In early September, a month after the Tate and the ensuing LaBianca murders, Manson moved his troops to Death Valley. Manson talked about General Rommel and desert campaigning. He was going to be the Desert Fox of Devil Hole at the head of a flying V of dune buggies racing across the desert for plunder. They stole a bunch of dune buggies, about seven in number, and a red Toyota. Manson spray-painted his command dune buggy and then, while the paint was wet, threw dirt on the paint to create a brown camouflage effect. Charlie drove back and forth in the various stolen cars, personally escorting his family to the desert paradise. There ultimately were thirty or forty humans living there.

At first the family set up camp at the Meyers Ranch, a lush, foliage-covered forty acres of patented land, purchased for a side of bacon by family member Cathy Meyers’ grandparents from a legendary local miner named Seldom Seen Slim.

Sometime later in September Manson visited Mrs. Arlene Barker, the owner of the nearby Barker Ranch up Goler Wash, at her home in Sunland. Manson asked Mrs, Barker if he could stay a few days and she gave her permission.

The Barker Ranch is encircled by a fence. Inside the fence are deposited forty or fifty years of desert detritus. There were several collapsed trucks, a chicken coop, plus, upon the hill in back, an old pear-shaped concrete swimming pool. There was part of an old mining-ball grinder on the property, the body of an old World War II plane, wing tanks and bits of ejected cockpits. Constant use of Goler Wash especially by dune buggies made it impossible to negotiate even with a four-wheel drive because the spinning tires would throw all the gravel out, exposing the boulders.

The main Barker ranch house is an L-shaped building with a kitchen equipped with stove and refrigerator. The electricity was not working at the time. There was a concrete bathtub and shower and a small medicine cabinet over the lavatory. Beneath it was the twenty-two-inch cabinet in which Manson would later be found hiding.

The family talked a lot about taking over the Death Valley town of Shoshone and also 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 leg or waist. The family was so completely into gore that everybody was armed, not so much in fear of the police, but 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 a weak link. For weak links could find themselves on the receiving end of a satanic ritual. Accordingly, the behavior in the desert was brutal and freakish. For instance, one witness reports Gypsy as being absolutely fearless with regard to handling live rattlesnakes: "She’d just pick it up and hold it and stare at it. . . . It was really far out." No, thank you.

And there were deaths. There are supposed to be two boys and a girl buried about eight feet deep behind the Barker Ranch. They filmed some of their despicable activities also with equipment stolen from the NBC truck. Several witnesses have described what might be termed the Barker Ranch chop-stab dance, where they danced in a circle, then pretended to go into slash-frenzies-attacking trees, rocks and one another with their knives. God knows what else they shot with their stolen NBC camera.

Torture seemed to comprise the substance of most of the conversation about Manson in the final few days before his capture. "He got wild when he was out there. I don’t know, he was just beating on Snake all the time-or everybody," Kitty Lutesinger remembered a year later. Kitty, a pregnant, redheaded runaway from Chatsworth, California, said Manson did not like her because she looked too much like his mother. When asked about threats, she replied, "Oh, the usual stuff, like, ‘We’ll hang you from the trees and cut out your tongue,’ or ‘We’ll tie you up to a tree and put honey on you and let the ants crawl all over you.’"

One night, Kitty committed the unpardonable transgression of falling asleep during a fireside rap of Charlie’s and he punched her in the face, knocking her into the ashes.

When Stephanie Schram, a member of the class of 1969 of Anaheim High School, who was five-months pregnant and whom Charlie had picked up just hours before the Tate murders, arrived in the desert, Charlie gave her a knife. Charlie gave everyone instructions in throat slitting. There was talk of decorating the Barker Ranch with skulls. Manson talked about boiling the skulls in large kettles to de-meat them. "We were all sitting around and he asked if we could do it. He asked if it came down to it could we do it and everyone said, ‘Oh yeah,’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah,’" Miss Stephanie remembered ten months later when she was interviewed just prior to a class in dog grooming. (After studying dog grooming she recently opened her own dog-grooming school.) She said, "When I said, ‘How? I don’t really know how,’ he used me as a live demonstration-how you cut from here to there" - indicating throat gash. "Then he said, ‘You have to know how to hide everything so no one will find it.’ We were down in some canyon somewhere."

A few days later Stephanie had a conversation with Manson about going back to her sister’s house in San Diego. The farouche young lady was standing holding a rifle in her arms. "I guess I looked homesick so Charlie asked me if I wanted to go home." She said that it was true that she was homesick. Manson then told her, according to her testimony at the trial, that he‘d give her one more chance to go home. Then he had one of his anger spasms. "He took the rifle and hit me in the head a couple of times and told me to forget about going home."

Months later she was asked by interviewers why she tolerated a person punching her in the face with a rifle butt. She replied, "I never wanted him to hit me, but I wanted to be made to see in a different way. And the only way Charlie knew how to make me see in a different way was to do that."

One of the barriers preventing total takeover of Goler Wash was Paul Crockett, a scientologist gold miner from Carlsbad, New Mexico. Manson hated Crockett because he had enticed two of Charlie’s male followers away from him: namely Brooks Posten and Paul Watkins. Crockett and his new-found disciples were living in a tarpaper-roofed cabin located at the Barker Ranch itself.

Manson told Brooks Posten that he still belonged to Manson and that he was released from none of his agreements. Manson tried the timeworn "Kill you-kill me" routine with Brooks, handing him his knife saying, "Brooks, kill me." And when Brooks refused, Charlie seized the knife and said, "Then I can kill you."

Manson had a remaining grudge against a sheriff’s deputy from Shoshone, who had led a raid against the Barker Ranch in February, 1969, after several of the family had given his stepdaughter some marijuana. Posten claimed that Charlie said that if Posten loved Charlie, then Posten would walk to Shoshone and kill the deputy.

Then Juan Flynn, a six-foot-five Panamanian Spahn Ranch worker whom Manson had forced to come to Death Valley by threatening to slit his throat, began to consort with the scientologist gold-miner Paul Crockett and the two ex-family members, Posten and Watkins; soon he began living with them in their tar-paper-roofed shack surrounded by bins of gold ore samples. Another follower was snared away by Crockett. Crockett even began to bad-mouth Manson to some of the girls, an ineffable sin in the eyes of Manson.

One night at midnight, Crockett, Posten, Watkins, Juan and a German shepherd were asleep in the cabin. The dog began to bark and Crockett, Posten and Watkins went outside to check it out. They didn’t find anything unusual so they went back to sleep. Later on, the dog began to growl and Juan stood up and looked out the window. In the moonlight he saw Clem Grogan and Manson creep-walking toward the cabin. Flynn claimed that Manson had a knife and that the fringes on Manson’s buckskins were going swish, swish. Naked, armed with a shotgun, Flynn left the cabin to confront Satan and Satan’s latah. But nothing came of it. Charlie and he just had a conversation and then Manson walked away.

Charlie and the gang, using a stolen Master Charge card, began to buy all sorts of supplies for the end of the world-tools, toolboxes, cases of oil, twenty sleeping bags, lots of knives, food, camouflage parachutes. He had two large spools of telephone wire which he had brought in to set up desert communications. They stayed away from the Barker Ranch mainly because of the presence of Watkins, Posten and Crockett in the little cabin. But they would visit all the time, roaring in and roaring by. On a couple of nights, the family did build a bonfire and smoke dope. Charlie lifted up his guitar to lead the singing outside the Barker Ranch. In the middle of the night, Charlie would roar into the ranch bragging about all the people he had killed, according to Paul Watkins, and "sending out pictures" of slaughter.

There is a story from Death Valley ’69, passed from mouth to mouth, which, if true, relates the first known belladonna truck hijacking. Several people have told how the girls sometimes wore pouches of crushed telache leaves or belladonna with which they could disable people by slipping it into food or water. Leslie Van Houten, Sadie and perhaps Patricia Baldwin were hitchhiking somewhere between Shoshone and Las Vegas when along came a refrigerator truck bound for Vegas bearing a load of fruits and vegetables. Naturally, the driver picked up the pretty young hippies.

Sadie supposedly began a pattern of very positive hints that she was willing to ball the driver. The driver was ready right then and there. But Sadie said something like, ‘‘Come on, come on. I know a place."

So she directed him on Route 178 into Death Valley. They turned left just past Ashford Mills on Furnace Creek Road and drove into the desolation. The trucker was anxious to stop immediately and create conjoinment but Sadie said, "No, no, we have to drive further." They passed the road sign that read, "Warning: Road not patrolled daily," and Sadie said, "No, no, drive on." So they drove forward up into the foothills of the Panamint Mountains. Finally they stopped. Sadie said something like, "Before we make love, I have to make you some coffee." Instead of coffee, she made the muddy, brown, bitter telache tea from her little Baggie of flip-out. Allegedly the truck driver passed out from the telache.

Meanwhile, one of the other girls ran to get a brush-covered dune buggy and, while the driver was out cold, they broke open the truck hatch, loaded the produce onto the buggy, took the dune buggy away to the ranch and then drove the driver to an obscure location and abandoned him.

Around this time Manson humiliated Barbara Hoyt and Simi Valley Sherri. Simi Valley Sherri was commanded to perform an act of fellatio with Juan Flynn. She refused and for this defiance, Manson beat her up. Next, he ordered Sherri’s close friend Barbara Hoyt to perform the act and, in fear, she complied.

The two girls decided to sneak out after this grim scene and some of the others expressed desire among themselves to split also, but only the two actually dared to leave, walking barefoot down the entire length of Goler Wash to the Wingate Road along the salt lake to the Ballarat General Store: twenty-eight miles of sharp rocks. The sneak-trudge occupied the greater part of the dark night and near dawn they crawled exhausted into a car near the store and slept.

Manson was furious when he found they had cut out. He roared down the gulch the next morning prepared to kill them. He found them eating breakfast in Mrs. Manwell’s Ballarat General Store. He stood outside the door and flashed the girls inside one of his silent signals, evidently, according to Mrs. Manwell, some sort of rolling eye whirl as indication that he wanted them to come outside for a chitchat or chit-chop. The girls told Manson that they were leaving; and just like a wind that changes its direction and therefore changes its name, Manson calmed down, commenting that, well, they couldn’t leave without money, so he gave them twenty dollars. And away he roared in his iron horse of the hairy locusts.

In his raps, Charlie talked about stashing dune buggies every ten or fifteen miles all over the desert, with hoards of food, ammunition and gasoline buried near them. Because he had in mind raiding little towns like Shoshone and Trona in some dune-buggy Rommel scene, he naturally wanted to be aware of any potential hideouts and raid outposts.

It is known that he hid some three hundred gallons of gasoline near Greater View Spring in the Butte Valley, in an old airplane wing tank. Also there were several other tanks of gasoline that were buried in the desert, not to mention the barrels that the owner of the Ballarat Store saw the miner Paul Crockett haul down Goler Wash as his own following the October arrests of the family.

Late Thursday night or early Friday morning, September 18-19, Manson led his troop out of 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 which would have led him down to the Hunter Mountain campsite, he stopped. Right in front of him were two large wide holes in the dirt way, evidently scooped out by some nearby earthmoving equipment, including a $30,000 Clark Michigan skip-loader.

Manson thought the authorities had deliberately dug the holes in his path so that he would crash his dune buggy into them! According to Kitty, Manson commanded her and the other girls to fill up the large but shallow gouge-outs with rocks and dirt. As they did this, Tex, Manson and Clem Grogan removed some gasoline tanks and a grease gun from the skip-loader, the evil machine of the Beast that tried to wipe out Jesus’ dune buggy. They let out the fuel oil, poured some gasoline on the wires and the engine, and poofed it.

Then the family raced away and the rest of the night was spent in a roaring dune-buggy frenzy. They arrived at a cabin in the forest area near Hunter Mountain and proceeded to get the ’69 green Ford stuck in the wilderness. Finally they rammed it into a tree. They stripped what they could from it and abandoned it, speeding away in the red Toyota, leaving telltale Toyota tracks in the dusty trails for many miles. "It was a wild night," as Miss Lutesinger remembered eight months later.

The burning of the Michigan loader enraged the rangers a t the Death Valley National Monument, which owned it. Relentlessly the Park Rangers, the California Highway Patrol and, to a lesser degree, agents of the Fish and Game Commission would begin to track down this un-cool group of murderers.

If they hadn’t roamed the Death Valley area as marauders, the Mansonists could have lived in that wilderness for years without any trouble. As one of the policemen said after the raid, "You could hide the Empire State Building out there and no one would be able to find it."

On September 29 a group of police officers were scouting around the area in a four-wheel-drive vehicle when they encountered a group of nude hippies-seven in all-scampering away in a draw near the Meyers Ranch. They also found a red Toyota which did not have a license plate on it, but they noted down the vehicle inspection number and ran it through the computer when they got back, and it was then they discovered that it was stolen. They also found a dune buggy which they later learned was stolen. Both of the cars were concealed by tarps and sleeping bags and clothing.

While the police were chasing the suspects, Manson came running up to the canyon, ran into Crockett’s cabin and grabbed Crockett’s double-barreled shotgun and sped up over the hill, evidently taking a position on the ridge between the Meyers and the Barker ranches. Brooks Posten said that he heard Manson fire the shotgun three times. Manson claimed later that he dodged around behind the rocks, shouting, trying to unnerve the police.

That night into the Barker Ranch compound roared Rommel and his teenage vampires in their attack vehicles. There was an engineless dune buggy set up in the front yard. They asked Crockett to help them haul in a motor which they had stashed in the canyon behind the ranch. Crockett helped them lift the motor onto a wheelbarrow and they carted it down to the dune-buggy frame. They put the motor into the dune buggy by lantern light and drove away, giving forth the family coyote yips and shooting off pistols.

The police encountered none of the Rommeloids, but they did secure considerable information from gold-miner Paul Crockett.

On September 30, spotter planes buzzed overhead to locate the hippie deployments. But the family covered themselves with tarps or froze in their tracks and evidently were not seen.

That night, Crockett and his helpers were sitting on the front porch of the Barker Ranch when they heard a noise. They went to get their two shotguns out of the cabin. That night someone creepy-crawled the cabin, the dog growled, the door was opened and Crockett claimed that Charlie had a half-dozen girls chasing around to grab the guns.

It was right about that time, after it became really obvious that the police were after him, that Manson banned all daytime activity. By day everybody was to remain hidden in the wilderness. They were to freeze if they saw any spotter planes or cover themselves with camouflage parachutes and remain completely out of the way. Food became scarce.

On Thursday, October 2, there was a hostile confrontation between Manson and Paul Crockett. Manson went into a snuff-spasm when Crockett told him that the police had accused him of abetting and aiding a fugitive from the law, namely Manson. "He told me just before I parted and walked out that I should be more afraid of him than the law," Crockett said. Crockett and Posten, in order to save their lives, packed up a few cans of food and walked out over Mengel Pass, down Butte Valley to a trailer camp near the Warin Spring talc mines, where they found safety.

Early the next morning, October 3, Crockett and Posten had a nice long discussion with the police, which was taped. Crockett offered the suggestion that the best way to get Manson was either to pick the family off one by one or to mount a large raid against them. They also told the police that Manson had seized Crockett’s shotguns and that all the girls were armed with knives and were like zombies trained for instant obedience.

On the night of October 2, 1969, Charles "Tex" Watson seized the ’42 Dodge power wagon, drove down Goler Wash, bumping into the night, to the mouth of the Wash and crossed the semidry lake. He slowed down or stopped in the middle of the lake and became mired in the salty mush. Watson was fleeing. He evidently feared the police raids. It was getting too hot in The Hole.

He spent the night sleeping by the side of the road. The next morning, a man named Mr. Holliday, a pipe-fitter from Rialto, California, picked up Watson and drove him to the San Bernardino railroad station. Watson 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 Collin County, Texas, for murder. He fought extradition from Texas for the better part of 1970, finally being removed to Los Angeles where his weight dropped to 110 pounds, weeping in his cell, covered over with a blanket, just before they shipped him to the Atascadero nut hatch where they fattened him up for trial.

With Crockett and crew ousted from the set, Manson began to use the Barker Ranch as headquarters, but only at night. Everybody by this time was on hand, including Sadie and Katie. Once a day, after dark, the girls would prepare a large meal for everybody in the Barker Ranch kitchen and the family would skulk in and get a little chow. Sometimes in the middle of the night they’d have to walk for supplies from the Barker Ranch eighteen miles over Mengel Pass to Willow Spring and back.

"We walked to Willow Spring and back in one night. We had to because of the police. Of course, we were helped by some good sunshine," said one of the girls a year later. "We were carrying dune buggies down the hills when the police were chasing us," she said. They began to leave false campfires to lead the police away from their real campsites.

Some of the girls spent the light of day at a campsite about a mile and a half east-northeast from the Meyers Ranch, where they carried sleeping bags and bottles of water. Other girls were required to hang out by day in the hot rocks near Mengel Pass. They "hid out all over the hills, hiding in parachutes,’’ according to Kitty. By night, after supper, they were honored with the task of building the hillside bunkers.

Manson issued an order that all of the girls were to stop smoking cigarettes. Subsequently, he asked for a show of hands as to who exactly had obeyed his order, and was chagrined to find that there were some who had ceased to obey. So he commanded that those who refused to stop smoking cigarettes dig several bunkers by night which were to serve as hidden shelters. Evidently against the police and against the winter air.

They built a bunker on a hill south of the Barker Ranch which they roofed over with metal and on top of the metal they placed sand and stones. Inside the bunker was a huge Playboy mattress on which bounced the bodies of Helter Skelter. They had a telephone set up. They ran field wires leading from this bunker up to a rectangular rock command post about three hundred feet up the hillside so that from this bunker by telescope a spotter could look about a mile and a half down Goler Wash.

Just before the police finally netted the family, Charlie reportedly sent Cathy and John Philip Haught a.k.a. Zero down to Los Angeles to kill her grandmother, enabling Cathy to inherit the Meyers Ranch. This would have legitimized Manson’s position in the area. This grim caper evidently was aborted when the automobile they were driving broke down.

On October 8, Manson and Bill Vance left the Barker Ranch area and traveled to Los Angeles together. There’s not much known about the reasons for this little trip, but it had to be important because Manson had been sticking close by his followers.

As usual, the golden opportunity to escape the family occurred whenever Charlie took a trip away. This was no exception.

Life was grim for the pregnant girls, Kitty Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram: little food, no showers, living by night, hiding by day, fearful, threatened by a maniac, confused. Kitty recalled it: "Now when I start thinking about it I remember how bad it really was. How he just talked about it so much that you just . . . you know . . . about snuffing people and torturing them, and all kinds of different orgies. You get so you just can’t listen to it anymore. It really was pretty bad."

So, on Thursday night, October 9, Kitty and Stephanie sneaked away a couple of hours after sunset. Clem Grogan had been assigned bed-check duty and discovered the girls missing. He yelled immediately for everybody to roust out and capture the runaways. Manson had issued proclamations that if they found anybody escaping, they were to beat them up, or worse.

Night held the young girls in safety as they wandered up the Wash to Mengel Pass and on to the Willow Spring area. Clem and Rocky Todd went to sleep down the Wash in the middle of the creek bed armed with a sawed-off shotgun; they were prepared to go out looking for the young ladies very early the next morning.

On October 9, 1969, the same niqht that Stephanie and Kitty skulked away from the camp, the police set up their final net to catch the car thieves. There had evidently been careful surveillance of the area by the police, who determined that the ranch was being used until daylight. Patricia Krenwinkel had been assigned the job of seeing that everybody got out of the Barker Ranch and out of sight before dawn. It was getting cold in the high desert, with winter approaching, and on this morning it was very cold and the family hung around the Barker Ranch area too long and were caught.

By cover of darkness the police approached the Barker Ranch from two directions: from the mouth of Goler Wash and from the Butte Valley over Mengel Pass and down the long seven and a half miles to the ranch.

Just before dawn the team of officers coming in from the west, from the Panamint Valley up Goler Wash, encountered, sleeping in suspicious tandem on the creek bed between blankets, Clem and Rocky. Near Clem’s head was Clem’s sixteen-inch sawed-off shotgun and twenty-four rounds of ammunition.

The officers awakened them and put them under arrest for having a sawed-off shotgun and for arson and for grand theft auto. The officers parked their four-wheel-drive vehicles evidently in a small draw to the west of the Barker Ranch. It is not known if the police were really aware of the disguised bunker. However, shortly after dawn, Sadie, wearing a red hat, emerged from the hidden bunker to relieve herself. She was evidentlv spotted by the cops. The cops, according to the girls, let loose a friendly shotgun blast on top of the hidden metal bunker roof causing the girls to come out.

Arrested at the south hill dugout were Leslie Van Houten, using the name Louvella Alexandria, Sadie, using the name Donna Kay Powell, Gypsy, using the name Manon Minette, and Brenda, using the name Cydette Perell. Inside the ranch house, the cops arrested Marnie K. Reeves a.k.a. Patricia Krenwinkel. They arrested Robert Ivan Lane a.k.a. Soup Spoon. They arrested Linda Baldwin a.k.a. Little Patti, and Squeaky, using the name Elizabeth Elaine Williamson. Some of the girls were nude. Official note was made of it 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, the police raided the "spike camp," as they called it, where they arrested Sandy Good, who was carrying 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 a.k.a. Diane Von Ahn. The babies were burned raw from the sun and one of them had a large cut on his face.

All day long the police stayed in the area checking it out. Finally, around dusk, a group of ten women, three men and two babies were chained together and transported down Goler Wash. Followed by police vehicles, they walked down the steep waterfall area to the mouth, the chains clanging in the night.

It was nighttime before the rest of the officers drove over Mengel Pass, their mission accomplished. As they drove toward Death Valley, through Butte Valley near Anvil Spring, Kitty Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram stepped out of the brush and flagged down the officers. They told the officers they had run away from the family and were afraid for their lives.

Clem Grogan called up the Spahn Ranch from the Inyo County jail in Independence, California, and asked to "speak to the Devil." Clem told Charlie about the arrests. Manson for reasons unknown seems to have left for Death Valley about a day later.

October 12, 1969, was English occultist Aleister Crowley’s birthday, a fit day for the arrest of killers.

But at this point in time, there are indications that Manson was about to undertake his wildest scheme of all, a series of assassinations of prominent Los Angeles citizens against whom he held grudges. The dune-buggy locusts would raid from The Hole, destroy, then return. Perhaps he liked the media attention given to the Tate murders. After all, he had been trying for fame as a recording artist for several years. Now he could be Charlie the Knife.

Central to a discussion of plans to kill famous people is the "list," about which a heavy area of silence has been created. The "list" was found in Death Valley and it marked out those to die. In one report it contained thirty-four names of stars and businessmen to be killed. High Inyo County officials visited Miss Lutesinger down in Los Angeles following the Barker Ranch raids and told her they had in their possession a written list of people to be killed, and she was on the end of the list.

Quite a few of the family members escaped arrest on the October 10 raid. Among them were Dianne Lake and Claudia Smith a.k.a. Sherry Andrews. Both of these girls hid under a canvas not far from the front ranch gate of the Barker Ranch when the raid occurred. So they were around when Charlie got back. Others had fled and were lurking in various parts of Goler Wash, never to be caught.

Late in the afternoon of October 12, Charlie walked up to the Goler Wash, stashed his pack near the Lotus Mine, then proceeded to the Barker Ranch. guitar in hand, ready for chow.

From a position on a ridge up above the Barker swimming pool, north of the ranch, Officer James Pursell and Ranger Richard Powell observed Manson and a couple of other people walk up the gulch and into the house. Another officer 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 began to hear giggling and laughter and conversation from the house so they knew there were quite a number of people in there.

The Chief Ranger for the Death Valley National Monument, Homer Leach, Deputy Don Ward, Inyo County sheriff’s officer, and Al Schneider, a district ranger, arrived just after dark. Then they radioed Officer Pursell, who walked down the hill in the back, slinked along the back side of the cabin just to the left of the Barker Ranch and walked in under the ivy-trellised side porch, kicked open the side door and said, "Stick ’em up." He slid along the wall to the left, 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 killers complied.

"I ordered the subjects out backwards one at a time, where Deputy Ward took charge of them," Pursell recounted later. But still the question had to be asked, "Where was Jesus?"

It was about six-thirty in the evening. Seven dirty hippies had been hauled out and handcuffed. The quick desert darkness was imminent. Officer Pursell carried the single candle which had lit the supper around the four-room cabin. He paused at the small blue bathroom with the poured-concrete bathtub and the small blue lavatory. Beneath the lavatory was a little cabinet out of which, as the officer placed the candle’s flame near, protruded hair. Then he saw wiggling fingers and he said, "All right, come on out, but slowly." And before he could ask, the small human uncoiling from the tiny cabinet said. "Hi, I‘m Charlie Manson."