Complications hamper probe in slaying of actress, 4 others
Friday, August 15th, 1969
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 15 – Police said yesterday their investigation into the “ritualistic” slaying of actress Sharon Tate and four others in her swanky Bel Air home is so complicated nearly everyone acquainted with the victims might have vital information.
“There are a lot of potential suspects,” police inspector Harold Yarnell said in an interview.
“Everybody could be a suspect.” He called the investigation “one of the most complicated in our police history.”
Yarnell refused to comment on published reports that narcotics were found at the death scene.
The bodies of Miss Tate, 26; hair stylist, Jay Sebring, 35; coffee heiress Abigail Folger, 26; screenwriter Voityck Frokowsky, 37, and Steven Parent, 18, a friend of a caretaker at Miss Tate’s rented $200,000 mansion, were found Saturday.
Sebring had a hood over his head and a rope tied loosely around his neck. It looped over a ceiling beam and around the actress. The word “PIG” was scrawled on the door in what police believed was the victims’ blood. They had been shot and stabbed. One officer called the deaths “ritualistic.”
Nineteen detectives are “ringing doorbells,” Yarnell said, in an effort to find the killer — or killers.
Four of the victims were buried Wednesday after separate funerals. Miss Tate’s services and the funeral for Sebring were attended by screen celebrities.
A requiem Mass was offered for Miss Folger in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Portola Valley. Parent, who police said apparently was not acquainted with the other four victims, was buried in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte.
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