Dear Matt,
In the interest of keeping the victims from being any further demeaned than they already have about bringing on their own deaths by insinuating that Roman Polanski sent trunks filled with the drug MDA to Sharon--and therefor making her an accomplice--I think there are a couple of thoughts to keep in mind concerning MDA.
I realize that if you go on the internet to search the history of the drug it will say that it was made illegal in 1970--therefore in "revatron's" opinion it had been around for years--and it had, in the synthetic pharmaceutical testing stages--just as LSD had been around since before the 1940's. Nevertheless, these are drug histories that are being written years after the fact.
But, lets go back to 1969 and what we know are the facts of what was happening in the investigation of Sharon's murder. Of note in the first Tate homicide report: "...Harrigan became quite friendly with Frykowski and Folger. This was mainly due to the fact that Frykowski was interested in known drugs on the market, in addition to future synthetic drugs that were being made in eastern Canada. ...Harrigan told Frykowski that they would obtain the new synthetic drug, MDA, from Canada and allow him to be one of the first to try it. This conversation or agreement apparently took place sometime in the early part of July, 1969 at the Polanski home...
Of further note, we have one of Lt. Bob Helder's portions of Five Down on Cielo, his book collaboration with PJ Tate written in 1970 :
What we needed was a stronger motive for revenge. Perhaps concrete evidence of a dope burn. Along these lines we pursued Kraznowski's account of Frykowski and Harrigan's discussions about the new drug MDA. We knew that the coroner had found an unknown drug in the urine specimens taken from Abigail Folger and Woytek Frykowski. I inquired whether the Coroner's Dept. was aware of this new drug. No came their reply. I checked with the chemists of our own crime lab and they too were not aware of it. So, I contacted the local agent for the FBI of Narcotics and asked if he could locate a sample. He rang back twenty minutes later to tell me that the drug was so new their laboratory in Washington only had a single tablet but they would be willing to send us a portion of it air mail special delivery. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me and I looked up the phone number of Paul Caruso, Tom Harrigan's attorney. I told him our problem and asked if he thought he might be able to get Harrigan to deliver a sample of MDA to his office if I would guarantee no questions asked. An hour later, a brown paper sack containing 25 tablets was delivered to my office. I took five of the tablets to the Coroner's office and sent the remaining 20 to the FBI.
Alisa Statman
