On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21, 2008, Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze stood at Barker Ranch, the stone cabin in the Panamint Range where Charles Manson had been arrested thirty-nine years earlier, and told a pool of reporters that his crews had found no human remains. The excavation had been scheduled to run into Thursday. It ended a day early. Lutze said he was glad of the result, because finding nothing meant nobody was buried there.
It had taken more than a year to get to that sentence. The search at Barker Ranch began with one off-duty police officer and his dog, grew into a joint operation involving a county sheriff, a national laboratory, a state cold case unit and the National Park Service, and finished as a two-day dig in triple-digit heat that turned up a shell casing, a pack rat’s nest and an old archaeological site.
Barker Ranch sits in a rocky canyon off Goler Wash at the southern end of the Panamint Range, three to four hours’ drive over rugged road. Bluth and Helen Thomason took up the property in the 1930s hoping to make a living from mining, and built the stone cabin in 1940. Jim and Arlene Barker bought it in 1955 and enlarged the house for family gatherings. The Manson Family occupied it briefly in 1968 and 1969, along with the neighboring Myers Ranch, which belonged to a relative of one of Manson’s followers.
The first time the Family saw the place was late in 1968. One later account, in the Sacramento News and Review, describes them arriving in their bus, about twenty strong with women outnumbering men two to one, and leaving it at the mouth of Goler Wash because the track beyond was fit only for a jeep or a dune buggy. From the bottom of the wash it is about seven miles up a dry creek bed to the ranch. The Myers place was their nominal destination; they settled at the empty Barker cabin a short distance away. Paul Watkins, who lived with the group and later testified against Manson, remembered that they came with a kilo of marijuana and fifty tabs of LSD.
The desert was more to Manson than a hiding place. He told his followers that a race war was coming, the one he called Helter Skelter, and that the Family would sit it out in a hidden paradise under Death Valley, a cavern he called the Hole or the bottomless pit, and emerge afterward to rule what was left. LIFE magazine, which sent the photographer Vernon Merritt III to Barker after the arrests, carried the idea to a national audience. In the late summer and autumn of 1969 members of the Family drove the washes in stolen dune buggies looking for the entrance. They never found it.
They were there in the autumn of 1969, after the murders in Los Angeles that summer. What brought the law to the canyon had nothing to do with those killings. In mid-September a Michigan loader, used by a park maintenance crew repairing roads near the Racetrack, was set on fire. The crew found a cut fuel line, an empty gas can and tire tracks leading away. Dick Powell, a twenty-seven-year-old ranger working out of the Wildrose station, took the radio call. He had no formal police training. His daughter Lenox later told the National Parks Conservation Association that he went after the case like a dog after a bone, and that he was the first to suspect the burned loader was part of something larger. Park rangers, the California Highway Patrol and Inyo County deputies began working the backcountry together. They found a rental car from Los Angeles crashed into a tree, campsites strewn with trash, stolen vehicles, dune buggies hidden in brush, and reports from miners and visitors of young people driving dune buggies through the night and living at an abandoned cabin on the old Barker property.
Two of the young women had already slipped away. Stephanie Schram and Kitty Lutesinger left the camp at night without shoes, kept to the top of a wash where the dune buggies sent after them could not follow, and walked until they reached a road and a passing officer. According to an Associated Press account published in 2008, the two seventeen-year-olds turned themselves in to the Highway Patrol on October 10, 1969, saying they were afraid for their lives, and two armed men from the ranch were arrested the same day. The raids came over two days in October, and officers detained twenty-six people on suspicion of arson, vandalism and auto theft. On the second day, October 12, a patrolman found a man hiding in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, a space LIFE measured at about twelve by sixteen inches. The door would not shut on him, and his hair gave him away. Asked his name, he gave it: Charles Manson. None of the officers knew it meant anything. The park superintendent of the day, Bob Murphy, later wrote in his book Desert Shadows that Death Valley could have had its own bloodbath had the officers given the Family the opportunity.
The road from that cabinet to the Tate case was short, but it ran through Los Angeles. Lutesinger, the girlfriend of Bobby Beausoleil, who was already in jail for the July killing of Gary Hinman, told investigators that Susan Atkins had been involved in the Hinman murder. Atkins was questioned in Inyo County, booked on suspicion of murder and moved to the Sybil Brand Institute for women in Los Angeles. There she talked about the Family, about Hinman and about the Tate and LaBianca killings to two women she was held with, Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham. On November 17 Howard telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department, and two officers interviewed her that evening. They believed her because Atkins had described details only the police and the killers knew. On December 1, 1969, authorities in Los Angeles announced that their suspects were already in custody, in the Inyo County jail.
Members of the Family were eventually convicted of nine murders: Gary Hinman, in his Topanga Canyon home in July; the five people killed at the Tate house on Cielo Drive on August 9, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca; and the ranch hand Donald “Shorty” Shea. The first seven are the Tate and LaBianca killings that made the case, and seven is the number given in much of the 2008 coverage of the dig. That last case is the reason nobody ever entirely dismissed the idea of hidden graves. Shea was last seen alive in late August 1969, and Manson, Steve Grogan and Bruce Davis were convicted of his murder without a body. His remains were not found until 1977, at Spahn Ranch, and they were found because Grogan drew investigators a map of where he was buried. Grogan was paroled in 1985.
The suggestion that there were more began during the original case. According to Vincent Bugliosi’s account in Helter Skelter, Atkins told a cellmate that the group had killed three more people out in the desert; the Associated Press, reporting in 2008, dated that jailhouse conversation to November 1, 1969. A 2021 legal history of the investigation in the San Antonio Lawyer says that in the same conversations she spoke of eleven unsolved killings. Nobody was ever identified or charged on the strength of any of it.
The ground at Barker had been turned over more than once before 2008. Paul Dostie, the police sergeant whose dog would start the 2008 search, said in January of that year that Inyo’s district attorney in 1969, Frank Fowles, had a trench dug by the fire pit that year in search of remains. In 1974, Inyo County’s undersheriff, Jack Gardiner, sent a detective named John Little out to Barker Ranch to look for four graves within 100 to 150 yards of the house. The man they were looking for was Shea, who turned out to be buried at Spahn Ranch. In 1998 a man who called himself White Rabbit told the sheriff’s office he knew where bodies lay; deputies dug and found nothing, and Dostie later dismissed him as a fraud. Emmett Harder, a gold prospector who had spent time around the Family in 1969, told CNN in 2008 that he believed there were more victims and described a young woman who had fallen out with Manson and Charles “Tex” Watson, who walked off with the two men and whom he never saw again. Harder’s account is his alone; no record identifies the woman or shows that she was harmed.
Other claims were larger and weaker. A detective told Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times that Manson had once told a prosecutor he had been involved in thirty or more killings; a jailhouse informant put Manson’s boast at thirty-five. The former prosecutor Stephen Kay, who had worked the case with Bugliosi, said in 2012 that Manson had told a cellmate his followers committed as many as thirty-five murders but “provided no particulars, no names and no dates.” Kay himself believed the Family was responsible for one killing beyond those charged. None of these figures was ever attached to a name, a date or a missing-person report. When the 2008 search began, police said they knew of no one associated with Manson who had been reported missing after his arrest.
Two deaths outside the desert have long been folded into the rumors, and both remain unproven. Joel Pugh, the boyfriend of the Family member Sandra Good, was found dead in a London hotel in 1969; British authorities ruled it suicide, though Kay and others suspected a follower. Ronald Hughes, a lawyer on the trial defense who had pressed Leslie Van Houten’s case in ways that worked against Manson, vanished in late November 1970, and his body was found about four months later in a creek in Ventura County. Bugliosi suggested Manson ordered his death. One story had Hughes taken to Barker Ranch. Charlie Rudd, the retired Ventura County sheriff’s sergeant who investigated, told the Associated Press in 2012 that he found little sign of foul play, nothing at Barker Ranch, and probably no connection to Manson.
One unexplained death did sit on the road to the ranch. Filippo Tenerelli was found dead of a shotgun wound in a motel room in Bishop on October 1, 1969, and the death was ruled a suicide. Weeks later the Highway Patrol found his Volkswagen over the edge at Father Crowley Point, in Panamint Valley on the way to Barker Ranch, with a good deal of blood inside and outside it. In January 2008 Debra Tate, Sharon Tate’s younger sister, called Bishop police to ask about him, and the department took a fresh look. Its chief, Kathleen Sheehan, said the review found nothing to indicate anything other than suicide, and that the file would stay open if anything new came in. Tenerelli has never been shown to have had any connection to the Family beyond what Tate said she had been told.
The search itself started with Paul Dostie, a sergeant with the Mammoth Lakes Police Department, and his black Labrador, Buster. Dostie had trained the dog to find old, buried remains rather than recent bodies, and said Buster was conditioned to the chemical traces of decomposing bone. Working off duty, he took Buster to Barker Ranch in 2007, about a year before the dig, after hearing the old stories. Over several visits the dog alerted at five places around the property. “I don’t know who’s buried here,” Dostie told CNN, “but I think there are bodies.” One of the spots lay in a sandy wash between the Barker and Myers houses. He said a former Family member had told him Manson talked about killing all the time, and that everyone carried a knife.
The sheriff’s office did not take a single dog’s word for it. It brought in teams from the Institute for Canine Forensics, which returned to the ranch in November 2007. Their dogs showed interest in the sites but did not give a trained alert, and the group did not recommend digging. In late January 2008 Sheriff Lutze told the Sierra Wave his department was in a holding pattern until better evidence turned up. Dostie answered that the desert’s low humidity might have dulled the dogs’ noses, and he kept collecting soil. Debra Tate, who was seventeen when her sister was killed and who has spent much of her life since attending parole hearings to oppose the release of the people convicted, was following his work closely.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, among them the senior researcher Arpad Vass, reviewed soil samples Dostie had collected. In February 2008 an informal team rode all-terrain vehicles up from Ballarat, about twenty miles, to test the ground. An Associated Press reporter went with them. Emmett Harder acted as guide. Vass and his colleague Marc Wise carried handheld chemical detectors; Vass’s instrument picked up fluorinated hydrocarbons, compounds he linked to decomposition. Daniel Larson, an archaeologist from California State University, Long Beach, took 5,327 magnetometer readings over a grid twenty-six feet by twenty, looking for disturbed earth rather than bone. “What I’m looking for is the pit, not the bones,” he said. Ground-penetrating radar had to wait because the soil was damp. “There’s definitely something down there,” Wise said. Dostie recommended excavating. Debra Tate came out to the ranch with them. “If there are bodies here,” she said, “we need to find them and send them home.”
Follow-up laboratory work suggested two likely grave sites and a third worth checking, and CNN reported that the scientists had found evidence of possible remains at three of the places Buster had marked. A second dog, from the nonprofit grave-search group NecroSearch, also showed interest. Not everyone on the law enforcement side was eager. Patrick Sequeira, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who handled the Family’s parole hearings, said a new prosecution looked unlikely: investigators would have to tie any remains to a missing person and then to a killer, and the surviving suspects were already serving life. The story was first reported in January 2008 by Lara Kirkner of the Mammoth Times, and by March it was national news.
Lutze did not order a dig on that evidence. On March 28, 2008, his office announced that it wanted more testing first. The dogs, it said, had given inconsistent results at many spots, and they had not been controlled the way recognized search organizations require. Barker Ranch was national park land and the Myers Ranch next to it was private property, and the sheriff said that justified using every reasonable test before anyone disturbed the ground. The testing would be closed to the press.
The next attempt stalled when a piece of soil-testing equipment was damaged on the way to the site in April. By early May the results were in and they were still mixed: the dogs had not responded consistently, and the soil samples were not conclusive, although, the Associated Press reported, tests of four kinds at five locations had given some corroboration of a possible find of human remains. In early May Lutze approved a limited excavation. “The only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson family,” he said, “is to proceed with limited excavation.” The Park Service prepared to close the ranch to the public for the second time that year.
Not everyone in the county thought it was money well spent. Residents told reporters that Inyo was short of funds, and asked what it would cost to establish whether any bones belonged to a 1969 homicide or to a far older burial, and then to identify a victim and prosecute a case nearly forty years cold. Bishop’s police chief had already put the other side of the argument in one line: there is no statute of limitations on murder.
Watson, serving life for seven of the Tate and LaBianca killings, answered the publicity with a statement on his website. He wrote that he had left Barker Ranch about two weeks before the October arrests, that as far as he knew nobody had been buried there before he left, and that none of the Family members he had spoken to since had ever mentioned bodies at the ranch. “I don’t think there were any more killed, I hope not!” he wrote in reply to a letter from CNN. Manson did not reply.
The dig began on Tuesday, May 20, 2008. A crew of about twenty went in by four-wheel drive, with Lutze, Dostie, scientists from Oak Ridge including Vass and Wise, investigators from the Utah Attorney General’s cold case unit and a forensic consultant, Charles Illsley. The temperature reached 107 degrees and the wind blew hot and dry. Reporters were held to a pool. In Ballarat, where the press trucks parked and camped on private land, the town’s only resident, Rock Novak, told an NPR reporter he had heard there were two bodies up there.
The crews worked through the four sites judged most likely to hold remains (one local report, from Sierra Wave, counts five), digging with shovels and sifting the soil, and camped beside the ranch house overnight. Dostie took a turn with a shovel. On the first day someone found a .38 caliber shell casing on the surface, which officers dismissed as recent. One hole held a pack rat’s underground nest. Another produced fragments of animal bone, an ash pit and stones of the kind used for making arrowheads; park rangers judged it an archaeological site, and the digging there was stopped and the location handed over to the Park Service.
There were no human remains in any of them. By Wednesday afternoon the teams had packed up. Vass told the Associated Press he had not been so frustrated in a very long time. Illsley said the story was not what had been found or not found, but how they had looked.
Lutze closed the matter in a press release in June. Vass’s analysis found that many of the chemical compounds in the soil samples were being produced naturally by plants native to the site, and that the radar and magnetometer anomalies were most likely natural features and root systems. He described the desert at Barker as uniquely complex and said the heat may have affected the markers they were measuring; Lutze added that the chemical readings had fallen as the temperature rose. Several of the tools had been used outside a laboratory for the first time, and magnetic rock and chemically active plants had interfered with them. With no evidence of bodies, Lutze said, there would be no further testing, and the speculation about remains from the Manson era had been put to rest.
The ranch outlived the search by less than a year. Visitors found the house gutted by fire on May 5, 2009; it had been seen intact a few days earlier. At first the Park Service said it did not know whether the fire was accidental or set; it now describes the fire as accidental. Only the stone and concrete walls survived. Manson died in custody on November 19, 2017, at eighty-three.
Dostie did not accept the verdict of the shovels. In 2012 he told the Associated Press, by then retired from the Mammoth Lakes department, that he believed the crews simply had not dug deep enough. No agency took up that view, and no one has excavated at Barker Ranch since.
The question of other victims came back to the Los Angeles Police Department instead, by way of a bankruptcy court in Texas. Watson had gone home to Texas after the killings, and after his arrest there a McKinney lawyer, Bill Boyd, fought his extradition and recorded about eight hours of conversation with him. In 1976 Boyd sold a copy of the eight cassettes to the prison chaplain Raymond Hoekstra, who used them for Watson’s 1978 book, Will You Die for Me?; the $49,000 went toward Boyd’s fees. Boyd died in 2009, his firm went bankrupt, and the tapes turned up in the trustee’s hands. The journalist Tom O’Neill learned of them in 2011 and told Debra Tate, who took the information to the district attorney’s office, and the LAPD became involved.
On March 19, 2012, two LAPD officers, the homicide detective Dan Jenks and Lieutenant Yana Horvatich, wrote to the trustee asking for the originals, saying the department had information that Watson had discussed additional unsolved murders committed by Manson’s followers. The department’s spokesman, Commander Andrew Smith, called the request due diligence and said the story had been blown out of proportion. Watson fought it. In a June 2012 letter to CNN he wrote that there were “no unsolved murders committed by the Manson Family” and nothing on the tapes that was not in his book. In May 2012 the bankruptcy judge, Brenda Rhoades, allowed the trustee to hand them over; Watson appealed. In October the LAPD tried a search warrant, and on October 9 a federal judge, Richard Schell, blocked it. A week later the department disclosed that it had open files on twelve unsolved homicides near places the Family had frequented in Los Angeles, which Smith said shared circumstances with some of the Manson killings. Debra Tate joined the department in pressing for the tapes’ release. In March 2013 Schell ruled that Watson had waived attorney-client privilege when he let the tapes be sold for the book, and the LAPD collected them that year.
Detectives from the Robbery-Homicide Division listened. Smith said afterward that there was no new information worth pursuing, and repeated it in September 2014. In a private briefing for Debra Tate and Anthony DiMaria, a nephew of Jay Sebring, officials said the tapes held no new information about the known murders either. The department has never released what Watson said on them, and the journalist O’Neill has argued that the public deserved to know whether the effort was worth it.
The twelve cases themselves have never been identified officially. Writers have pointed to some of the city’s unsolved killings from those years. The crime writer Michelle McNamara, in a 2013 piece for Los Angeles magazine, set out two: Marina Habe, seventeen, abducted from a West Hollywood driveway on December 30, 1968, and found stabbed off Mulholland Drive on New Year’s Day; and Doreen Gaul, nineteen, and James Sharp, fifteen, found stabbed and beaten in downtown Los Angeles about a year after Habe disappeared. McNamara noted that a link between Habe’s death and the Family had been suspected but never confirmed. No member of the Family has been charged with any killing beyond the nine.
Of the nine killings on the record, Shorty Shea’s was the one in which the body was hidden, and his grave was found because one of the men convicted of killing him drew a map. At Barker Ranch the method ran the other way: dogs, radar and soil chemistry in place of anyone who knew. It produced readings that turned out to be plants and roots, and four holes with nothing in them. When the sheriff closed the file in June 2008, not one of the rumored victims had a name.
• 1930s to 1940: Bluth and Helen Thomason take up the Barker property and build the stone cabin. • 1955: Jim and Arlene Barker buy the ranch and enlarge the house. • Late 1968: the Family arrives in Goler Wash and settles at Barker Ranch. • July to August 1969: Gary Hinman is killed in July; the Tate murders follow on August 9 and the LaBianca murders the next night; Shorty Shea is last seen in late August. • Mid-September 1969: a park loader is burned near the Racetrack. • October 10, 1969: Stephanie Schram and Kitty Lutesinger reach the Highway Patrol; two armed men are arrested. • October 12, 1969: Manson is found under the bathroom sink at Barker Ranch. • November 1, 1969: date given by the Associated Press for Atkins’s jailhouse remark about three people killed in the desert. • November 17, 1969: Ronnie Howard calls the LAPD. • December 1, 1969: Los Angeles announces that the suspects are already in custody in Inyo County. • 1974: Inyo County detectives search Barker Ranch for Shea’s grave. • 1977: Shea’s remains are found at Spahn Ranch after Steve Grogan draws a map. • 1998: deputies dig on a tip from “White Rabbit” and find nothing. • 2007: Paul Dostie and Buster begin visiting the ranch; Institute for Canine Forensics dogs return in November without alerting. • January 2008: the Mammoth Times breaks the story; Debra Tate asks Bishop police about Filippo Tenerelli. • February 2008: the forensic team tests the ranch. • March 28, 2008: Sheriff Lutze orders more testing. • May 20 and 21, 2008: the excavation, ended a day early with no human remains. • June 2008: Lutze closes the matter. • May 5, 2009: the ranch house is found gutted by fire. • March 2012 to 2013: the LAPD seeks and obtains the Watson tapes. • October 2012: the LAPD discloses twelve open homicide files near Family haunts. • September 2014: the LAPD says the tapes held no new information worth pursuing. • November 19, 2017: Manson dies in custody, aged 83.