A pregnant Sharon Tate, not long before she died.

40 years ago today, a horrific crime occurred that continues to have reverberations beyond the personal tragedy that it brought to the victims and their families.

Writers such as Joan Didion have identified the night of August 8, 1969 as the moment the 60’s died – when the spirit of the era, far from continuing to blossom and grow in the next decade, came crashing down in a symbolic execution.  

August 8th was the night that a small group of the usually peace-and-love-seeking hippies, led by one of the era’s famously charismatic leaders, and fueled by the celebrated stimulants of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, set out not to end a war or shake up established institutions but to commit two nights of senseless slaughter that shocked America.

Afterward, many would no longer see hippies, psychotropic drugs, communes and charismatic leaders as exciting manifestations of a new and more enlightened age, but instead as potential destroyers of innocent lives.  The worm was in the apple, and cynicism, fear and suspicion had returned after a few years of enthusiastic belief that the world could be changed for the better.  Now it was not just the middle-aged parents who saw danger, but also the children about to step into that bright new world.

I was 11 years old on August 6th, 1969, when my family moved into our new house in San Clemente, then a sleepy little beach town 70 miles south of where Sharon Tate and six others were about to die.  We had just relocated from the East Coast, and were still in shock at how different life was in California.  It wasn’t just the beautiful weather (no more choking summer heat and humidity), or the nearby Pacific that we could swim in every day as if on permanent vacation, or the utterly alien architecture (houses on stilts set on lots that seemed the size of a blanket compared to our East Coast neighborhoods), or the lack of trees and grassy yards, but the completely different culture.

In many ways, the late 60’s never seemed to reach the East Coast, with life still resembling an episode of Mad Men even in mid-1969.  Yet here in California, the 60’s were not only in full bloom, but about to drop off the vine.  We’d moved 3,000 miles but we’d also changed eras, moving years ahead in cultural time, into a nearly alien place.

Just how alien became clear only a few days after we moved in, when we were greeted by this screaming headline from the Los Angeles Times thrown into our driveway that morning:

Film star Sharon Tate, another woman and three men were found slain Saturday, their bodies scattered around a Benedict Canyon estate in what police said resembled a ritualistic mass murder.

I don’t recall my parents’ reaction, but my 16-year-old sister and I both wondered, “What kind of place are we living in?”  

Apparently it was a place where bizarre and brutal murders occurred with such regularity that another happened the following night at the LaBianca home:

A Los Feliz couple were found slain Sunday night under bizarre circumstances that police said may connect the crime with the weird ritual murder of actress Sharon Tate and four others in Benedict Canyon.


This correct connection was soon disdained by cops who were sure the Tate murders were a Hollywood drug deal gone bad, and who thus made no progress in solving the crime until they lucked into a jailhouse confession that Susan Atkins made to a bunk-mate.

While the months between the crimes and the Atkins confession had filled most Southern Californians with a constant and lurking fear that unknown killers might strike anywhere at any moment, the arrests and resolution of the mystery only brought fresh horror.

I’d always imagined murderers as dark hulking men like the criminals who appeared on TV or in movies.  But aside from Tex Watson, all of the killers were female. (While the instigator of the murders, Manson did not physically kill any of the seven victims.)  After months of imagining the maniacs who could have committed such heinous murders, they turned out to be young, long-haired women who resembled my teenage sister.  

Like most children, I’d always been warned to avoid sinister male strangers, but this was a danger that was almost impossible to comprehend:  Girls like the ones I saw every day might come one night to kill me.

After that shock came a worse one, in the details of the crime. Atkins’ grand jury testimony (which she later recanted) was printed in the L.A. Times and her matter-of-fact account of how the victims were slain was unbearably grisly and yet too mesmerizing not to read.  As she recounted her killing of Tate, who begged to be allowed to live long enough to have her soon-to-be born child, Atkins mentioned being tempted to cut the baby out of Tate’s womb and take it to raise, since the Manson “family” held children to be innocent and even sacred beings.

Reading this in the Times, my pounding heart seemed to stop for a moment.  I was a child!  So they wouldn’t kill me if they came to our house.  It was a small comfort, but I grasped at it.  I had to grasp at something, because for months now I had lain in my bed, scared to fall asleep lest killers creep into my ground floor bedroom window and stab me dozens of times.  Knowing the crime had been solved and that the murderers were in prison did no good – most of Manson’s “family” was still at liberty, not having been involved in the killings (one, Squeaky Fromme, would famously go on to try to kill President Ford, and, ironically enough, is being released from prison this very week).   

The danger was still out there, but now it had faces, frighteningly familiar ones hiding behind innocent facades, and their actions seemed more inexplicable and thus terrifying than ever.  These people killed for reasons that were utterly obscure, paranoid and capricious, and therefore the only logical conclusion was that we were all at risk, all the time.  

The long, nearly circus-like trial (the “trial of the century” of its time) brought no relief, instead putting the murders in daily headlines and conversation for months and prompting new worries (my mother was convinced that Manson would hypnotize the jury into finding them all innocent, and her oft-voiced opinion – which I was too young to question -- ratcheted up my anxiety).

Finally, a year and a half after the murders, the trial was over, the news turned to other subjects and so did the conversation of the adults around me.  I wish I could say that my childish terror died then, but something had sunk into my psyche that I’ve never been able to shake entirely.  For 40 years, I’ve continued to be haunted by the Manson family.

I can’t stay in a new place, especially an isolated house, without feeling that a band of strangers might break in at any time and murder everyone. When I lived alone, I chose apartments that felt secure to me, but still maintained an unconscious vigilance that made me a notoriously light sleeper.  Only since living with K. have I begun to relax that vigilance, no longer waking if he gets in and out of bed at night, or if the cat jumps on me.

My greatest fear has always been to wake up and find a stranger standing over me.  Of course, this is the worst fear of many women, especially those of us who’ve lived alone.  But it’s not just thieves or rapists I imagine breaking in, but crazy killers who will torment and terrify me before I die, as they did Sharon Tate, who had to witness everyone else being killed before she was slain.

As crazy and irrational as these fears of mine are, what happened to her and the other victims was literally unimaginable, beyond anyone's worst nightmares.  Sharon Tate was happily pregnant and thought that her home was a safe place that she would soon bring her newborn baby back to. She went to sleep utterly unaware that the unthinkable was about to happen, that she would wake to find a killer hovering over her, in the guise of a seemingly harmless young woman.

Sometimes I can’t help but imagine what it was like to be in that house on Cielo Drive that night, of what it would be like to go from a peaceful evening with friends to having violent strangers burst in and commit unspeakable acts.  One minute you are living your life, and the next minute it is taken from you, in a manner that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen or prevented.

But while the specter of the Manson family haunts me, I long ago realized that they are just a symbol that my mind latches onto.  What I really fear is something far less exotic:  The simple fact that I can only control so much of my life, much less my death.  I realized that at eleven years old, as I read the L.A. Times one summer morning.

It’s a realization that can be put to good use, if I let it, reminding me to value every moment, and to focus on what is truly important in life.

And what is truly important?  Always the same answer comes back:  Love.  The killers in our minds can only defeat us if we do not love.

I write this as I sit on my deck, on a beautiful August day in California, the state that I still love.

Dedicated to the memory of those who died 40 years ago:  

Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski,  Sharon Tate, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca.