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Transcript
- Imagine the sound of a knife sliding through the dark, and then silence so heavy it feels like it has weight. This is not a story about monsters; it is a story about five lives that were extinguished in a single night. Let’s remember her name. Sharon Tate. She was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when she walked into a nightmare from which there was no waking up. I want you to picture her not as a victim in a case file, but as a woman who loved life, who was building a future, who was surrounded by friends on a warm August night in 1969. That night, Los Angeles felt invincible. It was the summer of love, or so we tell ourselves, but beneath the surface, something rotting had taken root. On August 8th, four members of the Manson Family—Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian—drove from Spahn Ranch to Benedict Canyon. They weren’t looking for justice. They weren’t looking for truth. They were following orders. They arrived just past midnight at 10050 Cielo Drive. This was the home Sharon shared with her husband, Roman Polanski, who was away in Europe working on a film. The house was quiet. The occupants inside included Sharon, her friend Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairdresser; Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter; his girlfriend Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune; and Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old caretaker visiting in his car. When headlights approached the intruders hiding in the bushes, Tex Watson stepped out. He leveled a .22 caliber revolver at young Steven Parent. Steven begged him not to hurt him, promising he wouldn’t say anything. But violence does not listen to pleas. Watson lunged with a knife, slashing Steven’s hand, severing tendons, tearing off his watch, before shooting him four times in the chest and abdomen. He killed the boy in the front seat of his white 1965 AMC Rambler. The silence here is loud. Can you hear it? Watson cut the phone line to the house, isolating them completely. He climbed a telephone pole near the main gate, snipping the wires so no help could come. Then, he cut the screen of a window and entered, letting Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door. He whispered to Atkins and woke Wojciech Frykowski, who was sleeping on the living room couch. Watson kicked Frykowski in the head. In his dazed state, Frykowski asked who he was and what he was doing there. Watson replied, 'I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business.' Those words hang in the air even now. Atkins and Krenwinkel found the other occupants and forced them into the living room. The fear must have been absolute. They were tied together by their necks with a long nylon rope slung over a ceiling beam. It was designed to break, to kill them slowly. heading": "The Violence Unleashed