Though Melcher had lived at 10050 Cielo Drive from May of 1966 until January of 1969, the current residents are film director Roman Polanski—whose most recent hit is Rosemary’s Baby, starring Mia Farrow—and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. The twenty-six-year-old star of Valley of the Dolls is eight and a half months pregnant and in the company of three friends while Polanski is working on a new script in London.

Sharon Tate pleads for the life of her unborn child, but the murderers show no mercy, smearing the word pig in Tate’s blood on the white front door of the house. The next night, in central Los Angeles, the killing spree continues, claiming the lives of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. On a refrigerator at the LaBianca home, the killers leave another startling message in blood—a misspelling of “Helter Skelter,” the title of a Beatles song off the 1968 smash White Album.

Paul wrote the intense hard-rock number in response to an interview that ran in Melody Maker with the Who’s Pete Townshend proclaiming he’d just recorded “the raunchiest, loudest, most ridiculous rock ’n’ roll record you’ve ever heard.” (It was “I Can See for Miles.”)

“So I said to the guys, ‘I think we should do a song like that; something really wild.’”

Look out, warns the chorus. Coming down fast.

Though “Helter Skelter” is a song about a fairground slide, it also hints at the dark progression from innocence to violence.

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

Johnny’s in the basement

mixing up the medicine.

—“Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Leave John alone!”

At Tittenhurst Park, a seventy-two-acre Ascot estate that John and Yoko purchased in May of 1969 for £150,000, Yoko is showing photographer Ethan Russell a disturbing package she’s received from one of John’s fans. It’s a doll in her likeness, pins piercing the torso, with the message attached.

These are not happy times for them. Or for the band.

The Abbey Road sessions close on August 20 with a final recording of John’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”

“Louder! Louder!” he yells at engineer Geoff Emerick. “I want the track to build and build, and then I want the white noise to take over and blot out the music altogether.”

He succeeds. The response from the other Beatles is silence.

The mood hasn’t lifted two days later, when the band gathers at Tittenhurst Park, graced with flowering gardens and a man-made lake stocked with ducks and fish, for a promotional photo shoot.

Ethan Russell lines the four long-haired bandmates against a carved wooden door on the estate. No one is smiling, and Russell doesn’t force it.

Through his lens, it’s clear that “this marriage had come to an end—and boy does it show.”

It would be the last photo ever taken of the band together.

*  *  *

John and Yoko make a pact. They want to try again for a child, so they’re quitting their heroin habit.