Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [42]
The police found Beausoleil’s fingerprints in the house and tracked him down. They found the knife that killed Hinman and a T-shirt drenched in Hinman’s blood in Beausoleil’s car. He was convicted of murder and went to jail – without implicating Atkins or Manson.
Next Manson tried to get his composition recorded by Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. Melcher was a big player in the music industry and refused to take Manson’s material further. Meanwhile Manson’s followers formed a death squad. They dressed in black and trained themselves in the arts of breaking and entering abandoned buildings. These exercises were known as ‘creepy crawlies’. They were told that they should kill anyone who stood in their way.
On 8 August 1969, Manson’s death squad was dispatched to Melcher’s remote home on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Melcher had moved, but this did not matter to Manson. The people he saw going into the house were ‘movie types’. Their slaughter would act as a warning.
The house at the end of Cielo Drive was indeed occupied by ‘movie people’. It had been rented by film director Roman Polanski, who was away shooting a film in London. But his wife, film star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was at home. Coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and her boyfriend Polish writer Voyteck Frykowski were visiting. So was Sharon Tate’s friend, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring.
Manson ordered Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to kill them. They were armed with a .22 revolver, a knife and a length of rope. Kasabian lost her nerve at the last minute and stayed outside. When Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel pushed open the wrought-iron gates, they bumped into 18-year-old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker. He begged for his life. Watson shot him four times.
Inside the house, Manson’s disciplines told Sharon Tate and her guests that the house was simply being robbed and no harm would come to them. They were to be tied up, but Jay Sebring broke free. He was shot down before he could escape. Fearing they were all going to be killed, Voyteck Frykowski attacked Watson, who beat him to the ground with the pistol butt. In a frenzy, the girls stabbed him to death. There were 51 stab wounds on his body.
Abigail Folger also made a break for it. But Krenwinkel caught up with her halfway across the lawn. She knocked her to the ground and Watson stabbed her to death.
Sharon Tate begged for the life of her unborn child. But Susan Atkins showed no mercy. She stabbed her 16 times. Tate’s mutilated body was tied to Sebring’s corpse. The killers spread an American flag across the couch and wrote the word ‘pig’ on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood. They changed their bloody clothes, collected their weapons and made their way back to the Spahn Ranch.
Manson got high on marijuana and read the reports of the murders in the newspapers as if they were reviews. To celebrate this great victory, he had an orgy with his female followers. But soon he craved more blood.
On 10 August, Manson randomly selected a house in the Silver Lake area and broke in. Forty-four-year-old grocery-store owner Leno LaBianca and his 38-year-old wife Rosemary, who ran a fashionable dress shop, awoke to find Manson holding a gun to their faces. He tied them up, telling them they would not be harmed. He only intended to rob them.
He took LaBianca’s wallet and went outside to the car where the rest of his followers, including 23-year-old Steve Grogan, were waiting. Manson sent Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel back into the LaBiancas’ house. He said that he was going to the house next