The first and only time Debra Tate encountered Charles Manson face to face, she was 17 years old. It was December 1969. Days earlier, the now-famous mugshot of Manson – glaring black eyes set in a face framed by wild woolly hair – had ricocheted around the world, identifying him as the leader of a quasi-religious hippie cult that four months earlier had savagely murdered Debra’s elder sister, the actress Sharon Tate. She was eight and a half months pregnant with her first child by her husband, Roman Polanski, the film director.
Sharon, her unborn son, posthumously named Paul Richard Polanski, and four others – her former boyfriend, the celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her Polish partner, Voytek Frykowski; and 18-year-old Steven Parent, who happened to be visiting the home’s caretaker – were all slaughtered at her rented property on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles in the early hours of August 9.
The five victims killed at Cielo Drive on August 9 1969, from left: Voytek Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring and Abigail Folger Credit: AP
When the police discovered the scene the next morning, it was said to resemble “some weird religious rite”. A blood ritual to end the Sixties. The mutilated bodies of Folger and Frykowski were found strewn across the lawn in front of the French-style farmhouse, high up on a hill in Benedict Canyon, with its picture-postcard views of LA below. Inside, heavily pregnant Sharon and Sebring lay brutalised in pools of their own blood, connected by nooses looped around their necks. The word “pig” had been written on the front door of the house in Sharon’s blood.
The following night, supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were killed in startlingly similar circumstances in their home in the nearby neighbourhood of Los Feliz. The Tate-LaBianca murders, as they became known, remain one of the most 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔, sadistic and notorious killing sprees in history. The murders, ordered by Manson (who died, aged 83, in 2017), an itinerant lifelong criminal, were carried out by members of the “Family”. He had gathered around him young, directionless, middle-class, ne’er-do-well dropouts turned psycho-killer hippies, who intended to initiate an apocalyptic race war they called “Helter Skelter”.
None of this was yet known though, in December 1969, when Debra Tate, supremely confident and resourceful for her age, managed to gain entry, on her own initiative, to the Men’s Central Jail in LA, where Manson was being held pending trial. “All I wanted was to look in his eyes,” she says now, “because I felt I would get a true sense of who he was.” She wanted to see for herself whether this was the man the media said had her sister killed.
‘All I wanted was to look into his eyes,’ says Tate of Charles Manson, the man behind her sister’s murder Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty
They sat directly opposite each other at a small table in an annexe of the prison, armed guards watching them. He, a small, wiry, wizened felon dressed in prison blues, chained and shackled; she, a pretty, freckle-faced, red-headed teenager, preternaturally composed. Beauty facing the beast.
Neither said a word to each other. She looked into his eyes, searching for an answer; an experience she likens to looking into the eyes of a shark. “They were dark and they were still. And you could not see a freaking thing. Nothing in there. Deep black pools of nothingness,” Tate says. She was unnerved, she admits, but kept a poker face. After a time, she signalled to the guards to end the encounter. She knew.
Psychological toll
At 72, having lived her entire adult life in the shadow of this heinous crime, Tate is facing something far more unnerving today: the prospect that all the remaining Tate-LaBianca murderers will be freed in her lifetime, by a prison system that considers them “rehabilitated”, purely to fulfil a political agenda. “These people have all had the word ‘psychopath’ in their mental evaluations,” she says. “Every single one of them.” Rehabilitation is not in their nature, she says.
Earlier this year, two of the most notorious Manson killers, Patricia Krenwinkel and Bobby Beausoleil, were granted parole. Barring appeals, or an intervention by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, they may be out of prison by the end of the year. In August, a third Manson killer, Leslie Van Houten, was released from supervised parole, after being freed from prison in 2023, aged 73. Other than them, only two others, Bruce Davis and Tex Watson, remain incarcerated. Susan Atkins died in 2009, aged 61, at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.
Manson Family members, from left, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten at their murder trial in August 1970 Credit: George Brich/AP
What makes this all the more poignant is that Tate is the last surviving member of her family; the only person, other than Polanski (with whom she remains in contact), to have first-hand experience of the event. She faces watching all the decades of work by her family to keep them inside being undone.
For 28 years, Tate has attended parole hearings for the Manson killers, often several times a year, delivering victim impact statements off the cuff, and succinctly decimating arguments for release through an extraordinary recall of 50 years of facts in the case. The constant re-treading of the case takes a huge psychological toll on her, and she has had to live her entire life looking over her shoulder. The death threats from fans and followers of the Manson Family never stop coming, through her phone and social media. Sometimes people even turn up at her door.
Several years ago, during an auction of some of Sharon’s belongings held by LA auction house Julien’s Auctions, Tate was approached by a father and son, a retired LAPD police officer and an active probation officer. “They asked me if I had a licence to carry [a firearm], and when I said no, they suggested I get one,” she recalls. “I told them the same thing I tell everybody else: ‘I don’t like handguns; I like shotguns.’”
As the daughter of a military intelligence officer – Lt Col Paul Tate, who served with the 6th Army and was a veteran of both the Second World War and the Korean War – she understands the value of security and preparedness against an ever-evolving active threat. “I was raised by a spook,” she avers, “and I’m nobody’s fool.”
A case like no other
Tom O’Neill, an author who spent more than two decades researching and writing Chaos, a bestselling history of the Tate-LaBianca murders, first made contact with Tate in the early 2000s. “It wasn’t easy,” says O’Neill. “She was off the grid.” Tate was living on a ranch in southern California at the time, rescuing and rearing birds of prey, wolves and other endangered species – just one of the many vocations she has had, with others including model, casting agent and movie make-up artist. O’Neill went to meet her there. “I just remember being floored by how candid and no-holds-barred she was,” he says. “She opens her veins and tells you the truth as she sees it.”
Debra Tate in summer 1969, photographed at Cielo Drive wearing a dress that belonged to Sharon Credit: Shahrokh Hatami, by permission of the estate of Shahrokh Hatami
Tate is a beguiling mix of vulnerability and toughness. “My father called me the warrior daughter,” she says. “I call myself the son my father never had.” Hers is a personality shaped and defined by trauma. Savvy, sharp, witty and streetwise, she has extraordinary reserves of strength and resilience. Her memory is remarkable. Her sense of outrage at the treatment of victims is infectious.
This is a case like no other, predicated on the radical social and cultural changes of the 1960s, fuelled by fame and celebrity. The murdered and murderers morbidly entwined in a phenomenon that has spawned an industry. Books, films and commentary churned out year on year re-traumatise the victims over and over again, treating them as little more than collateral damage and an inconvenient truth. Tate plans to explore this and more in a memoir she has been working on, telling her family’s story for the first time.
While the cruel irony is that it took Sharon Tate’s murder to make her a household name, she was already well on her way; as a fashion star, a muse and an actress of considerable talent and versatility.
Sharon Tate, circa 1965 Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty/Moviepix
Her January 1968 marriage, in London, to Rosemary’s Baby director Polanski, then a hot talent in Hollywood, was a modern media spectacle. Writing about David Bailey’s fabled photo of the couple – both topless, Sharon’s arms draped around her husband – British author Peter Evans described them as the “Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford of our time… Cool, nomadic, talented and nicely 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔.” They were the “It couple” of their day. Debra has fond memories of Sharon and Polanski together, in what now seems like a strange brief idyll, the calm before the storm.
In 1966, the Tate family was living in a large Victorian house at Fort Baker, a military base in Sausalito, over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Sharon brought Polanski there to meet her family for the first time. “Roman was going to ask Dad for Sharon’s hand,” says Tate. “I was the first person in the family Sharon told they were getting married.”
Sharon married Polish film director Roman Polanski in London in 1968 Credit: Evening Standard/Getty/Hulton Archive
She met them at the Sausalito Hotel and took them out to the base. Sharon, in the first flush of her success, had bought her younger sister a horse, an Arabian that Debra named Shalazar and rode bareback in the hills around Fort Baker.
“We were army brats,” Tate says of a childhood that now seems like preparation for the immense upheaval to follow. In the late 1950s, when her father was posted to Europe, the family lived in Verona, Italy, for several years. “When you’re moving every three years, the only thing that you have is each other, and my sister and I were thick as thieves.” Even as a teenager, Sharon’s beauty was a magnet for male attention. Her soldier father, fiercely protective of his daughter’s honour, insisted on vetting all potential suitors. “I was her beard,” says Tate. “When she would want to talk or meet somebody, she would say she was taking Debbie to the park.”
In 1961, after graduating high school, Sharon bucked against these strictures and returned to the US on her own, to pursue an acting career. “She emancipated herself,” says Tate. “She was more adventurous than people realise.”
Sharon visiting Polanski on the set of his film Rosemary’s Baby in 1967 Credit: Santi Visalli/Getty
Sharon also saw untapped potential in her sister, 10 years her junior. “Sharon believed I was the smartest and most talented person in the family. When she died, that died with her.”
Did Tate have ambitions for herself before the murders? “I was going to be an artist, or a dancer. Or a dancing artist,” she laughs. “I was already competing as a very accomplished equestrian, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills.” She also had a keen talent for arts and crafts. She drew and sculpted. “I was also a fantastic freaking goldsmith,” she exclaims.
After the murders, she says, “I was put on the back burner, and I still haven’t got off the back burner”. Just as Sharon had played a nurturing role in her life, Tate became a mother to their younger sister, Patti, after Sharon was murdered. Their mother, Doris, was shaken to the core by the manner of her daughter’s death, akin to a public execution. “My purpose became trying to hold the family together,” says Tate, “because Mother would drop in and out of being capable and productive on God knows what trigger. She would completely fall apart and would stay apart for quite some time. She would take to her bed, there would be crying spells. Valium was a staple, and sometimes the doctors would have to come and give her shots.”
In 1982, Doris Tate received a call that would change everything from Los Angeles prosecutor Stephen Kay, who had helped secure convictions for all the Manson killers. “I was the first prosecutor in California ever to attend a parole hearing, and that was Patricia Krenwinkel’s hearing in July 1978. Krenwinkel was so upset to see me she said, ‘What the f— are you doing here?’”, says Kay, apologising for using language unbefitting a prosecutor. He told her: “I’m here to make sure that you don’t get out.” And he did.
This call, though, was about Leslie Van Houten, thought to be the canniest and the most manipulative of the Manson murderers, who had been the subject of a 1980 Los Angeles Times profile with the headline, “She believes she is rehabilitated”, and before that had even managed to attend the 1978 Academy Awards while out on bond awaiting trial. In 1982, having been convicted for the second time in her third trial, Van Houten was coming up for parole again, and had secured 600 signatures in favour of her release, from a group called “Friends of Leslie”.
Tate happened to be at her mother’s house when the call came through. Kay asked Doris if she could get more signatures to oppose Van Houten’s parole. “Mom said, ‘You bet,’” recalls Tate. “That’s the first time I saw the light come back in her eyes. She had a purpose.”
In no time, they collected 10,000 signatures. “I would stand outside restaurants by day, hot spots at night, anywhere there were people in an age group that would have voting rights,” says Tate. “Mom would do grocery stores and spread the word through her friends.” Then the National Enquirer took an interest. Doris convinced the publication to run a coupon to send in and support their cause. The number ballooned to 300,000 signatures. The campaign was a roaring success. Van Houten was denied parole and remained incarcerated until 2023.
Leslie Van Houten (pictured at a 2017 parole hearing) was released in 2023 at the age of 73 Credit: Stan Lim/Los Angeles Daily News via AP
Doris joined a local chapter of a nationwide pressure group called “Parents of Murdered Children” and began campaigning for a Victims’ Bill of Rights in the California constitution, which was enshrined in law in 1982. Activism gave her a new lease on life. Tate played a backstage role to prepare her. “I taught Mother how to have confidence in herself to speak, and to do the talk show appearances.” She did her hair and dressed her. “It was very difficult to dress my mom. She was a polyester queen.”
Doris would go on to establish the right for victims to deliver victim impact statements at trial and in parole hearings. Victims’ rights spread nationally. “Mother was even invited to Europe to speak,” says Tate. In 1992, wheelchair-bound, and dying from a rare brain cancer that robbed her of the ability to speak (“She and I would communicate through charades,” says Tate), Doris was honoured by then-president George HW Bush for her work.
The ‘California Model’
“They say, where California goes, so does the rest of the country,” Tate says, of her mother’s extraordinary achievements. However, in recent times, California has been travelling in the opposite direction entirely, trampling on victims’ rights to move even the most violent felons out of prison and back into the community.
In 2005, the California Department of Corrections added two words to its name – “and Rehabilitation” – signalling a radical change in its operation. The last two governors of California, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, have been championing something called the “California Model”, a one-size-fits-all programme for progressive prison reform to turn prisons into “campuses” aimed at reorientating inmates for re-entry into society. Parole hearings have become bureaucratic affairs, Tate says, concerned only with ticking enough boxes to justify granting parole to inmates, no matter how heinous the crime.
What this model is, in reality, is an economic plan to slash the state’s massive annual bill for housing its 90,000-plus prisoners, especially the $4bn (£3bn) it spends on healthcare for its ageing inmate population. The Manson killers, all now in their 70s or 80s, and a drain on the system, are the programme’s prime targets. Under the California Model, the “rehabilitation” and release of America’s most notorious murderers, and longest-serving inmates, would be “proof” the system works. In the UK, the idea that notorious murderers such as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nilsen or Fred and Rose West could have one day been deemed “rehabilitated” in their old age and fit for release is unthinkable. In the US, politics has made it a possibility.
A fact often forgotten is that all the Tate-LaBianca murderers, and Manson himself, were originally sentenced to death. If the prescribed justice had been served, they would all be long gone. Again, politics intervened. In February 1972, the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, citing it as a “cruel or unusual punishment”. Then-governor Ronald Reagan reintroduced it via a public referendum, overwhelmingly approved later that year, but not before the Manson killers’ death sentences were commuted to indeterminate ones, of several years to life, making them automatically eligible for parole and release. The victims’ families were given a life sentence alongside them.
All this raises the question: if the odds weren’t so heavily stacked in their favour, would any of the Manson killers be deemed suitable for release? Unlikely, says Tate.
Bobby Beausoleil, now 77, was granted parole this year despite flagrantly breaking prison regulations for decades, by running a business inside prison that has netted him tens of thousands of dollars. In the 1980s, he and his late wife published fanzines of Beausoleil’s illustrations of naked children being violently spanked, under the title Sassy Bottoms. A 1986 prison investigation discovered Beausoleil was also covertly making illustrated child pornography to order for active US-based paedophiles, who wrote to him with specific requests for age, 𝒔𝒆𝒙 and race.
Bobby Beausoleil following his arrest in 1969 Credit: Michael Ochs Archives
Beausoleil claimed in a 2005 parole hearing that his drawings were “like cartoons that you used to find in the Sunday comics”. Not so innocent that they didn’t inspire the formation of a child pornography ring, nicknamed “the Spanking Club”, who abused children as young as four and were busted by the FBI in 2002. Its members, who received sentences of up to 10 years, all met and corresponded through ads placed in one of Beausoleil’s fanzines, Domestic Discipline Digest. Just last year, Beausoleil was found to be sending sexualised images of naked cherubs, and one of his own sadomasochistic spanking drawings, using a messaging app on a prison-issued tablet, to a female employee. He pays the same woman to manage his business activities, which has included licensing music to an official Lady Gaga documentary on Netflix (netting him thousands of dollars), and a docuseries about the Manson Murders on Paramount+. In Beausoleil’s February 2025 parole hearing, Tate pointedly described him as the “Norman Rockwell of kiddie 𝒑𝒐𝒓𝒏”.
Similarly, headlines this June about Krenwinkel, now 77, being granted parole failed to tell the full story of how that had occurred. Krenwinkel’s May 30 parole hearing had barely begun when her lawyer raised a point of order to prevent his client from answering any of the parole board’s interview questions to determine her suitability for release. The law allows inmates to refuse to discuss the facts of their crime but not to remain entirely silent. He bet that without evidence to the contrary, the board would probably rubber-stamp her parole. And it did. But not without pushback from Tate.
Patricia Krenwinkel, pictured during an earlier parole hearing in 2011 Credit: Reed Saxon/AP
In the weeks after Krenwinkel was awarded parole, puff pieces appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, quoting her attorney, and former inmates and cellmates, swearing blind that “Pat has changed”. But has Krenwinkel really changed? Tate says not. Within the past decade, Tate says, she was approached through a mutual acquaintance by a former inmate of the California Institution for Women in Chino, who had shared a cell with Krenwinkel, and was subjected to a gleeful recounting of a gruesome anecdote from the Cielo Drive murders that spooked her so much she asked to be transferred to another cell.
“After Sharon’s death,” says Tate, “[Krenwinkel and Atkins] apparently marvelled and laughed over the moving foetus in Sharon’s stomach, as it struggled and went through distress as it was dying from being cut off from oxygen. So the baby lived longer than Sharon. Krenwinkel has never acknowledged in parole hearings that Sharon’s baby was murdered.”
Even Van Houten, in a 2016 parole hearing, said of Krenwinkel: “I’m not comfortable with her”. Indeed, despite her age, Krenwinkel’s most recent prison psychological report included a chilling caveat: “She does not present with substantial medical or cognitive limitations that preclude her risk for recidivism in the community, particularly with the use of a weapon.”
‘The only thing I have to offer is hope’
Tate is extremely fearful over the release of Krenwinkel, one of the most brutal Manson killers – or any of the others, for that matter: “They have a very structured lifestyle and are policed by guards with guns.” Take that away, she says, and the pressures and stresses of “normal” life multiply exponentially. “When the restraints of that controlled environment are removed, they revert to their original nature.” There were 30 or more members of the Manson Family at one time; only these ones, she points out, had the psychological profile of killers. “There were many others who were not willing to go out and perform these atrocities.”
She also fears that the authorities are assuming that having released one of the Tate-LaBianca murderers (Van Houten) without significant blowback, they can now release them all with impunity.
The question is not can they be released but should they be released.
Tate is clear about her role. “I feel God has given me a gift, that I was lucky to be able to survive it and to analyse it, when there was no psychological help,” she says. “I figured it out on my own, and the only thing I really have to offer is that I give people the hope of being able to survive the atrocity. They look at me and they say, ‘If she’s done it, maybe I can do it.’”
The battle to keep her sister’s killers behind bars continues inexorably. And Tate is determined to pursue it to the end.
