Even if you don’t know much about vintage Hollywood, you probably know the name Sharon Tate. The up-and-coming actress and wife of director Roman Polanski was just 26, and eight and a half months pregnant, on August 8, 1969, when four people broke into her home at 10500 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills — a house their cult leader, Charles Manson, had previously visited as a guest — and killed everyone inside. The next night, desperate to make the first round of deaths look like part of a race war, Manson ordered his followers to a different address in Central Los Angeles, this one owned by middle-class couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, to kill again.
The Tate-LaBianca murders, a.k.a. the Manson Family murders, profoundly shook America’s perception of itself. They upended ideas of safety, security, and innocence, and effectively sounded the death knell of ’60s counterculture, ushering in a new decade of darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America’s seedy underbelly. The ritualistic nature of the killings set the stage for the rise of Satanic Panic, a phenomenon that never fully went away.
