The accounts, though problematic in tone and approach, are first-hand, original statements from reporters, police and witnesses on the scene, the first from Winifred Chapman, the housekeeper employed by Roman Polanski and his wife and victim Sharon Tate.Ĭhapman arrived early the morning after the tragedy: “The maid ran screaming to a neighbour, who telephoned the police and said: “You’d better get a car over here right away. After being questioned for five hours he was charged with murder on five accounts.” He was arrested without offering resistance and taken, shirtless, to police headquarters. “Police who raced to the house of death found William Garretson, a 19-year-old, long-haired houseboy, asleep in a guest-house in the grounds. Serbing had been Tate’s hair stylist years prior and kept a working relationship with Tate post-split from 1966, the same year Tate met and worked for Roman Polanski on The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Menacing and final: “The word “Pig” was scrawled across the front door – in blood.”įolger and Frykowski were introduced to Serbing through Tate and Polankski in the summer of 1968. “The body of another murdered man lay slumped in a car parked in the drive.” But his identity was unknown. Next to her on the lawn was the body of 19-year-old Polish-born Voyteck Frykowski.” “Outside, in the grounds of the £83,000 hilltop mansion in Bel Air, California, lay the body of 26-year-old American coffee heiress Abigail Folger, wearing a nightdress.
And hanging on the other end of the rope was the black-hooded body of her former fiancée Jay Serbing…” The reporter continues to not hold back on the grim details: “The red-haired, 26-year-old star, clad only in a bikini, was hanging by a white nylon rope looped over a beam in the ceiling of a room. “Police described the house as “like a battlefield.” And certainly it was more a macabre sight than those brought to the screen by the actress’s film director husband, “master of suspense” Roman Polanksi.”, The People continue, in an almost sinister mention of Polanski’s former film credits. “FILM STAR Sharon Tate was found hanging and shot dead with four other murdered people yesterday in a “ritualistic” scene of horror at a blood-spattered Hollywood mansion.” He made the controversial films Rosemary’s Baby (1968), in which a girl is raped by the devil.” “Sharon, 26, who sometimes called herself “sexy little me,” died with another woman and three men at her £83,000 Hollywood home,” he continues, “Sharon who was eight months pregnant, was the wife of 36-year-old Roman Polanski, the Polish-born film director, who is away filming in Europe.”Ĭontinued: “Both he and Sharon have film associations with the occult. “Beautiful film star Sharon Tate was found murdered here today – the victim of a horrifying ritual massacre.” – Malcolm Keogh, The Sunday Mirror, August 10th, 1969. A British tabloid Sunday newspaper founded in 1881, The People is now known as The Sunday People.
The quotes featured are from The People and The Sunday Mirror, dated Sunday, August 10th 1969. When reading the article today, the events feel even more brutal and ghastly. Details, like the grotesque descriptions of how the bodies were mutilated, are vividly depicted, perhaps to expose the heinous nature of the crime. How the headlines portray the Tate Murders is gruesome.
Pinpointing the key moments of the shocking, gruesome nature of the crime, we examine the murders as portrayed by the media and the foreboding mystery surrounding the tragedy around one of the defining 1969 events.
Revisiting newspapers that captured the event in harrowing detail, we’ve compiled quotes from stories at the time to give an accurate account of how the murders were initially reported. August 8 – 9, 2019 marked 50 years since the Tate Murders.