Sharon Tate: A Life

by Ed Sanders

  If the stories circulated by disaffected members are to be believed, key Family members tortured Shorty and, during the torture, tampered with his mental state, as if they were conducting experiments. Manson and his adepts deliberately spread the story that Mr. Shea had been beheaded. Not true. The entire core Family was involved in the offing of Mr. Shea. Some killed, some buried, some burned his stuff, some packed his gear. “By that time, we all had our job to do,” Leslie Van Houten remarked, discussing her assigned task of burning Shorty’s clothes. They buried him during the night down the creek by the railroad tunnel at the back of the ranch, in a crude, temporary, brush-topped grave. The next day several girls reburied Shorty in broad daylight. The second time, his body was placed down the road toward Simi, and during the years thereafter the sheriff’s office occasionally bulldozed the area looking for it. (It was finally located years later.)

  By early September, Manson began moving his cult to Death Valley. Somehow, he raised enough money to pull it off. It’s not clear how, or from what source. (Did he receive a hefty sum for carrying out a contract killing?) He visited the owner of the Barker Ranch, located high up in the Panamint Mountains reachable from the Death Valley floor by an axle-busting four-wheel-drive trail up Goler Wash, and got the permission of the owner to stay a few days at Barker. The Family stole about seven dunebuggies to replace some of those that were confiscated in the August 16 raid. Charlie drove seven young female members to the mouth of Goler Wash, then dashed up the dynamited waterfalls seven miles to the Barker Ranch. Charlie went back and forth between the Spahn Ranch and Goler Wash in various rented and stolen vehicles.

  Ultimately about thirty or forty of the Family were ensconced at Barker. Some settled at the Myers Ranch, near the Barker Ranch, owned by a Manson follower’s grandparents, and at an abandoned gold mine along the edge of Goler Wash, as well as in other cabins.

  When Manson’s recently acquired love-mate Stephanie arrived at the Barker-Myers Ranch area, he handed her a knife. During those days he taught everyone lessons in throat-slitting. He mentioned decorating the Barker Ranch with human skulls, after boiling the skulls in large kettles to demeat them. “We were all sitting around and he asked if we could do it,” Stephanie later remembered. “He asked if it came down to it, could we do it and everyone said, ‘Oh yeah’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah.’” At first, Stephanie recalled that she asked Manson, “‘How? I don’t really know how,’ he used me as a live demonstration—how you cut from here to there,” indicating throat slit. “Then he said, ‘You have to know how to hide everything so no one will find it.’ We were down in some canyon somewhere.”

  Manson talked about General Rommel and desert campaigning. He was going to be the Desert Fox of Devil’s Hole at the head of a flying V of dune buggies, racing across the desert for plunder. Manson spray-painted his stolen dune buggy and then, while the paint was wet, threw dirt on the paint to create a brown camouflage effect.

  They talked a lot about taking over the Death Valley towns of Shoshone and Trona. Manson felt a bit of hostility toward all the desert people, wanting to ping them one by one. Manson talked about terrorizing the police. He talked about killing approaching policemen, removing their bodies from their clothes, then leaving the uniforms and shoes and hats neatly arranged on the desert ground, as if the bodies had somehow just disappeared from their uniforms.

  Everybody, even when nude, wore a hunting knife strapped to the leg or waist. The Family was so completely into gore that everybody was armed, not only in fear of the police perhaps, but also in apprehension of possible spontaneous slashing from fellow Family members. Charlie liked to comment on those whom he considered the weak links in the Family. The girls must have been desperate not to be thought of as weak links. Weak links could find themselves on the receiving end of a slash.

  And so it went with the Hole in the Universe Gang. For about two-and-a-half weeks the Family swarmed all over Goler Wash and the southwest part of the Death Valley National Monument. Then Manson flipped out and attracted the attention of the park rangers and the California Highway Patrol, so the Family had to go into hiding. But that’s why they went to the desert, to hide. Now it was like hiding within the hideaway.

  If they hadn’t roamed the Death Valley area as marauders, the Mansonites could have lived in that wilderness for years without any trouble. As one of the policemen who arrested them in Goler Wash said, “You could hide the Empire State Building out there and no one could find it.”

  Late Thursday night or early Friday morning, September 18–19, Manson led his troop out of the vastness called the Saline Valley over the bumpy wilderness trail up the mountain pass, the single headlight on his dune buggy his only guide. At the very top of the pass that would have led him down to the Hunter Mountain campsite, he stopped. Right in front of him were two large wide holes in the dirtway, evidently scooped out by some nearby earth-moving equipment.

  Kitty Lutesinger said that Manson, in crazed paranoia, thought the authorities had deliberately dug the holes in his path so that he would crash his dune buggy into them! Manson ordered her and key Family member Gypsy to fill up the large shallow gouge-outs with rocks and dirt. As they did this, according to Snake Lake, Scotty, Tex, Manson, and Clem Grogan removed some gasoline tanks and a grease gun from a nearby and expensive Clark Michigan skip-loader. Then they leaked out the fuel oil, poured some gasoline on the wires and the engine, then set it ablaze. The Family raced away and the rest of the night was spent in a roaring roam-frenzy of careening dune buggies.

  The burning of the Michigan loader enraged the rangers at the Death Valley National Monument, who owned it. Relentlessly the park rangers, the California Highway Patrol, the Inyo County sheriff’s department and, to a lesser degree, agents of the California Fish and Game Commission would begin to track down this uncool group of murderers.

  It’s always a mistake when a guru makes a claim or a prediction that can never happen. Manson made a big one that fall. He couldn’t come up with The Hole. His followers were counting on Manson leading them to it. It was one thing to rap about it around bonfires to one’s bedoped disciples; it was another to produce it, especially a Hole with such astounding attributes. According to Tex Watson, this underground paradise zone came outfitted with twelve magical trees bearing wondrous fruit and an underground lake that gave everlasting life. There was a different tree for every month of the year. Plus, most important of all, the sub-desert paradise would have provided a hiding place from the law. Therefore that fall, the dune buggy battalion went Hole-batty. Some hungered for the magical trees of The Hole, others hungered for a safe place from which to maraud forth. There were a few clues, such as great beflittings of black bats that swarmed into Goler Wash at dusk, which the M group was certain had flitted up from the Abyss. They searched everywhere, crawling into old mine shafts, looking for the vein to paradise. But no Hole, no molten Hershey bar factory beneath the Amargosa River. “It began to look,” Tex Watson later commented, “as if the Abyss would be harder to find than we’d first thought.”

  On September 29, Park Ranger Richard Powell and California Highway Patrol Officer James Pursell visited the Barker Ranch area. Manson may have spotted the officers, because two days later he handed Tex Watson a shotgun and told him to squeeze himself into a little crawlspace above the slatted porchway at the side door of the Barker Ranch and wait for Officer Pursell and Ranger Powell to return, then kill them. Watson waited up there until the morning of October 2, at which time he decided, he later wrote, he was no longer going to kill for M. “Even though I was willing to die for Charlie, I was getting tired of breaking my back for him. It seemed as if every day there was less chance of finding the Pit, no matter how much we drove around over the desert, no matter how many abandoned mine shafts we crawled through. We were short of food, we were allowed only one cup of water per day and, worst of all the drugs were running out.”

  Tex rummaged through the Family’s clothes pile to pick an outfit in which he coul
d split into the real world, then drove in a 1942 Dodge Power Wagon down Goler Wash to the Panamint Valley and, running low on gas, attempted a shortcut across the large semidry salt lake toward the Trona Road, where he mired down in the salty mush and soon ran out of gas.

  He spent the night sleeping by the side of the road. The next morning, a passing motorist took Watson to the San Bernardino railroad station and dropped him off. Watson said he was going back to Texas, where his parents owned a chain of supermarkets. When he returned to the commune, he was going to bring a truckload of groceries because that was what the commune needed most.

  Watson’s parents wired him money, and he went home to Texas. He was there for a while, then fled to Hawaii, then back to California, first in Los Angeles, then back to Death Valley, where a prospector told him that in the middle of the night the entire Family, including Manson, had been arrested. Watson’s parents again wired him money, whereupon he returned to Copeville, Texas, where he seems to have maintained a routine existence, dating a doctor’s daughter, till the end of November, when he was picked up by his cousin, the sheriff of Collins County, Texas, for murder.

  When Watson left, Manson was worried and ordered lookout posts and “dugouts” dug where girls hovered under tarps, always on the look for danger. Manson would beat his followers, and with food and water low and intimidation on the rise, girls kept escaping.

  Deputies and park rangers in the meantime staked out the Barker Ranch, gradually learning that the Family was only on hand during the night; they disappeared at dawn. Therefore, on October 9, in the dead of night, the police approached the Barker Ranch from two directions: one up the steep and difficult creek/semi-road of Goler Wash and the other from the Striped Butte Valley over Mengel Pass and down the long seven and a half miles to the ranch. The California Highway Patrol gave walkie-talkies to these two advancing parties so that once they got close enough they could communicate with each other. The two parties planned to converge on the Barker Ranch at dawn.

  The party of officers proceeding from the Striped Butte Valley parked their four-wheel-drive vehicles at the summit of Mengel Pass, then walked down the steepness toward the ranch.

  Just before dawn the two teams of officers achieved walkie-talkie contact. The team of officers arriving from the west, from the Panamint Valley up Goler Wash, encountered, sleeping on the creek bed between blankets, Clem Grogan and a youth named Rocky. Clem’s sixteen-inch sawed-off shotgun and twenty-four rounds of ammunition lay next to him.

  The officers awakened them and put them under arrest for having a sawed-off shot-gun and for arson and grand theft auto. The officers then left their four-wheel-drive vehicles in a small draw not far from the Barker Ranch. One officer positioned himself high on the south slope across from the Barker Ranch up above what was called “the bunker.” Shortly after dawn, Sadie/Susan Atkins, wearing a red hat, emerged from the hidden bunker to relieve herself. She was evidently spotted by the cops. The cops, according to the girls, fired a shotgun blast on top of the metal hidden bunker roof, causing the rest of the girls to come out.

  Arrested from the dugout were Leslie Van Houten, using the name Louvella Alexandria; Sadie/Susan Atkins, using the name Donna Kay Powell; Gypsy, using the name Manon Minette; and Brenda/Nancy Pitman, using the name Cydette Perell. Inside the ranch house, the cops arrested Patricia Krenwinkel, using the name Marnie K. Reeves. Also captured was one Robert Ivan Lane, aka Soup Spoon, and they picked up Linda Baldwin, aka Little Patti. Some of the girls were nude, as noted on the arrest report: “When the initial group of female prisoners were arrested, several of the females disrobed. Several of them urinated on the ground in the presence of the officers. They also undressed and changed clothes in the presence of the officers.”

  Proceeding north in the small draw between the Barker Ranch and nearby Meyers Ranch, the police raided the “spike camp,” as they called it, where they took into custody Sandy Good, who was carrying Susan/Sadie’s baby Zezo; Ouish, using the name Rachel S. Morse and carrying Sandy Good’s one-month-old baby Ivan; and Mary Ann Schwarm, aka Diane Von Ahn. One of the babies had a large cut on his face, and all were burnt raw from the sun.

  There was also a “list” allegedly found in Death Valley by law enforcement, which marked out those who were to die. It is not unusual for cults to have a hate list or enemy list. In one report the Family’s list contained thirty-four names of stars and businessmen to be killed. Included in the list of enemies were those who had helped out in the past but had ceased to aid them.

  A mysterious pack, which may have confirmed visual aids for the preparation of the “list,” was taken into evidence by the LAPD from the Family material seized by the police in Inyo County. The “army type pack,” as the police report read, contained “64 movie and TV star magazines, 3 bound library books, 1 canvas bag marked ‘Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas,’ ‘No. 3,’ (money type bag), savings account pass book. . . . with name of John C. Farnsworth, Los Gatos, California . . . , 1 paperback book Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.” Was this Manson’s pack? Was this pack the one Manson brought with him from Los Angeles and did he fib to attorney Paul Fitzgerald?

  If movie magazines were in the pack, for ideas on whom to kill, what was a bag belonging to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas doing in the pack? This leads to speculation that it might have contained money as payment for a hit.

  California Highway Patrol Officer Pursell, Park Ranger Powell, and another ranger went back in to the Barker Ranch area on Sunday, October 12, to look for more dune buggies and check out the various family campsites, looking for illegality. A motorist informed them that a truck had been abandoned in Goler Wash. The officers located the Chevrolet truck still loaded down with drums of gasoline and supplies. They decided that unarrested car-thief nudists, perhaps even Manson himself, had reentered the Barker Ranch area.

  So Pursell talked over the radio to other officers. It was decided that then was the time to noose Jesus/the Devil himself. About five o’clock that afternoon police entered the area and took up positions near the Barker Ranch. Meanwhile other officers were on the way from Ballarat, an outpost on the valley near the entrance to Goler Wash.

  From their lookout on a ridge up above the Barker swimming pool, Officer Pursell and Ranger Powell saw Manson and a couple of other people walk up the gulch and enter the house. Manson was carrying a guitar case. Another Ranger worked his way around to the front of the ranch so that he could meet the officers who were coming up the Goler Wash from Ballarat. They could hear laughter and conversation from the house, so they knew there were a number of people inside.

  The chief ranger for the Death Valley National Park, plus two representatives of the Inyo County sheriff’s office arrived and radioed Officer Pursell, who went down the hill in the back of the ranch, then stealth-stalked in under the ivy-trellised side porch, kicked open the side door, and said, “Stick ’em up.” He went along the wall, using it as a cover in case any of them should care to attack him, and he told them to put their hands on top of their heads. In slow-motion defiance, the Mansonites complied.

  “I ordered the subjects out backwards one at a time where Deputy Ward took charge of them,” Pursell told me later. Once again, as in the Spahn Ranch raid of August 16, the officers wondered: “Where was Jesus?”

  It was about six-thirty in the evening, and seven disheveled followers of Manson had been hauled out of the ranch house and handcuffed. The quick desert darkness was at hand. Officer Pursell carried the single candle that had been on the supper table around the four-room cabin. He stopped at the small blue bathroom with a poured concrete bathtub and a small blue lavatory. He held the candle’s flame near a little cabinet beneath the lavatory and spotted protruding hair. Then he saw wiggling fingers and he said, “All right, come on out, but slowly.” A small person uncoiled from the tiny cabinet and said, “Hi. I’m Charlie Manson.”

  Manson was then held in the Inyo County Jail.

  Kitty Lutesinger,
pregnant girlfriend of Robert Beausoleil, had been arrested during the Barker raids. When Sergeant Paul Whiteley and Deputy Charles Guenther, LA County homicide investigators working on the Hinman murder learned about Lutesinger, they drove right away to Inyo County and brought her back to the San Dimas sheriff’s station for interrogation.

  When police officers mentioned the words “gas chamber,” it caused some Family associates to talk, and talk plenty. In the beginning, the officers suggested to Kitty that she was one of the girls that had accompanied Beausoleil to Gary Hinman’s house. She replied that the girls were “Sadie and Mary” but she was definitely not one of them. She further alleged that they had “screwed up” at the Hinman residence, being sent there by Manson only to acquire money.

  Another possible reason that may have caused people such as Kitty to talk was that Manson uttered a few threats over the phone directed against “weak links,” either when Clem Grogan had called him down at the Spahn Ranch after the first arrests at Barker or when Manson called from the Inyo County Jail after he was arrested. Kitty really was worried for her life and that of her parents (who lived not far from the Spahn Ranch).

  The next morning, October 13, Whiteley and Guenther flew from the Ontario, California, airport to Independence to speak with Sadie/Susan Atkins. They brought with them photos of the Family. The Inyo County Jail was so packed with Family members that interrogation was difficult, so the officers escorted Sadie/Susan to the Lone Pine substation of the Inyo County sheriff’s department for Q and A.

  During skillful questioning, Sadie/Susan admitted participation in the Hinman murder and shortly thereafter even did some babbling about Shorty Shea. But she declined to tape-record the twenty-five minute session. Then the officers flew with Miss Atkins back to Ontario, whereupon they took her to the San Dimas sheriff’s station and booked her for suspicion of murder.