While they entered the grounds, headlights flashed from an approaching vehicle. Watson had already cut the phone line to the house.

She was hosting a small dinner party with guests Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairstylist who once dated Tate, Polanski's friend Wojciech Frykowski, and his partner, Abigail Folger, who was the incredibly wealthy heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.Īs the guests dined inside the house, Watson and the girls were scaling an embankment to the right of the gates, having parked the car further down the driveway. Late in the night of August 8, 1969, Charles Manson's right-hand man Tex Watson and three of his 'Family' - Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian - headed towards 10050 Cielo Drive, the house that Tate had occupied since February. 'I know one thing - I've never planned anything that ever happened to me.' FATE COMES CALLING I think something more powerful than we are decides our fates for us. In an interview just a week before she was brutally slaughtered, she was asked if she believed in fate. With three films set to come out in 1967, Playboy declared: 'This is the year that Sharon Tate happens.' Polanski wasn't taken with her at all, only agreeing to cast her if she wore a red wig in the film. She met Polanski in London when he was casting for his 1967 flick Fearless Vampire Killers. She starred in cult classics such as Eye Of The Devil, The Wrecking Crew, and Valley Of The Dolls, the latter of which earned her a Golden Globe nomination. 'Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the '60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true,' Joan Didion later wrote of the killings.Ĭharles Manson was behind the horrific slayings. This was the Associated Press news report about what would become known as the Tate murders: a gruesome series of slayings 50 years ago that closed the book on the utopian idealism of the 1960s, ushering in a dark new reality like a bad acid trip. 'A Hollywood actress, an internationally known male hairdresser and an heiress to a coffee fortune were found slain along with two other men Saturday in what one policeman described as a twisted 'ritualistic' killing.' Charles Manson was on a mission and Sharon Tate and her friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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