Dr. Mike Karch looks over an abandoned miner's truck that has helter

Arpad Vass pokes around a target site looking for buried bodies behind the abandoned Barker Ranch house, a former hideout for Charles Manson and his followers, as Buster, a cadaver dog, looks on. Both scientific tests and the dog indicated that human remains may be buried in the area.

Death Valley National Park, Calif. ? Bone-white stretches of salt, leached up from the lifeless soil, lay like a shroud over the high desert where a paranoid Charles Manson holed up after an orgy of murder nearly four decades ago.

Now, as then, few venture into this alkaline wilderness – gold-diggers, outlaws, loners content to live and let live.

But a determined group of outsiders recently made the trek. They were leading forensic investigators searching for new evidence of death – clues pointing to possible decades-old clandestine graves.

And the results of just-completed follow-up tests suggest bodies could indeed be lying beneath the parched ground. The test findings – described in detail to The Associated Press, which had accompanied the site search – conclude there are two likely clandestine grave sites at Barker Ranch and one additional site that merits further investigation.

Next step, the ad hoc investigators urge: Dig.

Unsubstantiated rumors

For years, rumors have swirled about other possible Manson family victims – hitchhikers who visited them at the ranch and were not seen again, runaways who drifted into the camp then fell out of favor.

The same jailhouse confessions that helped investigators initially connect the band of misfits living in the Panamint Mountains to the gruesome killings that terrorized Los Angeles hinted at other deaths. Manson follower Susan Atkins boasted to her cell mate on Nov. 1, 1969, that there were “three people out in the desert that they done in.” Other stories surfaced. In the absence of bodies, they were forgotten.

“We prosecuted Manson and the family for all the murders we could prove. But you know, could he have killed someone else? Possibly. Could another member of the family have killed someone? Sure,” said Steve Kay, a former deputy district attorney.

Last month, equipped with cutting-edge forensic technology, the investigators assembled in the ghost town of Ballarat for a 20-mile ride in all-terrain vehicles to the ranch.

Prospector Emmett Harder, who was once Manson’s closest neighbor, guided the expedition.

He had a claim on Manley peak, one of the jagged points looming over Barker Ranch, while the Manson family camped out there in the late 1960s. He shared dinner with the band at times and gave the men work.

During one of these visits he heard Manson say, “We’re not hippies; we’re here to get away from the troubles of the world.”

Later, Harder would learn more about the cult leader’s belief that the end of the world, which he called “Helter Skelter,” was near – and Manson’s conviction that through murder, he had a role to play in accelerating that chaotic time.

Desert hideouts

Barker Ranch was one of several hideouts used by Manson and his followers.

The killings that launched the cult onto national newspapers had been orchestrated from Spahn Ranch, a former Western movie set that served as backdrop to episodes of “Bonanza” and “The Lone Ranger.”

It was to Spahn that the killers initially retreated after the 1969 murders of Gary Hinman on July 31; Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger and Steven Parent on Aug. 9; and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on Aug. 10.

This was to signal the start of the apocalyptic race war that Manson told his followers would pit blacks against whites. He preached that they would emerge from the desert at the end and rule over the survivors.

But a daybreak raid on Spahn Ranch on Aug. 16 by Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies looking for car thieves netted 26 arrests. All were released a few days later on a technicality – a misdated warrant – but Spahn was no longer safe.

Barker Ranch was where Manson withdrew in those last, frenzied days.

Retracing his steps nearly four decades later, the search group stopped at the dilapidated house. From the porch, the view was clear for miles, broken only by the long twisted stems of creosote bushes and knee-high bunches of desert rabbitbrush.

‘Something down there’

About 100 yards behind the house, Sgt. Paul Dostie, a police detective and dog handler from the town of Mammoth Lakes, readied his dog, Buster, for the search.

“Go find Fred!” Dostie said, releasing the dog on the command that sends him searching for human remains.

The dog bounded away, zigzagging over the terrain. Then he lay down in a depression in the ground, quivering, ears upright. Buster looked at his trainer and emitted a high-pitched whine.

“He’s alerting,” Dostie said, throwing the dog his reward and planting a flag on the site.

Meanwhile, Arpad Vass and Marc Wise, senior researchers from Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were readying the first of the instruments they’d brought, capable of chemically detecting evidence of decades-old human bodies.

The machine detects fluorinated hydrocarbon compounds, one of the approximately 400 types of volatile organic compounds emitted by human bodies during decomposition. Focusing on these compounds is important because Vass believes they’re formed as the fluoride added to urban drinking water is released after death.

Their presence helps differentiate a human bone from bones from wild animals, explained Vass, who has spent years developing a decomposition odor database using bodies donated to the Oak Ridge lab.

The instrument beeped at regular intervals. As it approached the ground, the beeping accelerated until it was a steady stream of sound.

“That’s impressive,” said Wise, a senior researcher at Oak Ridge specializing in environmental analytical chemistry. Vass agreed, and suggested more sophisticated tests.

“There’s definitely something down there,” Wise said. “We just can’t know yet exactly what until we dig.”

“Or who,” Vass said.

Well-founded fears

Watching the scientists do their work, Harder spoke of his memories of the Manson clan – the churlish, armed young men, the pretty girls with blank, doll-like expressions.

“I didn’t feel real easy around them,” he said. “They picked up all kinds of people – hitchhikers and stuff.”

He particularly remembers two teenage runaways who escaped the ranch, then stopped at a nearby mining camp for food. They had enough fear in them to make it out of the rugged mountains barefoot, Harder said.

They turned themselves in to the California Highway Patrol at the mouth of Anvil Springs Canyon – booked as Stephanie Jean Schram, 17, a runaway from Anaheim, and Kathryn Rene Lutesinger, 17, a runaway from Los Angeles, on Oct. 10, 1969.

“Both females stated that they were attempting to run away from ‘Charlie’ the leader of the ‘family’ and that they were afraid of their lives,” read the CHP report.

Their fear was well-founded. Following the police raid on Spahn Ranch in August, Manson and the family killed ranch hand Donald “Shorty” Shea for “snitching” and buried him out there.

Were others less lucky than Schram and Lutesinger when they tried to escape?

Vass said that, considering the quantity and the types of markers of human decomposition found, along with the cadaver dog’s response and other tests, he found enough evidence to warrant further testing at a deeper level and a full-scale excavation at Barker Ranch.

But if a body is found on the Barker Ranch, then what?

The likelihood of a new prosecution appears slim. Locating remains would be just the first step, said Patrick Sequeira, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who has been in charge of the Manson family parole hearings since Kay’s retirement.

Then investigators would have to find out who killed them, where, and who could testify, he said.

The Manson family members currently in prison are already serving life sentences – the maximum penalty allowed at the time the crimes were committed.

Still, Sequeira did not discourage the efforts of the crime scene reinvestigators. “I’d love to see them put something together,” he said.