

Despite the uncanny similarities between the two murders, the police at first failed to connect them. DEATH TO PIGGIES and RISE appeared in the living room and the mis-spelled HEALTER SKELTER dripped from the refrigerator door.

Again, words were scrawled in blood on the walls. Rosemary lay face down on the bedroom floor, multiple stab wounds covering her back and buttocks. Leno was found dead with a fork protruding from his abdomen, the word WAR carved in his flesh. The following night, August 10, 1969, grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were savagely murdered in much the same way as those at the Polanski mansion. Police called the murders "ritualistic" and arrested caretaker William Garretson as a suspect. The word PIG was scrawled on the front door in Tate's blood. Lying in pools of blood, the victims had been stabbed repeatedly. Inside the mansion, police discovered a bloodbath. Eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, who was visiting the mansion's caretaker that night, was shot several times as he was leaving the grounds in his car. Tate was eight months pregnant at the time of her death. On the night of August 9, 1969, actress Sharon Tate, wife of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Roman Polanski, and three of her close friends - coffee heiress Abigail Folger, men's hairstylist Jay Sebring, and Polish actor Voytek Frykowski - were brutally murdered at the Polanski's mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air, California. See the extensive bibliography (divided into print, video/audio, and online resources) below the essay.Ĭharles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca Slayings
