Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent in 1969. Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994. And now, as 2025 comes to a close, Rob Reiner and his wife Michele.
Every era has had its garish Hollywood murder, and each crime reflects its time. Let’s hope that beyond the voyeurism, America learns the lesson behind the Reiner murders: chronic illegal-drug addiction and all-around antisocial behavior are not victimless crimes, and adults who refuse to take help should be incapacitated through the criminal-justice system.
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On an August night nearly six decades ago, the brutal torture and murder of 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate and her companions was shocking in its lurid details, but it was also a sign: after decades of relative safety, Americans were growing accustomed to violence and disorder. The nation’s per-capita murder rate doubled between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s and remained high until the early 1990s. Law enforcement could have prevented the Manson murders; Charles Manson himself, based on his many past crimes, should have been kept in prison, and his followers were petty grifters who stole to support their drug use.
Public frustration with elected officials’ failure to prevent crime turned voters more conservative. Ronald Reagan, governor of California for two years by 1969, was the tough-on-crime leader who became the tough-on-Communism president.
But rhetoric and action focused more on punishment than prevention. It wasn’t until the 1990s that New York put the Broken Windows policing theory into practice. As cities and states followed suit, murders fell to levels not experienced in half a century, and overall crime fell, too.
The 1995 trial of football player-turned-movie actor O. J. Simpson for the stabbing murder of his ex-wife and her friend in June 1994 highlighted a perpetual element of dysfunction in our criminal-justice system: our obsession with race. Simpson was a garden-variety domestic abuser who, absent any deterrent, almost certainly escalated his behavior to homicide. There wasn’t anything complicated about the case against him. Yet the press turned the O. J. case into a lesson on race, and a majority-black L.A. jury—nudged along by prosecutorial incompetence—agreed, acquitting him, despite the copious physical evidence against him.
In the mid-1990s, Americans overall were too fearful of the reality of crime to allow the race obsession to interfere with day-to-day policing and prosecutions, but as crime receded—and even the memory of it, by the mid-2010s—an incessant focus on race, rather than on the given facts of any case, eroded preventative policing, and crime began rising again.
The Reiner murders point up a big reason why: our increasingly casual acceptance of dangerous drug use over the past 15 years, and our collective failure to hold chronic drug addicts accountable for their transgressions. The Reiners’ throats were slit, allegedly, by their son Nick, a 32-year-old adult who, by all accounts, did nothing useful with his life. He let drug abuse consume most of his teen and adult years and even became a homeless drifter to avoid rehab. He reportedly trashed his parents’ house on at least one occasion, and acquaintances described him as “violent.” He once recounted a sociopathic tale of getting high and stealing money from his parents to take advantage of a prostitute.
A functional criminal-justice system would have held Reiner accountable for his actions as an addict, including the petty crimes of drug possession and open-air drug use while homeless. If young Reiner wasn’t responsible for his own behavior, due to severe mental illness, then he should have faced institutionalization. It’s one or the other. The media accounts of Nick’s life describe his “struggles,” “battles,” and “demons,” but at some point, a healthy society must determine that an individual has had enough chances and should be removed from circulation until he poses no harm to others.
The murder of Tate and her friends, and the murder of Simpson and Goldman, changed public perception of crime and punishment in their own ways, albeit gradually. The broader lesson is that, whether it’s petty crime, domestic violence, or illegal drug use, theft, and property damage, antisocial behavior escalates if not deterred or interrupted.
The most constructive lesson from the Reiner murders is that all the money and coddling in the world won’t fix a person who doesn’t want to be fixed. Until or unless he does, society—including the antisocial person’s own family—needs protection from him, not the other way around.
Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images