The Worst Crimes In History: Sharon Tate
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.
