by Ed Sanders
Between 4:30 and 5 a.m., a delivery man brought the morning Los Angeles Times to the Polanski front gate, where he noticed that there was a wire down, draped across the fence. At 7:30 a.m., a resident at 10070 Cielo Drive walked out to get his paper and noticed the wire down and spotted the yellow bug light beaming on the Polanski garage.
The Polanski housekeeper, well-spoken Winifred Chapman, had been working for them for just over a year, beginning when Roman and Sharon had rented Patty Duke’s place in the late spring of 1968. At about 8 a.m., Chapman took a city bus to Santa Monica and Canyon Drive at the southern end of Benedict Canyon. Because she was late she was considering calling a cab to get to Sharon’s residence on time, but she ran into a friend who took her up Benedict Canyon to the front gate on Cielo Drive. She arrived at 8:30 a.m.
When she pushed the button of the electronic gate, she noticed that a wire was down, gathered the Los Angeles Times, and strolled up the drive. She turned off the yellow bug light on the garage, then walked past the three-car garage, then headed right, out of view of the bodies, along the extreme north edge of the house to the back, and went into the house through a service entrance door.
She reached above the door to a rafter and picked up a key from its usual place, unlocked the door, put the key back, strode into the service area, and then into the kitchen where she switched off the back patio light and placed her purse down. She picked up the phone. It was dead.
She went into the dining room, intending to wake someone to tell them there was no phone service. She saw the bouquet of flowers that Linda Kasabian had seen the night before, on a small stand in the dining room.
By the time Chapman arrived at the front hall, she spotted a towel, spotted the steamer trunks, spotted blood, spotted an open front door, spotted the bloody doormat, spotted Frykowski. She dashed out of the house the way she had come in, gathering up her purse on the way. Then she ran shouting down the hillside parking lot, pushed the bloody exit button at the narrowing of the driveway, enabling her to flee. There was no answer when she jabbed the doorbell of the house down the driveway from the front gate. She dashed down the hill to the Asim residence, where she encountered fifteen-year-old Jim Asim. “There’s bodies and blood all over the place! Call the police!” Mrs. Chapman was so upset that the young man called up the police emergency number. After three calls, a police car arrived, with keening sirens, followed by another, another, another.
At 9:14 a.m., two LAPD officers, in separate West Los Angeles police cars, were given a call by central dispatch: “Code 2, possible homicide, 10050 Cielo Drive.” Officer J. J. De Rosa arrived first, encountering the young man Jim Asim and the visibly upset housekeeper, who told him of all the blood and the body as she showed the officer how to operate the electronic entrance.
With rifle in hand De Rosa strode onto the property and spotted Steven Parent slumped in the Ambassador, motor off, lights off. As De Rosa was checking out Parent’s automobile, Officer W. T. Whisenhunt arrived, having “received a call to back up a fellow officer investigating a possible homicide” as he later testified.
They called for an ambulance and verified that Parent was deceased. Then they warily proceeded onto the property again, rifles at the ready. They climbed up into the second story of the garage, where Roman Polanski was going to put his office, and checked it out, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
They passed Sebring’s black Porsche and the Firebird and the Camaro in the garage, and then walked across the lawn where they encountered Wojtek Frykowski, wearing colored bell-bottomed pants and a purple shirt, and buckled, brown, high-top shoes. They spotted Abigail Folger a few yards to the south, white gown splotched with red.
Another policeman, Officer Burbridge, was the next officer to arrive, joining the two policemen. The three policemen could see the great amount of blood on the front porch and, of course, the open front door. They hesitated, not knowing what sort of crazed killer might be lurking within. With De Rosa covering, Whisenhunt and Burbridge went around to the back of the house to locate additional entrances, but the back door was locked. Whisenhunt and Burbridge decided to enter the open nursery room window on the far right of the house, the very window that Tex Watson had slashed. The slit window screen was resting against the house.
Not long after, Officer De Rosa observed his fellow patrolmen within the house, so he walked over the flagstone porch into the hallway, avoiding the blood. He spotted the “PIG” on the door, and entered the ghastly ghostly gory desolation of Manson’s tableau. They spotted the bodies and the rope and quickly searched the house, the bedrooms, and the upstairs loft. A major task was to protect the scene, making careful note of the original physical circumstances of the area and leaving it undisturbed.
The officers completed their search of the house and were checking out the remainder of the estate—the pool area for instance—walking in the direction of the guesthouse, when they heard barking dogs, after which they heard a male voice within the guesthouse.
Bill Garretson yelled “Quiet down!” as the cops approached and started to get up from the couch in the living room where he had been sleeping since shortly after dawn. He was a short, tanned young man with semilong brown hair, age nineteen, barefoot, shirtless, and wearing pinstriped pants. He glanced out the window onto the front porch and saw an officer pointing a rifle at him. The officer told him to freeze. Christopher, the Weimaraner, was barking furiously. Garretson saw a second policeman leveling a rifle at him from the redwood picnic table on the porch.
Officer De Rosa kicked the front door in and the Weimaraner rushed forward and bit De Rosa’s leg. They tossed Garretson onto the porch floor, and handcuffed his hands behind his back. Garretson kept asking, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”
“You want to know what’s the matter? Well, we’ll show you what’s the matter,” as they marched Garretson across the lawn to Abigail Folger, who lay upon her back in her nightgown. He thought the body was that of the maid. They marched him over to Wojtek Frykowski. He looked away from the unidentifiable victim. Then they took him to the Ambassador, where he couldn’t identify Parent.
Thinking that the first body was the maid, Garretson was shocked when he spotted Mrs. Chapman alive when he reached the front gate. When he asked whose body it had been, he was told in error that it was Mrs. Polanski’s.
Chapman and Garretson were taken to a police station by Officers De Rosa and Whisenhunt while Officer Burbridge remained behind to protect the crime scene. Mrs. Chapman became overwrought and was taken to the UCLA Medical Center for sedation and then was escorted to West Los Angeles police headquarters for questioning. Daze-eyed Bill Garretson was led into the lockup and sometime later an officer approached to say, “There’s the guy that killed those people.”
Print and TV reporters who monitor police radio broadcasts quickly heard that something had happened on Cielo Drive. There was chatter about fires in Benedict Canyon with five people killed and that Sebring was one of the victims, so a reporter telephoned Jay’s house and spoke to an employee who had stayed over to paint or to repair the house. After the reporter called, the employee called the vice president of Sebring International, who called Sharon’s mother. Mrs. Tate then tried to contact Cielo Drive where, even though the phone lines were cut, the telephone appeared to ring, giving the appearance that no one was home. This was not startling to Doris Tate, because she was certain that Sharon was staying for the night at her friend Sheilah Wells’s house.
Meanwhile, six squad cars sped up to the Cielo gate, then more. Aerial photos taken a few minutes after the police arrived show the front gate of the estate glutted with reporters, none of whom was allowed through the electric gate onto the property.
The reporters quick-questioned the police as they entered or left the front gate. The first uniformed supervisor to arrive at Cielo Drive described to reporters the condition of the beds: “All of the beds, including those in the guest house, appear to have been used. . . . It looked
like a battlefield up there.”
And so the police entering and leaving gave out bits of information. One officer said that the murder scene “looked ritualistic.” Those words set the tone for early reportage. The Los Angeles Times came on the stands that afternoon with a page-one story about “Ritual Murders.”
The police gave out so much information that they were endangering the supply of “poly keys”—polygraph interrogation keys—key bits of information about the murders that only the killers could know, so that on a lie detector test the possible killer could be asked questions about these keys.
One officer told reporters that the victims were attired in “hippie type clothes.” Another stated that one of the victim’s pants were down. Another opined that it looked like a “typical fag murder.” Something led reporters to print that Sebring was wearing a black hood over his head, although there is a great difference between a light-colored bloody towel and a black hood.
Over forty officers, including the chief of the Beverly Hills police department, plus ambulance drivers and four members of the coroner’s staff, arrived. They spread upon the grounds, up on the roof, scraping, dusting, making notes.
Police photographers took hundreds of snaps of the inside of the house and the grounds. One of the jobs right away was to learn as much as possible about the victims, emphasizing seeking enemies and those with motives.
At around 10 a.m. the police called Sharon’s mother. They obtained from her the name of William Tennant, Sharon’s business agent. The police then located Mr. Tennant at his tennis club. He went immediately to 10050 Cielo Drive, arriving about noon, still wearing his tennis attire.
He identified Sharon, Abigail, Jay, and Wojtek, then departed, sobbing and holding back an urge to throw up. He refused to speak to the gathering of reporters at the gate. A TV gossip asked him if it was “really Sharon,” to which the anguished Tennant replied, “Oh, don’t be an ass.”
When Mr. Tennant called, it was early evening in London, and Roman Polanski was at home, preparing to go out to dinner with Victor Lownes, managing director of the London Playboy Club. At first Mr. Polanski thought it was a joke and hung up. Tennant called again. “She was such a good person,” Mr. Polanski said over and over during the early shock.
Also at around 10 a.m., West Los Angeles detectives arrived to take charge of the investigation. One of them covered the bodies with sheets. They searched the guesthouse looking for weapons. They checked the main house for signs of robbery and ransacking. They noted there were no drawers left open and Sebring was still wearing his $1,500 watch. They laddered up onto the roof to see where the downed telephone and communications wires led. The glasses were found near the blood-spotted steamer trunks.
An officer gathered up all the cutlery in both the caretaker’s house and the main house, to check for blood. Also he gathered Roman’s engraved .45-caliber revolver, which had been given to him by the cast of Rosemary’s Baby. They located three pieces of broken pistol grip from the Wyatt Earp revolver, and removed the spattered American flag from the couch.
Police also visited the Folger-Frykowski house at 2774 Woodstock and confiscated ten address books and notebooks, some or all of which were written in Polish. Also taken were various personal papers of the decedents and a box of “miscellaneous photographs and negatives,” as it was listed in item number 65 in the police property report.
A man from the telephone company showed up between 10 and 11 a.m., pushing through the news-pack at the outside rattan fence. He repaired two telephone wires and left two down pending police investigation. The police wanted to know what sort of device had severed the wires, so the phone man took a look at the wires to see what might have clipped it. A police officer cut a foot-and-a-half length of wire containing on one end the actual marks of the instrument used by the killer or killers to sever the wire.
The LAPD’s Special Investigation Division brought blood analysts to Cielo. A Sergeant Granado arrived and began to take blood samples from forty-three locations all over the house and grounds. For the later trial, the police created a large blood-map of the murder house, which was useful in determining how the crimes were committed. They checked the bloody barefoot prints on the sidewalk to the entranceway. There were bloody pink ribbons hanging on the front door. There was a blood-soaked purple scarf found near Frykowski.
Unfortunately some police officers themselves tracked blood on the front porch, leaving three red footprints. This created problems later when the police were trying to re-create the original scene. They had to find out what sort of soles officers had on their shoes in order to determine the bloody prints were in fact made by a policeman in the early minutes of the investigation.
What seems to remain a part of the mystery is a bloody boot-heel print on the flagstone front porch that was not made by the police. Whose was it? Likely it was not Watson’s or Manson’s since they seem to have been wearing moccasins.
Sometime around noon the investigation of the murders was reassigned from the West Los Angeles division of LAPD to the robbery-homicide division of LAPD. Lieutenant Robert J. Helder, supervisor of investigation for the robbery-homicide division, was chosen to take charge. Lieutenant Helder stayed in charge until the arrests on December 1.
Two fingerprint specialists, Officer Jerome Boen and Officer Girt, came to the residence about 12:30 p.m. and began dusting for prints. The ridges of the fingers, palms, and soles ooze with oil and fluid. An impression of the ridge patterns was made wherever surface contact was made. On hard, smooth surfaces the ridge impression can be removed. First the officer powdered the surface with a gray powder, which was brushed away with powder sticking to the ridges of the fingerprint or footprint. The print is then sprayed with iodine and transferred to a card with a special tape. Photographs were made of the precise location of the prints.
Another method of detection was used on those prints where dusting didn’t detect the “moisture ridges” sufficiently because of the faintness of the ridges. For that, the officers sprayed on an iodine/chemical mixture and within twenty-four to forty-eight hours the print appeared.
Fifty fingerprints were found, with twenty-two eliminated, plus three were “unmakable” and twenty-five remaining unidentified. Of this twenty-five, a good number were located on the freshly painted window sill of the nursery window, indicating that they were likely left there either the afternoon or the evening of the murders. Several were later connected to the killers.
Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the chief medical examiner of LA County, ordered that the bodies not be disturbed till he and his assistants should arrive at the scene. The nylon rope connecting Sebring and Tate was ordered severed by Noguchi. Later the police cut the sections of the rope to trace source, manufacturer, and possible purchasers.
The LA coroner Thomas Noguchi was at the crime scene to supervise details.
One of Noguchi’s deputies took liver temperatures of the victims as an aid in determining the time of death. Victims’ hands were wrapped with bags to save possible hairs and skin from the struggle. Then an ambulance crew brought wheeled stretchers and removed the victims.
Right away officers went to Sebring’s home to look for evidence. Several friends of Sebring, including a well-known actor, had rushed over to Sebring’s house on Easton Drive to clean it free of contraband, evidently ahead of the police.
Later on, the LAPD brought a van to the Polanski-Tate house and brought a truck-load of stuff down to headquarters for examination. A few days later they brought most of it back and tried to array it in the same order to re-create the original undisturbed crime scene.
The glasses found on the floor were picked up and replaced on the table in the foyer. They were later turned over to Sharon’s father, Paul Tate, who kept them for several weeks trying to locate the owner.
At the murder site, the police searched for drugs, finding a half-full baggie of twenty-six grams of marijuana in a living room cabinet. They located thirty grams of hashish in the nigh
tstand in Frykowski and Folger’s room, plus ten MDA capsules. Cocaine and marijuana were found in Sebring’s Porsche and a vial of coke in his pocket.
William Garretson, meanwhile, was questioned at the West LA jail at 4 p.m. He was read his rights and chose to speak without counsel present. “He gave stuporous and non-responsive answers to pertinent questions,” a police report said. Shortly after the 4 p.m. interview, he secured the services of LA attorney Barry Tarlow. Garretson was then transported downtown to the LA police headquarters. He was queried once again, this time in the presence of Mr. Tarlow. Garretson then agreed he would submit to a lie detector test on Sunday, August 10, with his attorney present.
The LAPD animal regulation department removed the dogs and the kitten from Cielo, and police instituted a day-and-night guard on the house that lasted almost two weeks.
Meanwhile Steven Parent’s body remained unidentified in the rush and confusion, although a reporter at the electric gate could read the license plate on Parent’s Ambassador, so he ran a check on it and got Parent’s home address. A priest friend of Parent identified his body, while his parents seemed to have learned of his death over television.
Some policemen got no sleep for three or four days, there was so much to do. There was fear as never before. And rumors as never before. Friends of the victims, some of them with enemies also, asked themselves, “Am I next?” Was there a maniac with a grudge slinking through the heat wave toward their homes?
Mother Doris Learns
“My God, Sharon’s been murdered,” Doris Tate exclaimed, sinking to her knees. Then she whispered, “My baby’s dead.”
Friends Learn
Joanna Pettet, her husband Alex Cord, and ten-month-old Damien were scheduled to return to Cielo Drive to swim. Pettet: “We were going to go swimming, Alex and I and Damien, and so I just called Sharon, to see what time we’d get there, and the phone rang and rang and rang. I said to Alex, ‘This is odd. They have a maid, and all those people in the house.’ I called again, and it rang and rang and rang. Then, my next call was from this lady, Janine Forman (whom Pettet had seen the night before) who said, ‘I just heard the news. And I think it’s your friend.’ I dropped the phone and dropped to my knees. Alex was in the room with me, and he picked up the phone and continued the conversation. And then it was just weeks and weeks and months and months of horror.”