McGann flew to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, to check out the alibis of Wilson and Jones. The pair claimed they had been there from July 8 until August 17, “making a movie about marijuana.”
Interviews with realtors, servants, and airline ticket agencies supported half their story: they had been in Jamaica at the time of the murders. And it was quite possible they did have something to do with marijuana. Their only regular visitor, excluding female friends, was a pilot who, a few weeks before, had without explanation quit his well-paying job with a leading airline to make unscheduled solo runs between Jamaica and the United States.
As for their moviemaking, however, the detectives evinced some skepticism, the maid having told them the only camera she ever saw in the house was a small Kodak.
The videotape Pickett gave Deemer was viewed in the SID lab. It was decidedly different from the one previously found in the loft.
Apparently filmed during the period the Polanskis were away, it showed Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Witold K, and an unidentified young lady having dinner in front of the fireplace of the Tate residence. The video machine was simply turned on and left to run, those present after a time seeming to forget it.
Abigail wore her hair tied back in a rather severe chignon effect. She looked both older and more tired than in her other photos; Voytek looked dissipated. Though what appeared to be marijuana was smoked, Voytek seemed more drunk than high. At first Abigail treated him with the exasperated affection one would accord a spoiled child.
But then the mood gradually changed. In an obvious attempt to exclude Abigail, Voytek began speaking Polish. Abigail, in turn, was playing the grand dame, responding to his crude jests with witty repartee. Voytek began calling her “Lady Folger,” then, as he became drunker, “Lady F.” Abigail talked about him in the third person, as if he wasn’t present, commenting upon, with some disgust, his habit of coming down off his drug trips by getting drunk.
To those viewing the tape it must have seemed nothing more than an overly long, exceedingly boring chronicle of a domestic argument. Except for two incidents, which, considering what would happen to two of those present, in this very house, gave it an eeriness as chilling as anything in
As she was serving the dinner, Abigail recalled a time when Voytek, stoned on drugs, looked into the fireplace and saw a strange shape. He had rushed for a camera, hoping to capture the image, a blazing pig’s head.
The second incident was, in its own way, even more disturbing. The microphone had been left on the table, next to the roast. As the meat was being carved, it picked up, amazingly loud, over and over and over again, the sound of the knife grating on the bone.
Hurkos was not the only “expert” to volunteer a solution to the Tate homicides. On August 27, Truman Capote appeared on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” to discuss the crime.
One person, acting alone, had committed the murders, the author of
The killer, a man, had been in the house earlier. Something had happened “to trigger a kind of instant paranoia.” The man then left the premises, went home to get a knife and a gun, and returned to systematically assassinate everyone in the place. According to Capote’s deductions, Steven Parent was the last to die.
From the knowledge accumulated in over a hundred interviews with convicted murderers, Capote revealed that the killer was “a very young, enraged paranoid.” While committing the murders, he probably experienced a sexual release, then, exhausted, went home and slept for two days.
Although Capote had taken up the single-suspect theory, the Tate detectives had by now abandoned it. Their sole reason for adopting it in the first place—Garretson—was no longer a factor. Because of the number of victims, the location of their bodies, and the use of two or more weapons, they were now convinced that “at least two suspects” were involved.
Killers. Plural. But as to their identity, they had not the slightest idea.
At the end of August there was a summing up, for both the Tate and the LaBianca detectives.
The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—Tate” ran to thirty-three pages. Nowhere in it was there any mention of the LaBianca murders.
The “First Homicide Investigation Progress Report—LaBianca” was seventeen pages long. Despite the many similarities between the two crimes, it contained not one reference to the Tate homicides.
They remained two totally separate investigations.
Although Lieutenant Bob Helder had over a dozen detectives working full time on the Tate case, Sergeants Michael McGann, Robert Calkins, and Jess Buckles were the principal investigators. All were long-time veterans on the force, having worked their way up to the status of detective the hard way, from the ranks. They could remember when there was no Police Academy, and seniority was more important than education and merit examinations. They were experienced, and inclined to be set in their ways.
The LaBianca team, under Lieutenant Paul LePage, consisted, at various times, of from six to ten detectives, with Sergeants Frank Patchett, Manuel Gutierrez, Michael Nielsen, Philip Sartuchi, and Gary Broda the principal investigators. The LaBianca detectives were generally younger, better educated, and far less experienced. Graduates of the Police Academy for the most part, they were more inclined to the use of modern investigative techniques. For example, they obtained the fingerprints of almost everyone they interviewed; gave more polygraph examinations; made more
They were also more inclined to consider “far out” theories. For example, while the Tate report didn’t attempt to explain that bloody word on the front door, the LaBianca report speculated as to the meaning of the writings found inside the residence on Waverly Drive. It even suggested a connection so remote it couldn’t even be called a wild guess. The report noted: “Investigation revealed that the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album, No. SWBO 101, has songs titled ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ and ‘Blackbird.’ The words in the song ‘Blackbird’ frequently say ‘Arise, arise,’ which might be the meaning of ‘Rise’ near the front door.”
The idea was just sort of tossed in, by whom no one would later remember, and just as promptly forgotten.
The two sets of detectives had one thing in common, however. Though to date the LaBianca team had interviewed some 150 persons, the Tate investigators more than twice that, neither was much closer to “solving” the case than when the bodies were first discovered.
The Tate report listed five suspects—Garretson, Wilson, Madigan, Pickett, and Jones—all of whom had by this time been eliminated.
The LaBianca report listed fifteen—but included Frank and Suzanne Struthers, Joe Dorgan, and numerous others who were never serious suspects. Of the fifteen, only Gardner remained a good possible, and, though lacking a palm print for positive elimination (one had been found on a bank deposit slip on Leno’s desk), his fingerprints had already been checked against those found in the residence with no match.
The progress reports were strictly intradepartmental; the press would never see them.
But already a few reporters were beginning to suspect that the real reason for the official silence was that there was nothing to report.
SEPTEMBER 1969
About noon on Monday, September 1, 1969, ten-year-old Steven Weiss was fixing the sprinkler on the hill behind his home when he found a gun.
