◆ SpookStack

Fidg350 (Rev. 7-16-63) - = You wouldn’t believe how weird these people were,” the detective said, not for the first time. We were talking about the most dreadful murder in Los An- geles memory, but the detective’s fas- cination for the lives the vietims had led kept intruding on his interest in the case. Our lunch grew cold as we talked, staring out the windows of the police cafeteria. The murder was still etehed across every conversation three months after the event. with the killers still at large to make nightmares for the city. Yet the police seemed to take a strangely philosophic tone. as though the feeling that the victims were not like the peo- ple next door had put a few nicks in their keen edge of indignation. The de- tective, in fact, could almost find a par- able for law and order in the killings: “If you live like that, what do youexpect?” Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Fol- ger, Voityck Frokowski—these were not people, these were weird people. They were weird because they used drugs and “messed around with sex,” weird in all the fashionable ways, weird as in the new movies. Their circle may have been friendly enough to protect them in their lifetimes, but now, in their posthumous notoriety, rumor had re- vealed them to all as connoisseurs of de- pravity, figures torn from a life that was pure De Sade, with Videotape machines in the bedrooms. = ~ ‘ @ (Mount Clipping in Space Below) =n respect for the dead, and for Ro- man Polanski, Sharon's husband, it should be said that the truth is disap- pointing—that their wild dope parties usually ran to endless evenings spent boring each other into such a reach of mindlessness that it would finally seem a brilliant idea to watch the test pat- tern on color TV. By the standards of modern Hollywood, they were only a step or two faster than the horde. pre- dictably loose. predictably stoned, too afflicted with money and success to be dedicated degenerates. let alone retro- spective heroes in the suicidal-romantic tradition. But the truth in such affairs is only so many entries in a detective’s note- book. What counts is the folklore. the expanded. popular version that every- one believes. The victims could have been any kind of moral vagabonds, but in fractured. menaced Holly wood, peo- ple can think of any number of good rea- sons for killing whatever they were. © 4 “Everyone sees the murders in hfs own light. Every story casts an interchange- able demon into the same blank seenar- io. Speed freaks or fags or Mafia con- tract men or black terrorists or witeh- craft nuts or vigilante rednecks enter the house, do the job. slip away. The same abject details are cited again and again. always proving something differ- ent, until one collects an impression of the vietims murdered again and again by relays of fresh marauders. ™ (Indicate page, name oft newspaper, city and state.) ___ LIFE (magazine) Page Date: 11/7/69 Edition: Author: BARRY FARRELL Editor: Title: Character: or Classification: 62 -6817 Submitting Office: Being investigated SERIALIZED _<*-~ FILED NOV 1 0 1969 FBI—LOS ANGELES