The dog stopped dead, nose twitching at the base of the old oak tree. Buster had found something before, right here at the spot where the Spawn Ranch once stood. Now he was circling back, pawing at the dirt, refusing to let it go. A second cadaver dog, Kazam, had already alerted in the same area, 20 feet uphill.
Two independent dogs, both trained to detect the scent of human remains, were telling us what we had come to find out: there might be bodies buried here, hidden for more than 40 years. I didn’t come to this case lightly. I’m a police sergeant, but I’ve spent years working cold cases with my partner, Buster, a human remains detection dog. We specialize in finding old graves, the kind that have been forgotten for decades.
When I first heard the stories about the Manson family, the official count was nine murders. But Charlie Manson himself claimed 35. Sandra Good, one of his most devoted followers, said 35 to 40. The question that haunted me was simple: where are the rest of them?
The Spawn Ranch in the hills above Los Angeles was where it all began. In the late 1960s, it was a run-down western movie set, still renting horses to tourists. But by then, Charles Manson and his ragged band of followers had essentially taken it over. George Spahn, the 83-year-old blind owner, was charmed and cared for by a couple of the young women.
He thought they were wonderful. They cooked for him, cleaned for him, slept with him. He had no idea what was really happening under his roof. Manson was 32 when he got out of prison, just in time for the Summer of Love.
He was a small-time crook with a guitar and a con man’s gift for reading people, especially young, lost girls. I was 17 when I first met him, one former follower remembered. I was fascinated by him. It was people loving each other and taking care of each other, and in the middle of all this, there seemed to be a person who cared more than anyone else.
At first, it felt like a game, pretending we were pioneers, pretending we were mountain folk. It was a light atmosphere, warm and safe. But the light didn’t last. Manson’s talk turned dark.
He was obsessed with race war, a coming apocalypse he called Helter Skelter. He preached that the blacks would rise up and slaughter the whites, but that they wouldn’t be smart enough to run the world. They would need him and his followers to take over. The discussions of Helter Skelter became constant.
The longer he waited for the revolution to start, the angrier he got. He started saying someone had to show the blacks how to do it. So, in August 1969, he sent out his killers. Over two nights, they butchered seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, and supermarket tycoon Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.
The crime scene at the Tate house defied belief; the victims were stabbed a total of 102 times. I told her I didn’t have any mercy on her, Susan Atkins later confessed about Sharon Tate, as tears ran down her face at a parole hearing. She asked me to let her baby live, and I told her I had no mercy. But those famous murders were only part of the story.
A few weeks before the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson violently confronted musician Gary Hinman over a drug deal gone bad. He slashed Hinman’s ear, then ordered three family members to kill him. Next was Shorty Shea, a ranch hand who had rubbed Manson the wrong way. Shorty saw what the family was up to and dedicated himself to getting them kicked off the ranch.
Manson blamed him for a police raid and thought he was an informant. Charlie and two others tortured and killed him. Even though Shorty’s body couldn’t be found, Manson and the others were convicted. It took eight years and a confession from one of the defendants to finally locate his remains, buried right down the bank from where he was killed.
Without that tip, his body might have stayed buried forever. If they killed and buried Shorty so close to where they lived, why not others? There were stories, so many stories. Ronald Hughes, a defense attorney who had argued with Manson, disappeared while camping during a break in the trial.
Manson pointed across the counsel table at him and said, “Attorney, I don’t want to ever see you in this courtroom again. ” We never saw him in the courtroom again. A family associate named James Willard was found shot and decapitated in the woods. His wife was found buried in the basement of a house rented by two Manson girls.
A man called Zero supposedly shot himself playing Russian roulette, but the gun was fully loaded. A biker with family ties was found shot dead near Death Valley, his blood-covered vehicle discovered 100 miles away on the road to the Barker Ranch. Even Joel Pugh, Sandra Good’s husband, was found dead in London, his slit throat ruled a suicide. Family member Bruce Davis, convicted in the Hinman and Shea murders, was in London at the same time.
The list went on and on. The family had two homes, two ranches. The Spawn Ranch above Los Angeles, and the Barker Ranch, a remote desert cabin hidden in the hills above Death Valley. They went back and forth between them for months, dodging the law and searching for the entrance to a magical underground city they called the Bottomless Pit.
At Barker, the atmosphere was heavy, paranoid. Charlie started beating people. I know he beat me one night, one follower said. In your mind, you think, maybe he’s doing this for our own good, because your whole belief system is that he knows everything.
There was no authority there. They ran around naked and dug holes to hide equipment, gasoline, and food for Helter Skelter. But I believe they dug graves too. There were stories from Barker.
A girl who didn’t fit in, taken for a walk by Charlie and Tex Watson, returning an hour later without her. A backpacker who stayed a couple of nights and then vanished, his backpack still there. When one of the girls asked where he went, Steve Grogan simply said he got homesick. Susan Atkins told a cellmate that three people were done in out in the desert, three bikers who gave her a ride to Barker after the murders.
Charlie looked at me and said, “What are you doing? Why did you bring them here? ” He took me off in one direction, and Tex Watson, Steve Grogan, and Juan took the other three men in another direction. I never saw those three men again.
Grogan was later arrested at Barker, sleeping on a tarp with a sawed-off shotgun. He told a cellmate that a body was buried beneath that tarp. I brought Buster to Barker Ranch on several occasions. On our first trip, 15 minutes into the search, he alerted.
Over more trips, he identified five distinct sites. I sent soil samples to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where leading forensic scientists analyzed them. Dr. Arpad Vass, a world-renowned expert in human decomposition chemistry, was intrigued enough to launch a full scientific expedition to Barker in April 2008.
The team of scientists used ground-penetrating radar, magnetometers, and soil resistivity measurements. After three days of compiling data, they concluded Buster was on target. The local sheriff was convinced enough to order an official dig. In May 2008, we camped in Charlie’s front yard, sleeping right next to where dead people might be.
It was an eerie feeling. The sheriff’s office limited the number of days and the size of the sites, and the forensic specialists had to follow slow, arduous evidence collection procedures, removing soil about one inch at a time. At one site, they found arrowhead chips within the first foot, and the archaeologist declared it a protected archaeological site, no further digging allowed. At the remaining sites, we dug shallow pits no deeper than three and a half feet, generally about three feet by six.
Nothing was found. I personally would have liked bigger, deeper holes. The sheriff’s office called the results conclusive proof that there were no bodies. We found rocks, we found sage, and we found dirt, they said.
But we had only scratched the surface, literally. Dr. Vass was perplexed. He felt very sure there were bodies there.
I called it a token dig. Back at the Spawn Ranch, we brought in a second cadaver dog to confirm Buster’s alert. Kazam hit on the same area within minutes, slightly uphill from Buster’s original site. Then Buster came back down and alerted at the base of a tree, about five feet from his first alert site.
We noticed a discernible circle of rocks there, and both dogs had shown interest or alerted within that circle. A volunteer probed the soil and dropped through, finding a pocket of soft dirt. When you dig a grave and put the dirt back, it takes a long time to compact. The chemistry from the soil samples matched what we look for in human bone decomposition.
We brought in ground-penetrating radar to narrow the search zone. The GPR technician spotted an anomaly on the monitor, right uphill from where both dogs had alerted, in a direct line down a little gully. We marked the spot and started digging. But we quickly hit a problem: the ground was filled with layers of asphalt and concrete debris, dumped after the old ranch buildings burned down.
We dug down nearly five feet through rubble, and as daylight faded, the property owners asked us to wrap up. We had to call the dig off. We would need heavy equipment to get down to the 1969 ground level, and then several more feet below that to find a grave. It was frustrating, but it didn’t negate the possibility that there are human remains here.
The dogs continue to alert; the chemistry is still good. I’m very encouraged that we are very close to human remains being here. It would just take an extraordinary effort to dig them up using mechanical means. We did everything we could using the science we have today.
It’s still not a perfect science, but the mystery is real. The Manson family called two ranches home, and both have been ravaged by fire, floods, wind, and erosion, permanently altering the landscape. Just the kind of places where a person, a grave, or even very old bones could disappear forever. I believe that there are definitely bodies buried out at Barker, Sharon Tate’s sister Deborah once said.
I believe that because various core members have made reference to that many times over the last 38 years. Our investigation has raised new questions about missing victims yet to be found. The science may be inexact, but the scent in the ground hasn’t faded. Every time one chapter of this case closes, another opens in its place.
And until we dig deep enough, the ground itself holds the answer.
