Tate murders
The Tate murders were a mass murder that occurred in the early morning of August 9, 1969 at the property at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles in which heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate , her unborn son, and Jay Sebring , Wojciech Frykowski , and Abigail Folger were involved and Steven Parent were killed by members of the Manson Family acting on behalf of Charles Manson .
One day later, on August 10, 1969, members of the Manson Family committed the double murder of the entrepreneurial couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca , which is why the Tate LaBianca murders are often mentioned .
The brutal approach of the perpetrators and the prominence of the victims contributed to the fact that the Tate murders caused headlines and lasting horror among the US population worldwide.
Course of action
Actress Sharon Tate, who was 26 at the time of the crime and was eight months pregnant, returned to her home with her friends Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger after a dinner in the Mexican restaurant El Coyote on the late evening of August 8, 1969 . The property at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles was rented by the owner Rudolph Altobelli to Roman Polański and his wife Sharon Tate after Terry Melcher moved to Malibu in 1969. Roman Polański was filming in London at the time. His return home was scheduled for August 12, 1969.
Around midnight, four members of the Manson Family - Susan Atkins , Linda Kasabian , Patricia Krenwinkel, and Charles Watson - reached the gate of the property in an old Ford . After Watson cut the phone line to the property, they parked the car further down the slope. They walked back to the property and climbed the fence to the right of the gate. As they walked up the driveway to the main house - armed with three knives and a .22 caliber revolver - they were met by 18-year-old Steven Parent, who had visited the property's caretaker that evening, William Garretson. According to Kasabian, who later described the events on the night of the murder in court as a key witness , Parent was shot through the open driver's window by Watson. During the autopsy of his body, four gunshot wounds and one defensive cut wound on his left hand were found. Garretson, who lived in an annex on the property, later testified during police interrogation that he had heard music and had heard nothing of the crime. A lie detector test confirmed the truth of his statement.
Atkins, Krenwinkel and Watson entered the main house through a window, while Kasabian, who was nine months pregnant, said she was waiting in the driveway. In the house, the perpetrators rounded up Tate and her guests in the living room and handcuffed them. Watson ordered the victims to lie face down on the floor. Sebring was shot once and stabbed seven times, causing him to bleed to death. Despite the stab wounds they had already suffered, Folger and Frykowski managed to escape to the front lawn, where they were caught by Watson and Krenwinkel. Kasabian testified that she saw Watson stab Frykowski several times and hit him with the revolver; Krenwinkel stabbed Follower. The autopsy of their bodies revealed that Frykowski had suffered 13 blows to the head and 51 stab wounds. Followers had 28 stab wounds inflicted. Sharon Tate was killed with 16 knife wounds. According to the coroner, who later autopsied Tate's body, the unborn baby was not injured by the knife stabs and could have been saved by an emergency caesarean section if help had been on site. As Atkins left the house, he wrote the word "PIG" (pig) in Tate's blood on the front door.
After the fact
The following morning the housekeeper Winifred Chapman entered the house through a back door and saw the bodies of Frykowski and Folger on the lawn. She ran to the neighbors, who alerted the police.
On August 10, 1969, the Manson Family, this time with Leslie Van Houten involved , committed the double homicide of the entrepreneurial couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca at their Los Feliz , Los Angeles home.
When Polański found out about the murder of his wife, he immediately returned to Los Angeles. In a demonstrative act of desperation, he allowed photo reporters for Life magazine access to the blood-smeared rooms of his house and gave the press a comprehensive statement about the atrocity.
Arrests
On August 16, 1969, as part of the police investigation into various offenses such as theft and arson, a raid on the Spahn Movie Ranch near Chatsworth in California's San Fernando Valley , in which several members of the Manson Family were arrested. In October 1969, other members of the Manson Family, including their then 34-year-old convicted leader Charles Manson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, were arrested during a three-day raid on the Barker Ranch in Death Valley . On November 6, 1969, Atkins confessed to a prison inmate that she and three other members of the Manson Family had committed the Tate murders, following Charles Manson's instructions.
Possible motives
In numerous books about Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher , the murder of Sharon Tate is also devoted to a separate chapter. Wilson, a member of The Beach Boys , was briefly friends with Manson in 1968, when Manson still had the ambition to be successful as a musician. Wilson took Manson an eight-track - demo tape and introduced him to Melcher, whom he had met at a party in Melchers house. Melcher listened to Manson's demo tape, but turned it down. Some time later Melcher moved out of the house on Cielo Drive and the owner Rudi Altobelli rented it out to Polański and Tate. The murders happened a few months later.
The assumption that there was a mix-up and that the assassination attempt actually belonged to Melcher could neither be proven nor clearly refuted. However, there is evidence that Manson knew very well that Melcher no longer lived in the house - according to statements by Altobelli and photographer Sharok Hatami, he was on the property the day before Polanski left for London and was turned away there. It is likely that he ultimately did not care who the murder victims were, and that he chose the house because of its remote location and prominent residents, whose deaths were sure to cause a stir.
Reactions
The murder of Tate or the Manson case was covered and discussed in the press for years. Manson and his followers were sentenced to death in 1970. In early 1972, the death penalty was abolished in California , so all sentences were commuted to life imprisonment . Tate family members litigated for years for the execution of Manson and his commune. Manson was glorified by supporters of Nazism and Satanism until his death and received letters of honor from around the world.
Manson himself, however, was not actively involved in the Tate murders. His involvement and polluter role was to commission his most devoted family members to do whatever Watson would tell them to do. Watson, in turn, had received all of the instructions from Manson. He had an order to carry out in which there was no room for maneuver but to commit a gruesome crime in order to frighten the establishment, which Manson had rejected as a musician and person, and to start Helter Skelter , his utopia of the final battle, Armageddon . His bizarre ideas were portrayed in the book Helter Skelter by Bugliosi, the prosecutor who later took the case to court.
A decade after the murders, Tate's mother, Doris Tate - appalled by the killers' growing cult status and terrified of the possibility that some of them might be pardoned - joined a campaign to ensure they remained in prison. Her determination to draw public attention to the inadequacies of the state's educational punitive measures , and her criticism, were among other things the trigger for the changes to the California Penal Code in 1982. These changes made it possible for crime victims and their families to make so-called Victim Impact Statements during the To hand in court hearings of detainees and at subsequent hearings on detention leave. Doris Tate was the first person to make such a statement under the new law when she testified at the leave hearing of one of her daughter's killers, Watson. She later said that she believed the changes in the law restored her daughter to the dignity she was previously denied and that she "succeeded in turning Sharon's legacy as a murder victim into a symbol of victim rights." After Doris Tate's death in July 1992, Sharon's younger sister Patti continued her mother's work until her own death in June 2000. Tate's sister Debra Ann Tate has since watched over her family's legacy and runs a website in memory of her sister.
Tate's unborn child was posthumously named Paul Richard Polański ; it was buried in his mother's arms in Holy Cross Cemetery , in Culver City , California .
literature
- Vincent Bugliosi , Curt Gentry: Helter Skelter. The true story of serial killer Charles Manson. From the English by Anke and Eberhard Kreutzer. riva Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7423-0249-6 ; Original: Helter Skelter. The True Story of the Manson Murders. WW Norton & Company, New York, NY 2001, ISBN 978-0-393-32223-1 .
- Greg King: Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders. Barricade Books, New York 2000, ISBN 1-56980-157-6 .
- Alisa R. Statman, Brie Tate: Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family's Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice. Dey Street Books, New York, NY 2012, ISBN 978-0-062-10949-1 .
Web links
- The Tate murders in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (English)
- The Manson Family and the Tate LaBianca Murders at CieloDrive.com
- Hannes Stein: You wrote “Pig” on the wall in your mother's blood . In: Welt.de , August 8, 2019.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 65.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, pp. 57, 87, 90.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, pp. 63, 385 ff., 469.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, pp. 67–69.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 388.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 60.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, pp. 62 f., 388 f.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 57.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 65.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, p. 120.
- ↑ Bugliosi, Gentry: Helter Skelter. 2017, pp. 120, 130 ff., 191 f.