Homicide at Rough Point

386 pages. Cielo Drive cuts like a beautiful scar along the bottom of a V-shaped canyon in the hills of Bel Air, off of Benedict. In February, 1969, as she looked out on it from the red farmhouse at 10050 Cielo that she and her husband Roman Polanski had just rented, Sharon Tate had no way of knowing that she only had 6 months to live. On the night of August 9, the hyper-violent "Manson Family" would invade that house, killing Sharon and 3 of her closest friends. But strangely, half a year earlier, she'd had a brush with a different killer. It happened after her sister Patti, then 11, looked across at the ominous Spanish-Moorish estate Sharon called "The Haunted House." In Restless Souls, their remarkable memoir, Alisa Statmen & Brie Tate write that Patti hiked down and crossed Cielo Drive, walking up to 1436 Bella Drive. There, she encountered an open gate where pillars bore the name: Falcon Lair. Once the home of Rudolf Valentino, it had been purchased in 1953 by the fabulously wealthy heiress Doris Duke.

The wrought iron gates were open when Patti wandered in. Suddenly she heard, an angry caretaker yell, "This is private property " Startled, she turned and lost her balance, falling and skinning her knee. Just then, as if on cue, a black limo pulled in. A tinted window went down and a tall woman in back lowered her sunglasses to ask who she was. Once she ID'd herself as Patti, whose sister Sharon lived "across in the red barn," Doris Duke knew that this wasn't just any child. She was the sibling of the hottest young star in town. So she snapped to the caretaker, "Stop being such an ogre and bring Patti in, so we can clean those scrapes. And get me the Polanski's phone number."

Later, the Duke staff was bandaging Patti's knee when Sharon arrived, "nervously chewing her lower lip" and apologizing to the blond billionaire who was the 3rd richest woman in the world behind Queen Elizabeth & Queen Juliana. But by then, Sharon Tate was Hollywood royalty herself; her husband Roman, coming off "Rosemary's Baby," was a kind of cinematic prince. So why was she nervous? What would make her bite her lip in the face of a woman whose caretaker's aggressive warning had caused her little sister to draw blood? Since Sharon was killed that summer, we'll never know. But one thing is clear: this wasn't the first time Sharon Tate had been pulled into Doris Duke's orbit. 2 1/2 years earlier, one of Sharon's closest friends, Eduardo Tirella, had been violently killed after Doris crushed him under a two-ton station wagon and, at that time, all of Eduardo's friends suspected he'd been murdered.

The brutal stabbing of Sharon Tate is the tragic tale of a young woman of great promise cut down in the prime of life. But the same could be said for Eduardo, whose own Hollywood career was just catching fire, when he told the possessive, heiress he was leaving her, just minutes before she ran him down outside the gates of her Newport, RI estate. Because she had the money and the power, Doris Duke succeeded in erasing his death from the narrative of her troubled life. For more than 50 years, the real truth behind what happened at Rough Point on the night of Oct. 7th, 1966 has been hidden. Until now...