Lee also had “extremely close” ties with another victim at the house that night: Jay Sebring.
Lee - who had already broken into the Hollywood acting scene as Kato in “The Green Hornet” - took on private martial arts clients and began teaching Polanski martial arts lessons at around $800 a pop, Polly said. “Sharon Tate was apparently a very good cook and Polanski did like him because he also felt sort of like an outsider in Hollywood,” Polly said. She later told her French-Polish film director husband that she thought he and Lee would "get on like a house on fire” and arranged for Lee and his wife to come to dinner at the couple’s home.
“He was hired to teach Sharon Tate how to do sidekicks and at some point, she was like, ‘You would really love my husband,” Polly told. Lee had previously met Tate while she was filming “The Wrecking Crew.” He had been hired to serve as the film’s karate instructor and fight coordinator, according to Matthew Polly, the author of the Lee biography “Bruce Lee: A Life.” One celebrity to rouse Polanski’s suspicion was martial arts instructor Bruce Lee because Lee was “the only kind of guy who could kill five people single-handedly,” Davis said. He became convinced the murders had been personal and began to suspect those closest to him. The paranoia and desperation to solve the crime was more heightened for Polanski, who had been in Europe at the time of the slayings. I remember Steve McQueen got himself a shotgun and a pistol.” “They starting getting guns and they had guard dogs. “As soon as the murders took place and there was no reason, Hollywood went into a kind of collective panic,” Davis said in the docuseries. However, it would be months before investigators would link the savage crimes to Manson and his followers, ushering in a wave of paranoia in the weeks that followed the killings. Members of the group went on to kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night, sending shockwaves through Hollywood.Ī Martial Arts Expert With Deadly Ambitions? The crime would eventually be attributed to followers of Charles Manson, who broke into the home and slaughtered all those inside at Manson’s behest. “He thought for a few crazy moments that somebody in his inner circle was responsible for killing Sharon.” “Roman became a detective,” journalist and author Ivor Davis said in the new EPIX docuseries “Helter Skelter: An American Myth,” airing Sunday nights. The crime was so horrific that Polanski believed it must have been carried out by someone the couple knew - and began casting a suspicious eye on some famous friends, even later admitting to sneaking into his friends’ garages to test their vehicles for signs of blood. Noguchi would later testify in court.Ĭelebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Polish producer Wojceich Frykowski, and Steven Parent, who had been a friend of the caretaker’s, all met an equally gruesome fate at the Benedict Canyon home that night. “My opinion was - and my opinion is still the same-that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds front and back penetrating the heart and lungs and causing massive hemorrhaging,” Los Angeles County Coroner Dr. Tate - who was eight and a half months pregnant - was stabbed 16 times, slashed twice, and “hanged,” according to a 1970 article in The New York Times. Sharon Tate and her film director husband, Roman Polanski, had been planning to welcome their first child into the world when Tate and four others were found slaughtered in the couple’s home.