On August 8, 1969, Abigail Folger had already made her decision. The 25-year-old heiress to the Folger Coffee fortune had quit her volunteer position with the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, packed her bags, and purchased a plane ticket to fly home to San Francisco the following morning. She was leaving behind a troubled relationship and a Hollywood lifestyle she had grown to despise.
She never boarded that flight.
Shortly after midnight on August 9th, Patricia Krenwinkel, a 21-year-old follower of Charles Manson, chased Abigail across the front lawn of 10050 Cielo Drive and stabbed her 28 times. Abigail fought desperately to survive. Her final words, spoken even as the attack continued, were: "I give up. You've got me. I'm already dead."
She died two days before her 26th birthday.
The world remembers that night primarily for the murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate, whose Hollywood fame captured the public imagination. But Abigail Folger’s death represented something the headlines largely missed: the violent end of a woman who had rejected idle wealth for hands-on social activism.
Abigail had graduated from Radcliffe with honors and earned a master’s degree from Harvard. In the final year of her life, she volunteered in Los Angeles’s poorest neighborhoods while her trust fund generated approximately $50,000 annually in dividends she barely touched. Her personal estate was valued at $48,000, roughly $2.7 million in today’s currency.
She had chosen to spend her days counseling struggling families rather than shopping on Rodeo Drive.
The Folger coffee fortune began with a 14-year-old boy from Nantucket who never found gold. In 1849, James Athearn Folger and his two older brothers left Massachusetts for the California gold fields. While his brothers headed for the mines, young James stayed in San Francisco, where high wages persuaded him to help rebuild the city after one of its many fires.
His carpentry skills led him to William H. Bove, an entrepreneur with a revolutionary idea: selling pre-roasted, pre-ground coffee to miners who had previously bought green beans and roasted them at home. James worked for Bove, saved his money, briefly joined his brothers seeking gold, then returned to San Francisco as a traveling salesman.
By 1865, he had saved enough to become a full partner in the mill. By 1872, he had bought out all his partners and renamed the company J.A. Folger and Company. When James died of a heart condition in 1889 at age 51, his son James II took over and expanded the company dramatically. By the mid-20th century, Folgers had become the third largest coffee wholesaler in the United States.
Abigail Anne Folger was born on August 11, 1943, in San Francisco, the daughter of Peter Folger, chairman and president of the family company, and Inez Mejia Folger, whose own father had served as consul general for El Salvador. The union joined two California dynasties, one of commerce, one of diplomacy.
Abigail grew up on the family’s sprawling estate in Woodside, a magnificent property whose horse stables, built between 1905 and 1906, featured pink marble baseboards, redwood wainscoting, and skylights flooding the interior with natural light. The estate originally encompassed approximately 1,500 acres.
In 1952, when Abigail was nine, her parents divorced, introducing instability into what had seemed an idyllic childhood. Her father remarried in 1960, taking his secretary, Beverly Martz, as his second wife. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, the following year.
In 1963, Peter Folger negotiated a landmark transaction. Procter and Gamble acquired the Folger Coffee Company in exchange for 1.65 million shares of P&G stock, though Peter and the family continued operating Folgers as a subsidiary.
Abigail, known to family and friends as Gibby, was about to graduate from Radcliffe College with honors. At the elite Santa Catalina School for Girls in Monterey, Abigail briefly shared a dormitory room with Sharon Gless, who would later win an Emmy for "Cagney and Lacey." But Abigail’s path led not to Hollywood, but to Cambridge.
She graduated from Radcliffe College with honors in 1964, then earned a master’s degree in art history from Harvard in 1967. Her senior thesis examined the politics in the plays of Christopher Marlowe, a rigorous scholarly undertaking that demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of literature, history, and the relationship between artistic expression and political ideology.
By 1969, Abigail’s personal estate was valued at approximately $48,000, with an annual income of roughly $50,000 from dividends and trust distributions. In today’s currency, that annual income would exceed $290,000, enough to fund a life of permanent leisure.
Instead, in September 1968, Abigail registered as a volunteer social worker with the Los Angeles County Welfare Department. Her work focused on child welfare initiatives, bringing her into direct contact with families struggling against systemic inequality. She spent her days in neighborhoods most heiresses would never enter.
In the spring of 1969, she joined volunteer efforts supporting Tom Bradley’s historic campaign to become the first African American mayor of Los Angeles. When Bradley was narrowly defeated by incumbent Sam Yorty, who employed overtly racist tactics, Abigail was reportedly incensed by the injustice.
She also devoted energy to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, attending fundraisers organized by her mother to support health care for the hippie community that mainstream medicine largely ignored. Abigail aligned herself not with abstract ideals but with the actual lived experiences of people facing systemic disadvantage.
And then she met a man who would lead her somewhere else entirely.
In early 1968, at a bookstore party in New York City, Abigail met Wojciech Frykowski, a 32-year-old Polish writer and aspiring screenwriter who had recently arrived in the United States. Known as Voytek to friends, Frykowski was a childhood companion of acclaimed director Roman Polanski. The two had grown up together in Poland, and Frykowski’s wealthy father had financed Polanski’s first film.
Despite a significant language barrier, Frykowski possessed only rudimentary English. The two discovered they could communicate fluently in French. This linguistic bridge created immediate intimacy.
In August 1968, they relocated together to Los Angeles, renting a home in the Hollywood Hills, directly across the street from Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. Abigail tutored Frykowski in English, spending hours helping him improve his fluency.
But the relationship proved deeply troubled from the outset. Frykowski had no steady income and lived entirely dependent on Abigail’s inheritance, a dynamic fraught with power imbalances and resentment. The couple became entrenched in the Hollywood party scene, hosting gatherings at their residence that attracted drug dealers, hangers-on, and various unsavory characters.
The drug use was systematic and intensive: hashish, marijuana, mescaline, cocaine, and the emerging synthetic drug MDA. In early July 1969, Frykowski became obsessed with obtaining MDA from suppliers who promised to procure it from Canada.
By summer, Abigail had grown increasingly disillusioned with her relationship, with Hollywood, with a lifestyle she perceived as hollow and spiritually empty.
In March 1969, Roman Polanski had invited Frykowski and Abigail to housesit at 10050 Cielo Drive while he traveled to Europe for film work. When Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, returned to Los Angeles in July, Polanski invited them to stay on in the guest rooms, believing their presence would provide emotional support for Sharon during his continued absence.
By early August, Abigail had made a definitive decision. She was leaving Los Angeles permanently and leaving Frykowski the very morning after August 9th. She had purchased her plane ticket and quit her volunteer position on August 8th.
That night she went to dinner at El Coyote Cafe with Sharon Tate, Frykowski, and celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring, expecting it to be her last evening in a city she had grown to despise.
The property at 10050 Cielo Drive had previously been rented by Terry Melcher, a record producer and only child of actress Doris Day. In 1968, Beach Boys co-founder Dennis Wilson had introduced Melcher to Charles Manson, an ex-convict and aspiring musician hoping to secure a recording contract.
Manson believed his musical talents warranted commercial success. Melcher considered Manson’s material but ultimately declined, determining it lacked commercial viability. When Melcher moved out, Manson’s disappointment calcified into rage at the entertainment establishment he believed had rejected him.
On the afternoon of August 8th, 1969, at Spahn Ranch in the Simi Hills, Manson announced to his followers, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter," his apocalyptic vision of a coming race war supposedly prophesied in Beatles lyrics. He directed Charles "Tex" Watson to gather followers and travel to Cielo Drive, specifically instructing Watson to "totally destroy everyone inside" and to do it "as gruesome as you can."
Watson selected Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian.
Just after midnight on August 9th, they climbed an embankment onto the property. Watson severed the telephone wires. Their first victim was 18-year-old Steven Parent, shot four times while leaving the property after visiting the caretaker.
Inside, Abigail was reading in her bedroom when Susan Atkins walked past her doorway. In a moment of terrible misunderstanding, Abigail looked up, smiled, and waved, apparently assuming Atkins was a friend of someone visiting the house.
Watson gathered Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail, and Frykowski at gunpoint, announcing, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business."
Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was stabbed 16 times. She begged to live long enough to deliver her baby. Jay Sebring was shot once and stabbed seven times. Frykowski was shot twice, bludgeoned until the gun broke, then stabbed 51 times.
Abigail ran toward the front lawn, fighting for her life. Patricia Krenwinkel chased her across the darkened grass with an upraised knife. Forensic evidence documented 28 stab wounds across Abigail’s body: four to her face, five to her neck, four to her chest. Defense wounds on both hands showed how desperately she had fought, trying to grab the blade even as it pierced her flesh.
On the front door, written in Sharon Tate’s blood, was one word: pig.
The trial lasted nine and a half months and cost approximately $1 million. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi called 84 witnesses and introduced 290 pieces of evidence. On January 25, 1971, the jury convicted Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten of first-degree murder. All received death sentences.
But on April 24, 1972, the California Supreme Court ruled the state’s death penalty unconstitutional, automatically commuting all sentences to life imprisonment.
Patricia Krenwinkel, the woman who stabbed Abigail 28 times, was denied parole 14 times over the following decades and became California’s longest-serving female prisoner after Atkins died of brain cancer in 2009. Tex Watson has been denied parole 18 times and remains incarcerated. Manson died of natural causes in November 2017 at age 83. Leslie Van Houten was finally released in July 2023 after 53 years in prison.
Abigail’s father, Peter, could no longer bear to live at the Woodside estate where his daughter had grown up. In 1974, he and his wife Beverly relocated to a newly constructed home, abandoning the mansion with its pink marble stables.
Five months after Abigail’s death, Peter received a bill from a Los Angeles boutique for custom clothing she had ordered but would never wear. He died on August 27, 1980, at age 74, 11 years after losing his daughter. Her mother, Inez, lived until 2007, dying at age 100, carrying the grief for 38 years.
Abigail was buried at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, California.
Joan Didion wrote in "The White Album": "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9th, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community. And in a sense, this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."
Abigail Folger had her plane ticket. She had quit her job. She was leaving that morning.