The Murders at 10050 Cielo Drive

Before dawn on August 9, 1969, five people were murdered at a house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. One was Sharon Tate, an actress who was pregnant. Another was eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, who had come to visit the property’s caretaker. The other three were Tate’s friends: hairstylist Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski. None of them had gone there to meet Charles Manson. To understand why his followers came to the house, we have to start somewhere else entirely: an old movie ranch outside Los Angeles.

Manson had spent much of his life in institutions and prisons. Released in 1967, he went to San Francisco, where a group of followers began to gather around him. They eventually settled at Spahn Ranch in Southern California. What they called a family had a leader who directed its members’ lives. Former followers later described his control, and prosecutors would present his talk of an approaching race war as central to their account of the murders. Manson was also an aspiring musician. He had met record producer Terry Melcher, who had lived at 10050 Cielo Drive. Melcher moved away. The house was rented by film director Roman Polanski, who was working in Europe that summer, and his wife, Sharon Tate. Investigators were uncertain whether Manson knew Melcher had moved. The address, however, had a connection to the producer who had rejected him. That connection does not, by itself, prove why Manson selected the house; prosecutors also argued that he wanted the killings to ignite the racial conflict he had been predicting.

On the afternoon of August 8, Manson called followers together. According to the trial account, he announced that the time had come for what he called ‘Helter Skelter.’ That evening, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian were told to prepare to leave. Manson spoke separately with Charles ‘Tex’ Watson. The four got into a car. As they pulled away from Spahn Ranch, Manson instructed them to leave a sign. At Cielo Drive that night were Tate, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski. Tate’s husband was overseas. Parent had been visiting the caretaker. The four people sent from the ranch arrived shortly after midnight, as August 8 became August 9.

Watson cut the telephone wires leading to the property. The four climbed over a fence and made their way toward the house. Then a car came down the driveway. Parent was behind the wheel. Watson shot him. Kasabian remained outside while Watson, Atkins and Krenwinkel went into the house. Inside, they attacked the four people there. Folger and Frykowski ended up outside on the lawn; Sebring and Tate were found inside. The trial account describes Tate as the last of the four to die and says Watson stabbed her while Atkins held her down. It also attributes the word ‘PIG,’ written in blood near the entrance, to Atkins. We know these events largely through evidence and testimony assembled afterward, not through an uninterrupted eyewitness record of every movement inside the house. There is no need to invent one. Five people were murdered at Cielo Drive: Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Sharon Tate, who was pregnant.

A maid arriving in the morning discovered the scene and raised the alarm. Investigators found Parent in his car, Folger and Frykowski on the lawn, and Sebring and Tate inside. For the people looking at that scene, the question was not yet which member of a group had done what. It was who could have committed the murders at all. The danger did not end at Cielo Drive. The following night, Manson accompanied followers to another house in Los Angeles, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered. The two scenes had disturbing similarities, including words left in blood, but police did not initially investigate them as connected crimes. That delay matters: the people responsible for the Cielo Drive murders were not identified at the house, and the second attack happened before investigators had a clear answer about the first.

The breakthrough did not come from a dramatic confrontation at the crime scene. In September, a child found a revolver that police collected without then connecting it to the Tate investigation. Separately, arrests involving Manson’s group arose from suspected property crimes. Manson and other followers were not immediately held as suspects in the murders. In October, officers raided the group’s remote Barker Ranch hideaway. Susan Atkins was jailed. On November 6, according to the trial account, she told fellow inmate Virginia Graham about the killings. Word of that conversation reached Los Angeles police through another inmate, Ronnie Howard. Detectives investigating the LaBianca murders also interviewed people who described Manson or his followers talking about killing five people. Those accounts helped turn a name from a jailhouse story into a focus of investigation. By early December, Manson and several followers had been arrested in connection with the murders.

Atkins described the Cielo Drive killings to a grand jury. When she did not become the prosecution’s witness at trial, Linda Kasabian did. Kasabian had gone to Cielo Drive but had remained outside the house; she received immunity in exchange for her testimony. Prosecutors used her account alongside other witnesses to argue that Manson had directed the killings, even though he had not personally killed the people at Cielo Drive. Manson disputed the case against him. His lawyer argued that the prosecution’s account of his motive was fanciful and pointed instead to Watson as the driving force. The jury rejected that defense. In January 1971, Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten were found guilty in the Tate–LaBianca case. Van Houten’s convictions concerned the LaBianca murders, not the attack inside Tate’s house. Watson, tried separately, was also convicted that year. The death sentences imposed on the five defendants became life sentences after California’s death-penalty law was struck down in 1972.

Manson and Atkins died in prison. The legal aftermath has continued for other people convicted in the case. In October 2026, a parole panel again recommended Patricia Krenwinkel for release, according to a report citing California corrections officials. That was a preliminary decision, not a release: California’s parole process includes further review, and the governor had reversed earlier recommendations for her. More than half a century after the murders, the investigation has an answer to who sent the attackers and who carried out the killings. It cannot make that night less devastating. The address is remembered because of Manson, but five people lost their lives there: Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Sharon Tate. Their names are where this story should end.