Four people went up the hill to 10050 Cielo Drive near midnight on August 8, 1969: Charles Watson, whom the others called Tex, and three young women, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian. Two of the women later described that night under oath. Atkins told it to a Los Angeles County grand jury on December 5, 1969. Kasabian told it to the trial jury eight months later, over several weeks on the stand, on the promise of immunity. Each heard and saw things the other did not. Read together, they are the nearest thing to a complete account that anyone who was there has ever given in court.
Their testimony is about five people, and each of them had a life that the night on Cielo Drive has tended to swallow.
Sharon Tate was twenty-six. She was born in Dallas in 1943 to Paul Tate and Gwendolyn Willet and grew up a military child, moving between bases in the United States and Europe. She was crowned Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas as a baby and homecoming queen in high school, and in Hollywood she signed with the production company Filmways and worked her way up from bit parts on television to her largest role, in Valley of the Dolls in 1967. She married the director Roman Polanski in January 1968. That summer of 1969 he was working in Europe, and she was about eight and a half months pregnant with a son they meant to name Paul, after her father. She had two younger sisters, Debra and Patti.
Jay Sebring was thirty-five. He was born Thomas John Kummer in Alabama in 1933, one of four children, and grew up in a middle-class suburb of Detroit. He learned to cut hair in the Navy during the Korean War, changed his name, moved to California, and helped invent the business of styling men’s hair; his clients included Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty, and he styled the haircuts for the film Spartacus. Three months before his death he opened the first salon of a planned chain, Sebring International, in San Francisco, and Sharon Tate’s parents came to the opening. He and Tate had dated before she met Polanski, and he stayed one of her closest friends.
Abigail Folger was twenty-five, two days short of her twenty-sixth birthday. She was the daughter of Peter Folger, chairman of the Folger coffee company, and Inez Mejia, and grew up around San Francisco after her parents divorced. A strong student, she did graduate work in art history at Harvard, worked at a California museum and then for a publisher and a bookstore in New York, and in Los Angeles volunteered as a social worker for the county welfare department until she quit in discouragement. She had met Wojciech Frykowski at a bookstore party in 1968; they spoke French together.
Frykowski was thirty-two, born in Poland in 1936. He had a chemistry degree but preferred the company of filmmakers, and he had helped finance one of Polanski’s early short films. He had been married twice and had a son, Bartek. He left Poland in 1967. The day after Folger quit her job, the couple moved into the house on Cielo Drive to look after it for Tate and Polanski, and when Tate came home from Europe they stayed on to keep her company.
Steven Parent was eighteen, the oldest of four children of a family in El Monte. He had graduated from Arroyo High School in June and planned to start at Citrus Junior College in the fall. He worked two jobs, delivering parts for a plumbing firm by day and selling stereo equipment at night, and he was fascinated by electronics. At about a quarter to midnight on August 8 he drove up to see whether the caretaker in the guest house, William Garretson, wanted to buy a clock radio from him. He was driving out when the four came over the fence.
The two accounts were not given on equal terms, and that matters for everything in them.
Atkins was born on May 7, 1948, in San Gabriel, outside Los Angeles. As a young teenager she sang in a church choir and nursed her mother, who died of cancer when Susan was fifteen. She fought with her father, left school and went to San Francisco, where she danced in a topless bar. In 1967, in the Haight-Ashbury, she met Manson, who named her Sadie Mae Glutz. She traveled the Southwest with the group on a school bus, bore a son in 1968 whom Manson helped deliver, and moved with the others to Spahn Ranch in 1969.
She was arrested in the desert that October with the rest of the Family and moved to the Sybil Brand Institute in Los Angeles on suspicion of the Hinman killing. On November 6, 1969, in a dormitory there, she described the Tate murders to a fellow inmate, Virginia Graham, without any sign of remorse. “You have to have real love in your heart to do this for people,” she told her. Word reached the Los Angeles Police Department through another inmate, Ronnie Howard, and what Atkins had said led investigators to the group. The district attorney’s office offered not to seek the death penalty against her if she would testify. She appeared before the grand jury with her court-appointed lawyer, Richard Caballero, who was the first witness sworn that morning. The deputy district attorney who questioned her, Vincent Bugliosi, took her through the night with photographs and a diagram of the property. She told the jurors she had been “in love with the reflection” of Manson, and at one point said, “I feel dead now.” The grand jury deliberated for about twenty minutes before indicting Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, Kasabian and Leslie Van Houten; newspapers reported the indictments on December 9. Then Atkins backed out of the agreement and refused to testify at trial.
Douglas Linder, whose Famous Trials project documents the case, suggests she probably did so under threat from Manson. Her grand jury testimony was never cross-examined, because no defense lawyer is present in a grand jury room.
Kasabian came to the Family by a much shorter road. She was born Linda Darlene Drouin in Biddeford, Maine, in 1949, and grew up in her divorced mother’s home in Milford, New Hampshire, with a stepfather she disliked. She left school at sixteen, married twice, and had a daughter, Tanya, in 1968. She moved to the Los Angeles area with her husband, Bob Kasabian, and met Manson on July 4, 1969, pregnant and with her young daughter. She later said she thought he could see inside her. By the night of August 8 she had been with the group about six weeks. She was the only one with a valid driver’s license, which is why she was in the car.
Three days after the killings she left Spahn Ranch in a borrowed car and went to her husband in Taos, New Mexico, came back to California for her daughter, and made her way to her mother’s house in New Hampshire. A California warrant was issued on December 1, 1969, and she was arrested the next day in Concord. She chose to go back to Los Angeles because, by her account, she wanted to tell what she knew. With Atkins gone, Bugliosi negotiated with her lawyer, Gary Fleishman. Bugliosi had first refused, since he already had Atkins. Now the prosecution agreed to ask for immunity after Kasabian testified; Bugliosi later wrote that the agreement was signed on February 26, 1970, and required her to give a full statement and testify truthfully.
Jury selection began before Judge Charles Older on June 15, 1970, and opening statements were made on July 24, the day Manson came into court with an X cut into his forehead. Kasabian was called on July 27 and spent eighteen days on the witness stand, finishing on August 19. The defense lawyer Irving Kanarek cross-examined her for seven days and at one point objected that she was not a competent witness because she was insane; Judge Older overruled him. Kanarek pressed her on her use of LSD, asking whether she had taken it about fifty times and inviting her to describe one of the trips by number. In the first week of August, while she was on the stand, Manson held up a Los Angeles Times headline reporting that President Nixon had declared him guilty; the jurors said it would not influence them, and a defense motion for a mistrial was denied. Immunity was reported granted on August 10, 1970. When she was shown photographs of the dead, she said she could not have done such a thing: “I do not have that kind of thing in me.”
So one account was given early, with a death sentence in the background, and was later disowned. The other was given late, for immunity, and was tested by the defense for days. Where two accounts made on those terms agree, the agreement carries real weight.
Both women put the same four people in the car and leave Manson at Spahn Ranch. Both describe the same instruction from him before they left, and describe it in nearly the same words. Atkins told the grand jury she never recalled getting any actual instructions from Charlie “other than getting a change of clothing and a knife and was told to do exactly what Tex told me to do.” Kasabian told the trial jury: “He told me to get a change of clothing, a knife, and my driver’s license.” Atkins said Watson did the driving and the talking, and told them they were going to a house on the hill that had belonged to Terry Melcher, because he knew its layout.
Kasabian added something Atkins did not mention. As the car started down the ranch driveway, she said, Manson stopped it, leaned in and told them to leave a sign: “You girls know what I mean, something witchy.”
They agree on the equipment. Atkins listed it for the grand jury: a rope and a set of bolt cutters in the back, a gun for Watson, a knife each for herself, Kasabian and Krenwinkel. She described Watson climbing a power pole with the bolt cutters and cutting two lines.
And they agree, almost word for word, on the first death. Kasabian watched it. They had climbed the fence, she said, when a light came toward them and Watson told them to get back. A car pulled up, Watson pointed his gun through the driver’s window, and the man inside said, “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” Watson shot him four times. Atkins did not see it; she said she saw only headlights, and Watson had told the women to lie down and be still. But she heard it. She told the grand jury she heard Watson say “Halt,” and then a male voice: “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” Then four shots. Two witnesses, testifying eight months apart in different proceedings, gave the same eight words for the last thing Steven Parent said.
They agree on what came after the house as well. Driving away, both said, Watson stopped where there was a garden hose so they could wash, and a woman came out and her husband followed. Both remembered him asking whether the car was theirs, and Watson answering that they were just walking.
At the house the two accounts separate, because the two women did.
Kasabian said Watson sent her round the back to look for an open window or door, and when she came back he was cutting a window screen and told her to go back and wait at the car. Krenwinkel came down, took Kasabian’s knife and told her to stay there and listen for sounds. So Kasabian’s evidence about the killings is mostly evidence of sound. She heard a man scream “No. No.” and then screams that went on and on. She ran toward the house, she said, because she wanted them to stop. A man with blood over his face was standing by a post at the door. “Oh, God, I am so sorry,” she told him. “Please make it stop.” He fell into the bushes. When Atkins came out, Kasabian asked her to make it stop too, and told her people were coming, which she admitted on the stand was not true. Atkins said, “It is too late,” said she had lost her knife, and went back inside. Kasabian then saw the man get up with Watson on top of him, and saw Krenwinkel chasing a woman in a white gown across the lawn with a knife raised. She ran to the car.
Atkins’s account is from inside the house. She told the grand jury that Watson climbed in through a front window and opened the door, and that only she and Krenwinkel went in. Watson sent her through the rooms to see who else was there. She saw a woman reading who looked up and smiled at her, and in another room a man with his back to her and a pregnant woman on the bed. She told Watson there were three more people. She loosely tied the hands of the man on the couch, Frykowski, and brought the others into the living room at knifepoint. She described Sebring being shot when he would not lie down, and stabbed. She said Watson told her to kill Frykowski, that she hesitated, that Frykowski knocked her down and pulled her hair, and that she swung her knife behind her four or five times without seeing what she hit. She described Folger, held by Krenwinkel, letting go and saying “I give up, take me” an instant before Watson stabbed her, and later seeing Folger on the lawn in a nightgown with blood on it.
On Sharon Tate she was specific. She said Tate begged, “Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.” She said Watson told her to kill Tate, that she could not, and that she held Tate’s arms so he would not see that, while he stabbed her. Afterward, she said, Watson told her to go back in and write something on the door in one of the victims’ blood. She took the towel she had used on Frykowski, touched it to Tate’s body, and wrote PIG on the outside of the front door.
The man by the post in Kasabian’s account appears to be Frykowski. Atkins described him breaking for the open front door, screaming for help, and Watson beating him there. Kasabian saw the same struggle from the yard.
The accounts do not fit together everywhere, and the gaps are worth noticing.
Atkins told the grand jury that once they were outside, she and Krenwinkel looked for Kasabian and called for her quietly because “she wasn’t anywhere around.” Kasabian described speaking to Atkins at the door while the killing was still going on. Atkins never mentioned that exchange. Atkins also described something Kasabian’s excerpted testimony does not: on the way back, she said, the weapons were handed to Kasabian in the front seat and thrown down an embankment off Mulholland.
The largest conflict is between Atkins and Atkins. Before the grand jury she said Watson stabbed Sharon Tate while she held her. At the trial she said otherwise. According to the Associated Press, she testified that she stabbed Tate herself, that she did not know how many times or why, and that she had been “stoned on acid.” The grand jury version was never cross-examined, and the record does not settle which version is true. What a reader can say is that the one woman who described Tate’s death from inside the room described it two ways.
Both women also describe the next night, when Manson came along. Kasabian said he called her, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten aside, told them they were going out again, and said the previous night had been too messy and he would show them how to do it. She went, she told the jury, “Because Charlie asked me and I was afraid to say no.” Atkins described Manson coming back to the car from the LaBianca house, seeing that she did not want to go in, and sending Van Houten instead. “I have got the people tied up,” she quoted him as saying. “They are very calm.” He said the night before, Watson had let the people know they were going to die, which caused panic, and that he had reassured these two with smiles that they would not be harmed. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed in their house on Waverly Drive that night.
The prosecution rested on November 16, 1970, after twenty-two weeks of testimony and eighty-four witnesses. Three days later the defense rested without calling anyone. The three women then demanded to testify, and Older let them, over their own lawyers’ objections; Manson took the stand himself and afterward told his co-defendants they did not have to testify now. On November 30 Van Houten’s lawyer, Ronald Hughes, failed to appear; he had vanished on a camping trip, and his body was found months later. Whether Manson’s followers had anything to do with his death has never been established.
The jury of seven men and five women received the case on January 16, 1971, and deliberated forty-two hours and forty minutes. On January 25 it convicted Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten on all twenty-seven counts. The transcript by then ran to nearly six million words, with 297 exhibits. In the penalty phase that followed, Atkins changed her story about Sharon Tate, as described above. On March 29 the jury returned death sentences, and Atkins told the courtroom, “Better lock your doors and watch your own kids.” Watson, who had fought extradition from Texas long enough to be tried alone, went on trial in August 1971; his lawyers called eight psychiatrists to argue he was insane or of diminished capacity, and the jury convicted him of the same seven murders and sentenced him to death. All of the sentences were reduced to life when the California Supreme Court invalidated the state’s death penalty in 1972. Kasabian, who had stood at the car, was never tried.
Atkins spent the rest of her life in prison, thirty-seven years of it at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. In September 1974, she said, a brilliant light filled her cell and she believed it was Jesus telling her she was forgiven; she wrote about it in a 1977 book, Child of Satan, Child of God. She earned an associate degree, started a prison ministry and kept a record the parole authorities described as exemplary. She married twice in prison: first Donald Lee Laisure, who claimed to be a wealthy Texan and from whom she was quickly divorced, and later James Whitehouse, a Harvard Law School graduate who had served as one of her lawyers. “I have to make amends to society,” she told a parole board in 2000. She apologized many times over the years. The boards turned her down every time.
In 2008 she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She lost a leg, underwent brain surgery and by her last months was paralyzed and barely able to speak. Her request for compassionate release was denied. Bugliosi, who had questioned her before the grand jury, spoke in favor of letting her go, calling the mercy she sought minuscule given that she was dying. Debra Tate told the board she would pray for Atkins’s soul when she drew her last breath, but wanted her kept in custody until then. At her final hearing, on September 2, 2009, Atkins was wheeled in on a gurney and slept through much of it; she and Whitehouse recited religious verse, and her last public words were “My God is an amazing God.” The board denied her. She died on September 24, 2009, at sixty-one, in the prison hospital at Chowchilla. By then she had been held longer than any other woman in California.
Kasabian went home. After the trial she rejoined her husband and children on a small farm in New Hampshire, and she was called to testify again in later proceedings. Linder writes that she later lived in the Pacific Northwest under an assumed name, left her husband, went back to New Hampshire, and in the 1980s lived what he calls a rough, rather down-and-out life. She made only three public appearances in the rest of her life, among them a 2009 British docudrama, Manson. In a television interview with Larry King that year she tried to explain why she had not simply left the ranch: it was not, she said, something she could turn around and walk out of. A British tabloid reported in 2017 that she was living in Tacoma, Washington, under another name. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in 2019, the actress Maya Hawke played a character based on her. She died in late January 2023, at seventy-three.
Krenwinkel is still in prison; parole panels have recommended her release twice since 2022, and twice the governor has refused it, most recently on October 14, 2025.
The families of the dead carried on their own long work. Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, once gathered 350,000 signatures to keep a member of the Family in prison. She died in 1992, and Patti Tate in 2000. Debra Tate, seventeen when her sister was killed, has gone on attending parole hearings; Jay Sebring’s nephew Anthony DiMaria has also followed the case on behalf of his family.
Neither woman’s account convicted anyone alone. Atkins’s was at the center of the grand jury hearing and was then withdrawn. Kasabian’s was tested for days by the defense and stood. The strongest thing in either record may be the plainest: two witnesses who had every reason by 1970 to keep their distance from each other, giving the same instructions from Manson, the same equipment, and the same last words from an eighteen-year-old in a car at the gate.
• 1967: Atkins meets Manson in the Haight-Ashbury. • July 4, 1969: Kasabian meets Manson. • August 8 to 9, 1969: the Tate murders at 10050 Cielo Drive. • August 9 to 10, 1969: the LaBianca murders on Waverly Drive. • Mid-August 1969: Kasabian leaves Spahn Ranch, three days after the LaBianca murders. • October 1969: Atkins arrested with the Family at Barker Ranch. • November 6, 1969: Atkins describes the Tate murders to Virginia Graham. • December 1 and 2, 1969: warrant issued for Kasabian; she is arrested in Concord, New Hampshire. • December 5, 1969: Atkins testifies before the grand jury. • December 9, 1969: indictments reported. • February 26, 1970: Kasabian’s immunity agreement signed, according to Bugliosi. • June 15, 1970: jury selection begins. • July 24, 1970: opening statements. • July 27 to August 19, 1970: Kasabian on the witness stand. • August 10, 1970: Kasabian’s immunity reported granted. • November 16 and 19, 1970: prosecution and defense rest. • January 25, 1971: guilty verdicts. • March 29, 1971: death sentences. • August 1971: Watson’s separate trial begins. • 1972: death sentences commuted to life. • September 1974: Atkins’s religious conversion, as she described it. • 1977: Child of Satan, Child of God published. • September 2, 2009: Atkins’s last parole hearing. • September 24, 2009: Atkins dies at Chowchilla. • January 2023: Kasabian dies, aged 73. • October 14, 2025: Governor Newsom denies Krenwinkel parole.
The Atkins quotations come from her grand jury testimony of December 5, 1969, published in full in this archive as TESTIMONY OF SUSAN ATKINS, MANSON GRAND JURY, 1969. The Kasabian quotations come from her trial testimony of 1970, which survives here only as excerpts (TESTIMONY OF LINDA KASABIAN, PEOPLE V. MANSON, 1970). Neither text has been checked against a certified court transcript.