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Sharon Tate's Death: The Details of the Actress's Tragic 1969 Murder and How It Changed Hollywood Forever
Sharon Tate was murdered by followers of Charles Manson on Aug. 9, 1969
By Jessica Sager Published on August 9, 2024 10:13AM EDT
Sharon Tate was a rapidly rising star in 1969, having won a Golden Globe the previous year and expecting her first child with husband Roman Polanski — but tragically, she is best known as the highest-profile victim of one of the most infamous murder sprees of all time.
The stunning blond starlet, whose most famous role was as Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls, was 8 ½ months pregnant when she was brutally murdered in her Los Angeles home along with her hairstylist and ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, Folger's Coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent on Aug. 9, 1969. Police eventually traced the slayings to the followers of Charles Manson, who used the victims' blood to write messages on the walls of the home.
Manson and his "family" of followers were eventually convicted of nine killings, and Manson himself was serving nine life sentences in prison before his death at age 83 in 2017. However, Tate's sister Debra believes there may be more victims of Manson's cult that haven't yet been discovered.
"There was nobody else at that time — other than the Zodiac Killer — who was prevalent at wielding a knife like these people," Debra told PEOPLE in 2019. "We are just scraping the surface."
Find out who Sharon Tate was, how she died and the legacy she left behind after her untimely death.
Who was Sharon Tate?
Tate was born Jan. 24, 1943, in Dallas. Her father, Paul James Tate, was an Army officer, and she, her mother Doris and younger sisters Debra and Patti moved often for Paul's military role.
Tate was a pageant regular when she was young, winning Miss Richland in Washington when she was 16. She also dabbled in modeling, once appearing on the front page of Stars and Stripes, the United States military newspaper.
While living in Italy with her family as a teen, Tate became an actress and appeared as an extra in several films. She moved to Los Angeles when she was 19 and signed a seven-year deal with film and TV producer Martin Ransohoff. She appeared in small and guest roles in TV shows including The Beverly Hillbillies and Mister Ed, then landed her first lead role in the 1966 horror movie Eye of the Devil.
Ransonhoff introduced Tate to Polanski, who then hired her to star in his horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers, in which Polanski costarred as her love interest. They began dating and she moved in with Polanski at his London home after filming wrapped.
Tate's star vehicles The Fearless Vampire Killers, beach romcom Don't Make Waves and cult classic Valley of the Dolls all debuted in 1967, but the following year was even bigger for her: She and Polanski married in London on Jan. 20, 1968, and she earned a Golden Globe nomination for new star of the year. In late 1968, Tate became pregnant with her and Polanski's first child, and in February, they moved to 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon.
How did Sharon Tate die?
Shortly after midnight on Aug. 9, 1969, Charles D. "Tex" Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins entered Tate and Polanski's Beverly Hills home while fellow Manson cult member Linda Kasabian remained in the car. According to Atkins' court testimony, per The New York Times, they ordered Tate, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski into the living room of the house, where Watson shot Sebring, then tied Sebring and Tate's necks together with a rope.
"They kept saying, 'Please don't hurt us, we won't tell the police,’ " Atkins recalled on the stand. "Frykowski kept pulling at my hair and I was fighting for my life and I was swinging my knife and I felt it sink into something and I didn't know what it was."
Atkins then stabbed Tate repeatedly. Before leaving the premises, Atkins wrote "PIG" on the white front door in Tate's blood.
Frykowski and Folger had escaped out of the front of the house, but the killers caught up with them and stabbed them each to death, leaving their bodies on the lawn. Watson also shot Parent, an 18-year-old driving away after a visit with the home's caretaker Willie Garretson, to death outside the front gate of the home.
Atkins testified that she couldn't recall how many times she stabbed Tate, but the coroner in the case, Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, counted: He declared on the stand that Tate was stabbed 16 times: Eight times in her back, twice in her upper right arm and once in her right thigh. She was also slashed twice on her left forearm, leaving what he called "superficial" wounds, according to The New York Times.
Dr. Noguchi testified that Tate was still alive when the Manson followers hung her and Sebring over a beam in the house's living room, giving her rope burns on her face and neck, and that she died shortly afterward.
"It is quite consistent, in my opinion, that [Miss Tate] was hanged," he said. "My opinion was — and my opinion is still the same — that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds front and back penetrating the heart and lungs and causing massive hemorrhaging."
When did Sharon Tate die?
On Aug. 8, 1969, Tate went out to dinner with friends Sebring, 35, Folger, 26, and Frykowski, 37, at El Coyote Cafe, Tate's favorite Los Angeles restaurant. The group arrived back at Tate and Polanski's home, where they were murdered shortly after midnight on Aug. 9, 1969.
Where did Sharon Tate die?
Tate, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger died at Tate and Polanski's home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon, a property previously occupied by the couple's friends Candice Bergen and Terry Melcher.
How old was Sharon Tate when she died?
Tate was 26 years old when she was murdered.
What were Sharon Tate's last words?
Tate begged for her life and that of her unborn son, offering herself as a hostage to the group if they'd let her survive long enough to give birth and keep her son safe, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi detailed in the book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.
Atkins confirmed the harrowing detail in her testimony.
"She said, 'Please don't kill me,' and I told her to shut up and I threw her down on the couch," Atkins testified. "She said, 'Please let me have my baby.’ Then Tex came in and he said, 'Kill her,' and I killed her. I just stabbed her and she fell and I stabbed her again. I don't know how many times. I don't know why I stabbed her.”
Why did the Manson Family murder Sharon Tate?
According to Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Manson ordered a string of slayings throughout Los Angeles in an effort to start a race war in the United States he dubbed "Helter Skelter."
In July 1969, Manson orchestrated the death of Gary Hinman. The evening after Tate's murder, Manson's "family" killed grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their Los Feliz home. The cult leader also ordered a ninth killing of victim Donald Shea before his arrest.
How did the public react to Sharon Tate's death?
While shocked at Tate's death, reports suggest that most people didn't panic about violence until Manson followers Krenwinkel, Watson and Leslie Van Houten murdered the LaBiancas, stoking fear in the general public.
"The rest of the country was like, 'Well, it's a movie star. You know how they live,' " Alisa Statman, author of Restless Souls: The Tate Family's Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, told the Washington Post. "When the murders happened the next night, that’s when the fear swept across the United States."
The Manson murders spawned at least one copycat slaying in February 1970, The New York Times reported. The slayings also stoked fear in stars and socialites, who began working more often with bodyguards and security details.
Photographer Julian Wasser, who took snapshots of the crime scene for Life magazine days after the slayings, later recalled to The Guardian that Tate's murder was the end of an era in Hollywood.
"It wasn't like it is now: there were no paparazzi, no VIP sections, no security. It was a really innocent time. You'd just walk up and there they were," he said. "They'd stop and smile and pose. Now it's a business. If you want exclusive access to a celebrity, you have to pay big money. You weren't considered some sort of psychotic menace who's going to rob or kill them either. Now they'll call their security person and you'll get beat up."
What legacy did Sharon Tate leave behind?
Tate's legacy lives on not just in her own films, including Valley of the Dolls — which was critically panned at the time of its release but became a cult classic — but also in films about Tate. Kate Bosworth was slated to play the slain starlet in a film titled Tate, and Hilary Duff starred as Tate in The Haunting of Sharon Tate. The most famous and commercially successful portrayal of Tate onscreen came from Margot Robbie, who played the actress in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, a fictionalized take on the slayings that had a much different ending than real life did.
In addition to her films and image, Tate contributed posthumously to victims' rights: Her mother, Doris Tate, helped get the Victims’ Bill of Rights, which allowed victim impact statements to be permissible in court, passed in California in 1982. Doris later founded the Coalition on Victims’ Equal Rights.
What happened to Roman Polanski after Sharon Tate died?
Polanski was still in London when Tate was murdered. His friend Andy Braunsberg was with him when he got the call about her death.
"He literally unraveled in front of my eyes," Braunsberg later told author Ed Sanders in Sharon Tate: A Life. "He disintegrated."
Days after the murder, Polanski and photographer Wasser returned to the Cielo Drive home, where Wasser took pictures of Polanski by the front door of the house that still had "PIG" smeared on it in his late wife's blood. Wasser was on an assignment for Life magazine, which ran gruesome photos of the crime scene, and told The Guardian that he also took Polaroids at Polanski's request to give to a psychic in an effort to find the killers.
In press notes for his 2019 film J'Accuse at the Venice Film Festival, Polanski said that he was under severe scrutiny after Tate's murder until the real killers were found.
"The way people see me, my 'image,' did indeed start to form with Sharon Tate's death," Polanski said. "When it happened, even though I was already going through a terrible time, the press got hold of the tragedy and, unsure how to deal with it, covered it in the most despicable way, implying, among other things, that I was one of the people responsible for her murder, against a background of satanism." He added that the satanism allegations likely stemmed from his hit film Rosemary's Baby.
In 1978, Polanski pleaded guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse after then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer accused him of plying her with alcohol and part of a quaalude before raping her. As part of his plea bargain, he served 42 days in jail, but fled the United States for France before serving the remainder of his 90-say sentence. Efforts to extradite him back to the U.S. have failed, and he's released several films from Europe, including 2003's The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. Several other women have since come forward accusing Polanski of sexual assault and misconduct.
Because of his outstanding prison sentence, Polanski remains a fugitive and hasn't been back to the United States since fleeing to Europe. As such, he hasn't visited Tate's grave in more than four decades.
"It is a very painful thing," his attorney said in a statement after Manson's death in November 2017. "Sharon and his son are buried here in Los Angeles at Holy Cross Cemetery and because of this case, he has never been able to visit their graves."
What happened to the Sharon Tate house?
Rudolph Altobelli, the owner of Tate and Polanski's rental home where the actress was murdered, sued Polanski and Life magazine for taking and publishing photos of the crime scene, which he alleged would hurt the property value of the Cielo Drive house. Tate's family also recalled in Restless Souls that Altobelli sent them what they called an "enormous" repair bill after her murder, then sued Tate's estate for $480,000 when her father replied to the bill with a caustic letter. Altobelli claimed that $300,000 of his request was for "embarrassment, humiliation, emotional, and mental distress," Curbed reported. He was awarded just $4,350 in the case.
Altobelli moved into the house three weeks after the slayings, he told 20/20, and lived there until September 1988, when he listed the property for just under $2 million. It eventually sold for under the asking price at $1.6 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was then resold in 1991 to a real estate investor for $2.25 million, then listed yet again for $4.95 million as-is in March 1992.
Later that year, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor rented the home for $11,000 per month and built a home recording studio in the same living room where Tate and Sebring were slain. He recorded the band's hit album Downward Spiral in the home, later telling Rolling Stone that a chance meeting with Tate's sister Debra made him cry and rethink living on the property.
"I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support," he explained. "When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, 'What if it was my sister?' I thought, 'F--- Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bulls---."
According to Rolling Stone, Reznor moved out of the rental in December 1993, taking the front door with him and installing it in his New Orleans' property, a former funeral home he converted into Nothing Studios. The outlet also reported that the home was demolished in 1994.
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