Tex and a couple others left the ranch heading to the desert, and about a week later, the Straight Satans rode their bikes up to the ranch.
Susan recalls, "His club members wanted him back in Venice and they didn't care what they did to us to get Danny back to Venice ... So they all talked to Danny in private. The men threatened to rape all of us girls, and they told us that if Danny wasn't back in Venice by five o'clock the next night they would come out and kill us all, including the children, and start a fire and burn the ranch down, and we proceeded to look at them and said, `Go ahead. Danny does what Danny wants to do. If Danny wants to stay here that is up to him, you can come out and kill us all, we won't even fight back ..."'
DeCarlo says, "My club brothers - they'd come up there to visit and Charlie would sit down there and run this thing down to them about tearing society apart, and they thought he was nuts and figured he was brainwashing me and they came up here that night to get me, and they were going to take him and wad him up in a rubber ball ... Me and one of my brothers was outside on the boardwalk out front there and everything was pretty well commotion. They took a gun off Clem and was going to tear the place apart, and beat all of them people to pieces, and Sadie said, `We can take care of the Straights like we took care of them five piggies."'
As Manson recalls, he told Clem, "I'll talk to them," but Clem said, "No, they're going to take the place apart."
Manson said Clem told him then, "Here is an idea. We put the gun tucked in your belt, behind you, then you talk to them with your hands spread apart, they will see you don't have any gun and I'll be behind you, so if you need to be backed up, I'll be there."
Then, Charlie says, "We did that and these six big guys came down on us, and I spread my hands and they said they wanted all kinds of bread, they were going to tear down Spahn and the people there. We had about fifty kids up there then and they were all living in the hills and in the caves ... I told him you can't do that, they haven't done anything and he can't want that. And this guy behind me is so scared he isn't behind me anymore, he is off in the corner shaking. And I asked the big guy, and I'm just a little guy, I looked up at him and asked what is it that you want, why do you want to bother us here? And he was going to do it anyway. So I said, `Look man, how much is it worth to you to break everybody up, and break the place down. Is it worth a life?' The guy answered, `Yeah, it's worth a life.' And I took this gun out from behind my belt and laid it down on the ground, and I said, `If it's worth a life, take mine.'
"He didn't take up the gun, and I said, `Mister, that was your judgment, not mine. And I don't ask for anything unless I can offer it.' So I picked up the gun, and I said, `It's your life or mine ..."'
DeCarlo recalls, "It was pretty much in turmoil, I wanted to hurry up and get the people out. I said, `Let's go down and have a beer.' So I made everybody get in all their cars and get on their bikes and shoot down there into the Valley so I could get them away from the ranch. I didn't want them to start no trouble up there." There was another reason they didn't want "no trouble" at the ranch. The sheriff's deputies had been coming around, "snooping, buzzing," and finally decided to make some arrests.
About 6 a.m. the following morning the deputies came in what appeared to Manson as "an army of law - raiding the ranch." Within a short time, they had arrested everyone except George Spahn. The first to enter the vans were Manson, Clem and DeCarlo, handcuffed to one another. Then Susan, along with twenty-seven others of the straggly group, was transported to the Sheriff's Department in Malibu where they crowded the cells. Some were later transferred to the Los Angeles County jail, held on various charges from prostitution to possession of narcotics.
Although some marijuana was found, most of the Family were held for only seventy-two hours. "The night I got out," DeCarlo says, "I went back to the ranch. About four or five days after that I went up to Death Valley. I drove the truck up there."
After the Family was released, Wallie Sellers recalls, she visited the ranch to see Charlie. He wasn't there, she says, but Sadie, Leslie, Katie, and other girls "were sitting out there in this freezing cold place, and they had absolutely no feelings of guilt or anything - no feelings of anything, except this mask of childishness."
According to Foster, this is when Charlie "lowered the boom around the ranch ... Inside this little family inside the bigger family, you had these vibes happening, and what Charlie tuned in on was that his enemy - Shorty Shea - had brought the law on them. And then they were figuring Danny DeCarlo and his fucking Straights were going to get everyone nailed, so Charlie made the decision to get rid of Shorty, who he knew knew too much about what'd been going down ... You know, the situation with the dead piggies ..
DeCarlo was quick to learn of Shorty's shortcomings, and his disappearance from the ranch - as though this was a warning directly aimed at Danny.
"They got a bunch of bayonets and a sword," Foster says, and managed to get Shorty off by himself down the trail. Each one had a razorsharp knife and they went to work on him fast - each of them sticking him, and carving him up like he was a piece of meat on a table. He didn't do any screaming cause he went down fast, though it took them a little while to dismember his body. They cut off the arms and the legs, and one of the legs they cut in half, I think, and then they cut his head off ..
"Cutting off the arms and the head was so they wouldn't know who the body was whenever it was found. What they did - covering it over with leaves and brush at the time, and planned on getting back to bury the pieces separately - some of them they got in garbage sacks - that's what I was told. The whole thing was a joke - and Charlie had a ball having Shorty's dead body taken apart piece by piece."
The point was then to get the dismembered corpse to decompose as quickly as possible, so the girls went out to shop for a sack of lime.
A few days earlier, Linda had left the ranch. She had borrowed one of the cars and drove off, leaving her baby daughter behind. A day later she reached New Mexico, hoping to find her husband, Bob. But the car broke down outside Albuquerque, and Linda hitchhiked north to Taos.
Meanwhile, up in Death Valley, DeCarlo says, Tex was there, but he didn't see any girls at the Barker ranch. "I was the first one to get out," he says. "Manson came in a car, all the young girls were with him. All the younger ones ... We was going to stay at the Barker ranch, but someone was living on the Barker ranch now, and you know, Charlie couldn't live there. One of the girls, Katie Meyer, her grandmother owned the Meyer ranch about a quarter of a mile down the road, down the little wash there, and when we first got to Death Valley we went over there to the Meyer's ranch and stayed there ... I was there for about four days, and when I left Death Valley that was it." DeCarlo then rejoined the Straight Satans in Venice, while others leaving Spahn ranch drifted northeast to the desert.
Charlie says, "Nobody wanted Death Valley. I said, I'll take it. Pretty soon I had about thirty or forty kids, and no one wanted them. They were kids that their parents didn't want, that society didn't want. I wanted them, like I wanted Death Valley." He scooped them up, it seemed, like salvaging garbage. They settled onto the wasted property in the dust and heat on the edge of Death Valley, hoping to live as well as the lizards and desert animals. Some envisioned it as "perfect," as perfect as everything in Manson's philosophy. Between sitting on rocks and scavenging in the old house, in the dusty cupboards, for whatever goods could be found, Skip scribbled writings. In one note she described the setting:
"A stone house sat in a valley, up a wash. It was a house traditionally open to passersby, miners, and prospectors, yet a couple of the girls had, a year previous, gained permission from its owner to live in and care for it. They had returned from the city at the end of the summer. All of us came flocking in to the desert at various times, stopping by the house, using it as a get-together for singing, and a warm place for babies, and a water hole."
While Bobby Beausoleil appeared for his preliminary hearing in the Hinman murder, Joe Brockman, released from jail
, joined Manson and the Family in the desert. He doesn't remember Goler Wash as being as pleasant as Skip's description. "That's where life was stripped down to being no different than the animals around us ... We roamed in small packs across the desert floor and all through the hills, hiding what we could and stashing things for later. Charlie had changed. He was now like a hard piece of bone and we were all puppets. We knew it, each of us, but the strange part was that we couldn't conceive of another way of living. He gave me the name `Scorpion.' It was complete. My past had been amputated and my future was happening at the moment. We carried knives and ate with the dogs. I humped girls on rocks or took them standing in the brush. Later, we built secret dugouts, and had supplies stashed in various caves throughout the desert."
For Manson, it was "a whole new world ... Before, I had never been around many animals in my life, being locked up. In the desert I got to looking at the coyotes, and I got to be close around with the dogs and the snakes, and the wild rabbits, goats, and mules ... they'd roam around the desert in small packs, and in herds that sometimes were only maybe a couple of burros, four or five in a pack, and they were afraid of man. You could tell he'd been around and cracked sticks on them, and beat on them whenever he could, and they were afraid of anyone going close to them. But I could do it. I'd approach them and I would sit down, and with all the strength I had I'd begin to cry out loud so that they could hear me. Just weeping and sobbing, and pretty soon one of the mules would come sort of close, then closer, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Then when he was right in front of me, pretty soon he'd reach over, he'd rub his nose against me, nudging me as if trying to understand. Very slowly, hardly making any motion at all, I'd touch him and before long he understood that I could love him and he'd be willing to do whatever he could for me, because he had it in his mind that I did love him and meant him no harm, and we were the same.
"Some of us went around the desert for weeks trying to get as close as we could to all the animals, to try to learn from them how to live out there, how they did it, and to be part of them, you know ...
Charlie told his followers no animals were to be killed in the desert.
"In Goler Wash," Carl Foster says, "even an insect or a scorpion that is deadly, that crawled up and sat on your arm ... if you brushed it off you were going against what Charlie wanted. He said, you have to let them crawl on you and you have to learn from them. They are the same as you. We're all here together ..."
On one occasion, Foster was walking through the desert and a rattlesnake crossed his path. He was about to jump aside but Charlie said, "No! Sit down and look him in the eye." Foster squatted down and tried to conceal whatever fear he experienced.
"After a while," Foster says, "the rattler stopped rattling and he didn't strike or come any further in my direction. It was like he knew I was going to just sit there and do what I was doing. Then he turned the way he had been going and went off real slow." Foster believes Charlie caused the snake to go the other way. "He had power over the animals, like he could hypnotize them ..
Freida King arrived in Death Valley with several other girls. "We always wanted to go to the desert," she says. "At first, we camped up behind the Meyer's ranch and I slept with the baby ... A lot of us slept in the bus . . ." Then, about living at the Barker ranch a short ways down the wash: "We lived outside, we just wandered all over the desert. I don't think anybody ever left to buy groceries. I think more people came and brung them up."
One of the young men says, "The women around the place were treated like dirt, it was the dogs that got the real good treatment."
Charlie says, "Don't treat the dogs like people. Treat the dogs like dogs. They are better than people."
"I remember Charlie," the boy continues, "how he'd sit sometimes for hours at a time, just looking into the face of one of the dogs, feeling their teeth with his fingers and talking to them. Whispering ..
The dogs would eat first, and then the men would eat whatever the dogs had left behind. Then the women would get what was left over from the men.
"None of us were really ourselves out in the desert," Foster says. "We were just reflections of Charlie. We were him and it was impossible for us to think of life without him."
The group soon spread through Death Valley in clusters of campsites and makeshift dugouts, and these shifted from day to day. Like burros, they roamed in small packs through washes and hideaways, and stashed whatever they could find where they might need it later. Stolen cars were camouflaged to become clumps of dried brush or boulders. Tiny lookout stations were linked from one point to another with portable phone lines connecting a few army surplus field phones. Unless they had run out of gasoline, the idea was to be able to mobilize within minutes. Manson learned the importance of water. He says, "Lots of times I'd camped out all night, sometimes for days at a time. I remember that on one of the first times I'd stayed out more than a day, I set up camp at a water hole, and then when I had sacked out for the night, I began to hear the coyotes howling and I noticed that it was not an ordinary howl, but going on and on, a peculiar kind of howling. Then it was like a flash, as though they were talking to me, telling me they were thirsty, needed water and I'd put myself right at that spot where they came for their water. They don't carry canteens and there are no drinking fountains in Death Valley so I put my gear together and camped off away from the water hole, oh, maybe a quarter of a mile, sort of up on a slope and I could still see the hole down there. After that they grew quiet and pretty soon they began to come down out of the desert to their water hole. And I knew, when they were howling again, only it was a lot different, that they were thanking me. That's what they wanted.
"I never carried a canteen, because I had stashed a canteen here, and a canteen over there, and they'd find me or I'd find them. They were put around in different places. Everybody would be so worried about me, `Where is your canteen? How are you going to get water?' But I knew that I'd find it, and it would be out there waiting for me when I needed it. That part of the desert was mine. And I knew it. If they chased me they'd have to carry a canteen, they'd have to carry a gun, and they'd have to carry a pistol, they'd have to have four other guys with them. And my canteens would be out there."
As to Charlie's commands, Foster says, "He had been saying that ours' was a democratic setup - that everyone had a voice ... but that he was receiving instructions from God. No one moved unless Charlie knew about it. You woke up and you didn't know what to do until he told you what to do. And in what he said - there would be certain words he'd implant and these words and the gestures he'd make would reach right into our subconscious minds ..."
It was as if Manson had changed after the killings in Los Angeles. Out there he wasn't any kind of "saintly" father. About that time, a visitor recalls, it was as though "the electricity was pouring out of him. His hair was standing on end. His eyes were wild. He was like a cat that was caged. He was like an animal ..."
"Old Buck," the itinerant handyman, had settled on the Barker ranch before Manson's arrival. Calling himself a "longtime student of human nature," he said he carefully watched Manson while he lived around the Goler Wash area. "There were snakes all over the desert. They got in the cabin and everywhere ... They picked up snakes in the house and carried them outside and turned them loose."
The man kept apart from the Family, though on occasion he discussed Manson with other miners in the area. "Manson believes that he - and all human beings - are God and the Devil at the same time. He believes all human beings are all part of each other. You see what that means," Buck says, "it means that human life has no value. If you kill a human being, you are just killing a part of yourself so it's all right .. .
This sort of power takes a long time to work an effect ... Motions are tied to emotions. Certain motions create certain responses if you know how to use them."
One day in September, Boyd Taylor, a U.S. commissioner, was driving through Saline Valley with his wife and son in a camper truck. "We
drove to the Warm Springs and camped that night. But about two o'clock that morning we noticed headlights approaching and two vehicles drove up, one a very streamlined dune buggy and another a Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle ... I was awake so I leaned out of the door of my camper and talked to the driver of the dune buggy [Manson]. He asked about the Warm Springs and I told him there was an Upper Warm Springs, and he said they'd go up there and try to find it."
The next morning, Taylor says, the two cars returned and Manson and "another tall, thin gentleman walked over to where we were and talked to us ... His [Manson's] hair was long and he wore a pair of shorts, no other clothing. The cars were very, very dusty; so were the occupants." Taylor said Manson told him he was unable to find the Springs. "I asked him about the dune buggy. I said, "That's a pretty fancy dune buggy. Did you have it built or did you buy it that way?" He said, no, he had bought it already made that way and that he was with the Beach Boys. He said he wrote arrangements for the Beach Boys ... that he was a drummer, also. He made $50,000 that last year and was just taking it easy and enjoying himself. He said they were going to meet some friends up at the `race track,' a big, flat dried lake area, and try out the dune buggies and have a race ...
Near the Barker ranch, Joe says, and above the wash, "I lived in one dugout above the ranch site and slept during the day." As a "sentry," he searched the area through binoculars - for an invasion by the law. "Sometimes I'd wake up with a snake near my face, trying to get close to my heat. Soon I could pick them up without fear. I milked a couple of rattlers and kept them around me on my night patrols. Me and Charlie stole five-gallon cans of gasoline from the rangers and hid them in another dugout across the wash. It was primarily a stash of auto stuff and cool enough to store the gas." At that time, it appeared that Joe and those in his dugout were preparing for war. They had weapons, Joe says, and "Charlie had our minds at his disposal. He had convinced me that he was getting messages from God ... and these messages became our thinking process - like tape in a computer."
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 18