Abigail Folger

 Abigail Folger (August 11, 1943- August 9, 1969)

Her parents were Peter Folger, Chairman and President of the Folger Coffee Company, and Inez Mejia, the daughter of a prestigious California land grant family. She is the great-great-granddaughter of J.A. Folger, the founder of Folgers Coffee. Abigail Folger attended the Santa Catalina Catholic School for Girls in Monterey, California, near Carmel. While there, she was well known and well liked as a model student who graduated with honors in June 1961. Abigail then matriculated at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1961. After graduating Radcliffe, she enrolled in the fall of 1964 at Harvard University, where she did graduate work and received a degree in Art History. After graduating in the spring of 1967, she took a 40-hour a week job at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley. It was at a bookstore party in December 1967 where she met Polish author Jerzy Kosinski, who was married to steel heiress Mary Hayward Weir. Hayward Weir ran in the same rich circle as Folger and it was she who introduced Kosinski to Abigail. In early January 1968, Kosinski introduced Abigail to his friend, aspiring writer Wojciech Frykowski, at a party and the two hit it off. Frykowski had been living in the U.S. for one month at the time. Wojciech was not then fluent in English, but like Abigail, he was fluent in French. From April to May 1968, Abigail became a political volunteer for the ill fated presidential campaign of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. On August 9, 1969, she was murdered, along with Sharon Tate, Wojciech, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent by the Manson Family. She was killed by Mason follower Tex Watson, who stabbed her 28 times. Abigail Folger’s body was returned to San Francisco, and taken to Crippen and Flynn Mortuary in Redwood City,CA. She was cremated, and her ashes interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California.