He was a hairstylist to Hollywood stars like Frank Sinatra… but his legacy is tainted by murder

Anthony DiMaria was four years old, flipping through a family photo album on the living room sofa. Page after page, he admired smiling faces, vacations, birthdays – then he stopped. 

A striking black-and-white portrait stared up at him: his Uncle Jay. He was cool, composed and unmistakably alive.

A wave of longing hit. He turned to his mother and asked, ‘When can I see him again?’

She froze. Her face drained of color. Then, softly, she said, ‘Honey, you can’t. He’s in heaven.’

What DiMaria didn’t know then was that just months earlier, his uncle Jay Sebring had been murdered. He was one of seven people slaughtered by the Manson Family across two nights of terror in August 1969 – a rampage that became one of the most infamous crimes in American history.

More than 50 years later, the horror of Sebring’s fate still haunts DiMaria and his family. But what makes this time of year especially painful is not just the memory of what was lost, rather it is how the world chooses to remember it.

While the names and faces of the killers – and their ringleader, Charles Manson – have been immortalized in the public imagination, their crimes studied and dramatized in countless books, films and TV shows, the victims have too often been reduced to footnotes.

‘Any time the dates come around, it’s always difficult,’ DiMaria told the Daily Mail. ‘But it’s made worse by how it’s treated as entertainment.

‘It’s painful to see how our loved ones have become props in the retelling of their own slaughter.

‘Meanwhile, the people who committed these horrific crimes are treated like rock star serial killers.’

Sebring was just 35 when he was killed. But before his life was cut tragically short, he’d established himself as a pioneer in men’s hairstyling.

He opened one of the first upscale men’s salons in LA and built a star-studded clientele, including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Lee.

His services were so in demand that he charged up to $50 a haircut – at a time when the average price was $1.50.

He’s credited with giving The Doors frontman Jim Morrison his iconic look, and became a celebrity in his own right, opening salons in New York and London.

Sebring’s influence helped transform male grooming into a luxury industry, the lasting impacts of which can still be felt today.

Yet despite all he achieved, Sebring is mostly remembered for how he died.

The brilliance of his life – and the scope of his accomplishments – have been overshadowed by the sensationalism of the Manson murders and the macabre fascination they still inspire, DiMaria says.

In various accounts and retellings, DiMaria believes his uncle’s character has been misrepresented – reduced to a whimpering caricature, and his final acts of courage erased from the record.

As a child, DiMaria became obsessed with learning everything he could about Sebring. His mother rarely spoke of the murders, so he turned to books, old clippings and documentaries.

He tried to take pride in his uncle’s legacy, bragging to classmates about his success. But when he explained how Sebring died – when he mentioned Manson – the room often went quiet.

When he was 12, DiMaria can remember being at a sleepover watching Saturday Night Live, when a sketch came on featuring Bill Murray, who was playing Sebring.

DiMaria felt nauseous. Embarrassed. ‘I just thought to myself, “My favorite TV show thinks my uncle’s life and his murder is a joke,”‘ he said.

In the years that followed, DiMaria found other portrayals just as demeaning – and completely at odds with the man described by family and friends.

A Time magazine article, published after the murders, painted Jay as a troubled coward, a deviant, even hinting at racist views – accusations DiMaria says couldn’t be further from the truth.

Another damning portrayal, he says, came from Vincent Bugliosi’s best-selling book Helter Skelter. Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, described Sebring as pretentious, unstable, and pitiful.

Worse, DiMaria says, the book left out his uncle’s final moments of heroism – details he’d only uncover years later through his own meticulous research.

That realization came after DiMaria contacted the LA District Attorney’s Office and requested access to the court testimony of the only three people who knew exactly what happened that night: Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins.

On August 8, 1969, Jay Sebring was at the Benedict Canyon home of his close friend and former partner Sharon Tate.

Tate, 26, who was eight and a half months pregnant, had invited Sebring and friends Wojciech Frykowski, 32, and Abigail Folger, 25, to keep her company while her husband, director Roman Polanski, was away filming in Europe.

Thirty miles away, a plan of unspeakable evil was already in motion. Charles Manson called it ‘Helter Skelter’ – a warped prophecy he believed would end the decade of peace and love by igniting a race war that would tear society apart.

Manson was a failed musician turned self-styled prophet who ran a commune in the California desert, where drifters, addicts and runaways gathered to escape society and absorb his paranoid teachings.

His apocalyptic ideology borrowed its name from a song on The Beatles’ White Album, which he believed contained coded messages about the coming revolution.

But the revolution wasn’t coming quickly enough. To hasten it, Manson plotted a series of murders he believed would be blamed on black militants – sparking the collapse he longed for.

Tex Watson, Manson’s most trusted lieutenant, was chosen to lead the slaughter. Manson told him to take three of the women to 10050 Cielo Drive, ‘do something witchy’ and make it gruesome.

The house had once been rented by music producer Terry Melcher, who had rejected Manson’s dream of stardom – and Manson wanted revenge.

Shortly before midnight, the group parked down the hill and cut the phone lines. Armed with a .22 revolver, a bayonet and hunting knives, they scaled the fence.

Their first victim was 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was shot four times by Watson while driving away from the home after visiting Tate’s caretaker.

Then they moved toward the house. Watson burst through the door and declared: ‘I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.’

Watson and the others forced Sebring, Tate, Frykowski and Folger into the living room. He tied Tate and Sebring together by their necks with a long nylon rope.

Amid the chaos, DiMaria says, his uncle – who had trained in martial arts with Bruce Lee – saw a chance to intervene.

From the killers’ own testimony, Sebring suddenly lunged at Watson, hoping to catch him off guard.

‘As Bruce Lee said, there’s no defense against a gun – only the element of surprise,’ said DiMaria. ‘Jay charged at Charles Watson, but one of the others alerted him.’

Watson turned and fired. The bullet tore through Sebring’s lung. Bleeding heavily and struggling to breathe, he collapsed – but moments later, to the attackers’ shock, he tried to stand again.

‘He was literally drowning in his own blood, and he still got back up,’ DiMaria says. ‘That’s when Watson kicked him in the face and stabbed him in the back.’

With Watson distracted by Sebring, Frykowski and Folger ran in opposite directions, briefly escaping before they, too, were overpowered.

The killers, DiMaria says, had planned to make the murders ‘methodical’ and ‘gruesome’ – but Sebring’s defiance disrupted that plan, if only for a moment.

The omission of his uncle’s heroism from the record infuriates DiMaria. His biggest frustration is with Bugliosi’s book, Helter Skelter, which is still widely considered the definitive account of the Manson murders.

‘Why didn’t Bugliosi put that in his book?’ DiMaria said. ‘Because Vincent Bugliosi made himself the hero of his own story – and if he included what Jay Sebring did, then Jay becomes the hero.’ 

Sebring, Tate, Frykowski and Folger were all stabbed and shot multiple times. Their bodies were mutilated. Tate’s unborn son was also killed.

The next night, Watson led another group to the Los Feliz home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The couple was slain in similarly horrifying fashion.

For DiMaria, his contention with Bugliosi’s account reflects a deeper problem: how the murders have been framed – and reframed – in the decades since.

In the aftermath, media coverage zeroed in on the victims’ personal lives – especially the fact that drugs, including cocaine and marijuana, were found at Tate’s house.

DiMaria says the ways in which the victims were portrayed stripped them of their humanity, turning their deaths into a twisted morality tale.

‘Instead of being seen for what they were – brilliant, beautiful young people – they became symbols of Hollywood decadence.

‘They became part of a cautionary tale: if you’re rich, if you party, if you hang out with the wrong crowd – this is what happens to you.

‘And the subtext was: ‘as it f***ing should.’ As if they deserved it.’

As the decades rolled on, the imbalance only deepened.

Charles Manson became cultural shorthand for evil – portrayed as a manipulative mastermind who cast a spell over his followers and bent them to his will.

He died in prison in 2017, but his face continues to be printed on T-shirts, his name invoked in songs, and his life mythologized in books, films, and countless documentaries.

DiMaria rejects the long-standing portrayal of the Manson Family naïve hippie cult, and Manson’s so-called ‘followers’ as helpless flower children under his spell.

In truth, he says, they were a gang of willfully violent criminals – a group with the optics of a commune, but the structure and intent of a criminal enterprise.

That false narrative, he says, has obscured the full scope of their crimes and allowed some of the killers – particularly Patricia Krenwinkel, who was recently approved for parole – to skirt responsibility by hiding behind decades of revisionism.

‘They start dressing themselves up as victims of Manson, and suddenly they’re the ones deserving sympathy,’ he says. 

‘Meanwhile, our families are still carrying the grief, still walking into parole hearings to make sure these people stay where they belong.’

For DiMaria, the fight to reclaim his uncle’s story – and the dignity of every victim – is about more than setting the record straight.

In an age of true crime obsession, he believes the only way forward is to refocus on the victims – their lives, their courage. Only then, he says, can we begin to grasp the full scale of what was lost – in this case, and in so many others.

‘We need to stop glorifying the people who did this,’ he says. ‘Stop turning them into icons. Start telling the truth about who they really were – and who they took from us.

‘Maybe then we’d start asking why we keep handing them the fame – and turning their crimes into a cash cow.’