The Fires Are Burning

Barker Ranch, the old Death Valley mining camp notorious as Charles Manson's hide-out, has been gutted in a suspicious fire, according to the National Park Service.

“The building is gutted, burned out,” said Terry Baldino, chief of interpretation at Death Valley National Park.

The homestead’s rock walls and tin roof were still intact, but its hand-hewn wooden interior beams and window and door frames were all reduced to ash, he said. An outbuilding, originally built as a garage or workroom, was destroyed, Baldino said.

Park officials said the fire might have started last weekend; it was reported Wednesday. No cause has been identified and the fire is under investigation, Baldino said.

The cabin is in a remote area of the park and used by backcountry campers. It had a stove and a fireplace, but there was no water source in the area. If the fire was inadvertently set, there was no water available to put it out.

“The thing that is really sad,” Baldino said, “is that a month ago we had a restoration crew out to stabilize the place. We were afraid the wood lattice and tin roof would come off. We replaced wood timbers in the sagging roof and cleaned up the interior and the grounds. It was actually in fairly good shape when we finished.”

The simple cabin was built in the 1930s by a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer, who, with his wife, had staked a gold claim. The Barker family then bought the house and worked the claim.

In the late 1960s, the Manson gang roamed the barren Death Valley landscape in dune buggies and prepared for "Helter Skelter," a race war Manson was trying to spark. The phrase was taken from a Beatles song, which Manson believed was encoded with predictions that the conflict would destroy modern civilization. Manson and his followers planned to survive by living in a tunnel, then emerge as leaders of some new world order.

Manson eventually was arrested in the cabin, hiding in one of the cupboards, after a 1969 murder spree in Southern California that included the killing of actress Sharon Tate, three friends and a teenager at the pregnant actress' Benedict Canyon home, and the slaying of a couple in Los Feliz.

The ranch was the subject of renewed attention recently when a local police detective searched the site for possible clandestine graves. The excavation revealed little more than a few bullet casings.

—Julie Cart

Sore Loser

Mark Turner writes :
The limited Barker Ranch excavation came to an end without any finds. The digs were limited to about three feet deep whereas Susan Atkins once stated the bodies were eight feet down. Also note that due to some sites being in washes, forty years of flash flooding could have added several feet of soil deposits. The digging was limited to areas three feet wide by six feet long. Due to the way scent can travel underground (roots and water), actual gravesites can be quite a distance from scent locations. Ten feet is not uncommon and the distance could even be thirty feet. It should also be noted that this was a multi-disciplinary approach that did not rely only on dogs. Other scientific methods also pointed to these sites. Perhaps the best article can be found by clicking here. Some may consider the excavation a failure but it did bring new methods to the extreme sites for field testing. Everybody involved should be commended for the hard work involved and the experience gained.

Of course the fact that there are no bodies also probably contributed to the lack of finding any.

Hey- anyone notice that this maroon was quoting Susan Atkins? That's like believing the Bug. I think Mark should pay them back every cent they wasted on this!

Somewhere, A Perv Called Larry Melton Laughs As He Mounts An Underage Child; Meanwhile Debra Tate Reaches for the Cheetos

Manson ranch dig called off with no remains found

By JULIANA BARBASSA – 2 hours ago

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — A dig for clandestine graves at Charles Manson's last hideout ended Wednesday, yielding no bodies and leaving scientists puzzled over the clues that enticed them to go this far.

The dig had been scheduled to last three days, ending Thursday. But the work went faster than scheduled, with the crew of 20 digging until dusk, then camping out at night beside the ranch house Manson and his followers had used.

"There have been no human remains found," Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze said after the four sites with greatest probability of holding human remains were dug up. "We're finishing up this site and that'll be it for the day — nothing."

Manson and his followers hid out at the ranch following their killing spree in Los Angeles. For years, rumors have swirled about other possible Manson victims, including hitchhikers and runaways who visited the site and were never heard from again.

Scientists who conducted a preliminary probe of the rugged, remote site in February said they identified several spots that could be graves, leading Lutze to conduct the exploratory excavation.

By Wednesday afternoon, the four most promising sites had been excavated and the dirt sifted. With the work done, the teams packed up and went home for good.

The search revealed little more than a .38-caliber shell casing — found on the surface on the first day and promptly dismissed by law enforcement personnel as being recent — and a pack rat's underground nest.

One site revealed fragments of animal bones, an ash pit and some stones used to make arrowheads. Rangers determined it was of archaeological interest, so digging stopped and the site was turned over to the National Park Service.

The researchers and law enforcers involved said the unusual physical environment made it harder to determine what was underground. Plants that exude unusual chemicals and rocks with magnetic properties were throwing off their equipment, they said.

"I haven't been this frustrated in a very long time," said Arpad Vass, a senior researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Vass said the excavation is a learning process.

"We're trying to improve the science. It's in its infancy," he said. "Every exercise we do like this will further the science so that one day we can say, 'Yes there is a body here.'"

Manson's clan was ultimately prosecuted for nine murders that took place in the summer of 1969. He is serving a life sentence at Corcoran State Prison.

Dostie Rep Will Take a Beating

Scientists gear up 'Big Dig,' seeking bodies on Charles Manson ranch

The search at the remote Barker Ranch in Death Valley, led by the Inyo County sheriffs, begins Tuesday. A Manson 'family' member suggested bodies were buried there.

By Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

3:36 PM PDT, May 19, 2008

PANAMINT SPRINGS — Spooky rumors have persisted for decades that there may be clandestine graves at a secluded ranch used as a hideout by the Charles Manson clan after a 1969 killing spree.

On Tuesday, Inyo County Sheriff's investigators and scientists packing portable ground-penetrating radar, magnetometers and shovels will convoy to the Barker Ranch on a mission to confirm or put to rest such speculation.

The search at the property, which is at the southern end of Death Valley National Park in terrain so rough it can only be reached by four-wheel-drive vehicles, was expected to continue through Thursday in temperatures expected to exceed 100 degrees.

Wild-eyed career criminal Manson directed the gruesome forays that resulted in the massacre of Sharon Tate, three friends and a teenager in the pregnant actress' Benedict Canyon home, and the slaying of a couple in Los Feliz the next night.

A member of the so-called Manson family later suggested that bodies were buried at the Barker Ranch.

In February, cadaver-sniffing dogs led by a black Labrador named Buster displayed tell-tale agitation at two sites on the decrepit ranch, tucked in an arid canyon in the Panamint Range. Buster is owned by Mammoth Lakes Police Department detective Paul Dostie, a small-town investigator with a penchant for recruiting anthropologists, geneticists and geophysicists for his cases.

"The dogs were trained to alert on the unique combination of odors that make up the smell of dead people," Dostie said in an interview. "They alerted on the same spots at Barker Ranch."

Intrigued by the dog's enthusiasm, soil samples were analyzed by scientists who volunteered their services, Dostie said.

Analyses of soil samples were inconsistent, as were subsequent searches. Facing mixed results, Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze authorized four days of exploratory excavation.

In a rare move, the National Park Service closed the ranch to the public pending completion of the investigation.

But on the eve of what has come to be known in these parts as "The Big Dig," locals are criticizing the effort as a waste of time and money in a sparsely populated county that can ill afford it.

Rock Novak, proprietor of a country store in the isolated ghost town of Ballarat, said, "I've heard so many stories over the years about Barker Ranch. Some say there's 30 bodies out there; some say 24. Some say none at all. We won't know until they dig it up."

Anticipating a crush of journalists and curiosity seekers at his forlorn store offering rock and mineral specimens, antique bottles and cold soda pop and beer, Novak said he was stocking up on T-shirts emblazoned with Manson's image.

"It's my reputation on the line if we don't find anything," Dostie said. "We all hope this isn't another Al Capone's secret vault kind of deal."

He was referring to a television special hosted by Geraldo Rivera in 1986. The program was broadcast live and featured the opening of a vault believed to have been used by the infamous Chicago mobster. When the vault was finally opened, however, the only things inside were some empty bottles.

The ongoing Barker Ranch investigation involved forensics experts from the Utah Attorney General's Office, the private laboratory Evident Inc. of Virginia, an archaeologist from Cal State Long Beach and members of the Anthropology Research Facility at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, otherwise known as "The Body Farm."

They aim to sweep the property today with radar, magnetometers, lasers and special blue lights that cause bones to glow at a great distance. They also will test soil samples with portable gas-chromatograph and mass spectrometers.

"This is the stuff of television's 'CSI' series," Lutze said in a prepared statement. "Some of this equipment is so cutting-edge that it does not exist in the market place. This case will dramatically alter how police agencies search outdoor crime scenes in the future."

In any case, locals predicted investigators may unearth ancient Indian graves. Some park rangers speculated that if human remains are discovered at the ranch, they may be connected to a separate Death Valley mystery: the 1996 disappearance of four German tourists -- architect Egbert Rimkus, 34, his girlfriend, Cornelia Meyer, 28, his 10-year-old son Georg Weber, and Meyer's son Max, 4.

In the late 1960s, the Manson gang roamed the barren landscape in dune buggies and prepared for "Helter Skelter," a race war Manson was trying to spark. The phrase was taken from a Beatles song, which Manson believed was encoded with predictions that the conflict would destroy modern civilization. Manson and his followers planned to survive by living in a tunnel, then emerge as leaders of some new world order.

Manson was arrested by law enforcement authorities who discovered him hiding beneath a sink in the rock-and-plaster ranch house five miles up Goler Wash, a narrow rocky canyon that is home to chuckwallas and wild burros and is traversed via a teeth-chattering serpentine dirt road.

After months of frustration investigating the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders, detectives got their break when Manson follower Susan Denise Atkins, being held at the Sybil Brand Institute in East Los Angeles on separate murder charges, talked to a another prisoner who conveyed the incriminating information to authorities.

Manson and his followers were subsequently arrested in a raid at Barker Ranch.

In 1970 and 1971, Manson, Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Tex Watson were tried for murder. All were found .guilty and sentenced to death. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court abolished the death sentence.

Their petitions for parole have been repeatedly denied.

Orca Makes it All About Her- Again

Facts? Who needs Facts! Nineteen people my ass. Tate Murdered in Los Feliz my other ass.

WHY is Orca doing all this publicity shit recently?

More Wasted Time

(CNN) -- Authorities said Friday they will begin digging for evidence of graves at a California ranch that once was home to the infamous "family" of convicted killer Charles Manson.

Soil testing to determine the possible presence of buried bodies was inconclusive, authorities said Friday, so "exploratory excavation" will be done later this month, Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze said.

The dig will be carried out "to either confirm or put to rest speculation that bodies may remain there from the Charles Manson era," Lutze said in a written statement.

In March, search crews found indications that human remains may lie within a few yards of Barker Ranch, the onetime hideout of the "Manson family."

The sites were first identified by trained dogs, and testing equipment from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory also indicated the possible presence of remains, said Sgt. Paul Dostie of the Mammoth Lakes, California, police department.

The excavation will take place at sites where cadaver dogs gave mixed indications and soil testing was inconclusive, Lutze said.

"There was no consistent response from the dogs that searched, and no conclusive findings from the soil samplings tested by top experts in the field," he said. "Therefore, I believe the only way to determine once and for all whether there are bodies buried at Barker Ranch from the time of the Manson family is to proceed with limited excavation in a very few areas."

He said four methods of testing were used at five sites on the ranch. No site was identified by all four methods as possibly having remains, but positive findings by one method were corroborated by another at some of the sites, the sheriff's department said.

The excavations will begin May 20 and will continue through about May 23, although additional days will be added if needed, he said.

Barker Ranch is National Park Service property, and will be closed to the public during the excavation, the sheriff's department said. Media access will be limited, but daily briefings will be provided.

After Dostie's dog and another dog, from NecroSearch, a nonprofit organization that specializes in finding clandestine graves, indicated the possible presence of human remains, testing equipment from Tennessee's Oak Ridge laboratory indicated two likely grave sites and a third possible grave site, Dostie said.

Manson and four others were convicted of murder and other charges in connection with a two-night spree in August 1969 that included the slaying of actress Sharon Tate. The slayings -- and Manson and his family members -- transfixed the nation.

Manson is serving a life sentence at California's Corcoran State Prison. CNN sent letters to him and to codefendant "Tex" Watson, asking if there were victims buried behind Barker Ranch.

Manson did not reply, but Watson did, writing in a letter:

"I was the first family member to go to the desert after the murders and also the first to leave. I say this only to let you know that no one was killed while I was in the desert. But I don't know what took place after I left. I don't think there were any more killed, I hope not! I have absolutely nothing to hide."

Why Bother With Facts?

.... Charlie is their source? Of course Charlie is nuts- gone.

.... Barker Ranch is not acres and acres....

And most importantly- this is all bullshit. No bodies will be found.

How lame.

Mark Turner Is Desperate

Mark Turner has a big announcement for January 31- Today!

Wait for it.

Hear it comes.

There have been rumors of dead bodies buried at Barker Ranch. And so for most of 2007 some fools, I mean people, have been out there with dogs looking. And they let little Markie come along.

Excuse me I am going to vomit.

Bleeechhh. Thank you.

Okay. So here is where he explains his big announcement.

A first year philosophy student can explain his logical syllogisms. The other team of dogs failed to find any bodies not because of the damn humidity but because there aren't any. He also blames that asshole Melton for the lack of funding. But then these are people that listened to the asshole in the first damn place. They are not smart. Debra Tate was at the ranch with the dogs- either she thought she might get to eat one or she was snorkeling for truffles. What a crock of shit!

And he loves that MOST EVIL show wherein the senile psychologist believes the lies of Gypsy Share.

Bleeech! Excuse me.

Here is an interview with a cop with too much time of his hands. He cites Ed Sanders, the same unreliable hippie loon who used asshole Melton as a source for his books. THAT'S good cop work!

Then he goes on to explain why a dog with the name BUSTER might have smelled a 500 year old Indian grave. Public Funds being wasted as I type.

Here he says " I spoke to a source who interviewed Manson around year 2000. Manson had a handler who is another inmate, who is a "jailhouse lawyer."" - and a friend of a friend of mine can fly without a plane.

There is no way to tell without digging if they are Native Americans, old prospectors, Manson Family Victims, or if the dogs made a mistake. Or just wishful lunacy.

BUT The BUG is very supportive. And he loves Latin Music Cds.

Debra Tate would like funding for the dogs. And a dozen large pizzas.

Cyber Detective Mark Turner has helped.???

BLECCH.... excuse me.

What did Mark do again? Ask Barbara Hoyt to make up more fucking bullshit lies?

Grave Sites? or maybe just a nice place to piss?

Somebody else talks about toilet paper and mob hits.

So what is the big news? Mark spent most of 2007 feeding Babs Hoyt and Debra Tate truffles and took fifteen cars and dogs out to Barker Ranch and found nothing.? White Rabbitt Mach 2.

To repeat the big announcement using their own useless words as they wonder about bullshit funding...
There is no way to tell without digging if they are Native Americans, old prospectors, Manson Family Victims, or if the dogs made a mistake.

My big announcement? I chew gum sometimes!

PS- that noise you hear is Bill Nelson rolling in his grave.