The perpetrators killed five people on the night of August 8–9: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her companions Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski, along with Steven Parent.
[1][2][3] On the night of August 8–9, four members of the Family – Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian – drove from Spahn Ranch to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, the home Tate shared with her husband, film director Roman Polanski.
Manson was a cult leader and wannabe musician who had tried to get a contract with record producer Terry Melcher, who had previously rented the house.
The following night, the four participants in the Cielo Drive killings, in addition to Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Steve "Clem" Grogan, committed two more murders.
On the night of August 8, 1969, Tex Watson took Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California.
Watson instead lunged at Parent with a knife, giving him a defensive slash wound on the palm of his hand that severed tendons and tore his watch off his wrist, then shot him four times in the chest and abdomen, killing him in the front seat of his white 1965 AMC Rambler.
[5]: 22–25 [6] Watson next cut the screen of a window, then told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate; she walked over to Parent's car and waited.
He began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with a long nylon rope which he had brought, then slung it over one of the living room's ceiling beams.
[6] He fought his way out the front door and onto the porch, but Watson caught up with him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times, stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.
Rosemary was brought into the living room from the bedroom, and Watson covered the couple's heads with pillowcases which he bound in place with lamp cords.
[9] Watson heard a scuffle in the bedroom and went in there to discover Rosemary LaBianca keeping the women at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck.
[5]: 44, 206, 297, 341–42, 380, 404, 406–07, 433 Watson then cleaned off the bayonet and showered, while Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls and "Healter [sic] Skelter" on the refrigerator door, all in LaBianca's blood.
She gave Leno LaBianca 14 puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach.
[5]: 176–184, 258–269 [9] Meanwhile, Manson drove the other three Family members who had departed Spahn with him that evening to the Venice home of the Lebanese actor Saladin Nader.
[5]: 84–90 In later statements to her attorney, to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury, Atkins indicated Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.
However, in 1972, the Supreme Court of California ruled in People v. Anderson that the state's then-current death penalty laws were unconstitutional.
[12] As a result, the Anderson decision spared the lives of 107[13] death row inmates in California, including Charles Manson and his four "family members".
[14] Subsequently, the death sentences for each of the five perpetrators convicted in the Tate–LaBianca murders were commuted to life in prison, which – by law – included the possibility of parole.
[1] Some critics have claimed that it led to the proliferation of "darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America's seedy underbelly" by the movie industry, including films such as Dirty Harry (1971).
As of 2015[update], Helter Skelter was the bestselling true crime book in publishing history, with more than seven million copies sold.