Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  It was felt that possibly the Canadian dope dealers involved in that Jamaican grass-trafficking were also involved in a Jamaican voodoo group that was somehow connected with the crimes. According to the reporter Min Yee, he and John Phillips went to a voodoo astrologer, who informed them that midnight August 8–9 was a fitting time for a voodoo sacrifice. There was also indication that one of the voodoo adepts had threatened Wojtek Frykowski a few days prior to his death.

  One girlfriend of Sebring later alleged that John and Michelle Phillips were into a certain kind of voodoo.

  Polanski departed Jamaica the end of August, to New York City. He stayed at the Essex House on Central Park South, where he had purportedly resided during the NY shoots of Rosemary’s Baby. And, according to Barbara Leaming’s biography of Polanski, “was seen about town with friends: lunching at P. J. Clarke’s with columnist Steve Brandt, visiting Warren Beatty at the Delmonico.” Richard Sylbert was with him in New York City. He then flew to London, “but the press was full of the killings—and Polanski,” so he returned to “California, moving into Richard Sylbert’s Malibu beach house. Sylbert found him distraught.”

  Here’s one woman’s recollection of a visit to Sylbert’s Malibu beach house while Polanski was staying there: “As I recall it was on the Old Malibu Road. Which is different than the Colony Road. He and Roman shared the house. I went there only once (after the murders) with Carol G . . . and Mary D . . . , Roman and Warren. I believe we had all been at some club and then went to Milton F. Kreis (drugstore and luncheonette) which was in the Beverly Wilshire and a favorite place to have breakfast after clubbing. I was hoping to see Sylbert, but he didn’t return home.

  “Mary, whom we used to refer to as ‘Mary Mattress,’ was having sex with Roman on the living room floor, Warren and Carol had gone off into a front bedroom, and I had stayed in the kitchen at some sort of a breakfast bar which gave a bird’s eye view of the living room. I was a little surprised that Roman a recent widower was so casually fucking this girl whom he had just met. Warren was trying to get it into Carol who was teasing him but nothing more. She came out and said she was leaving. She was our driver that evening. A tussle broke out with Warren trying to get me into the bedroom, and when I finally extricated myself from his attempt, I told Mary to put her clothes on and meet us in the car or she’d have to walk home. I remember she kept saying to Roman, ‘Oh, you’re just like a little teddy bear!’”

  A faithful memory?

  Polanski’s Secret/Not-So-Secret Investigation

  As we have noted, after Roman Polanski passed his lie detector test, he began a secret investigation of his own. He worked for a few weeks looking for the culprit among his acquaintances, mingling among them casually, trying to keep them unaware of his sleuthing.

  Polanski was provided with the prescription of the pair of myopic glasses found in the house. He used a professional lens-measuring device, with which he stealthily checked out his friends’ glasses, looking for the mate to the fire-starting glasses Manson had left as a deceptive clue in the house.

  Polanski: “And when Bruce Lee told me he’d lost his glasses, I suspected him. So I accompanied him to the opticians to see if his glasses matched those found in the villa after the crime.” (From Roman Polanski: Interviews, 1984, p. 108, an interview with Franz-Olivier Giesbert.)

  Polanski also did handwriting analyses of friends. He was struck by the word PIG written by the killers on the front door of the house—it was Sharon’s blood-type.

  Polanski became suspicious of singer/composer John Phillips, with whose wife, Michelle Phillips, Mr. Polanski had conducted a one-night stand in London apparently while Sharon was filming The Thirteen Chairs in Rome. Polanski wondered if Phillips had suffered a jealous flip-out and took part in the murders. In his autobiography, Mr. Phillips wrote that his wife, from whom he was separated, “had also had an affair with Beatty in London, too. I had phoned Warren once and . . . I warned him, in a drunken, stoned stupor, to lay off other guys’ wives or he’d get himself seriously injured. Warren must have related that conversation to Roman, who must have been impressed with my anger and potential for violence.”

  One night Polanski entered Phillips’s Bel Air garage and apparently chemically checked his Jaguar for bloodstains, with no results. He found a machete in the trunk. Another time he was alone in Phillips’s Rolls convertible and rifled through Phillips’s Gucci diary. “I noted that all the entries, from first page to last, were printed in block capitals. What chilled me was that the lettering bore a distinct resemblance to the word ‘PIG’ that had been scrawled in blood on the door . . . I quickly photocopied some sample pages and sent them, together with photographs of the ‘PIG’ inscription, to a handwriting expert in New York.” This bore no results.

  The conclusion of Roman’s investigation of Phillips, according to John Phillips, occurred at the Malibu beach house of Michael Sarne, for whom Mr. Phillips was composing music for his movie Myra Breckinridge. Phillips remembers there was a full moon, which would have meant it was the very day that just a few miles away the Manson spores were burying the remains of one of their victims, stuntman Shorty Shea.

  Phillips: “We were all helping to prepare dinner. Roman was chopping vegetables with a cleaver. I was sitting on the couch, still in my bathing trunks. Suddenly I felt a powerful hand clutch my hair from behind and yank my head back with a violent jerk. I felt the razor-sharp edge of the cleaver pressed against my throat. I recognized the shape and strength in the hand from countless arm-wrestling bouts. Roman grunted.

  ‘Did you kill Sharon? Did you?’ “

  Mr. Phillips countered, no, indeed he had not.

  The extensive carnage on Cielo Drive would have meant that the killers or killer would have likely had blood on their clothes, hands, and arms, so that they likely would have smirched blood upon the seats and steering wheels of their automobiles. The luminol chemiluminescence reaction is responsible for the glow of lightsticks. The reaction is used by criminologists to detect traces of blood at crime scenes. In this test, luminol powder (C8H7O3N3) is mixed with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and a hydroxide (e.g., KOH) in a bottle. The luminol solution is applied where blood might be found. The iron from the hemoglobin in the blood serves as a catalyst for the chemiluminescence reaction that causes luminol to glow, so a blue glow is produced when the solution is applied where there is blood. The blue glow lasts for about 30 seconds before it fades.

  Polanski acquired a container of Luminol, then surreptitiously swabbed the automobiles of certain friends to check for blood. One night he was going into John Phillips’s garage with the Luminol, when two officers came to check out what he was up to; Polanski said he’d left a bag in Phillips’s automobile, and the officers let him off the hook.

  On September 2, a well-known broadcaster, Rona Barrett, asserted on a Metromedia station serving Los Angeles, that Roman Polanski had received $50,000 from Life magazine for the photos and story from the murder house. The charge was hotly denied by Polanski and his attorneys. The owner of the murder house, Rudy Altobelli, became so outraged over the alleged $50,000 that he sued Roman Polanski and the estate of Sharon Tate for around $668,000 dollars, charging “trespassory conduct” in that Abigail Folger and Wojtek Frykowski had dwelled in a house rented for one family residency. He also sued for back rent, damages (lots of blood), and emotional distress.

  Mr. Peter Folger, Abigail Folger’s father, according to a number of people interviewed, initiated an intense investigation into the matter. Roman Polanski was assisted by several famous LA private investigators. “Polanski worked on it himself. But Polanski didn’t realize it was hippies. He was working in his own area,” reported one of his investigators. For a while, Polanski was protected constantly by two armed bodyguards. In all, at least ten private investigators in Los Angeles were used extensively throughout the investigation of the case, both by private parties and by the district attorney.

  The Reward

  Early in September
, Peter Sellers, Warren Beatty, Yul Brynner, and others announced the establishment of a reward of $25,000 for the arrest and conviction of the murderers. “We handed the money over to Roman Polanski and his lawyers in the hope that that would bring the killers to justice,” stated Mr. Sellers.

  Why would Yul Brynner, star of The King and I, fork over money to the award fund? Because he was at Mama Cass’s for the torment session?

  One possible answer was provided by a police photographer named Don Dornan, who a little more than a year later, talked with attorney Paul Fitzgerald. I had heard previously that Don Dornan had copious materials, including police reports, many photos, interviews, hours of tapes, maybe even films, all collected together, perhaps for a book on the murders. Dornan had gone to Inyo County in December of 1969, so I had heard, to take photos for both the sheriff’s office and for the LAPD. I later learned that Don Dornan was the brother of the future congressman from Orange County, Bob “B-1 Bomber” Dornan, and that he was well regarded among homicide investigators.

  So, I asked Paul Fitzgerald to call Mr. Dornan, which he did that evening of December 7, 1970. Dornan confirmed he had become involved in December of 1969 when he went to Inyo County to take photos. He also sold photos, he said, to Paris Match, to Stern, and to a newspaper in London, among others.

  Notice of the reward, published in the Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1969

  Fitzgerald spoke with Mr. Dornan for about a half hour, after which he provided about a ten-minute rendition of the call. I switched on my tape recorder while Paul was describing the Dornan call, glancing at his notes while he spoke:

  “He says that the tapes were found in the closet the next day. He says that there is an underground film club in Hollywood of prominent people; it’s like a lending library, they exchange tapes. Polanski did not know who the participants in the films that happened to be in his closet were.

  “Apparently he hadn’t seen them or hadn’t viewed them. . . . The police apparently confronted Polanski about this when he came back. Polanski at the time was working with an ex-cop in a detective agency who got the tapes back from LAPD.” Dornan told Fitzgerald that Polanski then obtained money from Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers, and Warren Beatty for the reward.

  I asked, “Who obtained the money?

  “Polanski and the ex-cop detective agency guy—$25,000 for the reward. He’s an ex-cop, he’s an Irishman and he talks with a brogue.” Quicksand.

  Colonel Tate’s Investigation

  After the murders, Paul Tate drove his family to Texas for reasons of safety, then he returned to California to put in his retirement papers to the army. The lieutenant-colonel resigned from the service at age forty-six, two weeks prior to his scheduled retirement after over a twenty-year career. He had been stationed at Ft. Baker in Sausalito, California—6th Region Headquarters, Army Air Defense Command. Tate had been involved with protecting Nike-Hercules missile sites. Tate immediately put together a team to investigate the murders.

  According to an account the colonel later wrote, he had three men, “all friends from the US Department of Defense,” as he later described them, and all seasoned investigators, who gathered at the Tate residence near Los Angeles to help in the colonel’s investigation. A person Tate called Guy had been the first to offer sleuth-help. He’d been an FBI agent for twenty years (and not technically in the Department of Defense), plus there was a man named Jake and one named Frankie, who was six foot, eleven inches tall. (It’s not known whether these are pseudonyms.)

  Colonel Tate worked in subsequent years on a book-length account of his investigation. In September of 1973, a press release was issued from an English publisher, Talmy, Franklin Ltd.: “Shel Talmy today announced his acquisition for Talmy, Franklin Ltd. of the exclusive worldwide publishing rights to Col. Paul J. Tate’s personal investigation into his daughter’s murder.” No such book was ever published. At the time, I called the publisher’s New York law firm, and was informed that Colonel Tate was still working on the book. The lawyer would not say that Tate was collaborating with others on the project. My investigator Larry Larsen reported in 1974 that Colonel Tate had formed a security company with LAPD Lieutenant Robert Helder and Los Angeles–based FBI agent Roger “Frenchy” LaJeunesse. Were they assisting in the book project? The record is blank.

  There apparently were several versions of Colonel Tate’s manuscript. One was located in the 2000s in the hands of the William Morris Endeavor Agency in Los Angeles.

  According to Paul Tate’s account, his investigation began with a gathering of his team on the same day that former film partner Gene Gutowski defended Polanski at a press conference and also the same day as Polanski’s polygraph. The meeting was held at the Tate residence in Palos Verdes. Jake suggested that they follow Polanski and check him out. Guy volunteered to see what Interpol had on Roman, and Frankie was to check on Roman’s paper trail.

  Later that day the colonel was going through Sharon’s check registry looking for suspicious checks. Later, Lieutenant Earl Deemer provided a tape of Polanski’s polygraph, which the colonel and two of his team listened to. Jake was on surveillance duty, watching Polanski.

  Returning from the Polanski surveillance, Jake reported to Tate’s investigators that he had followed Polanski the previous night to John Phillips’ Bel Air house. He said he had observed Polanski climb over the gate, and then look within a Rolls-Royce parked near the garage. Then the LAPD showed up, and confronted Polanski just as he was leaving. They checked his ID, and soon he was set free. Jake approached the patrolman writing up the report, who told him that Polanski had claimed he’d left something in Phillips’s Rolls, and didn’t want to disturb him.

  Colonel Tate allegedly paid a surprise visit to Sharon’s close friends, Jim Mitchum and Wende Wagner Mitchum. Jimmy told the colonel that Jay Sebring was using a lot of coke. He blamed that on Sharon’s pregnancy, that Jay had never expected the marriage to last, and now had lost hope in ever getting back with Sharon.

  He further suggested to the colonel that Steve McQueen had cleaned out Jay’s house before the arrival of the police. They told Tate about Cass Elliot’s friends, Billy Doyle and Pic Dawson, and others, who they said took advantage of Cass. Dawson’s father was a diplomat, and Dawson used to light up some marijuana and announce, “diplomatic immunity,” because he said he’d smuggled it in in sealed diplomatic pouches. The colonel learned that Wojtek Frykowski had befriended Cass Elliot’s friends, and they hung out at Cielo Drive.

  Tate then, it is averred, stopped off to see Steve McQueen, who denied cleaning out Jay’s house, saying that he had “only made the suggestion.” The colonel allegedly chided McQueen for not coming to Sharon’s funeral. Colonel Tate also spoke with actor James Coburn, who confirmed there was coke secreted all over Sebring’s house. This was shocking to the colonel, who considered Jay like a son to him.

  Sebring in Debt

  Tate’s associate Guy delivered a report on Sebring, noting that he was more than $250,000 in debt. Within the past year, he’d borrowed $6,000 from his dentist, $2,700 from Sharon, and $5,000 from Abigail Folger. Tate wondered if there weren’t a debt they had not located.

  Tate also had a conversation with Warren Beatty, who returned Tate’s call. Beatty recalled the year Paul and Doris had had a bunch of them over for Thanksgiving. That night, after Paul and Doris had gone to bed, Beatty, Jay, and the others stood in the backyard watching for shooting stars. “Someone may have lit a joint, I don’t remember. But I do remember we passed that night like so many others—blamelessly. Not like what they’re writing in the papers. Jay was a good man; the best friend a person could have.”

  The colonel apparently then received an anonymous telephone call telling him to contact actress Candy Bergen, who, when Tate spoke with her, was still mightily afraid. Candy Bergen tipped off Colonel Tate to the putative buggering of Billy Doyle. In her version, according to the colonel’s later account, Billy Doyle had gone to Jamaica to acquire a significant amount of
drugs for Wojtek and Abigail, Bergen continued, and when the money didn’t arrive from Los Angeles, Doyle returned in anger over the botched deal. With a gun, Doyle, the story went, stormed to Cielo Drive, and threatened to kill Wojtek. Jay was on hand, and with Wojtek’s help, overcame Doyle and took him to Woodrow Wilson Drive to Mama Cass’s house, where they tied him to a tree, then buggered him in front of an audience of twelve. Doyle threatened to get even.

  Told that, Tate and his crew decided to locate Mr. Doyle, and contacted Lieutenant Helder, who told them Doyle had passed a polygraph. Tate wanted to find out for himself, and Helder suggested he try Toronto.

  Tate and the ex-FBI agent, Guy, flew to Toronto. They had a photo of Doyle, and spotted him leaving a business owned by his father. They conducted Doyle to a bar, and questioned him.

  Doyle denied threatening Wojtek. Then why, Tate wanted to know, was everybody pointing the finger at him? Doyle: “This mess was started by John Phillips. As I’m sure you know, I was living with Cass Elliot until a few weeks before the murders. I love Cass. We have a lot in common. After the murders, John convinced her that I killed all those people. She believed it and told the police a bunch of false things about me. She has since apologized.”

  “Why did Phillips have it out for you? Did you ball his wife?” asked one of the team.

  “No, but Roman did. Has anyone considered that John did this for revenge?” Doyle also allegedly said, “Michelle Phillips is a cobra. I couldn’t be less interested in her. As for John, he’s a violent fellow who liked to settle all of his arguments with Cass by hitting her. I stopped that, and he’s never liked me since.”

  Then the investigator allegedly suggested, “Tell us about the time that Wojtek tied you to a tree and balled you in the ass.” Doyle replied, “I, uh, he didn’t. Wojtek invited me up to the house to do some mescaline. I only remember a bit of the party. I can’t give you the facts. I was unconscious. But I wasn’t sore there the next day, and I was sore everywhere else.”