Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.
The Worst Crimes In History: Sharon Tate And The Manson Family
Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesSharon Tate, one of the victims of the famous murders perpetrated by the Manson Family. Circa 1965.
Actress Sharon Tate‘s gruesome murder at the hands of the Manson Family, while she was more than eight months pregnant, has terrified Hollywood and the rest of America for decades.
On the night of Aug. 8, 1969, Tate was home with friends Wojciech Frykowski, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring. Her husband, director Roman Polanski, was out of the country filming a movie.
Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPolish film director Roman Polanski and American actress Sharon Tate at their wedding.
The couple was renting a glamorous house in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood in Los Angeles at the time, and the house would become the setting for the grisly murders.
Infamous cult leader Charles Manson instructed a few of his loyal followers to enter the house and kill everyone inside “as gruesomely as you can.”
Los Angeles Public LibraryCharles Manson, the man who ordered the famous murders of Sharon Tate and her friends. March 6, 1970.
Upon entering the property, the cult followers murdered 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting the estate’s caretaker. Then they made their way inside, their sights set on the home’s inhabitants.
They gathered the four people in the living room and tied them up. Sebring protested, saying that they were treating the eight-months-pregnant Tate far too roughly. But the only answer he got was a bullet in the chest, a foot to his face, and a knife thrust into his body again and again until he died.
Folger and Frykowski got free of their bindings and tried to make a run for it. The escape attempt failed. The killers chased them down and brutally stabbed them dozens of times.
Tate was the only one left alive. She pleaded with her captors to let her live, begging for the life of her unborn baby. The Manson Family, though, was not moved. They stabbed her to death and used her blood to write the word “Pig” on the home’s front door.
Manson’s motive behind the attack lies in the house itself. The home’s previous tenant, music producer Terry Melcher, had earlier denied Manson a recording deal, and Manson wanted revenge.
By the end of the year, all of the assailants from that night were caught, as was Manson himself. They were sentenced to life in prison. Every request for parole has been denied.
Nicole Brown Simpson And Ronald Goldman
Left: Archive Photos/Stronger/Getty Images, Right: WireImage/Getty ImagesLeft: O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson on March 16, 1994, at the premiere of Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult in which O.J. starred. Right: Ronald Goldman
The trial following the famous murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman is one of the most highly publicized trials in American history.
Brown was the ex-wife of famous football player O.J. Simpson. The pair married in 1985 and had two children, but their relationship was tumultuous and fraught with domestic violence. In 1992, after seven years of marriage, Brown filed for divorce.
On June 12, 1994, Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman were found brutally murdered outside of Nicole’s Brentwood, California home.
The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesThe Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman murder scene on June 1994.
They were both stabbed to death, with Nicole stabbed five times in the neck. According to court testimony, her throat was savagely slashed down to the spinal cord. Nicole’s ex-husband was the prime suspect.
O.J. agreed to turn himself in, but on June 17, he made a run for it with his friend A.C. Cowlings. With a gun to his head threatening to kill himself, O.J. led police on a chase throughout Los Angeles until he eventually turned himself in.
During the trial, piles of evidence were stacked against O.J. for the crime. O.J.’s blood was found at the crime scene, DNA from Nicole and Goldman were found in his car and his home, a pair of O.J.’s gloves were found on Nicole’s property, and a bloody footprint at the murder scene matched his shoe.
Despite all of the evidence, O.J. was ultimately acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife and Goldman. However, he was later found guilty of the crimes in civil court and was ordered to pay the families $33.5 million.
