LOS ANGELES _ Hearing the retired prosecutor recount the bloody crimes that scarred Los Angeles, it is easy to forget that the savage murders happened half a century ago.
Stephen Kay runs one hand slowly down his cheek, describing the mark a thick rope scraped along actress Sharon Tate's face. The rope was tied around her neck and looped over a living room beam in her rented Benedict Canyon home. She was 8 { months pregnant. Clad in just a white bra and panties. Still alive, though not for long.
He recounts, as if it were yesterday, how Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were tied up and dragged into separate rooms in their Los Feliz home, where they too died at the hands of Charles Manson's brutal "family."
"When Rosemary heard Leno getting stabbed, she cried out," Kay says. He leans forward, hands splayed on knees, his voice rising like a terrified woman's. "'Leno! Leno!'"
Kay is slender, avid and 76. His white hair fluffs out above his tanned face. He helped put Manson family members behind bars for the 1969 slayings of nine people and attended 60 parole hearings since to make sure they stayed there. He still recalls every awful detail of the murders, at times closing his eyes as if to block the images.
The slaughter and its aftermath "left the biggest imprint on Los Angeles, (on) all of Southern California," Kay says. And also, it seems, on the prosecutor himself. "It's the case that just never goes away."
The Tate-LaBianca murders rocked California, drew international attention and came to symbolize the city of Los Angeles. And they continue to fascinate to this day, as their 50th anniversary nears.
"Helter Skelter" tours that follow the family's bloody footsteps regularly sell out. Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" _ fiction wound around Manson family fact _ opened last week. Chief prosecutor Vincent T. Bugliosi's 1974 book, "Helter Skelter," has never gone out of print; it is joined on a regular basis by new entries into the Manson canon, at least two this summer alone.
Other killers have come and gone. Other crimes since have accounted for more deaths. People more famous than Tate, hairdresser-to-the-stars Jay Sebring and coffee heiress Abigail Folger have been slain. Still, the memory of Manson and the men and women he persuaded his followers to murder has not faded.
The question, which persists to this day, is why?
"It's a story that still baffles," says Linda Deutsch, who covered the Manson case for The Associated Press. "Manson had a streak of pure evil. ... It persists now that he's dead _ finally. It's as if the curse has not disappeared; it hangs over everyone who was ever involved with him."
