THE STRANGE CASE OF VICTORIA VETRI

The first time I saw Victoria Vetri, she was going by the name Angela Dorian and she wasn't wearing a stitch. With long hair, sun-bronzed skin and a 36-21-35 near-perfect body, she stared right into my eyes. Sadly, the vision I describe was not "in the flesh", but glaring back at me from the slick pages of a certain popular men's magazine that specialized in photographic images of earthbound angels such as this. Contrary to the hedonistic editor and publisher's declaration, no girl that ever lived next door to me ever looked like that!

So I was forced to be content to behold that sun-bronzed beauty on the printed page, in the pictorial that showed her after winning the PLAYBOY Playmate-of-the-Year for 1968. A year or so later I began to see a platinum blonde version of Angela Dorian in a couple of monster magazines, depicting her in a fur bikini for her role as Sanna in WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, a Hammer Film! I had the iconic poster of Raquel Welch in her deerskin bikini from ONE MILLION YEARS, B.C., and here was yet another cave girl for a young, red-blooded teenage boy to worship. Vetri had also starred (as herself) in ROSEMARY'S BABY.

Little did I know at the time, but when she wasn't running around half-naked on a movie set, she was apparently running around naked in threesomes with fellow-actress Sharon Tate! Vetri and Tate were best of friends and that included -- according to her ex-husband anyway -- sharing the sheets together. These escapades included a variety of mind-altering substances that were typical of the times and the company. You see, in typical ironic fashion, all this happened at the house on Cielo Drive (another irony -- Cielo means "heaven" in Spanish) that was being rented by Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski.

In another of life's (and death's) ironies, on one hot summer night in August, 1969, Vetri was invited to dinner by Tate at the Cielo Drive house. Vetri was feeling a bit under the weather, so she declined. The next morning, the news arrived that everyone in the house where Vetri would also have been had she been feeling better, were viciously murdered in what became known as the notorious Tate-La Bianca Murders.

Vetri was devastated. She also grew increasingly concerned that cult-leader Charles Manson -- the perpetrator of the murders -- was after her as well. She couldn't shake the fear and guilt, and began a downward spiral of paranoia.

Val Guest, who directed Vetri in WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, had this to say about her:"a real nothing, and a very strange mixed up lady... it was tough to take her. She was a... nitwit". My guess is she was still in her "fear-phase" during this time.

Flash-forward almost 20 years to 1986 and Vetri is married to a would-be rocker by the name of Bruce Rathgeb. They seemed to get along fine until it is revealed that Vetri's fear and paranoia are very much still evident -- so much so, that she has become delusional. Everything comes to a head in October 2010, when she and Rathgeb get into an argument and she pulls out a gun and, believing that he is Manson, shoots Rathgeb, seriously wounding him. Vetri is convicted of attempted voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison where she remained until her release this April.

Now 74, Miss Vetri is featured in an interview in the latest LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS magazine. Now that Charles Manson is thankfully dead, I'm hoping to find that she's gotten herself out of the mental terror she suffered for so many years and is living a much more comfortable life.

Inside front cover of CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN #16, July 1971.

CoF's "Slaymate of the Month" July 1971.