Summer of '69: When Charles Manson Scared the Hell Out of Hollywood

Margot Robbie Wore Sharon Tate's Jewelry On Set

On Aug. 8, 1969, Sharon Tate was a strikingly beautiful B-movie actress best known for Valley of the Dolls and being married to director Roman Polanski.

On Aug. 9, 1969, followers of Charles Manson turned her into the biggest star in Hollywood.

By a horrible twist of much-documented fate, 26-year-old Tate—who was eight and a half months pregnant—became the most famous victim of the so-called "Manson Family" when several followers of the 5-foot-2 cult leader slaughtered five people at 10050 Cielo Drive, a sprawling but isolated property tucked into a hillside in Los Angeles' Benedict Canyon. They killed supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz the following night.

The murders resulted in death sentences—later commuted to life in prison—for Manson, Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. And since Manson wasn't at the scene when any of the seven victims were killed, and he later denied getting anyone to do anything, his role remains the most pored over part of these crimes' long, convoluted legacy.

Almost a decade after his death, Conversations With a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes, a three-part series premiering Aug. 12 on Netflix, seeks to add to the how of it all with never-before-heard prison recordings, firsthand commentary and archival footage.

But first, the devil had to be in the right place at the wrong time for everyone else involved.

Manson, a musician who aspired to worldwide stardom, had been to the Cielo Drive House when it was being rented by record producer Terry Melcher, who lived there with his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen (who put up the Christmas lights that were still decorating a fence on the property when the killings occurred) and musician Mark Lindsay.

Talent scout Gregg Jakobson had met Manson in 1968 at Beach Boys member Dennis Wilson's house and—impressed by the "whole Charlie Manson package" as an artist, as he told the cops—introduced Manson to Melcher, who was unimpressed.

Whatever transpired between them, Manson left Cielo Drive with a grudge.

Tate spoke with Melcher (whose mother was screen legend Doris Day) on the phone about the lease transfer in February 1969, but never met him in person before she and Polanski started renting the house from talent manager Rudi Altobelli for $1,200 a month.

The grisly killings—Tate was stabbed 16 times and hog-tied from a ceiling beam, the other end of the rope wrapped twice around Sebring's neck; Atkins wrote "pig" on the front door in Tate's blood; Frykowski was stabbed 51 times—shocked and appalled an entire city, from the law enforcement who saw the scene up close to the media to every single L.A. resident, particularly the famous ones.

The terror multiplied the next night, when the LaBiancas were murdered in similarly gruesome fashion at their home at 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz.

"Rise" was scrawled on the wall in LaBianca's blood, the word "war" had been carved into his stomach and there was an ivory-handled carving fork sticking out of his belly. "Death to pigs" was written on the wall and "Helter skelter"—like the name of the Beatles tune, though it was misspelled "healter"—was written on the refrigerator, also in blood.

Cue the panic.

A famous person had been brutally murdered—and because Tate had the recognizable name, the crimes of Aug. 9, 1969, were immediately dubbed the "Tate case" by law enforcement, while collectively the crimes are known as the Tate-LaBianca Murders.

That, combined with the never-ending obsession with Manson—which spiked again around the summer 2019 release of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood and the 50th anniversary of the killings—turned Tate into one of the most famous murder victims of all time practically overnight. 

And with all that fascination, some of the reporting was bound to get wildly out of hand, even with no Internet to help it along. For instance, a towel that had been thrown across Sebring's face was reported in different instances as having been either a white or black hood, prompting multiple theories about who or what the victims may have been mixed up with. 

Tate's family lamented the coverage, remembering her as a promising actress and glowing presence in their lives who was overjoyed to be starting a family of her own.

"The world lost an amazing set of philanthropists," Sharon's sister Debra Tate told ABC News in March 2017. "They definitely would have been the movers and the shakers in this industry."

As detailed by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry in their 1974 book Helter Skelter, Rosemary's Baby star Mia Farrow was said to be too afraid to go to her friend Sharon's funeral. Frank Sinatra reportedly went into hiding. Tony Bennett moved from a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel into one of the inner suites. 

Two hundred guns were sold at one Beverly Hills sporting goods store in two days. The price of a good guard dog went from $200 to $1,500. Anyone who could afford private security hired more private security. 

The overarching theory of the case that helped put Manson in prison for the rest of his life has since come into question in subsequent accounts of the crimes. But at trial Bugliosi laid out Manson's motive: That the killings were intended to trigger a race war and he got all the instructions he needed from the Book of Revelations and, the Beatles' White Album.

The cops had been back and forth to Spahn Ranch, an abandoned Western-themed movie set where the Manson Family was squatting when the murders were committed, for various other crimes—an Aug. 16, 1969, raid turned up a massive weapons cache and Manson was arrested—but it was a bout of bragging that did them all in.

Atkins had been arrested along with Manson and 22 others in early October 1969 when Inyo County authorities conducted a three-day raid on the latest Manson hangout, Barker Ranch, located in the desert near Death Valley, on suspicion of a host of charges including arson and grand theft. During that time, two girls who had been hiding in the bushes a few miles away from the ranch approached officers and said they needed help, that they were trying to flee.

L.A. authorities had been looking for one of the girls, Kitty Lutesinger, because she was the girlfriend of Bobby Beausoleil, their main suspect in the July 25, 1969, murder of music teacher Gary Hinman. Beausoleil had disappeared from Spahn Ranch and Lutesinger, who was five months pregnant when she made contact with police, had no idea he was in jail on suspicion of murder.

Atkins told Graham that there was a list of celebrities, including Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, who were going to be killed, and she shared how each one would die. (There was never any proof that such a list actually existed.)

According to Atkins, per Helter Skelter, Watson told her on the night of the Tate murder that they "were going to a house up on the hill that used to belong to Terry Melcher, and the only reason why were were going to that house was because Tex knew the outline of the house." 

Asked by Bugliosi what Watson told them to do once they got there, Atkins replied, "To get all of their money and to kill whoever was there." The prosecutor asked, "It didn't make any difference who was there, you were told to kill them; is that correct?" 

"Yes," Atkins said.

In 1971, Manson—who wasn't present for any of the murders but led Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten to the LaBiancas' home, where he tied up the couple and then left—was found guilty of first-degree murder along with the killers.

Kasabian, who by all accounts didn't participate in the physical act of killing, was Bugliosi's star witness. As the only member of the Family who had a valid driver's license, she ended up along for both rides.

The still-terrifying story of these murders continues to breath posthumous life into Tate's short movie career, the actress eternally remembered as a great beauty who had her whole life ahead of her before she ended up playing the starring role in one of the most storied crimes of all time.

But it was Manson who became the larger-than-life figure, the boogeyman who was too crazy to be taken seriously once he was safely behind bars, but who was an unassuming villain who destroyed dozens of lives when he walked free.

Krenwinkel, now 78, was granted parole in 2022 and again recommended for release in 2025, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed the decision, so she remains behind bars. Watson has been denied parole 18 times.

Atkins died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 61.

Van Houten, who was 19 when she took part in the LaBianca murders, was freed on parole July 11, 2023.

"The single most important is that the murders were probably the most bizarre in American crime, and people are fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre," Bugliosi, who died in 2015, told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. "It's not the brutality—they were extremely brutal murders, but like you say, there have been more brutal murders. Not the prominence of the victims. Another reason—the very name 'Manson' has become a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure."

And not even Manson's death at the ripe old age of 83 helped break the spell he still managed to cast for all those years from a prison cell.

(Originally published Nov. 19, 2017, at 9:54 p.m. PT)