Crime: The Night of Horror

The crime was “so weird and bizarre,” declared Los Angeles Coroner Thomas Noguchi, that he had taken an unusual step. He was showing photographs of the bodies of Starlet Sharon Tate and the four other murder victims to a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Perhaps the killer had left some clue to his character in his sick and savage assault on the bodies of his victims.

What the police found when summoned to the Benedict Canyon house of Miss Tate, 26, wife of Film Director Roman Polanski, 36, was far bloodier and grimmer than they had let on. TIME learned last week. There was evidence of a wild struggle with the killer or killers as Sharon and another victim, Hair Stylist Jay Sebring, 35, were slashed repeatedly while they fought for their lives. A large number of pistol bullets were embedded in the walls and ceiling. Blood was spattered over most of the living room walls, and pools of blood and bloody footprints led into a hall, indicating a vain struggle to escape. One set of prints, possibly a killer’s, led out into the hall, then back into the living room.

Sharon’s body was found nude, not clad in bikini pants and a bra as had first been reported. Sebring was wearing only the torn remnants of a pair of boxer shorts. One of Miss Tate’s breasts had been cut off, apparently as a result of indiscriminate slashing. She was nine months pregnant, and there was an X cut on her stomach. What appeared to be the bloody handle of a paring knife was found next to her leg, the blade broken off. Sebring had been sexually mutilated, and his body also bore X marks.

Almost Incidental. Sharon and Sebring were the prime objects of the mayhem: the deaths of the other three victims seemed almost incidental. The bodies of Coffee Heiress Abigail Folger, 26, and her boy friend, a sort of society camp follower named Voityck Frokowski, 37, were found on the lawn. Both were clothed, but Frokowski’s trousers were down around his ankles. Miss Folger had been stabbed repeatedly, and Frokowski had been both stabbed and shot. Steven Parent. 18, a student, was shot five times in the chest, apparently while trying to get away in his car. None of the three, however, had been mutilated.

The stabbings appeared to have resulted from a swordlike instrument rather than a common knife, which at first led to rumors of ritualistic killings, but the apparent frenzy of the murders belied that. No fingerprints were found anywhere, Rumors of a wild drug and liquor spree were set off when police found a small quantity of marijuana and other drugs in Sebring’s black Porsche. However, no drug traces were found in any of the five bodies, and none had been drinking except Sebring, who had had the equivalent of a martini and a half. Friends said the group had gathered to discuss plans to open a new Hollywood club, “Bumbles.”

Sunning in a Bikini. Theories of sex, drug and witchcraft cults spread quickly in Hollywood, fed by the fact that Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds. Says London Celebrity Tailor Douglas Hayward, “They were both enormously popular in a trendy, fashionable, hippie world.” They also habitually picked up odd and unsavory people indiscriminately, and invited them home for parties. “Roman and Sharon had as much idea about security as idiots,” says Publicist Don Prince. “They lived like gypsies. You were likely to find anyone sleeping there.”

How much of a role drugs played in their world is hard to discern. Columnist Steve Brandt says that Sharon gloried in her pregnancy, sunning herself in a bikini while pregnant. When asked if she was taking drugs, she told him, “Steve, I would do nothing to jeopardize the baby.” Sharon was described by some friends as a serious actress with a wide range of interests—dance, music, fencing, skiing—and by others as a vacuous bathing beauty who was capitalizing on Polanski’s fame.

Polanski, who was in London at the time of the murders, is noted for his macabre movies. He is no stranger to death : his mother died in a Nazi concentration camp. Polanski was spectacularly grief-stricken; five days after his wife’s death, he still could not walk without assistance.

There also appeared to be a dark side to the lives of the other victims. “Gibby” Folger had been an aimless heiress since her graduation from Radcliffe, drifting from a Harvard graduate course to a job as a clerk in a New York bookshop to volunteer political work for Robert Kennedy and Thomas Bradley, the Negro Los Angeles mayoral candidate. She had most recently been a welfare worker. Author and Artist Barnaby Conrad, a family friend, described her as “square in the best sense of the word,” but others who knew her say that she had changed in the year since she took up with Frokowski.

Frokowski was a free-spending Polish refugee who loved fast cars and women, and was once described as a sort of Hemingway hero. A man who could inspire deep friendship and violent enmity, he had left two former wives behind in Poland. Frokowski was not believed to be a confidant of Polanski’s, as he claimed, but rather a hanger-on with sinister connections to which even the tolerant Polanski objected. Both he and Gibby were said to be familiar with at least marijuana, possibly stronger drugs. “You could walk in their house, take a deep breath and get high,” said one acquaintance.

Sebring, a diminutive men’s hair stylist ($11.50 per haircut), was a health nut with violent convictions (especially anti-Negro). He had a black belt in karate and kept guns in his glove compartment and an assortment of whips handy in his purple and black bedroom. An old girl friend, who said Sebring often asked to tie her up for whippings, reported that he also smoked marijuana. He and Sharon were once engaged, and shared an apartment in London’s Eaton Square in 1965.

Parent, the fifth victim, was not part of the crowd, and is believed to have been at the scene by coincidence. A quiet boy from a middle-class family, he had become friendly with William Garretson, 19, the caretaker of the Polanski house, who lived in another building on the property. It is doubtful that Parent was at the party. Rather, he may have stopped his car after leaving Garretson’s room, witnessed Sharon and Sebring being tortured and slain, and been shot down as he tried to drive off.

Second Slaughter. Los Angeles was still reeling from shock at the gruesome Tate murders when a second multiple murder occurred last week, only nine miles away and 24 hours later. Leno LaBianca, 44, the owner of four markets, and his wife Rosemary, 38, were slashed to death in their secluded home in the Los Feliz area. “It’s a carbon copy,” reported a policeman upon first viewing the scene, and fears of a maniac running amok quickly spread through the city. Indeed, there were chilling similarities between the two slaughters: the words ”death to pigs” smeared in blood on a wall, the mutilation of victims’ bodies, a pillowcase over LaBianca’s head and a lamp cord around his neck.

On more thorough investigation, the Los Angeles police decided that the similarities were largely superficial—and perhaps intentional—and that the crimes were probably unconnected except by the publicity given the first one. There were, for example, no sexual overtones to the LaBianca deaths. The lethal weapons, including a meat-carving fork, were left in the LaBianca house. None were found at the scene of the first crime.

Two days after the LaBiancas were killed, a gunman shot and killed William Lennon, father of the singing Lennon sisters, and police reported 29 Los Angeles murders within four days, compared with an average rate of about one a day. Precisely because the Tate murders were so brutishly irrational, Hollywood was seized by fear. Celebrities, including Frank Sinatra and Alan Jay Lerner, hired guards for their families, and several guests at Sharon’s funeral packed guns. At week’s end, police were still without a firm lead. The most likely theory was that the slayings were related to narcotics. Meanwhile, the police released Garretson, their only suspect, for lack of evidence, and were guarding a Polish emigre who claimed to know the identity of the killer or killers.