Winnie Chapman, who had been the Polanskis’ cook, party caterer, and housekeeper for the past sixteen months, got dropped off a little late for work on Saturday morning, August 9.
As she approached the gate she could see the downed black wires on the fence and wondered if the phone would be out, making a mental note to check the line inside.
Starting up the driveway toward the house, she noticed a white Ambassador that was parked askew, but paid it no mind because the Polanskis often had visitors who stayed the night.
She picked up the newspaper on her way, then headed into the garage to turn off the outside lights. A string of outdoor holiday lights were always on, a decorative contribution from the previous tenant, Candice Bergen, but someone had left on the overhead light as well.
Chapman then walked to the service entrance on the west side of the house, grabbed the key from the rafter above the service door to unlock it, and replaced the key in its hiding place.
When she tried the phone in the kitchen it was dead, as she’d feared. So she proceeded into the dining room, where she was taken aback to notice that two trunks were sitting in the front entry hall—with blood on them. They hadn’t been there when she’d left the house the day before. The front door, which she’d just scrubbed clean of finger marks and paw prints, was also wide open.
Standing in the foyer, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing: the walls were covered with swatches of red, and as she looked out the door to the lawn, there was a lifeless, bloody figure of a man lying on the grass.
As she ventured onto the porch in shock, she glanced down at her feet to see numerous reddish pools and a yellow towel, marked with dried blood.
Hysterical and frightened now, she ran along the stone path to the driveway as fast as she could, past more spots of blood, and headed for the front gate. Passing the white car from a different angle this time, she could see that a young man was slumped over in the driver’s seat.
She couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.
“There’s bodies and blood all over the place!” she yelled as she scrambled to the Kotts’ house next door, and rang the doorbell.
Her heart was beating so hard she couldn’t wait any longer for them to answer the bell, so she took off for the next house. This time someone came to the door.
A teenager who lived there called the police department to report what the highly emotional woman communicated to his parents on their doorstep. He made several calls in fact, because it took some time for the officers to respond. A diligent Boy Scout looking toward a law enforcement career, he clocked the time of his first call at 8:33 a.m. However, a snafu with LAPD’s records logged only one call, reporting a possible homicide, at 9:14 a.m.
“You better get a police car over here right away,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s a man lying on the front lawn and blood all over the place. It looks like a bad one.”
After the first three officers from the LAPD arrived, they quickly scanned the scene, first taking in the bodies on the lawn. Moving inside, they discovered the bodies inside the main house, noting that all the inside lights were off except for a desk lamp in the living room and one in the hall that led to some of the bedrooms.
The officers listened for sounds but heard only an eerie silence broken by the buzzing of flies hovering over the deceased. Their ears perked up, however, when they heard a dog barking at the rear of the property.
“Shhh, be quiet,” a man’s voice said.
As the three officers headed cautiously toward the guesthouse, they mentally prepared to find the shooter waiting for them inside the one-story red building.
When they burst in around 9:30 a.m., they saw a bare-chested teenager on the couch in the front room. He may have been unarmed, but he was, after all, the only person on the entire property who was still alive.
William Garretson was startled awake by Christopher barking again. Moments later, three police officers stormed through the front door, guns drawn and pointed at him.
“Freeze!” they yelled.
Now barking like crazy, Christopher charged straight for the officer who was holding a rifle on Garretson. The dog bit him on the leg, then jumped up and snapped his jaws around the tip of the barrel.
As that officer wrestled with the Weimaraner, the other two grabbed the teenager off the couch and pulled him outside to the patio, where they pushed him down and snapped handcuffs on him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, genuinely confused.
“Shut up!” they said.
“What’s the matter?”
“We’ll show you.”
They took him out to the lawn, where they pushed him to the ground again, ripping a hole in the knee of his pant leg. Dragging him toward the closest body, they showed him a barefoot woman in a bloody nightgown, lying on her back. Garretson quickly averted his eyes.
Next, they took him sixty feet north to the limp body of a blond man lying on his right side in blood-stained clothes on the grass. Garretson would never forget the image of that man’s eyes, still wide open.
The bodies were so mutilated and bloody that they were almost unrecognizable. Garretson initially thought the dead woman was the maid, Winnie Chapman, an African American in her midfifties. So that’s what he told the officers.
A few minutes later, when he saw the maid talking to an officer across the yard, he realized his mistake. He later learned that the victim was actually Abigail Folger, who was twenty-five and white.
The officers took Garretson back to the guesthouse for questioning, then promptly arrested him. On their way past the white Ambassador in the driveway he saw a body slumped in the driver’s seat. But Garretson couldn’t see his face, so he couldn’t identify him either.
Garretson was frightened. And even more confused.
How come I wasn’t murdered? he wondered.
More than that, he was highly agitated and anxious because he’d been arrested for murder. He was informed that two other bodies were inside the main house, a man and a woman, for a total of five victims.
Within minutes of obtaining authorization to arrest Garretson, the officers walked him to the patrol car. On their way out the gate, an officer pressed the button to open it, even though he saw that it was covered with blood. This, of course, obliterated any chance of lifting a fingerprint, although Winnie Chapman had likely pressed that button already.
When the police realized that among the victims was Sharon Tate, a beautiful Hollywood ingénue and the pregnant wife of a famous director, the department responded quickly, with plenty of manpower. Within a few hours, the Cielo Drive property was swarming with law enforcement personnel.
By the afternoon, they numbered about forty, from detectives to supervisors and evidence techs, collecting blood samples and lifting fingerprints. There were so many investigators—officers from the LAPD’s West LA and Robbery-Homicide Divisions, the Beverly Hills Police Department, and even the county coroner-medical examiner himself— that the LAPD’s first investigative report didn’t even try to list the order of their arrival.
Given the high-profile nature of the Tate murders, one of the homicide lieutenants assembled a team of veteran investigators, with Sergeants Michael J. McGann and Jess Buckles taking the lead, and three other detective sergeants assisting.
Reporters and photographers, who routinely listened to police scanners, showed up quickly, setting up camp outside the gate and crowding the long driveway with their bodies and equipment. Because the police had sealed off the perimeter, this was as close to the action as they could get.
Early police reports were purposely vague, but sensational: “It looked like a battlefield up there,” a sergeant told the New York Daily News.
One neighbor caused confusion by telling the press that Terry Melcher, the previous tenant, still “owned” the place. But once it got out that the house was actually leased by Roman and Sharon Tate Polanski, word of the murders spread faster and wider than a California wildfire, first by word of mouth, then by broadcast news, followed by newspapers and magazines.
After a series of unsuccessful attempts by family members and associates to reach the victims by phone, Sharon’s mother called the wife of William Tennant, Roman’s business agent, to see if her husband could find out what was going on. She had Tennant paged at his tennis club.
Arriving at the crime scene in his tennis outfit around noon, Tennant pushed through the throng of media to talk to detectives. Going from body to body, he was able to confirm several of the victims’ identities— Sharon, Gibby, and Voytek. And although he wasn’t positive, he thought the man with the towel over his face was Jay Sebring.
He didn’t recognize the kid in the white Ambassador, who remained John Doe 85 for most of the day, because no one had a chance to run his license plate and registration through the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a name and address.
Afterward, Tennant threw up from the horrors he knew he could never unsee.
While LAPD Sergeant McGann was observing the first autopsies at the county morgue in the Hall of Justice basement, his partner, Sergeant Buckles, got a call from two sheriff’s detectives working the murder of musician Gary Hinman in Topanga Canyon.
Sergeant Whiteley and Deputy Guenther said they thought their case might be related to the Tate slayings because the killers had written messages about pigs in the victims’ blood at both scenes. They had a suspect in custody, a young guy who lived at the Spahn Movie Ranch with a group of hippies led by a Jesus Christ wannabe named Charlie.
But Buckles dismissed any connection, saying he was sure the Tate murders were “part of a big dope transaction.”
When McGann asked Buckles what the call was about, the detective didn’t even think enough of it to tell his partner. “It was nothing,” Buckles said.
Looking back years later, McGann said, “That was a screw-up, a major screw-up. Let me tell you, we would have solved that case in a month if I’d known about this.”
It was immediately obvious to investigators that the savagery was far too extreme to be the work of a lone assailant with a knife and a gun.
During the autopsies, the pathologists determined that the victims’ massive deep cuts likely were made by a bayonet with a six-inch blade, a decidedly unusual murder weapon. Additionally, a large number of stab wounds typically indicated a crime of passion by someone who knew the victim. But there was nothing typical about this human slaughter.
Whoever had cut the overhead wires didn’t seem to know what he was doing. One turned out to be a telephone cord; the other had once connected the button at the gate to a buzzer inside the house, but it was no longer in use.
After Sergeant McGann arrived around 1:30 p.m., he quickly made his first tour of the scene and all five victims. This was by far the worst and most grotesque crime scene he’d witnessed in all his years working homicides.
Peering first into the white Ambassador, he noted that the teenager in the driver’s seat had been shot in the face, chest, and left arm. His right forearm was on the arm rest. A vertical cut on his left palm, which went between his small and ring fingers, looked like a defensive wound. It was the only visible cut on his body.
The ignition switch and emergency brake were both in the off position; the shift lever was in second gear. The boy’s wristwatch, found on the back seat with its band severed, was apparently sliced off during his altercation with the killers.
Voytek Frykowski was lying on his right side on the lawn nearby, his left arm outstretched and perpendicular to his body. His hair was matted with blood, as were his purple shirt, leather vest, and multicolored pants. He had almost too many stab wounds to count, primarily on the exposed left side of his body. He died clenching a fistful of grass.
Abigail Folger’s body was also lying on the lawn, south of the stone bungalow, between it and the guesthouse. Her face was marred with blood from several slashes to the left side of her face and chin. Her blood-soaked nightgown was ratty with tears from stab wounds that started at her breasts and ran down her body.
As McGann headed through the front door, past the blood spatters and the word “PIG” scrawled in blood, he crossed through the foyer into the living room. There, he found the very pregnant Sharon Tate lying in a fetal position on her left side in front of the sofa, facing the fireplace. Her pink and white bikini was drenched with blood from the stab wounds around her breasts and upper abdomen. She’d also been stabbed in the back of the right leg.
Jay Sebring, shot in the chest and also stabbed, was lying on his right side in the living room, about four feet from Sharon, in front of a chair. He had a sizable abrasion on the left side of his face, with bruising and swelling around that eye and across the bridge of his nose. A light-colored towel, also drenched in blood, had been placed over his head and face like a hood.
Curiously, Sharon’s entire body was smeared with dried blood. Based on the blood pools that the officer from the Scientific Investigation Division (SID) sampled that day, investigators suspected that someone had moved Sharon’s body from the front porch while her wounds were still fresh, and possibly Jay’s as well.
The officer, who collected and typed a total of forty-five blood samples from the house and front porch area, determined that a large spot near the entryway matched Sharon’s, just three feet from another large spot on the front porch that matched Jay’s.
A three-strand nylon rope, forty-three feet and eight inches long, and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, was wrapped twice around Sharon’s neck, went up and over a ceiling beam, and hung freely down to the floor. The other end was wrapped one and a half times around Jay’s neck and went under his body and toward the fireplace. They couldn’t be sure if the victims had been hanging at some point, or if their bodies had simply been arranged that way.
Either way, it was a truly horrific scene. With the rope tying, so many stab wounds, and so much blood, especially the red-lettered message on the white door, these murders seemed ritualistic. Like black magic.
The LAPD kept their only suspect, William Garretson, in jail for two days. But after putting him through multiple interrogations and polygraph tests—which he passed—they determined that they couldn’t connect him with the crime.
He was finally released at 2:00 p.m. on Monday, August 11, and immediately returned home to Lancaster, Ohio. Within a week his mother had filed a $1.25 million claim on his behalf against the city of Los Angeles, alleging the violation of his civil rights by false imprisonment. The claim was ultimately rejected.
Although Garretson had told detectives that he couldn’t remember hearing any strange noises or whether he’d let the dog out that night, he later admitted at trial that he’d taken the Weimaraner out the back door to do his business.
He was lucky to be alive.