"Nothing But Bodies"

"You'd better get over here right away," the caller told Los Angeles police. "There's a man lying on the front lawn and blood all over the place. It looks like a bad one." It was even worse than the caller thought. When police reached the hilltop home rented by Film Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water, Rosemary's Baby) in the fashionable suburb of Bel Air, they found not one body but five. It was a scene as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski's film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character.

Telephone and electric lines leading to the red, barnlike house had been severed. The word "pig" was scrawled on the front door in blood. Inside, police discovered the body of Polanski's pregnant wife, Actress Sharon Tate, 26. She was clad in a bikini nightgown. A nylon cord, looped around her neck and passed over a beam, linked her body to that of Jay Sebring, 35, who had been her beau before her marriage. A hood covered Sebring's head, but the two appeared to have been stabbed or shot, not hanged. "It seemed kind of ritualistic," said one of the officers investigating the case.

Nor was the slaughter confined to the house. "There was ample blood all around," said a policeman. On the lawn lay the bodies of Voyteck Frykowski, 37, a friend and associate of Polanski's, and Abigail Folger, 26, heiress to her family's coffee fortune and a partner of Sebring's in his chain of men's hair-styling shops. In a white Ambassador sedan parked in the driveway was the body of an unidentified young man. All had been slain.

Like a Battlefield. Miss Tate, who was expecting her baby this week, had appeared on television and in movies. She met Polanski when he directed her in The Vampire Killers. She returned about two weeks ago from Europe, where she had reportedly been traveling with Polanski. He had planned to return to Hollywood in time for the birth of their child, but was still in London when the bodies were discovered. He wept when he heard the news.

The brutality of the killings shocked even homicide-squad detectives. Said one: "It looked like a battlefield up there." Police said that every room in the house showed signs of a struggle. The victims appeared to have been dead for about twelve hours when they were discovered in the morning by a maid, Winifred Chapman, who ran screaming to neighbors for help. "This is a tough one," a detective said at first. "We don't have anything but bodies." But the police soon had more than that. They arrested William Garretson, 19, a caretaker who lived in a guesthouse on the property, and booked him for the quintuple slaying.

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