"How can rocks and sand and silence make us afraid, and yet be so wonderful?"
__ Edna Brush Perkins. The white heat of Mojave, 1922
Manson on the stairs in Independence Courthouse in 1969.
Charles Manson, 24 'family members' arrested
By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
In 1987, while working at a small daily in the desert north of Los Angeles, I pulled a magazine assignment for multi-day tour led by Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, Military, California and Nevada state, county officials, to write and photograph attractions of the desert near Death Valley.
Scotty's Castle, the Panamints, Trona Pinnacles, Ubebehebe Crater, Devil's Golf Course, Amargosa Valley, and of course — Wildrose Canyon (Manson Family headquarter, for a time.).
It was one of the most fascinating, but chilling visits I've ever encountered.
It was here in Independence that 24 members of the Manson Family were jailed in 1969 for possession of stolen vehicles and property. Within days of his preliminary hearing, Charles Manson was indicted in the Tate murders and transferred to Los Angeles.
Barker Ranch is infamous as the last hideout of Charles Manson and his “family” after the gruesome Los Angeles murder spree. Today, little remains except for stone walls and concrete slabs.
"Dick Powell was just starting his workday at the Wildrose Ranger Station in what was then Death Valley National Monument when the call came over the radio: The Michigan loader was on fire. The maintenance crew had been using the brand-new piece of heavy machinery to fix some roads near a dry lakebed called the Racetrack Playa. As they arrived at the job site that morning, flames were still licking at the loader’s wheels. The crew discovered a cut fuel line, an empty gas can and tire tracks leading away from the scene. Arson, " writes Julia Busiek, who worked in national parks in Washington, Hawaii, Colorado and California.
"It was mid-September 1969, another sunny morning in California’s vast inland desert. As the day heated up, rangers poked around the crime scene gathering evidence, then started to fan out across the park, searching for the culprits," Busiek writes.
Powell and his National Park Service colleagues joined forces with a small band of California highway patrolmen and Inyo County sheriff’s deputies. Right away, they found clues that the arson on the Racetrack Playa wasn’t an isolated incident. They discovered a rental car from Los Angeles that had been abandoned after it crashed into a tree. They found campsites strewn with trash, food and tattered clothing. They followed a maze of tire tracks, turning up stolen vehicles and dune buggies hidden in the brush. Powell and his fellow investigators questioned other park visitors, miners and local residents. Had they seen anything out of the ordinary?
"For weeks, the informal alliance of park rangers, patrolmen and deputies roamed across thousands of square miles in and around the park, over mountain passes, through dusty small towns and up rugged canyons. They worked overtime and overnight on stakeouts and long drives to link the growing number of puzzle pieces."
"Gradually, an unsettling picture came into focus. Some park visitors reported that a ragtag bunch of young people who had camped near them had stayed up all night driving dune buggies. The local sheriff questioned and issued warnings to some hippies who were panhandling in town and trying to sell marijuana to high schoolers. Others said they saw a suspicious group crowded into a dingy, abandoned cabin on the old Barker Ranch. Their long-haired leader wore robes and preached weird sermons, and his followers were wandering around the desert naked, "
"The Inyo County sheriff department, California Highway Patrol, and National Park Service Law Enforcement Rangers captured the group in raids on October 10 and October 12, 1969. Manson was caught hiding under the bathroom sink. At the time of his arrest they were unaware of the magnitude of their find. They wanted to prosecute the persons responsible for vandalism within Death Valley National Monument further north, unaware that they had a mass-murder suspect and his followers, according to a Steven V. Roberts story, (Dec 7, 1969). "All the Twists Are Bizarre In the Tate Case." in the New York Times.
Charles Manson in a famous 1969 Associated Press photo as he is escorted to his arraignment on conspiracy-murder charges in Los Angeles.
The name meant nothing to Powell and the other officers. They wouldn’t know until weeks later that they’d just apprehended the most wanted murderer in America.
Earlier that summer, cult leader Charles Manson had directed his followers to murder actress Sharon Tate, businessman Leno Labianca and his wife Rosemary, and six other people in a brutal killing spree. Through confessions, testimonies and trials, it emerged that the random murders were all part of Manson’s plan to instigate an apocalyptic race war, abscond with his followers — who called themselves the Manson Family — to a subterranean paradise hidden somewhere beneath Death Valley, and emerge in the aftermath to rule over the survivors.
By mid-September, most of the Manson Family had fled the city and assembled in decrepit squatters’ camps and mining cabins in and around Death Valley to await the next chapter of Manson’s dark plan. Los Angeles authorities, meanwhile, had made little headway: They’d erroneously ruled out any connection between the Tate and Labianca murders, and detectives soon exhausted their leads.
Terror and speculation gripped Los Angeles that summer and fall, but news of the Tate-Labianca murders hadn’t made much of a splash 250 miles away in Death Valley. Even if rangers had followed the headlines, they wouldn’t have read anything linking the bedraggled kids arrested at the Barker Ranch to the grisly murders in Los Angeles.
But once in custody, one of the women who had murdered Sharon Tate bragged about the crime to her cellmates, who promptly informed the guards. It was the definitive break in the case: On December 1, Los Angeles authorities announced that the suspects in the Tate-Labianca murders were a bunch of hippies led by a delusional prophet named Charles Manson — and they were already in custody in the Inyo County Jail.
“It came as a terrible shock to the Inyo officers when the vicious record of the Family … came out into the open,” wrote Bob Murphy, the park’s superintendent in 1969, in a book called “Desert Shadows” about the Manson Family’s apprehension. “Death Valley could well have had its own blood bath, had the officers provided the opportunity.”
"Manson and four of his followers were eventually convicted of first-degree murder for the deaths of their nine victims and sentenced to death. Their sentences were commuted to life in prison following the passage of a law that outlawed the death penalty in California. Manson died at age 83 in 2017. "
"In the end, the Manson Family misjudged Death Valley National Monument as the perfect place to hide out. It was vast and remote, but they failed to account for the dedication of people like Dick Powell and his fellow desert-dwellers. “My dad was actually the first person to suspect that the arson was part of something much bigger,” Lenox Powell told Busiek.
“That the Manson folks were out raising hell with dune buggies, vandalizing park property and damaging the pristine beauty? That really ticked him off,” she said. “Death Valley is too special and too delicate. My dad’s attitude was: If you’re going to mess with this place, we will hunt you down, and we will find you.”
The first Manson Family forays to Inyo County are reported to be in the fall of 1968, a year before the Barker Ranch raids. Family members were reported to be staying in the Olancha area.
In November of 1968, 82 year old Olancha resident Karl Stubbs was found badly beaten in front of his house. He died soon after, but before he passed, newspaper reports from 1969 indicate Stubbs told deputies that he was assaulted by two young men and two young women who were laughing and giggling throughout the assault. The article states that Stubbs had let the group into his house to give them a glass of water. The house was also ransacked and $40-50 taken.
No killer was ever charged in this case, but a former Inyo County Sheriff Deputy that we spoke to said that for years after that crime, Deputies thought that Karl Stubbs was killed by Manson Family members.
Another possible Manson slaying in the Eastern Sierra, was a man named Fillipo Tennerelli. Tennerelli was found dead in a hotel in Bishop in October of 1969 of a shotgun blast to the head. The death was ruled a suicide at the time, but some highway patrol officers became suspicious of the official cause of death when weeks after the death of Tennerelli, they found his car over the edge of Father Crowley Point, in the Panamint Valley and on the way to Barker Ranch. CHP reports from 1969 say that officers found quite a bit of blood inside the vehicle. More blood was found on the outside of the Volkswagen, leading investigating officers to suspect foul play.
Deborah Tate, the sister of Manson murder victim Sharon Tate, called the Bishop Police to ask about Tennerelli. Bishop Police Chief Kathleen Sheehan reports that Bishop Detectives took a fresh look at the forty year old case, and have so far not found anything to indicate that the case was anything but a suicide. While investigations have not found evidence of murder, Chief Sheehan says that unanswered questions remain. Police have re-opened the case and left it open. Sheehan says that officers are ready to move if anything new comes up.
While these cases may never pan out, Dostie believes that he has found additional support for the possibility of buried bodies at the Barker Ranch. Former Inyo Sheriff Officer John R. Little recently contacted Dostie to tell him that around 1974, Inyo Under Sheriff Jack Gardiner directed him to go to the Barker Ranch to locate four grave sites within 100/150 yards from the main house. At that time they were looking for the body of Family murder victim Shorty Shea, who later turned up buried in Southern California at the Spahn Ranch.
"Why would the Undersheriff think there were four bodies at the Barker? Dostie said he believes that its possible Family member Dianne Snake Lake may have told him that information. Jack Gardiner and his wife adopted Lake after the criminal trials and helped her return to normal life. The former Manson Family member, raised in other cults and given by her parents to the Family, ended up graduating from Big Pine High School. Lake credits the Gardiners for saving her life, Dostie says. He also thinks Lake may have said something to Gardiner," according to Sierra Wave Media, Eastern Sierra News .
On April 6, 1968, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys was driving through Malibu when he noticed two female hitchhikers, Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey. He picked them up and dropped them off at their destination.On April 11, Wilson noticed the same two girls hitchhiking again and this time took them to his home at 14400 Sunset Boulevard.Wilson later recalled that he "told [the girls] about our involvement with the Maharishi and they told me they too had a guru, a guy named Charlie [Manson] who'd recently come out of jail after twelve years."Wilson then went to a recording session; when he returned later that night, he was met in his driveway by Manson, and when Wilson walked into his home, about a dozen people were occupying the premises, most of them young women. By Manson's own account, he had met Wilson on at least one prior occasion: at a friend's San Francisco house where Manson had gone to obtain marijuana. Manson claimed that Wilson invited him to visit his home when Manson came to Los Angeles.
Wilson was initially fascinated by Manson and his followers, referring to him as "the Wizard" in a Rave magazine article at the time. The two struck a friendship, and over the next few months members of the Manson Family – mostly women who were treated as servants – were housed in Wilson's residence.This arrangement persisted for about six months.
Wilson introduced Manson to a few friends in the music business, including the Byrds' producer Terry Melcher. Manson recorded numerous songs at Brian Wilson's home studio, although the recordings remain unheard by the public. Band engineer Stephen Desper said that the Manson sessions were done "for Dennis [Wilson] and Terry Melcher". In September 1968, Wilson recorded a Manson song for the Beach Boys, originally titled "Cease to Exist" but reworked as "Never Learn Not to Love," as a single B-side released the following December. The writing was credited solely to Wilson.[When asked why Manson was not credited, Wilson explained that Manson relinquished his publishing rights in favor of "about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stuff." Around this time, the Family destroyed two of Wilson's luxury cars.
Wilson eventually distanced himself from Manson and moved out of the Sunset Boulevard house, leaving the Family there, and subsequently took residence at a basement apartment in Santa Monica. Virtually all of Wilson's household possessions were stolen by the Family; the members were evicted from his home three weeks before the lease was scheduled to expire.When Manson subsequently sought further contact, he left a bullet with Wilson's housekeeper to be delivered with a threatening message.
Wilson in a 1970 promotional shot for the film Two-Lane Blacktop.
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