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On this date in 1969, it was -- as junk-rocker Jim Carroll would later croon -- too late if you were in love with Sharon Tate.

The luminous fair-haired Texan who had starred in Valley of the Dolls and The Fearless Vampire Killers happened to be in the wrong groovy Los Angeles pad on the wrong hazy night, when the knife-wielding minions of larger-than-death psycho Charles Manson embarked on a massively lethal “creepy crawl.”


Sharon Tate was nine months pregnant at the time of her murder. Her husband, filmmaker Roman Polanski, rushed home from London to mourn his wife and unborn son, and to help police catch the killers.

Eventually, The Manson Family was nabbed and incarcerated.

Their plan had been to slaughter Hollywood's rich and famous and blame the African-American community for the carnage.

This would, Charlie imagined, ignite a race war that would inevitably be won by black people who, after the fact, would look to the Manson clan to lead them.

Charlie reportedly also thought the Beatles were talking to him personally via the rave-up "Helter Skelter." Suffice to say, things didn't work out as Manson had hoped.

Polanksi, whose parents had been executed in a Nazi death camp, went on to survive the Manson horror, but found himself a fugitive in 1977 after allegedly drugging and having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

In the end, Sharon Tate was torn from life tragically, and too early. Fortunately, her film work will live forever. Especially the nude stuff.