In the early hours of August 9, 1969, five people were killed at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles. They were the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; the celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; the aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski; Abigail Folger, an heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune; and Steven Parent, 18, who had been visiting the property's caretaker. Tate's unborn child also died. The house was the home Tate shared with the film director Roman Polanski, who was working in Europe at the time.
The following night, the supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, were killed at their home at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.
Both attacks were carried out by members of the Manson Family, a group based at Spahn Ranch that followed Charles Manson. On the first night, Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel entered the Cielo Drive property, where Parent was shot and the four people inside the house were shot or stabbed. A fourth member of the group, who stayed outside, later received immunity from prosecution and became the prosecution's principal witness. On the second night, Manson went with the group to the LaBianca house, and Watson, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten killed the couple.
Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten were tried together in a trial that began on June 15, 1970. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi argued that Manson had intended to provoke a race war; Manson denied ordering any killings. On January 25, 1971, the jury found the four defendants guilty on all 27 counts against them, and on March 29, 1971, it returned death verdicts. Watson was tried separately and convicted on October 12, 1971, of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy. The death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court's 1972 decision in People v. Anderson invalidated the state's death penalty statute.
Van Houten's first conviction was overturned on appeal in 1976; after a second trial ended in a mistrial, she was convicted again in 1978 of two counts of murder and one of conspiracy. She was released on parole on July 11, 2023, after an appeals court set aside the governor's reversal of her parole grant. Atkins died in prison of brain cancer in September 2009, and Manson died in custody at a Kern County hospital on November 19, 2017, at 83. Krenwinkel remains in prison: a parole panel recommended her release in May 2025, and Governor Gavin Newsom reversed that recommendation in October 2025, as he had in 2022. Watson also remains in prison and has been denied parole repeatedly.
The killings drew lasting public attention. Bugliosi later co-wrote the book Helter Skelter (1974) about the prosecution, and the case has been the subject of many films, documentaries and books.
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