Manson Clan Body Dig Underway

IN THE FALL OF 1969, the Inyo County Sheriff’s department and other law enforcement agencies descended upon a dilapidated house known as Barker Ranch in the Panamint Mountains of Death Valley. They were out to crack the case of a destroyed $40,000 bulldozer, and their suspects were a ragtag group of hippies — strangers who’d recently moved in.

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The Barker Ranch, circa 1940

From the book These Canyons are Full of Ghosts: The Last of the Death Valley Prospectors. By Emmett Harder

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Charles Manson and Carl Ruona

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What they had unknowingly stumbled across instead were the people later accused of being among the most sensational murderers in history, 24 members of a hippie cult known as the “Manson Family.” They discovered Charles Manson himself, cowering inside a cabinet under a sink in the bathroom. “His hair was sticking out of the cabinet,” remembers former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Bill Gleason, who was there to ID them for the local cops, having arrested several of the trouble-making clan at a previous hangout, Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth.

Manson had preached of an apocalyptic race war he said was predicted in the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” His followers believed they would eventually control the United States — if they performed grisly murders for Manson. To that end, about two months earlier, they had murdered seven people and were suspected in two other slayings. The dead included pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and wealthy Los Feliz hills grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.

“[Manson] was thinking that the world was coming to an end, and the only safe place was Death Valley,” Gleason says.

Today, May 20, about four decades later, law enforcement agencies and scientists, shadowed  at a distance by a small army of local and international reporters, descended on Barker Ranch. Tools in hand, they began to dig up the dry soil in hopes of getting to the bottom of a persistent rumor that murder victims are buried there.

In a desolate wilderness of windswept vistas and rough, dirt roads, Barker Ranch sits hours from the closest town, accessible only by four-wheel drive. The locals are bemused by the sudden interest, perhaps wondering if “the dig” will be a dud, something like Geraldo Rivera’s 1996 investigation into “the mystery of Al Capone’s vault.”

Kathleen New, executive director of the chamber of commerce in picturesque Lone Pine — the meet-up spot for investigators involved in the dig — scoffed, “We don’t care.” The desk clerk at Panamint Springs Resort Spa suggests that any bones found will be long-dead Indians. “People are saying it is a publicity thing,” she sniffs.

Phones at the tiny Inyo County dispatcher’s office are backed up with calls from People and CNN. But locals would rather see the big-city reporters write about their beloved Devil’s Hole pupfish, an endangered and ancient species. “We don’t understand what’s causing their demise,” says Death Valley National Park historian Terry Baldino. “The males are gorgeous iridescent blue.”

The pupfish will have to wait. Manson took center stage in April after the Associated Press wrote about Mammoth Lakes detective Paul Dostie’s search for alleged mystery graves at Barker Ranch. Dostie’s interest was piqued in 1998, when an Inyo County deputy told him the sheriff had dug up the ranch after a former Manson Family member told an author that bodies were buried there.

That dig, 10 years ago, turned up zilch. But Dostie trained and used his own “cadaver” dog, Buster, to sniff the site in February 2007, and Buster “alerted” on four different patches of soil. That attracted the curiosity of forensic scientists at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research facility, who in April took soil samples seeking evidence of human bones.

A few weeks ago, Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze found “no consistent response from the dogs that searched, and no conclusive findings from the soil samplings.” Lutze concluded that “the only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson Family is to proceed with limited excavation.”

MANSON’S FINAL HIDEOUT, Barker Ranch was built in 1940 by retired Los Angeles Police Detective Bluch Thomason and his wife, who hoped to mine gold to supplement their retirement. No records have been found to indicate how successful they were, but historian Terry Baldino says the Thomasons lived there until Bluch died. In 1956, the property was sold to James and Arlene Barker, who lived on it for about 10 years before leaving the remote ranch in the mid-’60s.

In the fall of 1968, Mrs. Barker allowed Manson and his followers to move in, one year before they committed the sensational Tate-LaBianca murders. Long before the killings, prospector Emmett Harder remembers meeting the young hippies while mining for gold near Barker Ranch. He tells Weekly he gave Manson tips on prospecting, and even shared his food.