Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

by Greg King

  On the evening of June 30, 1969, Watson, accompanied by his girlfriend Rosina, went to Bernard Crowe’s house in an effort to swindle him out of both drugs and money. Crowe gave Watson $2,400 to make a marijuana purchase; he later claimed that the deal involved a total of $20,000, and that the money he gave to Watson that night was only an initial payment.14 Watson took the money, excused himself, and, with Rosina sitting in the living room with Crowe, dashed out the rear of the house and fled back to Spahn Ranch. How and why Watson ever thought he could get away with such a piece of obvious thievery is not known. Within a few hours, Crowe had cornered a terrified Rosina, who finally rang Spahn Ranch, pleading for Watson to come back and settle up. Finally, Manson himself got on the telephone and told Crowe that he would be on his way in a few minutes.

  It is not known if Manson was aware of the deception beforehand. He took Family associate Thomas Walleman, known as T.J. the Terrible, with him; Bobby Beausoleil has also claimed that Bruce Davis accompanied the pair.15 Manson drove ranch hand Johnny Shwartz’s yellow and white 1959 Ford; on the front seat lay the .22 caliber Buntline Special. Once at the apartment, Manson got into a heated exchange with Crowe, claiming he had not been responsible for Watson’s action. After this went on for several minutes, Crowe was joined by several friends. Manson pulled out the gun and offered it to Crowe, telling him that he could shoot him. Crowe replied that he was not interested in hurting Manson, just Watson. Manson, according to the witnesses, did a kind of ritualistic dance around the apartment and grabbed the gun, aiming it at Crowe and pulling the trigger. The chamber was empty, and nothing happened. Crowe looked relieved, but Manson, with a smile on his face, pulled the trigger a second time, and the gun went off, the bullet fired almost directly into Crowe’s stomach. He fell over onto the floor, silent. Manson bent down and kissed his feet, then picked up the gun and calmly walked out of the apartment.

  Back at Spahn Ranch, Manson told Watson and Danny De Carlo about the shooting. Manson believed he had killed Crowe; but Bernard Crowe was only wounded, and was taken to the hospital for emergency surgery—a fact which, if known, might have prevented the bloodshed in the coming months. Instead, Manson’s paranoia increased dramatically. There were witnesses to the shooting, and Manson feared a Black Panther backlash against the Family.

  In the next few days, Manson ordered guard posts set up around Spahn Ranch, and had regular dune buggy patrols of the fire roads leading to the back ranch house where most of the Family stayed. Sometime earlier that summer, several members of the Family had stolen a green telescope from Terry Melcher’s Malibu beach house; now, they used the spyglass to scan the hills surrounding Spahn Ranch, fearing that the Black Panthers were going to attack.16 Manson became fanatical about the start of Helter Skelter, waiting for a chance to move his Family out to Death Valley. But they still needed money.

  Manson got some cash when Linda Kasabian joined his Family on 4 July. Kasabian, twenty, had spent several years wandering from commune to commune; in the process, she married twice, the second time to a fellow hippy Robert Kasabian with whom she had a daughter, sixteen-month-old Tanya. Within a day, Kasabian, having stolen some $5,000 from a friend of her husband, had duly turned over the cash, along with her own wallet and driver’s license. The money helped, but Manson needed more. It was now that the Family’s associations with musician Gary Hinman became deadly.

  Hinman, a thirty-two-year-old former musician and friend of Bobby Beausoleil, had always been helpful to Family members, giving them money when he could and allowing them to stay at his house. Hinman also apparently was involved in the manufacture of mescaline and LSD, work he carried out in a small, make-shift laboratory in the basement of his hillside cottage in Topanga Canyon.17

  There are several versions of what led to the eventual confrontation between Hinman and Manson. On the surface, it was a conflict over money, with Manson expecting the musician to apparently hand over the cash which the Family wanted. According to several sources, however, someone in the Family had purchased 1,000 tabs of acid from Hinman, for distribution to Danny De Carlo and his Straight Satan motorcycle gang; a day later, members of the gang claimed that the acid was bad, and complained to Manson that Hinman had deliberately swindled them.18

  On 25 July, Manson dispatched Beausoleil, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins to Hinman’s Topanga Canyon house. At first, Hinman welcomed them. Then, after they demanded the pink slips to his cars as well as his money, he told them to get out. Beausoleil, Brunner and Atkins threatened and pleaded with him for several hours before Beausoleil pulled out a nine millimeter Radon pistol which Bruce Davis had purchased a few weeks earlier. After waving the pistol in the air for a few minutes, Beausoleil hit Hinman in the face, and the musician spit out a mouthful of blood and a piece of chipped tooth. A struggle ensued, during which time Hinman eventually got the gun away from Beausoleil and turned it on the three. Unbelievably, he then did something which was to cost him his life: Hinman handed the gun back to Beausoleil, saying that he did not believe in violence. After asking them to leave, he wandered off into the living room. Uncertain what to do, Beausoleil called Manson at Spahn Ranch.19

  Around midnight, Manson, accompanied by Bruce Davis, arrived at Hinman’s house. Manson waved his sword in Hinman’s face, threatening him and demanding money, but the musician continually begged to be left alone. Finally, Manson raised the sword and brought it down on the side of Hinman’s head, cutting off part of his ear. After this, Manson and Davis quickly left for the ranch.20 The rest of the Family members, however, remained behind, tying up Hinman and taking turns watching him all night. Susan Atkins later admitted that she walked down the canyon to an all-night store and bought some food, bandages and white dental floss so that they could sew up the wound in the side of Hinman’s head.21 While she was gone, Beausoleil and Brunner turned the house upside down, searching for money and the pink slips to Hinman’s cars.

  For two days, the trio of Mansonites tormented Hinman, with the girls offering him food while Beausoleil repeatedly beat him. Finally, Hinman signed over his Volkswagon minibus and his Fiat. Beausoleil reported back to Manson at the ranch, who told him to kill Hinman, saying “He knows too much.”22

  Atkins was in the kitchen when she suddenly heard Hinman screaming, “No Bobby!” She saw Hinman stagger into the kitchen, clutching his chest, and Beausoleil followed, holding a knife which he had used to stab him twice.23 Beausoleil and the women moved Hinman into the living room; he was a Buddhist, and they placed him before his Nichiren Shoshu shrine, handing him his prayer beads. The trio stood over him, watching as Hinman lay on the floor, covered in blood, chanting his prayer until he fell silent.24

  With clear heads, and under instructions from no one, the three spent the next few minutes running through the house, wiping it down for prints.25 They covered Hinman’s body with his green bedspread; above him, on the living room wall, they printed the words “Political Piggy” in his blood, drawing a paw which was supposed to point toward the Black Panthers as the culprits. They locked all the doors and climbed out a side window.

  As they stood on the deck outside the house, they heard Hinman moaning. Beausoleil went back inside, followed by the women. They took turns holding a pillow over the struggling musician’s face until he again fell silent. They left in Hinman’s VW bus, Manson and Bruce Davis having already taken the Fiat. On their way back to Spahn Ranch, they stopped at the Topanga Kitchen Restaurant for cherry cake and coffee, paid for with a twenty dollar bill Mary Brunner had stolen from Hinman’s wallet.26

  A day later, police raided Spahn Ranch. It was not in connection with Gary Hinman’s murder, but with reports that an auto theft ring was operating out of the property. Manson managed to effectively threaten the officers by saying that he had armed troops hidden in the hills above the ranch. But the police left after arresting only Johnny Schwartz, whose 1959 Ford had invalid registration. Manson and his followers remained at the ranch.

  On 31 July, worried at no
t having heard from their friend for several days, Hinman’s friends went round to his house and found his mailbox full of mail. As they wandered round the deck, they noticed hundreds of flies swarming at the windows. When they broke in, they found Hinman’s body, covered with maggots and rapidly decomposing in the heat.27

  Manson was away from Spahn Ranch when, on Tuesday, August 5, Bobby Beausoleil left in Hinman’s stolen Fiat, on his way to San Francisco. There was a police bulletin out on the vehicle, and it only took a few hours before a California Highway Patrol car pulled Beausoleil over near San Luis Obispo. Although Beausoleil declared that he had purchased the car the previous week from an unknown black man, the police were suspicious enough to have his fingerprints sent down to Los Angeles for comparison with those found in Hinman’s house. When they matched, Beausoleil was shipped south to Los Angeles, charged in the murder of Gary Hinman. He admitted that he had been in Hinman’s house, and that Gary had told him he had been attacked by some black militants. Beausoleil said he and two unnamed female friends had helped sew up the musician’s face, and that a grateful Hinman had given them the pink slips to his cars.

  The police bought none of it. On August 7, Beausoleil arrived in Los Angeles and made his one telephone call, to Spahn Ranch. A few hours later, on the morning of Friday, August 8, 1969, Charles Manson returned to the ranch from a trip north and learned what had happened. In less than twelve hours, he would order his followers to kill everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive.

  Chapter 24

  Thirteen Chairs

  Sharon arrived in London on Tuesday, 24 March, 1969. She was scheduled to begin work on Thirteen Chairs the following month, in both England and in Italy. She joined Roman, who had arrived earlier for business meetings, at their Eaton Place Mews house. That same week, John and Michelle Phillips flew in from the United States, and the two couples accepted an invitation from producer Alfred “Cubby” Broccoli to stay with him at his country estate.

  On Saturday night, while Roman and John Phillips were talking, Sharon pulled Michelle aside and disappeared into a bathroom to have a cigarette. “Roman hated her smoking, and was always trying to get her to quit,” recalls Michelle Phillips. “She used to sneak cigarettes behind his back.” In the bathroom, Sharon told Michelle that she was pregnant. “She said that she hadn’t yet told Roman, and began to laugh about it. She seemed very happy, very giddy.”1

  By the last week of March, however, Sharon could no longer conceal the truth. She finally told Roman. She had waited until the last possible moment, fearful perhaps that he would try to force her to have an abortion, and uncertain what his response would be. To Sharon, the prospect of a baby meant a chance to save her marriage, to reform her husband’s troubling behavior, and to finally settle down to the role which she had always wanted most: that of wife and mother.

  Roman’s response to the news was apparently less than enthusiastic. He had not wanted a child, and, now that the choice had been taken from him, he panicked. One of his first remarks was to remind Sharon that she was scheduled to do Thirteen Chairs, and that, by the time production actually began in a few weeks, she would almost certainly be visibly pregnant. Sharon dismissed this with a calm, “Everything’s going to be fine.”2 To every objection, she answered with assurances.

  It took Roman several months before he began to warm up to the idea of being a father. Finally, however, he began buying books on fatherhood and babies, talking to doctors about what to expect from his wife’s pregnancy, and making plans for the future of the child.

  Now that she did not have to hide the fact, Sharon was transformed by her pregnancy. Suddenly, everything else—her career, her troubled marriage to Roman—took a back seat to the child growing within her. The prospect of motherhood fulfilled a deep need in Sharon, and her sense of expectancy over the impending birth overshadowed her other concerns. “She was really happy,” remembers Michelle Phillips, “and seemed at peace with herself.”3

  Very quickly, Sharon was wrapped up in shooting Thirteen Chairs. There was a month long rehearsal period, and the picture itself was on a relatively short six-week shooting schedule, with another month slated for post-production work in London. Director Nicolas Gessener had to shoot around Sharon’s pregnancy, especially since she was to be semi-nude in several scenes filmed for the European release. Gessener slated these scenes for early shooting, before work began on the rest of the film; even so, Sharon masked her rapidly-growing stomach with a succession of purses, long coats and scarves. By the time the production wrapped in late May, she was visibly pregnant.

  Sharon played the role of Pat, an assistant in an antique store in England. Mario, played by Vittorio Gassman, flies from New York, where he works as a barber, to England to collect an inheritance left by an aunt. Expecting great wealth, he instead finds a crumbling house, empty but for a dozen old chairs. Needing money to return to America, he takes these to the local antique shop and sells them. Sharon’s role called for not only comedic talents and timing, but a brusque, almost sarcastic delivery. Her first scene, set in the antique shop, had her selling a chamber pot to visiting American tourists. The pot is one of many, but she craftily tells the couple that it might have belonged to Queen Victoria, allowing her to raise the price. Once they leave, the shop owner, Mr. Greenwood, confronts her.

  “When you first came to work here,” he says, “it was because I thought we needed maybe a little trans-Atlantic efficiency. But now, sometimes, Pat, I feel that you are sometimes a little.…”

  “Mercenary?” she answers. “Sure I am, Mr. Greenwood. “I think money’s sexy, sexier than people.”

  “That means you haven’t met the right person,” Greenwood tells her.

  “All that means,” she declares, “is I haven’t met the right money.”

  Mario brings his twelve chairs to Mr. Greenwood’s shop and asks the owner for $264.

  “How much did you say you wanted?” Greenwood asks.

  “Two-hundred-sixty-four dollars,” he answers.

  “That would be about.…”

  “One hundred twenty six pounds, eleven and eight,” Pat interjects.

  “Why?”

  “London to New York economy flight,” Mario replies.

  “Well, now,” Greenwood answers, “if you want to leave them with us on a commission basis, I am sure that within a few days.…”

  “How much is London-New York by boat?” Pat asks.

  “About ninety dollars, I guess,” Mario tells her.

  “In that case,” Pat announces, “I hope you don’t get seasick.”

  Only after he has sold the chairs does Mario discover that his aunt has hidden a fortune under one of the seats. By the time he returns to Greenwood’s shop, the chairs have already disappeared, on their way to London. Pat, suspicious, quickly decides to follow him, announcing that she has the name of the buyer on a piece of paper, and that he must share the money with her if he wants to find the chairs. In their London hotel, Mario corners her, trying to take the paper away, but Pat eats it. In the struggle, however, he rips off her shirt, and she is forced to run, arms crossed over her bare breasts, through the hotel corridor to her own room. The following morning, stealing a raincoat, she sneaks away, hoping to locate the chairs herself. Thereafter, she and Mario pursue the chairs from London to Paris to Rome, through a series of misadventures and deceptions, in a futile attempt to find the hidden treasure.

  For much of the filming, Sharon was unwell, suffering from morning sickness. Nevertheless, Gessener was on a tight schedule and could not wait, and much of Sharon’s performance in the movie appeared strained and uneasy. Her mental state, too, was not the best. She had gone off to Rome radiantly happy, but soon, depression set in. She missed Roman, who was busy working on a script for a film version of the novel Day of the Dolphin. Although she made regular telephone calls to him, this brief contact did little to lessen her loneliness.

  Sharon frequently asked Roman to join her in Italy, but he continually replied that
he was too busy in London to get away. She knew it was an excuse, and became depressed, worrying not only about her husband’s activities but that she was becoming unattractive to him.

  At the beginning of the summer, she finally joined Roman in London, to complete the dubbing of the film. Things were tense from the start. The novelty of her pregnancy had, at least for Roman, apparently worn off. He was accustomed to Sharon’s undivided attention; now, he found her increasingly focused only on her pregnancy. According to one of her friends, “The summer did nothing to improve their relationship. God knows, Sharon tried, she tried almost too much. But he was bored with her being pregnant. He treated her like she was a piece of excess baggage. He was even pointedly cruel to her in front of others at times, calling her a dumb hag and criticizing her whenever she expressed an opinion.”4

  For the time being, Sharon ignored the uncomfortable reality of the situation. As the baby grew inside of her, her need for Roman lessened; all of her energies, enthusiasm and expectations concentrated solely on the birth of her child. She haunted the fashionable shops in Knightsbridge and Regent Street, buying a layette for the baby, and spent hours reading every book on childbirth and babies she could find.5

  Sharon wanted an English nanny for the baby. After placing an advertisement in The Times, she spent the next few weeks interviewing the various candidates who applied and were willing to move to Los Angeles to take up the post. Eventually she settled on a young girl named Marie Lees and arrangements were made with the proper authorities to get the necessary work papers and permits. There was no question but that the baby would be born in the United States, and Sharon spent her last few days in London on the telephone, planning her return to America.