In 1969, Sharon Tate was on the rise, having won a Golden Globe the year before and expecting her first child with husband Roman Polanski. However, her most notable legacy is as the highest-profile victim of one of the most heinous murder sprees in history.

On August 9, 1969, a brutal murder took place in the Los Angeles home of the stunning blond starlet, whose most famous role was Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls, along with her hairstylist and ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, Folger’s Coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. Police later linked the killings to Charles Manson followers, who used the victims’ blood to paint inscriptions on the home’s walls.

Manson and his “family” of followers were eventually convicted of nine murders, and Manson himself served nine life terms in jail before dying at the age of 83 in 2017. Debra, Tate’s sister, thinks there might be undiscovered victims of Manson’s cult.

“There was nobody else at that time—other than the Zodiac Killer—who was prevalent at wielding a knife like these people,” Debra told the magazine folks in 2019. “We are just scraping the surface.”

Discover who Sharon Tate was, how she died, and what legacy she left following her tragic death.

Tate was born on January 24, 1943, in Dallas. Her father, Paul James Tate, was an Army officer, and she, her mother Doris, and her younger sisters Debra and Patti relocated frequently due to Paul’s military duties.

Tate participated in pageants frequently when she was younger, winning Miss Richland in Washington at the age of 16. She also dabbled in modeling, appearing on the main page of Stars and Stripes, the US military publication.

As a teenager, Tate became an actor while living in Italy with her family, appearing as an extra in various films. She relocated to Los Angeles when she was 19 and signed a seven-year contract with film and television producer Martin Ransohoff. She starred in minor and guest appearances on television series such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Mister Ed before landing her first main role in the 1966 horror film Eye of the Devil.

Ransonhoff introduced Tate to Polanski, who later cast her in his horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers, in which Polanski also appears as her love interest. They began dating, and she moved in with Polanski at his London house when the filming was over.

Tate’s Star Vehicles In 1967, Tate released The Fearless Vampire Killers, the beach romantic comedy Don’t Make Waves, and the cult classic Valley of the Dolls. However, the following year held even greater significance for her: she married Polanski in London on January 20, 1968, and received a Golden Globe nomination for new star of the year. Tate became pregnant with her and Polanski’s first child in late 1968, and the couple relocated to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, in February.

On August 9, 1969, just after midnight, Charles D. “Tex” Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins entered Tate and Polanski’s Beverly Hills home, leaving fellow Manson cult member Linda Kasabian in the car. According to Atkins’ court evidence, they forced Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski into the house’s living room, where Watson shot Sebring and tied Sebring and Tate’s necks together with a rope, as reported by The New York Times.

“They kept saying, ‘Please don’t hurt us, and we won’t tell the police,'” Atkins recalled on the stand. “Frykowski kept pulling at my hair, and I was fighting for my life. I was swinging my knife, and I felt it sink into something, and I didn’t know what it was.”

Atkins then repeatedly stabbed Tate. Before departing, Atkins used Tate’s blood to write “PIG” on the white front door.

Assassins caught Frykowski and Folger as they fled out the front door and stabbed them to death, leaving their bodies on the lawn. Watson also fatally shot Parent, an 18-year-old driving away after a visit with the home’s caretaker, Willie Garretson, at the front gate.

Atkins claimed she couldn’t recall the number of stabs she inflicted on Tate, but coroner Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi recorded in court that Tate sustained 16 stab wounds, including eight in her back, two in her upper right arm, and one in her right thigh. The New York Times reported that she sustained two “superficial” wounds from slashes on her left forearm.

Dr. Noguchi stated that Tate was still alive when the Manson followers hanged her and Sebring from a beam in the living room, causing rope burns on her face and neck, and that she died soon after.

“It is quite consistent, in my opinion, that Miss Tate was hanging,” he told me. “My opinion was—and still is the same—that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds front and back penetrating the heart and lungs and causing massive hemorrhaging.”

On August 8, 1969, Tate went out to supper with pals Sebring, 35, Folger, 26, and Frykowski, 37, at El Coyote Cafe, his favorite Los Angeles eatery. On August 9, 1969, just after midnight, the party returned to Tate and Polanski’s house, where they met their demise.

Tate and Polanski’s house, 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon, where the couple’s friends Candice Bergen and Terry Melcher had previously resided, claimed the lives of Tate, Sebring, Frykowski, and Folger.

Tate was 26 at the time of her death.

Tate begged for her and her unborn boy’s lives, offering herself as a hostage to the group in exchange for allowing her to give birth and keep her child alive, according to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.

Atkins verified the horrible details in her testimony.

“She said, ‘Please don’t kill me,’ and I told her to shut up, and I threw her down on the couch,” Atkins stated during the trial. “She asked, ‘Please let me have my baby.'” Then Tex stepped in and shouted, ‘Kill her,’ and I did. I stabbed her, causing her to collapse, and then proceeded to stab her once more. I’m not sure how many times. I’m not sure why I stabbed her.”

According to Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, Manson ordered a series of killings around Los Angeles in an attempt to spark a race war in the United States, which he termed “Helter Skelter.”

In July 1969, Manson organized Gary Hinman’s killing. The evening following Tate’s murder, Manson’s “family” murdered grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their Los Feliz home. Prior to his arrest, the cult leader ordered the ninth killing of victim Donald Shea.

While shocked at Tate’s death, reports suggest that most people didn’t panic about violence until Manson followers Krenwinkel, Watson, and Leslie Van Houten murdered the LaBiancas, stoking fear in the general public.

“The rest of the country said, ‘Well, it’s a movie star.” You know how they live.” Alisa Statman, author of Restless Souls: The Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, told the Washington Post. “When the murders happened the next night, that’s when the fear swept across the United States.”

The Manson murders spawned at least one copycat slaying in February 1970, The New York Times reported. The slayings also stoked fear in celebrities and socialites, who began working more often with bodyguards and security details.

Photographer Julian Wasser, who took snapshots of the crime scene for Life magazine days after the slayings, later recalled to The Guardian that Tate’s murder was the end of an era in Hollywood.

“It wasn’t like it is now: there were no paparazzi, no VIP sections, no security. It was a really innocent time. You’d just walk up and there they were,” he said. “They’d stop, smile, and pose.” Now it’s a business. If you want exclusive access to a celebrity, you have to pay big money. You weren’t considered some sort of psychotic menace who’d rob or kill them either. They will now summon their security personnel, who will physically assault you.”

Tate’s legacy endures not only in her films, such as the critically panned Valley of the Dolls, which later became a cult classic, but also in films dedicated to her life and career. Kate Bosworth was slated to play the slain starlet in a film titled Tate, and Hilary Duff starred as Tate in The Haunting of Sharon Tate. The most famous and commercially successful portrayal of Tate onscreen came from Margot Robbie, who played the actress in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time. In Hollywood, a fictionalized take on the slayings had a much different ending than real life did.

In addition to her films and image, Tate contributed posthumously to victims’ rights: Her mother, Doris Tate, helped get the Victims’ Bill of Rights, which allowed victim impact statements to be permissible in court, passed in California in 1982. Doris later founded the Coalition on Victims’ Equal Rights.

Polanski remained in London at the time of Tate’s murder. His friend Andy Braunsberg was with him when he got the call about her death.

“He literally unraveled in front of my eyes,” Braunsberg later told author Ed Sanders in Sharon Tate: A Life. “He disintegrated.”

Days after the murder, Polanski and photographer Wasser returned to the Cielo Drive home, where Wasser took pictures of Polanski by the front door of the house that still had “PIG” smeared on it in his late wife’s blood. Wasser was on assignment for Life magazine, which ran gruesome photos of the crime scene, and told The Guardian that he also took Polaroids at Polanski’s request to give them to a psychic to find the killers.

Polanski stated in press notes for his 2019 film J’Accuse at the Venice Film Festival that he faced intense scrutiny following Tate’s murder until the discovery of the real killers.

“The way people see me, my ‘image,’ did indeed start to form with Sharon Tate’s death,” Polanski said. “When it happened, even though I was already going through a terrible time, the press got hold of the tragedy and, unsure how to deal with it, covered it in the most despicable way, implying, among other things, that I was one of the people responsible for her murder, against a background of satanism.” He added that the satanism allegations likely stemmed from his hit film Rosemary’s Baby.

In 1978, Polanski pleaded guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse after then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer accused him of plying her with alcohol and part of a quaalude before raping her. As part of his plea bargain, he served 42 days in jail but fled the United States for France before serving the remainder of his 90-day sentence. Efforts to extradite him back to the U.S. have failed, and he’s released several films from Europe, including 2003’s The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. Several other women have since come forward accusing Polanski of sexual assault and misconduct.

Because of his outstanding prison sentence, Polanski remains a fugitive and hasn’t been back to the United States since fleeing to Europe. As such, he hasn’t visited Tate’s grave in more than four decades.

“It is a very painful thing,” his attorney said in a statement after Manson’s death in November 2017. “This case has prevented Sharon and his son from visiting their graves at Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles.”

Rudolph Altobelli, the owner of Tate and Polanski’s rental home where the actress was murdered, sued Polanski and Life magazine for taking and publishing photos of the crime scene, which he alleged would harm the property value of the Cielo Drive house. In Restless Souls, Tate’s family also recalled that Altobelli sent them what they called an “enormous” repair bill after her murder, then sued Tate’s estate for $480,000 when her father replied to the bill with a caustic letter. Altobelli claimed that $300,000 of his request was for “embarrassment, humiliation, emotional, and mental distress,” Curbed reported. The case awarded him just $4,350.

Altobelli moved into the house three weeks after the slayings, he told 20/20, and lived there until September 1988, when he listed the property for just under $2 million. It eventually sold for under the asking price of $1.6 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 1991, a real estate investor resold it for $2.25 million, and in March 1992, they listed it once more for $4.95 million as-is.

Later that year, Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails, rented the home for $11,000 per month and constructed a home recording studio in the same living room where Tate and Sebring met their deaths. He recorded the band’s hit album Downward Spiral in the home, later telling Rolling Stone that a chance meeting with Tate’s sister Debra made him cry and rethink living on the property.

“I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister to a senseless, ignorant situation that I don’t want to support,” he explained. “When she was talking to me, I realized for the first time, ‘What if it was my sister?’ I thought, ‘F— Charlie Manson. I don’t want people to perceive me as a supporter of serial killers.”

According to Rolling Stone, Reznor moved out of the rental in December 1993, taking the front door with him and installing it in his New Orleans’ property, a former funeral home he converted into Nothing Studios. The outlet also revealed that Reznor demolished the home in 1994.