Life photographer took a number of Polaroid shots first, to check lighting, placement, angles. Usually these are thrown away after the regular pictures are taken, but Hurkos asked if he might have several of them, to aid in his “impressions,” and they were given to him, a gesture the photographer, and Life, would very soon regret.

As Polanski looked at objects once familiar, now turned grotesque, he kept asking, “Why?” He posed outside the front door, looking as lost and confused as if he had stepped onto one of his own sets to discover everything immutably and grossly changed.

Hurkos later told the press: “Three men killed Sharon Tate and the other four—and I know who they are. I have identified the killers to the police and told them that these men must be stopped soon. Otherwise they will kill again.” The killers, he added, were friends of Sharon Tate, turned into “frenzied homicidal maniacs” by massive doses of LSD. The killings, he was quoted as saying, erupted during a black magic ritual known as “goona goona,” its suddenness catching the victims unawares.

If Hurkos did identify the three men to LAPD, no one bothered to make a report on it. All publicity to the contrary notwithstanding, those in law enforcement have a standard procedure for handling such “information”: listen politely, then forget it. Being inadmissible as evidence, it is valueless.

Also skeptical of Hurkos’ explanation was Roman Polanski. He would return to the house several times over the next few days, as if looking for the answer no one else had been able to give him.

T here was an interesting juxtaposition of stories on the B, or lead local news, page of the Los Angeles Times that Sunday.

The big story, Tate, commandeered the top spot, with its headline, “ANATOMY OF A MASS/MURDER IN HOLLYWOOD.”

Below it was a smaller story, its one-column head reading, “LA BIANCA COUPLE,/VICTIMS OF SLAYER,/GIVEN FINAL RITES.”

To the left of the Tate story, and just above an artist’s drawing of the Tate premises, was a much briefer, seemingly unrelated item, chosen, one suspected, because it was small enough to fit the space. Its headline read, “POLICE RAID RANCH,/ARREST 26 SUSPECTS/IN AUTO THEFT RING.”

It began: “Twenty-six persons living in an abandoned Western movie set on an isolated Chatsworth ranch were arrested in a daybreak raid by sheriff’s deputies Saturday as suspects in a major auto theft ring.”

According to deputies, the group had been stealing Volkswagens, then converting them into dune buggies. The story, which did not contain the names of any of those arrested but did mention that a sizable arsenal of weapons had been seized, concluded: “The ranch is owned by George Spahn, a blind, 80-year-old semi-invalid. It is located in the Simi Hills at 12000 Santa Susana Pass Road. Deputies said Spahn, who lives alone in a house on the ranch, apparently knew there were people living on the set but was unaware of their activity. They said he couldn’t get around and he was afraid of them.”

It was a minor story, and didn’t even rate a follow-up when, a few days later, all the suspects were released, it being discovered they had been arrested on a misdated warrant.

F ollowing a report that Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones were in Canada, LAPD sent the Royal Canadian Mounted Police a “want” on the four men; RCMP broadcast it; alert reporters picked it up; and within hours the news media in the United States were heralding “a break in the Tate case.”

Although LAPD denied that the four men were suspects, saying they were only wanted for questioning, the impression remained that arrests were imminent. There were phone calls, among them one from Madigan, another from Jones.

Jones was in Jamaica, and said he would fly back voluntarily if the police wished to talk to him. They admitted they did. Madigan showed up at Parker Center with his attorney. He cooperated fully, agreeing to answer any questions except those which might tend to involve him in the use or sale of narcotics. He admitted having visited Frykowski at the Cielo residence twice during the week before the murders, so it was possible his prints were there. On the night of the murders, Madigan said, he had attended a party given by an airline stewardess who lived in the apartment below his. He had left about 2 or 3 A.M. This was later verified by LAPD, which also checked his prints against the unmatched latents found at the Cielo address, without success.

Madigan was given a polygraph, and passed, as did Jones, when he arrived from Jamaica. Jones said that he and Wilson had been in Jamaica from July 12 to August 17, at which time he had flown to Los Angeles and Wilson had flown to Toronto. Asked why they had gone to Jamaica, he said they were “making a movie about marijuana.” Jones’ alibi would have to be checked out, but after his polygraph, and a negative print check, he ceased to be a good suspect.

This left Herb Wilson and Jeffrey Pickett, nicknamed Pic. By this time LAPD knew where both men were.

T he publicity had been bad. There was no disputing that. As Steven Roberts, Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times, later put it, “All the stories had a common thread—that somehow the victims had brought the murders on themselves…The attitude was summed up in the epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”

Given Roman Polanski’s affinity for the macabre; rumors of Sebring’s sexual peculiarities; the presence of both Miss Tate and her former lover at the death scene while her husband was away; the “anything goes” image of the Hollywood jet set; drugs; and the sudden clamp on police leaks, almost any kind of plot could be fashioned, and was. Sharon Tate was called everything from “the queen of the Hollywood orgy scene” to “a dabbler in satanic arts.” Polanski himself was not spared. In the same newspaper a reader could find one columnist saying the director was so grief-stricken he could not speak, while a second had him night-clubbing with a bevy of airline stewardesses. If he wasn’t personally responsible for the murders, more than one paper implied, he must know who committed them.

From a national news weekly:

“Sharon’s body was found nude, not clad in bikini pants and a bra as had first been reported…Sebring was wearing only the torn remnants of a pair of boxer shorts…Frykowski’s trousers were down to his ankles…Both Sebring and Tate had X’s carved on their bodies…One of Miss Tate’s breasts had been cut off, apparently as the result of indiscriminate slashing…Sebring had been sexually mutilated…” The rest was equally accurate: “No fingerprints were found anywhere…no drug traces were found in any of the five bodies…” And so on.

Though it read like something from the old Confidential , the article had appeared in Time , its writer apparently having some tall explaining to do when his editors became aware of his imaginative embellishments.

Angered by “a multitude of slanders,” Roman Polanski called a press conference on August 19, where he castigated newsmen who “for a selfish reason” wrote “horrible things about my wife.” There had been no marital rift, he reiterated; no dope; no orgies. His wife had been “beautiful” and “a good person,” and “the last few years I spent with her were the only time of true happiness in my life…”

Some of the reporters were less than sympathetic to Polanski’s complaints about publicity, having just learned that he had permitted Life to take exclusive photos of the murder scene.

Not quite “exclusive.” Before the magazine reached the stands, several of the Polaroid prints appeared in the Hollywood Citizen News .

Life had been scooped, by its own photographs.

There were some things Polanski did not tell the press, or even his closest friends. One was that he had agreed to be polygraphed by the Los Angeles Police Department.

P olanski’s polygraph examination was conducted by Lieutenant Earl Deemer at Parker Center.

Q. “Mind if I call you Roman? My name is Earl.”

A. “Sure…I will lie one or two times during it, and I will tell you after, O.K.?”

Q. “Well—all right…”

Deemer asked Roman how he first met his wife.

Polanski sighed, then slowly began talking. “I first met Sharon four years ago at some kind of party Marty Ransohoff—a terrible Hollywood producer—had. The guy who makes ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ and all kinds of shit. But he seduced me with his talk about art, and I contracted with him to do this film, a spoof on the vampires, you know.

“And I met Sharon at the party. She was doing another film for him in London at the time. Staying in London alone. Ransohoff said, ‘Wait until you see our leading lady, Sharon Tate!’

“I thought she was quite pretty. But I wasn’t at that time very impressed. But then I saw her again. I took her out. We talked a lot, you know. At that time I was really swinging. All I was interested in was to fuck a girl and move on. I had a very bad marriage, you know. Years before. Not bad, it was beautiful, but my wife dumped me, so I was really feeling great, because I was a success with women and I just like fucking around. I was a swinger, uh?

“So I met her a couple of more times. I knew she was with Jay. Then [Ransohoff] wanted me to use her in the film. And I made tests with her.

“Once before I wanted to take her out, and she was being difficult, wanting to go out, not wanting to go out, so I said, ‘Fuck you,’ and I hung up. Probably that was the beginning of everything, you know.”

Q. “You sweet-talked her.”

A. “Right. She got intrigued by me. And I really played it cool, and it took me long dating before—And then I started seeing that she liked me.

“I remember I spent a night—I lost a key—and I spent a night in her house in the same bed, you know. And I knew there was no question of making love with her. That’s the type of girl she was.

“I mean, that rarely happens to me!

“And then we went on location—it was about two or three months later. When we were on location shooting the film, I asked her, ‘Would you like to make love with me?’ and she said, very sweetly, ‘Yes.’ And then for the first time I was somewhat touched by her, you know. And we started sleeping regularly together. And she was so sweet and so lovely that I didn’t believe it, you know. I’d had bad experiences and I didn’t believe that people like that existed, and I was waiting a long time for her to show the color, right?

“But she was beautiful , without this phoniness. She was fantastic. She loved me. I was living in a different house. I didn’t want her to come to my house. And she would say, ‘I don’t want to smother you. I only want to be with you,’ etc. And I said, ‘You know how I am; I screw around.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to change you.’ She was ready to do everything, just to be with me.

She was a fucking angel . She was a unique character, who I’ll never meet again in my life.”

Deemer asked about his first meeting with Sebring. It had occurred in a London restaurant, Polanski said, describing how nervous he had been, and how Jay had broken the ice by saying, “I dig you, man. I dig you.” More important, “he seemed happy to see Sharon happy.” Roman had remained slightly uncomfortable through their next several meetings. “But when I came to Los Angeles, started living here, he came to our parties, etc. And I started liking Jay very very much. He was a very sweet person. Oh, I know of his hangups. He liked to whip-tie girls. Sharon told me about it. He tied her once to the bed. And she told me about it. And was making fun of him…To her it was funny, but sad…

“And he was more and more often a guest of ours. He would just hang around, hang around, and sometimes Sharon would resent his staying too long, because he was always the last to leave, you know.

“I’m sure in the beginning of our relationship there was still his love for Sharon, but I think that largely it disappeared. I’m quite sure.”

Q. “So there was no indication that Sharon went back to Sebring at any time?”

A. “Not a chance! I’m the bad one. I always screw around. That was Sharon’s big hangup, you know. But Sharon was absolutely not interested in Jay.”

Q. “Was she interested in any other men?”

A. “No! There was not a chance of any other man getting close to Sharon.”

Q. “O.K., I know you have to get on your way. We might as well start. I’ll tell you how this works, Roman.” Deemer explained the mechanics of the polygraph, adding, “It’s important for you to remain quiet. I know you talk a lot with your hands. You’re emotional. You’re an actor type person, so it’s going to be a little difficult for you…But when the pressure is on, I want you to remain quiet. When it’s off, you can talk and even wave your arms. Within reason.”

After instructing Polanski to confine his answers to “yes” and “no” and to save any explanations for later, Deemer began the interrogation.

Q. “Do you have a valid California driver’s license?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Have you eaten lunch today?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you know who took the life of Voytek and the others?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you smoke cigarettes?”

A. “Yes.” There was a long pause, then Polanski began laughing.

Q. “You know what you are going to do, with that screwing around? I’m going to have to start over again!”

A. “Sorry.”

Q. “Look at the increase in your blood pressure when you start to lie about your cigarettes. Boom, boom, boom, just like a staircase. O.K., let’s start over again…

“Are you now in Los Angeles?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did you have anything to do with taking the life of Voytek and the others?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Have you eaten lunch today?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you feel any responsibility for the death of Voytek and the others?”

A. “Yes. I feel responsible that I wasn’t there, that is all.”

Q. “From running this thing through your mind, repeatedly, as I know you must have, who have you come up with as the target? I don’t think it ever crossed your mind that Sharon might be the target, that anyone had that kind of mad on for her. Is there anyone else who was up there that you can think of who would be a target for this type of activity?”

A. “I’ve thought everything. I thought the target could be myself.”

Q. “Why?”

A. “I mean, it could be some kind of jealousy or plot or something. It couldn’t be Sharon directly. If Sharon were the target, it would mean that I was the target. It could be Jay was the target. It could be Voytek. It could also be sheer folly, someone just decided to commit a crime.”

Q. “What would Sebring be doing, for instance, that would make him a target?”

A. “Some money thing, maybe. I’ve also heard a lot about this drug thing, drug deliveries. It’s difficult for me to believe…” Polanski had always believed Sebring to be “a rather prosperous man,” yet he’d recently heard he had large debts. “The indication to me is that he must have been in serious financial trouble, despite the appearances he gave.”

Q. “That’s a hell of a way to collect debts. It’s no ordinary bill collector that goes up there and kills five people.”

A. “No, no. What I’m talking about is for this reason he might have got into some dangerous areas to make money, you understand? In desperation, he may have got mixed up with illegal people, you know?”

Q. “Eliminating Sharon and the kid, of the three remaining you think that Sebring would be the logical target, huh?”

A. “The whole crime seems so illogical.

“If I’m looking for a motive, I’d look for something which doesn’t fit your habitual standard, with which you use to work as police—something much more far out…”

Deemer asked Polanski if he had received any hate mail after Rosemary’s Baby . He admitted he had, surmising, “It could be some type of witchcraft, you know. A maniac or something. This execution, this tragedy, indicates to me it must be some kind of nut, you know.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the target. In spite of all this drug thing, the narcotics. I think the police like to jump too hastily on this type of lead, you know. Because it is their usual kind of lead. The only connection I know of Voytek with any kind of narcotic was he smoked pot. So did Jay. Plus cocaine. I knew he was sniffing. In the beginning I thought it was just an occasional kick. When I discussed it with Sharon, she said, ‘Are you kidding? He’s been doing it for two years, regularly.’”

Q. “Did Sharon mess with narcotics to any extent, other than pot?”

A. “No. She did take LSD before we met. Many times. And when we met we discussed it…I took it three times. When it was legal,” he added, laughing. Then, serious again, Polanski recalled the only time they had taken it together. It was toward the end of 1965. It was his third trip, and Sharon’s fifteenth or sixteenth. It had begun pleasantly enough, with them talking all night. But then “in the morning she started flipping out and screaming and I was scared to death. And after that she said, ‘I told you I couldn’t take it and this is the end.’ And it was the end, for me and for her.

“But I can tell you this, without question. She took no drugs at all, except for pot, and not too much. And during her pregnancy there was no question, she was so in love with her pregnancy she would do nothing. I’d pour a glass of wine and she wouldn’t touch it.”

Once more Deemer took him through the questioning, then ended the examination, satisfied that Roman Polanski had no involvement in, or any hidden knowledge of, the murder of his wife and the others.

Before leaving, Roman told him, “I’m devoted now to this thing.” He intended to question even his friends. “But I’m going to do it slowly, so they don’t get suspicious. No one knows I’m here. I don’t want them to know that I’m trying in any way to help the police, you know? I’m hoping in this way they’ll have more sincerity.”

Q. “You have to go on living.”

Polanski thanked him, lighted a cigarette, and left.

Q. “Hey, I thought you didn’t smoke cigarettes!”

But Polanski had already gone.

O n August 20, three days after Peter Hurkos accompanied Roman Polanski to the Cielo residence, a picture of Hurkos appeared in the Citizen News . It was captioned:

“FAMED PSYCHIC—Peter Hurkos, famed for his consultation in murder cases (including the current Sharon Tate massacre), opens Friday night at the Huntington Hartford, appearing through Aug. 30.”

M adigan and Jones had been eliminated as suspects. Wilson and Pickett remained.

Because of his familiarity with the case, it was decided to send Lieutenant Deemer east to interview the two.

Jeffrey “Pic” Pickett had been contacted through a relative, and a meeting was set up in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. The son of a prominent State Department official, Pickett appeared to Deemer to be “under the influence of some narcotic, probably an excitant drug.” He also had a bandaged hand. When Deemer expressed curiosity about it, Pickett vaguely replied that he had cut it on a kitchen knife. Though he agreed to a polygraph, Deemer found that Pickett couldn’t remain still or follow instructions, so he interviewed him informally. He claimed that on the day of the murders he had been working in an auto company in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Asked if he owned any weapons, he admitted he had a Buck knife, purchased, he said, in Marlboro, Massachusetts, on a friend’s credit card.

Later Pickett gave Deemer the knife. It was similar to the one found at Cielo. He also turned over a roll of videotape which he claimed showed Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski using drugs at a party at the Tate residence. Pickett didn’t say how he came into possession of the film or what use he had intended to make of it.

Accompanied by Sergeant McGann, Deemer went to Massachusetts. A check of the time cards at the auto company in Sheffield revealed that Pickett’s last workday was August 1, eight days before the homicides. Moreover, though two stores in Marlboro sold Buck knives, neither had ever stocked this particular model.

Pickett’s status as a suspect rose appreciably, until the detectives interviewed the friend he had mentioned. Going through his credit card receipts, he produced the one for the Buck knife. It had been purchased in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on August 21, long after the murders. The friend and his wife also recalled something Pickett had apparently forgotten. He had gone to the beach with them the weekend of August 8–10. Pickett was subsequently polygraphed, twice. Both times it was decided he was telling the truth and was not involved. Eliminate Pickett.

Flying to Toronto, Deemer interviewed Herb Wilson. Although initially reluctant to submit to a polygraph, Wilson consented when Deemer agreed not to ask any questions that might make him liable to Canadian prosecution on narcotics charges. He passed. Eliminate Wilson.

The fingerprints of both Pickett and Wilson were checked against the unmatched Tate latents, with no match.

Although the first Tate investigative report—covering the period August 9–31—concluded that Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones “have been eliminated at the time of this report,” in early September Deemer and McGann flew to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, to check out the alibis of Wilson and Jones. The pair claimed they had been there from July 8 until August 17, “making a movie about marijuana.”

Interviews with realtors, servants, and airline ticket agencies supported half their story: they had been in Jamaica at the time of the murders. And it was quite possible they did have something to do with marijuana. Their only regular visitor, excluding female friends, was a pilot who, a few weeks before, had without explanation quit his well-paying job with a leading airline to make unscheduled solo runs between Jamaica and the United States.

As for their moviemaking, however, the detectives evinced some skepticism, the maid having told them the only camera she ever saw in the house was a small Kodak.

T he videotape Pickett gave Deemer was viewed in the SID lab. It was decidedly different from the one previously found in the loft.

Apparently filmed during the period the Polanskis were away, it showed Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Witold K, and an unidentified young lady having dinner in front of the fireplace of the Tate residence. The video machine was simply turned on and left to run, those present after a time seeming to forget it.

Abigail wore her hair tied back in a rather severe chignon effect. She looked both older and more tired than in her other photos; Voytek looked dissipated. Though what appeared to be marijuana was smoked, Voytek seemed more drunk than high. At first Abigail treated him with the exasperated affection one would accord a spoiled child.

But then the mood gradually changed. In an obvious attempt to exclude Abigail, Voytek began speaking Polish. Abigail, in turn, was playing the grand dame, responding to his crude jests with witty repartee. Voytek began calling her “Lady Folger,” then, as he became drunker, “Lady F.” Abigail talked about him in the third person, as if he wasn’t present, commenting upon, with some disgust, his habit of coming down off his drug trips by getting drunk.

To those viewing the tape it must have seemed nothing more than an overly long, exceedingly boring chronicle of a domestic argument. Except for two incidents, which, considering what would happen to two of those present, in this very house, gave it an eeriness as chilling as anything in Rosemary’s Baby .

As she was serving the dinner, Abigail recalled a time when Voytek, stoned on drugs, looked into the fireplace and saw a strange shape. He had rushed for a camera, hoping to capture the image, a blazing pig’s head.

The second incident was, in its own way, even more disturbing. The microphone had been left on the table, next to the roast. As the meat was being carved, it picked up, amazingly loud, over and over and over again, the sound of the knife grating on the bone.

H urkos was not the only “expert” to volunteer a solution to the Tate homicides. On August 27, Truman Capote appeared on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” to discuss the crime.

One person, acting alone, had committed the murders, the author of In Cold Blood said authoritatively. He then proceeded to tell how, and why.

The killer, a man, had been in the house earlier. Something had happened “to trigger a kind of instant paranoia.” The man then left the premises, went home to get a knife and a gun, and returned to systematically assassinate everyone in the place. According to Capote’s deductions, Steven Parent was the last to die.

From the knowledge accumulated in over a hundred interviews with convicted murderers, Capote revealed that the killer was “a very young, enraged paranoid.” While committing the murders, he probably experienced a sexual release, then, exhausted, went home and slept for two days.

Although Capote had taken up the single-suspect theory, the Tate detectives had by now abandoned it. Their sole reason for adopting it in the first place—Garretson—was no longer a factor. Because of the number of victims, the location of their bodies, and the use of two or more weapons, they were now convinced that “at least two suspects” were involved.

Killers. Plural. But as to their identity, they had not the slightest idea.

A t the end of August there was a summing up, for both the Tate and the LaBianca detectives.

The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—Tate” ran to thirty-three pages. Nowhere in it was there any mention of the LaBianca murders.

The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—LaBianca” was seventeen pages long. Despite the many similarities between the two crimes, it contained not one reference to the Tate homicides.

They remained two totally separate investigations.

Although Lieutenant Bob Helder had over a dozen detectives working full time on the Tate case, Sergeants Michael McGann, Robert Calkins, and Jess Buckles were the principal investigators. All were long-time veterans on the force, having worked their way up to the status of detective the hard way, from the ranks. They could remember when there was no Police Academy, and seniority was more important than education and merit examinations. They were experienced, and inclined to be set in their ways.

The LaBianca team, under Lieutenant Paul LePage, consisted, at various times, of from six to ten detectives, with Sergeants Frank Patchett, Manuel Gutierrez, Michael Nielsen, Philip Sartuchi, and Gary Broda the principal investigators. The LaBianca detectives were generally younger, better educated, and far less experienced. Graduates of the Police Academy for the most part, they were more inclined to the use of modern investigative techniques. For example, they obtained the fingerprints of almost everyone they interviewed; gave more polygraph examinations; made more modus operandi (MO) and fingerprint runs through the California State Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification (CII); and dug deeper into the backgrounds of the victims, even checking the outgoing calls Leno LaBianca had made from a motel while on vacation seven years ago.

They were also more inclined to consider “far out” theories. For example, while the Tate report didn’t attempt to explain that bloody word on the front door, the LaBianca report speculated as to the meaning of the writings found inside the residence on Waverly Drive. It even suggested a connection so remote it couldn’t even be called a wild guess. The report noted: “Investigation revealed that the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album, No. SWBO 101, has songs titled ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ and ‘Blackbird.’ The words in the song ‘Blackbird’ frequently say ‘Arise, arise,’ which might be the meaning of ‘Rise’ near the front door.”

The idea was just sort of tossed in, by whom no one would later remember, and just as promptly forgotten.

T he two sets of detectives had one thing in common, however. Though to date the LaBianca team had interviewed some 150 persons, the Tate investigators more than twice that, neither was much closer to “solving” the case than when the bodies were first discovered.

The Tate report listed five suspects—Garretson, Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones—all of whom had by this time been eliminated.

The LaBianca report listed fifteen—but included Frank and Suzanne Struthers, Joe Dorgan, and numerous others who were never serious suspects. Of the fifteen, only Gardner remained a good possible, and, though lacking a palm print for positive elimination (one had been found on a bank deposit slip on Leno’s desk), his fingerprints had already been checked against those found in the residence with no match.

The progress reports were strictly intradepartmental; the press would never see them.

But already a few reporters were beginning to suspect that the real reason for the official silence was that there was nothing to report.

SEPTEMBER 1969

About noon on Monday, September 1, 1969, ten-year-old Steven Weiss was fixing the sprinkler on the hill behind his home when he found a gun.

Steven and his parents lived at 3627 Longview Valley Road in Sherman Oaks. Running parallel to Longview, atop the hill, was Beverly Glen.

The gun was lying next to the sprinkler, under a bush, about seventy-five feet—or halfway—up the steep hill. Steven had watched “Dragnet” on TV; he knew how guns should be handled. Picking it up very carefully by the tip of the barrel, so as not to eradicate prints, Steven took the gun back to his house and showed it to his father, Bernard Weiss. The senior Weiss took one look and called LAPD.

Officer Michael Watson, on patrol in the area, responded to the radio call. More than a year later Steven would be asked to describe the incident from the witness stand:

Q. “Did you show him [Watson] the gun?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did he touch the gun?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “How did he touch it?”

A. “With both hands, all over the gun.”

So much for “Dragnet.”

Officer Watson took the cartridges out of the cylinder; there were nine—seven empty shell casings and two live rounds. The gun itself was a .22 caliber Hi Standard Longhorn revolver. It had dirt on it, and rust. The trigger guard was broken, the barrel loose and slightly bent, as if it had been used to hammer something. The gun was also missing the right-hand grip.

Officer Watson took the revolver and shells back to Valley Services Division of LAPD, located in Van Nuys, and after booking them as “Found Evidence” turned them over to the Property Section, where they were tagged, placed in manila envelopes, and filed away.

Between September 3 and 5, LAPD sent out the first batch of confidential “flyers” on the wanted Tate gun. In addition to a photograph of a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver, and a list of Hi Standard outlets supplied by Lomax, Deputy Chief Robert Houghton sent a covering letter which asked police to interview anyone who had purchased such a gun, and to “visually check the weapon to see if the original grips are intact.” To avoid leaks to the media, he suggested the following cover story: such a gun had been recovered with other stolen property and the police wished to determine its ownership.

LAPD sent out approximately three hundred of the flyers, to various law-enforcement agencies in California, other parts of the United States, and Canada.

Someone neglected to mail one to the Valley Services Division of the Los Angeles Police Department in Van Nuys.

O n September 10—one month after the Tate murders—a large advertisement appeared in newspapers in the Los Angeles area:

REWARD

$25,000

Roman Polanski and friends of the Polanski family offer to pay a $25,000 reward to the person or persons who furnish information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer or murderers of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the other four victims.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1288