Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Beausoleil himself has said that Linda was upset and that she asked what could be done to help him and that a discussion was held regarding possible plans of action. According to Beausoleil the discussion involved copy-cat murders or murders removing those who might have known about the Hinman matter. Such discussions of possible murder to get Beausoleil out may have served to rev up the Family for more carnage, another example of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Sadie Glutz, aka Susan Atkins, testified at the Tate-LaBianca trial that soon after Bobby called, Leslie, Sadie, Linda Kasabian, Katie (aka Patricia Krenwinkel), and others had a homicide-klatch to discuss and to determine how to get Bobby, their brother, out of jail. According to the Glutz-Atkins testimony, one of the girls had seen a movie where copy-cat murders were committed over a period of time, enabling a killer to get out of jail.

  A Spate of Arrests

  A dejected and rejected Charles Manson arrived at the Spahn Ranch in the early afternoon of August 8. With him was the pregnant runaway graduate of Anaheim High School, Stephanie, whom he had picked up near Esalen. Charlie was quickly apprised of Robert Beausoleil’s arrest. The whole trip up north had been a bummer for Charlie, who hated rejection, and now, with Beausoleil’s arrest for murder, Manson’s very freedom was up for grabs.

  As soon as he got back, driving the 1952 Continental Bakery Hostess Twinkie truck, Charlie sent Mary Brunner and Sandy Good off to run a credit-card caper at the Sears store. Before they left they took Stephanie’s credit cards and identification away from her, naturally, and filed them with the master credit-card hoard in George Spahn’s house.

  Around 4 p.m., Mary Brunner and Sandy Pugh—for Sandy was using the name of her former husband, borrowed Manson’s bakery truck, and soon were making purchases at a Sears store. They used a stolen credit card, recently stolen from a Manson follower’s brother-in-law in Bothell, Washington. Mary Brunner forged the name Mary Vitasek on the credit card. The two young ladies then split. If they had gone away immediately, they probably would not have been arrested.

  But instead they decided to make some more purchases at a different checkout counter and again presented the same stolen credit card. An alert cashier saw that the card was on the “warning sheet,” and also became suspicious when the pregnant Sandy kept looking over her shoulder.

  The store manager approached and the girls fled. He followed the two in his automobile, trying to get them to pull the truck off to the side of the road. Sandy and Mary cut through a service station in a ditch-maneuver. The chase led to the Chatsworth entrance to the San Diego Freeway, where the girls were stopped. Sandy had managed to toss the credit cards out the window, but the act was spotted by those pursuing.

  Captured with the two young ladies, therefore, was a stash of various credit cards. Mary and Sandy were charged with several violations of the California Penal Code. Mary Brunner admitted that she, in fact, forged the credit card, but Sandy Good/Pugh denied guilt.

  The two were booked at the police station just as, thirty miles away, Abigail Folger was ending her appointment with her psychiatrist. Brunner and Good/Pugh were taken to a police station and later that evening to downtown Los Angeles where, at 10:21 p.m., they were booked into the Sybil Brand Institute Inmate Reception Center.

  Meanwhile, back at the Spahn Ranch, murder was on their minds. Mary Brunner arrested. Sandy Good arrested. Bobby Beausoleil arrested. Charlie Manson rejected in Big Sur. It was time for drastic action.

  First, some went on a garbage run for the evening meal. Then, at the back ranch, they cooked dinner on a Coleman camp stove. People were excited that Charlie had returned. Charlie said that the people “up north” were not that together, they were just off on their own little trips. According to Tex Watson’s book, Will You Die for Me?, Manson said, during the meal, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

  During the communal dinner, Charlie instructed that all people under eighteen were to sleep in the wickiup by the back ranch. Then the obedient girls washed the dishes and Tex Watson and Charlie plotted what to do about Beausoleil’s arrest.

  When Mary and Sandy were booked into Sybil Brand jail at 10:21, they likely called the ranch and told them the news. About an hour later, the killers were on their way.

  After dinner Charlie brought fresh love Stephanie to a trailer. “He told me he’d be back in a little while,” she testified at the murder trial. Manson would not return till dawn.

  Charles Manson holding the broken Straight Satans sword at the Spahn Ranch, early August 1969. To the left is the 1959 Ford the killers drove to Cielo Drive.

  Manson pulled Sadie aside about an hour after the meal, and told her to get a knife and clothes to change in. Sadie called the back ranch over the field phone and told a young follower named Barbara Hoyt to gather three sets of dark clothing and bring them to the front of the ranch.

  Linda Kasabian had helped with dinner and the cleanup, then had gone to stand by the Rock City Café when Charlie came up and pulled her off to the end of the boardwalk and told her to get a knife, a change of clothing, and her driver’s license. Linda was the only person at the ranch with a valid driver’s license. She walked across the dusty driveway from the Spahn Ranch movie set and into George Spahn’s saddle-lined house to look for creepy-crawly equipment. She rummaged through a box and found a blue denim miniskirt made from chopped-off blue jeans and a lavender knitted top. She asked Squeaky Fromme, the Family quartermaster, where her driver’s license was.

  Squeaky suggested some chests of drawers. No. Next, a box on the fireplace mantel. No. Then she went into the saloon to look for a Buck knife she had brought with her when she had come to the ranch in July. She couldn’t find it. She walked down the boardwalk to the Rock City Café kitchen, where a ranch hand gave her a kitchen knife with a handle wrapped in dark electrical tape. It turned out that Sadie was packing Linda’s Buck knife.

  Patricia Krenwinkel was coming down from an LSD trip and was asleep when she was nudged and told to get a knife and a change of clothes. She really didn’t want to get up, but she did, under the summons of someone claiming to be both Jesus and the Devil.

  Someone may have called in advance to the Polanski residence to see who was going to be there, or at least that there was no party going on. Vern Plumlee, for instance, has claimed that they thought Sharon Tate was not going to be there.

  In the hot August evening, people were sitting and chatting on the boulders and rocks and chairs that were situated in front of the Spahn Ranch, unaware of what was going on. In the presence of Manson, Brenda (aka Nancy Pitman) came up and handed Linda her driver’s license. All was ready.

  Manson prepared Watson for the event by blaming him for the “killing” of drug dealer Bernard Crowe back in July. It was Tex’s fault M had to shoot him; therefore Watson owed him plenty. Manson laid out a fairly comprehensive set of instructions, and he wanted severe gore. Watson claims M told him, “Pull out their eyes and hang them on the mirrors.”

  There may have been a tinge of amphetamine psychosis in the air, because, in violation of family rules, Tex Watson had a secret supply of powdered amphetamine in a Gerber baby food jar. He and Sadie had been snorting it constantly for three or four days. When Manson gave the kill instructions, Sadie was already stoned on amphetamine, and Watson went to where the Gerber jar was hidden on the porch. “I took a couple of deep snorts of speed,” he writes, “and went to get the clothes and rope and bolt cutters as Charlie had ordered.”

  The automobile, an old yellow and white 1959 Ford with another car’s license plate on it, was parked and ready in the space between the end of the Rock City Café and George Spahn’s house. George Spahn was not at home. It was his custom to dine about this hour at the International House of Pancakes in Chatsworth. Or perhaps he was visiting his relatives, following his meal.

  Linda Kasabian got into the car, in the right front passenger seat. Sadie and Katie were in the back of the car. Also in the back of the car were a pair of red-handled bolt
cutters and a long, coiled, three-quarter-inch nylon rope. Tex got into the car and the car backed away and then headed out down the dirt driveway toward the exit to the west, by the corral. About halfway down the drive, Manson stopped them. He came over and stuck his head into the window on Linda’s side and said, according to Linda, “Leave a sign. You girls know what to do. Something witchy.” Then Manson stood alone, watching the car drive off.

  Tex Watson’s memory was that Manson told him to get money for Mary to get out of jail. “If you don’t get enough money at the Melcher house, then go on to the house next door and then the house after that until you get six hundred dollars.”

  The car belonged to Johnny Swartz, a horse wrangler at the Spahn Ranch. He was sitting in his trailer near George Spahn’s house when he recognized the sound of his engine and walked to the window of his trailer just in time to see the taillights of his automobile fade away down the road.

  Tex told Linda that the gun was in the glove compartment. Three knives were on the front right floor of the automobile. Tex told her to bundle up the knives and gun and then to throw them out the window if the police attempted to pick them up. This Linda did, bundling them with her very own shirt. Linda Kasabian testified that she believed she was merely going on a second-story caper in Beverly Hills. A second-story caper with forty-three feet of rope, a gun, changes of clothing, and three sharp knives.

  After the 1959 Ford, license plate GYY435, had pulled away toward its desolate goal, Barbara Hoyt came trundling to the front ranch from the back ranch, bearing the three sets of dark clothing that Susan Atkins had ordered over the field phone. Charlie was angry at her and snapped, “What are you doing here?” Because it was a rule that all those who didn’t have a reason, particularly soulless females, were to stay in back out of sight and not appear in the public part of the ranch. Miss Hoyt told him what Sadie had asked her to do, and Manson said that they had already left.

  The 1959 Ford in which the murderers drove to Cielo Drive. Photo taken exactly one week later.

  In the speeding car, the girls seemed to be barefoot. Sadie had on blue denim genuine Sears Roebuck jeans and a baggy blue T-shirt. Linda was barefoot and in her lavender top and dark blue denim skirt. Tex wore moccasins, jeans, and a black velour turtleneck sweater. Katie wore a black T-shirt and jeans.

  Tex told the girls that they were going to Terry Melcher’s former place, but that Melcher no longer lived there. He described the setup of the house, including the rooms inside, and evidently noted that there was a smaller guesthouse on the property, and to make sure that the guesthouse was creepy-crawled also.

  According to Sadie, Tex said that they were going to kill whoever was in the house and then get all their money.

  They drove there straightaway, leaving around eleven o’clock in the evening. They got lost and ended up going all the way into Hollywood, then back west on Santa Monica Boulevard past the Tropicana Motel and the Troubadour Bar, through West Hollywood and the edges of Beverly Hills. Then they cut up past the perfect mansions with their tall elegant palms, to Sunset Boulevard, then to Benedict Canyon, then finally turned left onto Cielo Drive and proceeded to the house on the hill.

  Why Were They Killed? It’s a Mystery

  Was it to help trigger the Black Uprising known in Mansonland as Helter Skelter? Or, perhaps to blame the murders on the “Black Panthers” through writing in blood, with the word “PIG” on the front door of Cielo Drive repeating the “Political Piggy” written above Mr. Hinman’s body in Topanga Canyon, thus possibly to help free Robert Beausoleil? Or was Sharon Tate the real target? (See the afterword to this book.) Or, did they think she was not going to be there? How could they have believed she was not going to be in the house? Who could have told them?

  Manson had said several times that, if the true story were known about the Tate-LaBianca murders, there would be a “big stink” of a scandal. He has said that he has chosen silence because of the age-old code of criminal behavior that makes telling the names of people involved in a crime equal to the crime itself. Manson has, naturally, also said that the Polanski murders were the idea of his followers. “I don’t care. I have one law I live by and I learned it when I was a kid in reform school, it’s don’t snitch and I have never snitched, and I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good, if they do it with a good thought,” Manson testified on page 18123 of his trial.

  A dope burn has been proposed as one possible motive. One former family associate stated that he was told by Gypsy that the burn involved “63 keys [kilos] of grass, something like fifty dollars’ worth of smack and some speed.” One of Manson’s closest friends outside the Family told this writer on December 1, 1970, that an $11,000 LSD burn was involved and that involved also was a “real millionaire” friend of Manson whose car Manson wrecked around the time of the murders. Vern Plumlee also claimed that the motive involved LSD. Plumlee, certainly a trusted Family member during the time of the murders, worked closely with Bill Vance in committing various robberies and forgeries during those days of murder. Plumlee, in a taped interview, said that Bill Vance told him that the Tate and LaBianca murders were both committed as a result of an acid burn. This is what Plumlee said about Vance’s explanation of the motive: “You see, I worked with him for quite a while, you know, burglaries and things like that. . . . And during the time I was doing it I was, you know, we got to be pretty able to talk with each other.

  “I heard things about something to the effect the LaBiancas were supposed to have sold to ‘the Tates,’ the Tates were supposed to have sold to the Family, and some people got uptight about it, ’cause it was a burn. . . . Like, I was told by him, he says, ‘don’t worry about it though because they’ll never find out who did it.’ So I just let it slide.”

  On another occasion Plumlee told a reporter that the Family went there to get Frykowski and anyone else present. According to Plumlee, the Family had received information that Sharon Tate was not going to be at Cielo Drive. But how could that be? How could anyone associated with Manson know that? I asked Sharon’s close friend Sheilah Wells, “Who else knew that Sharon might be staying over at your place?” (I told her the rumor I had heard that the “family” had thought Sharon was not going to be there. Wells replied, “No, huh unh, because that whole conversation (with Sharon) was that Friday. It was a last minute kind of thing.”

  Even while the Manson murder trials were under way, in the fall of 1970, several private investigators, working for the district attorney, were looking into the possibility that the murders were contracted. It was believed that a wealthy individual in Kansas City, Missouri, issued the contracts. They checked banks in Kansas City, Kansas, to see if money had been deposited for Manson, Watson, Susan Atkins, Bill Vance, and three others. They also checked possible bank deposits in a coastal town of Texas, perhaps Corpus Christi, to no avail.

  A reporter covering the Tate-LaBianca trial got ahold of Tex Watson’s address book and found the phone number of a former Polanski residence in it. A private investigator who worked on the case for the family of one of the decedents for months after the murders told this writer that the motive for the crimes was that “they knew too much about what was going on.”

  Sadie Glutz, aka Susan Atkins, said the impetus for the murders was twofold: to get Beausoleil off and because Linda Kasabian was burned on a purchase of MDA. On Volume 180, page 23049 of the trial transcript, she testified that Linda Kasabian came to her and complained about being burned at the Polanski residence: “‘You remember the thousand dollars I had?’ I told her yeah—and she said, ‘Well, I went up to some people in Beverly Hills for some MDA’—some new kind of drug . . . MDA. Oh anyway, she went up there to buy something and they burnt her for the bread.”

  Robert Beausoleil claimed that Tex Watson and Linda were operating together during those weeks prior to the murders and that the key lies there. There remains the possibility that Manson wanted to raise a large amount of money in an attempt to p
ay off someone for the purpose of freeing Beausoleil. Danny DeCarlo said this in a police interview: “Mary [Brunner] and Bobby got busted. It was all—the main objective was to get money to get them out of jail so they could all get in the wind which was to the desert. Mary’s bail was $500 and they were going to get out—they needed some fantastic amount of money to get Bobby out. Hell, I didn’t understand. There was no bail on him.”

  So perhaps the Family went into a flurry of quick dope deals or Manson took a murder contract to raise large amounts of fast cash.

  DeCarlo, after his testimony at the Tate-LaBianca trial, told a CBS-TV reporter that the true motive had not been told, but he would not elaborate.

  Sharon’s mother, Doris, was eager to find out the real reason. She was not willing to accept any of the motives discussed in public. Years later, when I went to the home of Doris and Paul Tate in Palos Verdes, Doris, who knew I was corresponding with Manson, urged me to ask him for the actual reason he dispatched his marauders to Cielo Drive. (In the course of a few difficult-to-decipher letters to me, however, Manson kept the reasons to his chest.)

  A husband-and-wife team of informants surfaced in 1974 claiming that Manson had been hired by an English Satanist to kill Sharon Tate because of something she had learned about Sirhan Sirhan. This issue is discussed in the afterword of this book.

  Over four decades later, well into a new century, the reason or reasons are still a lingering mystery.

  Sharon’s Father Watches The Wrecking Crew That Fatal Night

  Meanwhile at Fort Baker in San Francisco that night, Colonel Paul Tate attended an eleven o’clock showing of The Wrecking Crew at the base movie house. In the ultimate of ironies, he enjoyed the film during just about the same hours as Sharon’s house was invaded by the spores of evil. “Sharon had enjoyed working on the picture and it was apparent in every moment of her performance. I left the theater immensely proud, with a plan to call Sharon in the morning.”