Although nearly 40 years have passed since Charles Manson and his "family" of followers terrorized Los Angeles with the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders, the public still cannot seem to get enough about the case. Newspaper men and women live on headlines, and it is a fact of life that stories of murder and mayhem sell newspapers, magazines, and books—the more gruesome the crimes, the better the sales. And of course anytime old Charlie Manson makes it into the news, the public wants to read about it.
According to CNN and the Associated Press, searchers at an old Manson compound at Barker Ranch, located in Death Valley and perhaps best known as Manson’s last hideout where he was found holed up inside the cupboard of a bathroom vanity at the time of his arrest, have found new evidence of two possible gravesites. It’s never been a secret that there might be additional Manson family victims buried in that desolate, rarely visited area—runaways from Southern California, as well as hitchhikers, were known to have visited Manson and his followers at the ranch only to never be seen again. Manson follower Susan Atkins even boasted to a cellmate in 1969 that there were at least three additional bodies buried "out in the desert that they done in," and last month, February 2008, searchers riding all-terrain vehicles made a 20-mile trek from the ghost town of Ballarat to Barker Ranch, carrying with them sophisticated forensic equipment able to detect traces of human decomposition.
The search team was comprised of two lab researchers, Arpad Vass and Marc Wise from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; a police official, Sgt. Paul Dostie, from Mammoth Lakes, accompanied by a dog, Buster, trained to sniff out human remains; and an anthropologist, Daniel Larson, department head of archaeology at California State University, Long Beach, equipped with a magnetic resonance device and a ground penetrating radar device. Sharon Tate’s sister was also among those who made the journey, along with a gold prospector, Emmett Harder, intimately familiar with the area around the Panamint Mountains, who led the search team into an area of the harsh California desert where few people dare to venture. Harder also knew Manson and several of his followers personally—he ate dinner with them at times and occasionally provided work for the men in the group.
Barker Ranch, it should be noted, was one of several hideouts used by Manson and his family after things became too hot for them at Spahn Ranch, an old movie set from where they had made most of their murderous plans, following a crack-of-dawn raid by the police on August 16, 1969. Although 26 arrests had been made that day, those taken into custody had to be released because of a technicality—according to historical data, the date on the warrant used for the raid was incorrect. The police activity that fateful morning had nonetheless forced the family to move on to other hideouts, including Barker Ranch...
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