After seeing the movie, "The Strangers" with Liv Tyler, I had to wonder what the murder was that had inspired this movie, in which the couple is eventually stabbed to death by three murderers for no reason other than they were home. We looked it up and found that it was loosely based on the Manson Family murders. Being only 23 years old, I had heard of the Manson Family murders but did not know what had happened. So I researched it, to my mortification, the murders that were actually committed by these young girls and their friend, Watson, were much worse than this movie, "The Strangers".
I was peeked about something other people had told me when discussing the death of Sharon Tate. The thing that was told to me, and this person was certain, is that the baby had been cut from Sharon by the murderer that took her life. Through my research, all done online, all of the articles and pages I had read did not indicate this gruesome detail, though many other details were mentioned specifically. When my friend asked me, "did you know they cut the baby from her belly also?" ... I said, "but why then wouldn't they put that into the articles with the rest of the murder details?"
Another person speculated that it's possible that the story of the baby being cut from Sharons belly was taken from another movie about the murder made much earlier than "The Strangers", "Helter Skelter" which apparently, shows that the baby had been cut from the mother. I have not seen "Helter Skelter" and do not know if that is the case but if it is, there are many people who haven't done their research and weren't old enough at the time of the act to understand or remember the incident on the news when it had happened, that think the baby was surely cut from his mother that night, by the murderer.
Then I saw another article online that gave another clue to why this rumor has many people thinking this had occurred. On this page:
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/manson/confess_4.html in the 10th chapter called "Confession", toward the bottom part of it, is shown this info about what Susan Atkins had to say to a girl named Virginia while they lived in close proximity in prison: "...Susan explained. She had wanted to cut out Sharon's baby but there wasn't enough time. She had also wanted to take out all the victims' eyes and squash them against the walls and cut off and mutilate all of their fingers, but they didn't have the chance." Susan Atkins was one of the girls that had stabbed Sharon Tate numerous times.
I also found this page:
http://www.maebrussell.com/1960s%20Terror/Details%20of%20Los%20Angeles%20Murders.html where, about five paragraphs down, under the bold words that start as "The man caught her...", this paragraph shows Sharon begging for her life and then states, "...the blows were directed toward her upper torso. The stomach wasn't touched. It was found out later that a perfectly formed baby boy died with her." I translate this to mean that during the autopsy is when they took out the baby. Of course, if you kill a pregnant woman, the baby will die. In my research, I also read that Sharon was buried with her child in her arms. Then, on top of all of this, this very site, franksreelreviews.com, has pictures of the murder scene where Sharon is shown laying in her living room, pregnant stomach intact. DO NOT look for those photos if you can't handle it. I don't want people emailing or messaging me about it.
It's too bad that people have to believe things they watch in a movie. A movie is fiction. A documentary will likely show accurate information. Having someone who watched a movie tell me that my research didn't give me all the information is just messed up. Doing all of this research was interesting for me but I would have been content to understand just the basics about the incident. I hope that we can watch a movie for entertainment but not actually believe the things and then give someone else false information. Happy reading.