LOS ANGELES, Jul. 30 — It has been years since Doris Tate and Roman Polanski saw each other.

“For a while, I couldn’t bear to see him because in my state of denial I would always expect to see Sharon with him,” says Tate.

Twenty years after the nation’s most notorious mass murder, the mother and husband of slain actress Sharon Tate are the most visible survivors of the gruesome tragedy.

Tate, 64, who says her grief kept her immobilized for 10 years, has emerged as an articulate spokeswoman for victims’ rights and a source of comfort to the grieving.

“If they look at me and see that I have gone on for 20 years, then they feel there is hope,” she says. Her group, Parents of Murdered Children, has helped hundreds cope with a child’s loss.

Her husband, Paul, a retired Army colonel, has avoided the limelight.

Polanski, 55, a film director and actor, is a fugitive from justice, having fled to France in 1978 rather than appear for sentencing after he was convicted of having unlawful intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

Nine years earlier, on Aug. 9, 1969, his 26-year-old wife, 8 1/2 months pregnant, was found murdered along with three friends and a caretaker’s guest. The following night market owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were slain in another gruesome killing.

Charles Manson and a group of his young disciples were convicted of the murders.

Polanski was abroad when his wife and friend were slain. Devastated by the tragedy, he returned to the horror of suspicions surrounding him because he had directed “Rosemary’s Baby,” a film about devil worship.

The arrests of the Manson “Family” ended that part of his nightmare. He went on to direct the Academy Award-winning film “Chinatown” in 1974.

Living in Paris after the scandal surrounding his trial, he directed the stunningly beautiful “Tess,” which won critical acclaim.

But his fugitive status makes negotiations with Hollywood studios difficult. His two most recent films “Pirates” in 1985 and “Frantic” in 1987 – did not do well.

Polanski won plaudits in France for his interpretation of a man turned into an insect in the 1988 stage version of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” at a Paris theater.

He is occasionally seen at theater openings or taking refreshments in a cafe like the chic Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysees. Friends talk of negotiating his return to the United States. but so far it is only talk.

Tate’s odyssey from grieving mother to outspoken advocate is a lesson in survival. She credits her Roman Catholic faith with sustaining her and sees herself as “a soldier of the Lord.”

“Since the victims don’t have a voice, we that are left behind that represent our loved ones must be counted,” Tate says.

She recently formed an umbrella organization, Cover, to coordinate some 400 victims’ rights groups around California. She serves on a Department of Corrections advisory board and visits prisons to tell inmates serving time for lesser crimes the devastation suffered by survivors of the murdered.

“If I can change two of those people before they go on to murder, then I have saved two victims,” says Tate.

She also campaigns to keep the Tate-LaBianca murderers in prison. She attends parole hearings for Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles “Tex” Watson and for Leslie Van Houten, who was not involved in the Tate murder but admitted being at the LaBianca slayings.

When Van Houten’s friends gathered 900 signatures urging her release, Tate gathered 352,000 urging her continued imprisonment.

She is adamant that the killers of her daughter remain behind bars.

“When a person has murdered eight people – I always include the baby – then they’re untrustworthy to be released into society,” she says. “They have proven they cannot live in a normal society.”

Two decades later, she realized the murder case will be famous forever.

“It won’t go away and that’s the reason I feel I’ve got to do whatever I can do,” she says. “That it won’t go away is fine with me. It affords me an opportunity to do something in my daughter’s name. If there’s such a thing as destiny, then this is my plight.”

By LINDA DEUTSCH