Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  Jack Gardiner also told Larry Larsen that other Family members, including Leslie Van Houten and a young man named Christopher Zero, talked about the English cult while in jail in Inyo County in late 1969. Zero, whose true name was John Philip Haught, was shot to death, or shot himself, under very strange circumstances, in a house in Venice a few weeks after being released from the Inyo County Jail.

  Dianne Lake may have also suggested to Jack Gardiner that there were murder victims buried at the Barker Ranch, located in the mountains above Death Valley, where Manson and his group were arrested in October of 1969. In 1974, Gardiner sent an Inyo County detective to look about 150 yards behind the Barker ranch house, where Manson was arrested, for four gravesites. The detective complied with the order, but no gravesites were located.

  John Phillips, the talented but troubled troubadour, leader of the Mamas and the Papas, donated as much as $25,000 to the English satanic group when it was in Los Angeles in 1967 and 1968.

  LA private investigator Larry Larsen and I looked into various aspects of the Manson Family’s associations and activities, and also the assassination of Robert Kennedy, for years. Larsen was an exceptional investigator—fearless, honest, and very ethical. In August of 1972, less than a year after the publication of The Family, Larsen reported on becoming close to an investigative team associated with IRS Intelligence. It was just after the IRS, along with other federal agencies had arrested many associated with Timothy Leary’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love (which had paid the Weather Underground to help Leary escape from prison). It was in the course of meeting with associates of IRS intelligence that Larsen was informed that the head of the English satanic organization had recruited Manson. Through Larsen, I was asked to help in the investigation of Timothy Leary, but I refused, saying that I didn’t think Leary had done anything to warrant his capture.

  Larsen also did research for other writers. In 1974, he was assisting writer Alexander Cockburn in research for an article on Sirhan Sirhan when Larsen learned about an investigation being conducted by an Immigration and Naturalization Service criminal investigator named Richard Smith. The investigation was into the activities of the Satanist group of English origin which had oozed to America in 1967, 1968, and 1969. The investigation delved not only into the activities of the English cult, but also into the Robert Kennedy assassination, the activities of Sirhan Sirhan, and finally into Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate. Larry Larsen provided some reliable information, given to him by Smith himself, outlining Smith’s investigation.

  Richard Smith prepared a report on the English Satanists around the summer of 1974. Smith was attempting to launch a full-scale investigation of the Satanists, with investigators to go from Frankfort, Germany, to London, England, to speak with Scotland Yard and other sources. Smith proposed to the INS to have the field office in Mexico City investigate the Mexican operations of the satanic cult, but apparently when a superior at INS saw the name of the daughter of a prominent US congressman as belonging to the Satanist society, and other factors as well, he got cold feet. Larsen learned that Smith was told to turn in his files to superiors at the INS office in New York City. Mr. Smith was also denied permission by his superiors to interview Sirhan Sirhan in prison.

  Larsen was allowed to read Smith’s report. The report stated that English Satanist cult members invited Sirhan Sirhan to a number of parties that were sponsored by television people in the LA area, and that one of the parties took place at Sharon Tate’s residence. At these parties, it was averred, sexual and ritualistic rites were reported to have occurred. From Smith’s actual report, a copy of which I obtained in later years, it was written that Sirhan Sirhan “had attended some parties given by television personalities in behalf of the organization, where rites took place usually dealing with sexual deviations and heavy drug use. One of these parties took place at Sharon Tate’s home.”

  These assertions were apparently based on an FBI report done during the initial investigation of the Robert Kennedy assassination, which Mr. Smith had acquired. An FBI report with the information linking Sirhan with the English Satanists, though with virtually all of the information blacked out, was received by the Yonkers police department during the Son of Sam investigation decades later. Investigators in Yonkers verified what was in the blacked out sections, and it corresponded with what the INS officer wrote in his 1974 report, regarding Sirhan Sirhan attending parties on behalf of the Satanist English cult, including one at Sharon Tate’s place.

  CBS television reporter Carl George, whom I met at the Tate-LaBianca trial, alleged that a sheriff’s office homicide detective stated he could link Sirhan Sirhan in Pasadena to a member of the English satanic cult.

  INS criminal investigator Richard Smith’s report stated that an LA law enforcement agency had a female informant who averred that the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon Tate. Larsen asked Smith about the informant and was told it was a person who alleged that she had been in the same room at the time the Satanists let out an order for a contract to Manson to kill her. The reason for the contract, as Larsen stated in a report to me, was “something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan.”

  At this point in the conversation between Larry Larsen and Richard Smith (the conversation had gone on for one-half hour or longer, and Smith had answered every question freely and had shown Larry Larsen every document he had with him), Larsen reported the following: “And then I asked the obvious question, ‘What did Sharon Tate allegedly overhear?’ and he said, ‘I cannot discuss that. It’s a matter of national security.’”

  Smith elaborated, after a question by Larsen, that it had nothing to do with Colonel Paul Tate and Tate’s intelligence activities.

  Larsen received this data on October 4, 1974. Smith’s list of confidential informers went from L-1 through L-6. The FBI had no number, but Larsen learned it was one of the agencies which provided information.

  As we have indicated, the satanic cult had a recruit who was the daughter of a prominent liberal New York Congressman, as a result of which, as he indicated to Larsen, Smith’s investigation was terminated, and he was told to turn in his paperwork to the INS chain of command, which he did, but he kept a copy of his “Memorandum to File.”

  Smith remained in government service and confirmed the facts of his investigation, including follow-up interviews, in subsequent months and years, that were conducted by Larry Larsen. The INS officer was questioned at least twice, in the 2000s, about the assertions of the document, once in 2000 and another time in 2004. During those years I was working on a project with Maury Terry, author of The Ultimate Evil. Maury and I figured out a way to approach Richard Smith. Accordingly, I helped prepare a list of questions submitted to Mr. Smith in 2004, at which time he was an INS officer in a large Western city. Smith, thirty years after his original report, still refused to say what Sharon Tate had allegedly learned about the Robert Kennedy assassination that was of such magnitude that it caused her murder and could not be revealed because of “national security.”

  These matters have disturbed me now for over forty years, and I feel obligated to bring them up in this afterword. (I brought up some of the same issues in an updated edition of my book, The Family, in 2002.)

  The two houses in which Sharon Tate dwelled at which a party conducted by the satanic organization could have been held are (1) the “Cary Grant” mansion in Santa Monica rented from actor Brian Aherne; and (2) the fourth-floor apartment at the Chateau Marmont Hotel where she and Roman Polanski resided in the late winter and spring of 1968.

  There is one individual whom I interviewed, a musician, who claimed to have attended a party at the Chateau Marmont in the spring of 1968, at which he told me he had observed someone he believed to be Sirhan Sirhan. The party, so he alleged, was not at Sharon Tate’s suite at the Chateau Marmont, but at the rooms of a photographer friend of Sharon’s at the Cha
teau. Sharon, he said, was there. Everyone was clothed at the gathering and nothing he observed was of a sexual nature. This individual’s allegations were in no way connected with Mr. Richard Smith’s.

  As for Larry Larsen, from 1975 until 1980 Larsen was an LA County deputy supervisor, working for Supervisor Baxter Ward. One of Larsen’s duties was to assist Ward’s investigation into the death of Senator Kennedy.

  Another acquaintance of Larry Larsen during those years was legendary IRS intelligence agent John Daley, stationed in California, who in 1972 investigated Teamster head Frank Fitzsimmons’s connections to the Nixon White House. Daley and fellow IRS agents learned from the Teamsters’ officials that the Teamsters had given something like $500,000 directly to Nixon, plus other payments to CREEP (the Committee to Re-Elect the President) during the 1972 presidential campaign. Daley and the IRS had learned about the money flowing to Nixon while interviewing Teamsters’ president Fitzsimmons and associates, who provided the information hoping to avoid prosecution for other transgressions. After Nixon had won reelection in 1972, there was a meeting between Richard Nixon and Frank Fitzsimmons, in a private room at the White House. Also in attendance was Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who was ordered by Nixon to review all pending Teamsters investigations, and to make sure that Fitzsimmons and associates were not harmed. This is discussed in Anthony Summers’s book The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. (Try chapter 28.)

  John Daley also developed information on the murder of Sharon Tate. Larry Larsen learned some of Daley’s assertions. One, based on information from a woman and her husband in Los Angeles, was that the head of the English Satanist group came through Kansas City, saw “two brothers,” then went on to California where he contracted with Manson to kill Sharon Tate. The contract amount, it was alleged, was $25,000. Daley’s female informant said she’d witnessed the contract with Manson. I asked former LA County sheriff’s office homicide officers Paul Whiteley and Charles Guenther (both now retired) about the supposed informant, and both denied ever interviewing the informant or knowing the informant’s name. An LA sheriff’s office intelligence division officer, alleged to be one of Richard Smith’s sources on the allegation that there had been a contract to kill Sharon Tate because of something she had learned about Sirhan Sirhan, also denied to Larry Larsen that he had been a source to Mr. Smith. Yet in all of Larsen’s contacts with Smith, Smith never backed down from his 1974 report.

  (Back in January of 1971, during our original investigation for my book The Family, Larry Larsen interviewed a woman who had typed reports for private investigators who had been hired to work on the murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, and the others. She typed reports for a number of months. One investigator looked into locating assets in Kansas City, Missouri, in the name of Susan Atkins, Charles Manson, and on key Manson associate Bill Vance. They also looked in the seacoast town of Corpus Christi, Texas.)

  But, all in all, the question is this: Could Sharon Tate have been involved, even in a tangential way, with an organized occult religious group such as the English Satanist organization? It brings to mind the interview that actor Steve McQueen, longtime pal of Sharon Tate, gave in 1980, not long before he passed away. (We have traced this interview earlier.)

  The interviewer asked McQueen about going into the occult. McQueen answered, “I was on the ring of it. Jay Sebring was my best friend. Sharon Tate was a girlfriend of mine. I dated Sharon for a while. I was sure taken care of; my name never got drawn into that mess. He was having an affair with the girlfriend of a warlock. It may be for the worse, but I was always against it. I was one of the ones who always felt that I was one of the good guys, but boy I tell you, they did a number on me. I’m against that whole thing.”

  McQueen went on to say that what attracted him to the occult “was the women, and the dope, and the running around. That’s all that was.” McQueen insisted that he “didn’t know it was the occult. It’s bullshit is what it is. No, I really didn’t know what it was, and by the time I did, I had never gone to any of the meetings. Never knew anything about it, and was always against it. It was never for me.”

  What’s interesting is the statement: “I had never gone to any of the meetings.” What meetings? I asked three people close to Sharon Tate if she had had any involvement with the occult or an occult group. All three—Joanna Pettet, Sheilah Wells, and Shahrokh Hatami—denied that Sharon was involved. Of course, that does not preclude Sharon Tate learning something about the Robert Kennedy assassination that resulted in her own death.

  The FBI provided information to INS officer Richard Smith during his investigation. This brings to mind the story, already referred to in this book, that two reporters for the New York Daily News wrote, just days after the murder of Sharon Tate, based on conversations conducted with a federal narcotics agent in Los Angeles, who was investigating the murders. Based on information supplied by the agent, the two reporters wrote a story published in the Daily News on August 13, under the headline, “Believe Cultist Hired Sharon Killer.”

  In a conversation with the author, over forty years after the publication, William Federici stood by the material in the article. I asked why the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now DEA) agent would have known about the Tate murder investigation. “They were involved in this thing right from the beginning,” he replied. “The BNDD was part of the whole thing. There was a whole task force.” Federici got his law enforcement contacts in New York to get in touch with law enforcement in Los Angeles and ask them to help Federici. Hence the meeting with the federal narcotics agent. I asked, “The material in the article reflects what you learned from the federal narcotics officer?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  The Federici-McGovern story has been recounted before in this book, but it bears repeating. It began: “Beautiful Sharon Tate and four others are believed to have been the victims of an assassin hired by a member of a cult which met regularly for sex-drug rituals in her posh Bel Air home, authorities disclosed today.” The story claimed that members of the cult included “top Hollywood personalities and show business executives.” The story went on to assert that “an assortment of the cult’s tools—including black leather masks, whips, ropes, and chains” was found in Sharon Tate’s house.

  “The club has a permanent membership of nearly 50 but was increased with the admittance of strangers picked up at exclusive Hollywood discotheques by Sharon’s crowd. The group, a throwback to the Hollywood of another era, drew its inspiration from the fantasy world here of the ’30s.”

  A follow-up story in the Daily News of August 17, by another reporter, had the following assertion: “a source close to the investigation declared that here had been a ‘wild party’ attended by some of ‘the biggest freaks and weirdos’ in Hollywood.’ What’s more, probers said Sharon and the other four might have been victims of an assassin hired by a member of the cult that met regularly in the Polanski home for sex-drug rituals.”

  I became friends with Michael McGovern while both of us covered the 1970 trial of Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, and Van Houten for the murders. He filled me in on the source and circumstances of the information he and Federici had received from the government agent in the LA restaurant. He also said they had been told by the federal narcotics agent that black hoods were found in the house, and some sort of black aprons shaped like a downpointed ace of spades.

  Part of the unfair hysteria decried by Roman Polanski and the relatives of Sharon Tate? Indeed, three friends of Sharon Tate—actresses Joanna Pettet, Sheilah Wells, and photographer friend Shahrokh Hatami—all stated to the author that, as far as they knew, Sharon Tate was not upset, in the days before she was killed, about anything she had learned or heard.

  Of course, the killers might not have known the real reason for Manson ordering the attack. One or more of them thinking they were starting a race war. One or more of them hypnotized and robotized by extended cult-babble. And some believing they were doing a copy-cat
to get off their brother Bobby Beausoleil.

  I decided to write once again to Charles Manson, to try to get clarification of what IRS intelligence officer John Daley alleged to Larry Larsen. For an updated edition of my book The Family, and at the urging of Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, I had already conducted a correspondence with Manson back in the 1980s. When I first wrote to him, he was very unfriendly, initially sending me a postcard of the devil with a swastika he drew upon the devil’s dangling tongue with a red pen. I wrote back, essentially urging him to cool out, and we began a correspondence in which he did supply useful material for the updated The Family. In one letter, he wrote, “We knew you were CIA all the time.” That was fine with me. In the end, however, he decided to cut me off, writing in a letter postmarked April 24, 1989, that never again would he open my letters, while at the same time he jotted a six-page reply to a question list. In one passage he wrote, “I’m not schooled enough to play words on paper with you but in real life if we could ever meet you would fare about as well with me in real as I do in this game—If I had the power you say & and the command to do such as you write, you would be gone and you know that in your own judgement of me.”

  Even so, during the writing of this book on Sharon Tate, I wrote him a brief letter, hoping that he might answer. I’d learned that he has been talking, by cellphone, with a former police officer in California, so I invited Manson to call me. The letter is as follows, with a name deleted:

  Dear Charles Manson,

  You have written replies to some of my letters in the past.

  And I have learned that you have recently communicated by telephone or cell-phone with an acquaintance of mine in California.