The Tate-LaBianca murders were a Los Angeles case from the first hour to the last. The LAPD worked them, the county sheriff worked the LaBianca side, and Vincent Bugliosi tried them for the district attorney. The FBI had no jurisdiction and never claimed any, and its file says so in as many words: a man who called the Bureau with something to offer "was advised that the FBI could take no action regarding matter within the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department."
What the Bureau did instead was keep a file. Two of them, in fact, one indexed under Sharon Tate and one under Charles Manson, and what they hold is the traffic that collects around a case an agency is watching rather than investigating: a cable from the legal attaché in London the week Roman Polanski was there, a request that the Liaison Section pass something to sources in Canada, name checks, the Los Angeles field office reporting that the LAPD had interviewed hundreds of people and that the case had received "maximum publicity", and page after page of newspaper clippings.
The single most useful line in either file is the Bureau's own stamp, which appears on document after document: this record "contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency."
Sharon Tate was murdered. Her name is on a file number here because the Bureau indexed the case under the best-known victim, which is ordinary filing practice and nothing more. Nothing about her presence in this archive should be read as placing her among its subjects.
Manson does not speak anywhere in these pages and neither does anyone convicted with him. There is no interview here, no confession and no evidence: the killings were state offences and the investigative record sits with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County and the LAPD. What the FBI holds is liaison traffic about someone else's case, which is a genuinely different kind of document and worth reading as one - it shows a federal agency deciding, repeatedly, that something is not its business.
The rights here split in two, and the split decides what is on this page. Everything the Bureau wrote - the memoranda, the cables, the stamps, the withheld-page notices - is a federal government work and reproduced in full. Everything the Bureau cut out of a newspaper still belongs to the newspaper, and that is most of the physical file.
The clippings are a different matter and we have not reproduced them. Most of what physically fills these 117 pages is newspaper coverage the Bureau cut out and filed - the Washington Daily News, the Evening Star, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, wire copy from August 1969 onward. A newspaper article does not become a government work by being pasted into a government file, and the papers that published it still own it. So the clippings are described rather than printed, which costs the reader nothing: the coverage of these murders is the best-documented thing about them and is available in any newspaper archive.
What is left after that is small and battered. Of roughly 14,133 words across the two releases, 457 are printed here, and the reason is arithmetic rather than squeamishness: two OCR engines shown the same pages agreed with each other on 31.6 per cent of words on one sampled page and nothing at all on another, because a scanned newspaper column reads as two columns interleaved and a teletype reads as a grid. The Bureau's passages that survive are printed as they came, with their damage visible - "Legat, London" arrives as "neelTed cable from Legat, London" and the Los Angeles Police Department as "LAPP" - because repairing a word we cannot read would be writing the file rather than reading it.
Both releases carry the same Los Angeles memoranda, so several passages arrived twice in different states of damage - the loaned-document stamp, the Liaison Section request, the refusal of jurisdiction - and we kept one copy of each. Spotting them took more than it should have: two scans of the same paragraph never share five consecutive words, because each scan fails at a different one, so "consider" and "ooniider" sit in otherwise identical sentences. The Bureau's withheld-page notice appears eleven times and in no legible state at all, so it is described here rather than printed.
Foragoing Infomtlon neelTed cable from Legat, London, requested that local authorities, Los Angeles and NevOrleans, and Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs be advised. Bureau of stops, irttere Jurisdiction lies rather tap lu Narcotics ard Dangerous Drugs, as advised bj 8AI Telmi ron
The Miss of Sharon Tate, who was married to a Hollywood movie producer, and four others were found at the Tate residence following a bizarre IdlUng in which tie victims were shot and repeatedly stabbed. Attached advises Los Angeles Police Department has requested Bureau assistance in determining the identity of the person
be noted that this crime has received, receive, maximum publicity In the Los Inception of this Saso, Los Ancoles Police i itit Department officials plaied a their Investigation and they have only minimum of For example, no details have been mutilation of the furnished victims nor 0 the victims
Sharon Tate, a motion picture actress who was years of age. She was Married to Roman Polanski, a motion ploturo director, who in London, England at the time wurders. She was approximately eight months pregnant the time of her death.
Investigation by Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department revealed that the above victims were beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. The telephone lines leading to the house were out and scrawled in blood on the front door of the house was the word
He was advised that the FBI could take no action regarding matter III jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department made some critical comments regarding the Los Angeles I
This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI, It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency; it and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.
Enclosed herevlth for the Bureau are copies of sn concerning in feraatlon provided bi
Bureau Liaison Section is requested to consider providing the enclosed to the appropriate sources in Csnada.
Although the Los Angeles Office has been liS' with the LAPD in connection with this case in a lialsbn wcapacity, and in one Instance, FBI covered a lead foci' the LAPD with Bureau approval, the minute details' of case have never been solicited or discussed with' the' Anploa Police Department. LAPD strongly feels thit their refusal to make public the small details of the crime willincrease, the possibility or InHheT past
Officials of th LAPP have advised that hundreda Individuals of have been Interviewed in connection with this extremely complicated case. Officials have also indicated that although the investigation has focused largely on the narcotics aspect of the case, no prime Pp or suspects for the crime have been developed, and further, officials are unable to speculate on the nationality of the murderer or murderers.