Fifty-seven years ago today, Sharon Tate was buried.
That sentence seems almost startling because history has trained us to remember another date: August 9, 1969, the night Tate and four others were murdered in a Los Angeles house and became forever attached to the name Charles Manson.
Four days later, on August 13, Tate was laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City CA. She was 26 years old and more than eight months pregnant. Her unborn son was buried with her.
Maybe this is the anniversary we should remember.
I say that knowing I have contributed, in my own small way, to the enormous shelf of words devoted to the Manson crimes. My book Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Los Angeles contains a chapter about them. Any honest tour through the darker crime history of Los Angeles would have difficulty avoiding the case.
But there is a difference between remembering a crime and allowing a killer to own the memory of everyone he destroyed. For more than half a century, Manson has owned far too much of it. And Sharon Tate is, regrettably, the only major crime victim most ordinary people can name. Off the top of your head, can you name another?
Sharon Tate’s grave in Culver City CA
Manson’s face became an icon. His name became cultural shorthand. He was my generation’s all-purpose boogeyman. His ramblings were studied, quoted and endlessly dramatized. Movies, documentaries and books kept returning to him, as though there must have been some great dark mystery inside this grubby little career criminal that, if examined long enough, would explain evil itself.
Meanwhile, Sharon Tate and her friends became “Manson victims.” Think about what that construction does. It makes him the noun and them his possession. The same thing happens again and again in true crime. Murderers acquire mythology while their victims acquire labels. The killer becomes fascinating. The dead become evidence.
But on August 13, 1969, there was no mythology at Holy Cross Cemetery. There was just a family burying a daughter.
There were friends burying a young woman whose life had been violently interrupted. There was a child who would never be born. There were people standing beneath the California sky confronting the oldest and simplest fact of murder: somebody they loved was here, and now she was not.
Sharon’s mother, Doris Tate, would eventually transform that grief into a remarkable campaign for victims’ rights, becoming a powerful advocate for giving victims and their families a voice in the criminal justice system. In a way, she spent the rest of her life fighting the same imbalance that still infects true crime—the enormous attention paid to those who kill and the comparative silence surrounding those who are killed.
Perhaps remembrance can help correct that. We don’t have to forget the crime. History shouldn’t be sanitized, and evil shouldn’t be ignored. But neither should the killer get everything. So today, don’t remember the night Sharon Tate died. Remember the day she was buried.
Remember that before she became evidence, folklore, a headline and a chapter in somebody else’s story, she was a daughter, sister, wife, friend, actress and expectant mother.
For once, let’s leave Manson outside the cemetery gates.
Today belongs to Sharon.