Aug. 18 – On a lazy August weekend five years ago, they found the bodies – hacked, beaten, grotesque. The first four, including that of gorgeous movie star Sharon Tate, were discovered Saturday morning, Aug. 9, and while newspapers around the world were headlining the story, two more mutilated bodies were found that Sunday. At both murder scenes, messages had been left in blood.

The killings did more than shock – they terrified. They were so bizarre, so senseless and so motiveless that they became then, and remain today, not just more murders occurring in a violent era, but symbols of evil.

Today, five years later, only the victims are at rest. The murders continue to haunt those who, guilty or innocent, were connected with the case.

The convicted killers were saved from the gas chamber when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death sentence. The so-called mastermind, Charles Manosn, was transferred recently to a maximum security prison for the insane.

The three young girls convicted with him are serving their life terms isolated from the rest of the prison population, confined for the last three years in a special concrete pillbox built for them when they were awaiting death as the youngest women ever sentenced to die in California.

Only two of them, Patricia Krenwinkel, 27, and Leslie Van Houten, 24, are making any attempt to cope with and fill the endless, empty years.

Rounded up in the months following the murders, members of the Manson band are languishing in various prisons on charges ranging from murder to spiking a hamburger with LSD. One of them involved in the slayings became a mute and skinny “vegetable.” The children born to Manson’s girl followers have been taken away from them.

The chief prosecutor and one of the defense attorneys have just been charged with perjury in a case that grew out of the murder trial. If convicted, they face disbarment and prison.

A reporter who wrote a Manson trial story was sent to jail for what could have been a possible life term because of it: he still faces time behind bars.

The trial judge has been publicly criticized because of these recent events.

Sharon Tate’s husband, the talented filmmaker, Roman Polanski, left Hollywood and its bitter memories when he was at the height of his fame here. He returned last year, long enough to make his phenomenally successful movie, “Chinatown” — the first to be acclaimed since the deaths. He is a nihilistic man, who says: “I don’t believe in the immortal soul, divine justice, or any kind of plan in existence. We are born. It means nothing. We die.”

Terry Melcher, the producer and musician, only now is coming out of a five-year nightmare created by a false rumor that it was he, not Sharon and the others, the Manson gang intended murder on that August night.

Melcher, the son of Doris Day, got dragged into the case because he had once listened to Manson’s music and had once lived in the house where the four died: it was believed that the killer wanted to do him in because he had refused to record Manson’s music.

In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, the 31-year-old musician said that for nine months they had me thinking those people got killed because I couldn’t be found. My guilt was monumental .. I noticed that a few people became afraid of me. I know I became afraid of them.”

Melcher said he finally went to a psychiatrist who told him: “I don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to be crazy for a while. Try to get through it.”

His career suffered. He wrote a song about his experiences, but was dissuaded from selling it because he was told he would be “capitalizing on a tragedy.” He spent months in a hospital after both legs were broken in a motorcycle accident in 1972.

Finally, this year, he completed an album which Rolling Stone described as having “excellent” prospects. He has married, he has pulled his personal and creative life together. And he knows he will be forever linked to the terrible events of August, 1969.

When the weird murders were discovered, Los Angeles panicked. There was a run on locksmiths, and in one week more guns were bought by private citizens than ever before, including immediately after the Watts riots.

As weeks went by without an arrest, without an explanation, without any link being found between the victims at Sharon’s rented home in Benedict Canyon and the murdered couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, several miles away, the fears increased, the stories became more lurid, and the dead and the living were tainted with sinister rumors.

Sharon was eight months pregnant when she was killed, and the autopsy revealed that her first-born would have been a healthy son. They were buried together here, under a headstone that reads:

BELOVED WIFE OR ROMAN
SHARON TATE POLANSKI
1943 – 1969
PAUL RICHARD POLANSKI
THEIR BABY

Killed with Sharon were two house guests, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, 26, and her boy friend, Voityck Frykowski, 37, and an old friend of Sharon’s who had dropped by to visit, Jay Sebring, 35, the successful and well-known hair stylist.

The whisperings about the victims included tales of an association between Sharon and Manson, reports of drug dealing, orgies, sex movies. (Polanski was in Europe working at the time of the murders, but he too was dragged into the sensational, and untrue, rumors.)

At the other house, where LaBianca, a well-to-do supermarket owner, was killed with his wife. more rumors sprouted. He was possibly a victim of the Mafia, the unfounded rumors went.

Nobody knew at that time that a shaggy, doped-up band of runaways led by a puny ex-convict named Charles Manson had been arrested a week after the murders on drug charges, and released for lack of evidence – and that this was the band which later would admit, with the exception of Manson, the six killings.

If it had not been for one Manson girl Susan Atkins, it is possible that more months would have gone by without an arrest, or even that no arrests would have been made at all.

Susan, a girl with a desperate need for attention, wanted to shock and impress a cell-mate and hinted enough about the Tate murders to send her confidant running to the officials with the story.

It wasn’t until Dec. 1, almost four months after the bodies were found, that Manson and his followers were charged with the murders. Besides Manson, then 35, the defendants were Susan, then 21; Leslie, then 19; Patricia, then 22; Linda Kasabian, then 20, and Charles (Tex) Watson, then 24.

By the time the trial started, Linda had turned state’s evidence in exchange for immunity, and eventually walked out free, although she had been involved in both murder cases. Watson, the one-time Texas athletic hero, had become a zonked-out “vegetable” and his trial was delayed. (He also is serving a life term.)

Manson and the three girls were convicted and sentenced to death in April, 1971, by Judge Charles H. Older after a marathon trial as bizarre as the murders. President Nixon became involved, almost causing a mistrial by publicly declaring that Manson was guilty, despite the fact that as a defendant Manson legally was presumed innocent until a jury returned a verdict.

One of the defense attorneys, Ronald Hughes, disappeared on a weekend trip to Sespe Hot Springs. His body was recovered on the day the jury decided on death for the four defendants. He apparently had fallen and drowned during a flash flood in the desolate area.

Several of the defense attorneys were sent to jail for contempt during the proceedings, and the chief prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, was fined for contempt by Judge Older.

Arrests of other Manson members were made on the sidewalk outside the Hall of Justice, where the Manson girls held a vigil for months, shaving their heads, threatening to break Charlie out, preaching the boring philosophy of their leader, and obeying his male chauvinist orders.

After the trial, Manson was sent first to San Quentin’s death row, then transferred to Folsom and placed in the adjustment center, the toughest lock-up in the prison.

Somebody there is said to have put rat poison in Charlie’s Tang. Some of Charlie’s devoted followers, still free, were caught when they held up a store to get guns and ammunition in a plot to help him escape.

Asked about Manson’s recent transfer to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, the high security mental prison, officials said that he was “showing some signs of emotional psychiatric disturbance.”

Said the officials: “At the present time, he is in one of the psychiatric treatment programs and will probably remain in that program for an in-determinate length of time.

“It’s too early to make any prognostication as to the length of time or possible effectiveness of the therapy.”

Manson, who fired several defense attorneys when they tried to plead him innocent because of insanity, is said to have got into a fight recently at Vacaville and was cut on the head.

With the others, his case is on appeal. Though the girls admitted – the killings to the jury, without any signs of remorse, Manson swore he neither ordered the murders nor participated in them, telling the jurors:

“These children who come at you with knives, they’re your children. I didn’t teach them. You did.”

(Manson always referred to his followers as his “children,” a phrase also attributed to the slain Symbionese Liberation Army leader, Donald DeFreeze, when he was talking of the white girls in his army, including Patricia Hearst. Manson’s girls, like the members of the SLA, also took other names: Susan Atkins was “Sadie Glutz”; Catherine Share became “Gypsy.” There was “Snake” and “Ouish” and “Squeaky”, just as Patty Meant became “Tania” and DeFreeze became “Cinque.”)

When the death sentences were changed to life, the three girls in the concrete pillbox at the State Prison for Women, Frontera, hoped this would mean their release into the general prison population. Denied this privilege, they shaved their heads in protest, to the dismay of their families and lawyers, who had been urging them to try to adjust to their confinement and salvage the rest of their lives.

Two of the girls have changed. Leslie, the lovely, one-time high school homecoming princess, and Patricia, the former choir singer and beloved daughter, have become model prisoners, said the chief defense attorney at the trial, Paul Fitzgerald, who visits Patricia, whom he defended, and Leslie, once every month.

Unlike Susan Atkins, who was rejected by her father (her mother died when she was quite young), and who has nobody to bolster her, Leslie and Patricia have parents who have loved them and helped them even during the worst days of the case, when the girls still chanted their devotion to Manson and showed neither compassion for their parents nor remorse for their victims.

Explaining the changes in the two, Fitzgerald describes them as “detoxified” — as having come back to sanity.

“I think in the last year they have really broken with Manson,” said Fitzgerald, now a Beverly Hills attorney. “They no longer offer excuses about why they were convicted, they no longer feel there really was any injustice other than the publicity about their case.

“They’re at a terrible loss to explain how all this happened. It all seems to be a blur to them, it is as though they reverted to their conduct before they ever met Manson.

“They are thinking much more clearly now, like the middle class kids they are, doing just what is expected.”

In May, Leslie and Patricia completed a remarkable needlework project, which they started one and one-half years ago, and which they hope will be exhibited at the Los Angeles County Fair this fall.

It Is a bright dragon, 6 feet long, 3 feet wide, in a multitude of colors. On the dragon are 400 scales, and each scale took the two girls three hours to embroider, with the total project using 500 skeins of thread.

“I love the ol’ dragon,” Patricia wrote to Fitzgerald, “but I’m happy to retire from sewing. For the summer, I’m going to read and write, and practice the guitar.” She told him that the dragon had been appraised “as an art object for $1,000” and that it is being kept by her father, Joseph, until it is shown at the fair.

“The two girls are writing, they’re painting, they’re involved in education, and they’re very involved in women’s lib,” Fitzgerald said. “Their hair has grown out, it’s shoulder length now, and they’re dressing in pretty dresses and pants-suits.”

(As Manson followers, they would have considered women’s lib blasphemous, since Manson’s beliefs included female servitude to man.)

Fitzgerald said the girls have filled out a form for “dead time,” explaining that under a recent California Supreme Court decision, they now can get credit for the time they spent in jail before and during the trial, almost two years.

“Not that it’s going to make much difference,” the attorney said. “They are quite realistic. They’re not talking about getting out, they really are realistic. They are talking about getting out of the pillbox, getting on the campus [with the general prison population] where they can have a lot more latitude, attend classes, see movies and go to the library.”

Patricia’s father sees her “religiously every Monday morning at 9:30,” Fitzgerald said. “Can you imagine that? The guy never fails to see her except recently when he went on vacation in Japan for three weeks.

“He brings her clothes, he brings her books, he sees that she has subscriptions to magazines, and he’s such a cheerful guy, you know, he cheers up Leslie as well.”

Leslie’s parents are divorced, and her father and his new wife come from the Tacoma-Seattle area to visit her regularly. Her mother, a teacher, lives here and visits frequently.

“They wanted to know what the situation was when Charlie got sent to Vacaville,” Fitzgerald said, “and they knew about the struggle that was going on with the Aryan Brotherhood [the prison white racist group] and they heard about the rat poison in Charlie’s Tang. Apparently there are a lot of people interested in doing him [Manson] in. But the two girls don’t otherwise seem to have any interest in him, except curiosity about the reports.”

A former Manson member, Kenneth Como, in prison, became a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, and some of the Manson girls decided he was their new idol. According to Fitzgerald, Patricia and Leslie stayed out of that game.

In the pillbox, there are six cells facing each other. Besides Patricia, Leslie and Susan, another occupant is Mary Brunner, one of the first of the Manson girls and mother of his child, who had a master’s degree in library science when she dropped out to wander with Charlie. She is serving a 10-years-to-life term for two armed robberies, including the gunshop holdup involved in the plot to free Manson.

Describing a visit to the girls, Fitzgerald said that “you go into a small concrete building and everybody is very nice, the girls are dressed in regular clothes. Besides the cells, there is a hallway and a tiny room, almost what you could describe as a parlor.

“It has some chairs, tables, a couch and a small record player, and you just sit down there and talk with them. They get outside in a little yard, surrounded by a 16-foot wire fence topped with concertina barbed wire.”

Fitzgerald thinks the “detoxification” of Patricia and Leslie “would have occurred much faster had they been isolated [from each other and the other Manson girls], but the authorities put them together, where they reinforced one another. Everyone suggested that they be separated so that their unfortunate loyalties would break down, so that they could be on their own and resolve their own personalities. It was unfortunate that they were stuck together, but in this last year Patricia and Leslie really have made changes.”

The two girls are extremely interested in writing, but have decided not to write anything at this time related to the Manson case, fearing it would be sensationalized. They also want to make it on their own, as Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, not as “the Manson girls,” and are concentrating on stories disassociated from the case.

Fitzgerald who gets a letter each week from Patricia, was particularly moved by a recent one, in which she told him about selling $150 worth of paintings, and “even won second prize in an art contest here. Les won third.” In the letter Patricia told of a visit from her mother, who lives in Alabama and has been in failing health.

“I saw my Mom,” Patricia wrote. “we touched. Boy, oh boy, did I cry, “This was the first time in five years it felt so good!

“Mamas are a special breed, ’cause in truth they never stop loving no matter what ya do; now that’s a hard kind of love to take, for her eyes show the pain but she discussed small dreams.

“My biggest fear right now is that we may not visit again because of money and whatever, but Les and I have figured we are going to have to make the bread so she can.”

Patricia wrote that she and Leslie knew how hard they must work before they can ever think about parole, many years from now, and know the challenge … “the most monstrous, notorious dogs released! !”

“We have been thru so many wringers, the innocence is just about gone. Ain’t many people left that could take us or really game us anymore unless we let ‘um,” she wrote.

“Kind of scary to see how cold and lonely this ol life is, but my mama told me no matter what befalls us, we go on.

“You know, Paul, I will never again in this world hurt my mother. Out of every person I have met and listened to, no one ever stuck by me like mother and dad. That says more to me than anything.”

After the girls were found guilt, and the jury heard testimony in the penalty phase to decide on life or death, the parents of Patricia and Leslie testified about their children, describing the loving and normal relationships they had as the girls grew up, showing the pain and bewilderment they were suffering at the murder trials of these same girls.

At that same penalty phase, the girls admitted the killings, unable to give any rational explanation, still so enamored of Manson that all they wanted the jury to know was that Manson was not guilty, that the ideas had been theirs alone.

“There is one beautiful thing Charlie did that I remember,” Patricia wrote. “When my folks came to the courtroom, he stayed out … that was respect for me and mine.”

By THEO WILSON