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It was “a night so quiet you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon,” United Press International reported 10 years later.

But sometime in the early morning, four of Manson’s followers climbed over the driveway gate and launched a savage attack. First they saw Steven Parent, who had come to try to sell a clock radio to the estate’s caretaker, and they shot him. Then they went inside and killed the four others.

Tate was stabbed 16 times, Statman said. The killers – Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian – painted the word “PIG” on the home’s front door with Tate’s blood.

Although other celebrities were terrified that their own deaths might follow, Statman said, most people initially shrugged off the killings.

“The rest of the country was like, ‘Well, it’s a movie star. You know how they live,’ ” Statman said. “When the murders happened the next night, that’s when the fear swept across the United States.”

Photo by -/AFP/Getty Images

Manson took several of his followers that night to the Los Angeles home of grocery store executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, where the cult members killed the couple and wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the wall with blood. They also wrote “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator door – a misspelled reference to a Beatles song that Manson thought alluded to a coming race war.

The Tate-LaBianca murders shifted how some Americans viewed the counterculture that Manson had exploited to attract troubled young people to his desert commune. The Woodstock music festival, which took place the following week, further polarized the divide between those who embraced the hippie ethos and those who were repulsed by it.

Tate’s family, meanwhile, was critical in advocating victims’ rights in California. Her mother, Doris Tate, addressed Watson, one of the killers, at his parole hearing in 1984 – the first impact statement to be given in the state. She also advocated the Victims’ Bill of Rights, a 1982 California law that codified victims’ right to provide impact statements.

“This family took the most heinous circumstances on the planet and turned it into a positive,” Statman said. “The Tate family proved that in the most adverse circumstances, you don’t have to turn out like these killers – ever.”