“THE SUM OF OUR FEARS”

Fifty years after the notoriously brutal Manson murders, Debra Tate tells William Langley that, still haunted by her sister Sharon’s murder, she is continuing the fight to keep her killers behind bars for the rest of their lives.

- William Langley

In the strangely hot summer of 1969, the hills above Los Angeles offered a sanctuary, not only from sweltering workplaces and smog-wreathed freeways, but the ominous flow of bad news spilling through the vast metropolis.

At her home on Cielo Drive, a steep, winding road behind Beverly Hills, 26-year-old Sharon Tate, one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars, kept the windows open and padded around the secluded property dressed as lightly as possible. Things were going well for Sharon. After a hesitant start, her career had taken off, and a year earlier she had married the newly fashionable French-born film director Roman Polanski, whose worldwide hit Rosemary’s Baby had rocketed him into the big league. Best of all, Sharon was eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child. As the weekend of August 9-10 approached, Sharon learned that Roman had been delayed in London and wouldn’t be home as planned. Instead, she invited friends over for dinner and a chill-out at Cielo Drive. None of them would survive what the Los Angeles prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, later characterised as “perhaps the most bizarre, savage, nightmarish murder spree in the recorded annals of crime”.

Fifty years on, the killings, orchestrated by hippy cult leader Charles Manson and largely carried out by his female followers, have lost none of their power to terrify and astonish. Six people, including Sharon’s unborn child, died at her house, and two more were slaughtered the following night. The murders marked the end of the freewheeling idealism of the 1960s, bringing fear and paranoia into Hollywood and darkening America’s sense of itself.