The Manson Women and Me

March 1997

My daughter was home for spring break from college when I decided we should travel to Death Valley to take a look at Barker Ranch, the Manson desert outpost where he was arrested a month after the Tate-LaBianca murders. The ranch held so much significance that it had been designated a national monument. We rented a four-wheel-drive Ford Explorer and took off for the desert.

We slept the first night at the Furnace Creek Lodge. Actually, she slept. I didn’t. At 2:00 a.m. I was lying in my bed, my heart pounding. What was my problem? I’d carefully planned the trip. I had maps, many maps, including the forest service topographical map, and I had stocked up on food, water, extra sweaters, and even a blanket. We were only going to the Barker Ranch for the day, but I knew that many people who rent cars to explore unfamiliar deserts end up dead—it’s not called Death Valley for nothing—and usually those people had set out unprepared.

Since 1970 when I read Diane Kennedy Pike’s account of having to drink her own urine after she and her husband, James Pike, a former Episcopalian bishop, got stranded in the Judean Desert, I’ve had a keen interest in being prepared in such circumstances. (The couple set off for a journey in their Avis rental car with only two bottles of Coca-Cola to drink. The car got stuck in a rut. When Bishop Pike was unable to walk with her to get help, she continued without him. He died. She didn’t but before she didn’t die, she drank her urine.)

But, as I say, we were well prepared and we had four-wheel-drive to deal with the ruts. My panic had little to do with the desert. It had to do with Barker Ranch, which had become a shrine to Manson, attracting all sorts of bikers, survivalists, Satanists, and who-knows-what-ists. Or so I had heard. And Manson still had a couple of crazy women followers from the old days who occasionally threatened people they perceived as his enemies. I knew people occasionally camped there, but otherwise I didn’t know what to expect. Why was I going? What could I learn from the place?

But my panic also had to do with my daughter, the very same daughter who had been a newborn infant when I first read Helter Skelter. All of the fear I felt then came roaring back—a primitive, almost reptilian fear combined with intense protective instincts.

All I could think of were the ways I had been a bad parent when my kids were young: slapping my son once in the face, leaving a red mark; subjecting my daughter to Mommy and Me swim classes; on a couple of occasions being late picking them up from summer camp. These failings may seem totally unrelated to driving out to Barker Ranch with my college-age daughter, but in those hours before dawn there was hardly anything too trivial in the parenting department for me to dredge up, and by first light I had decided to call off the excursion. It was way too risky.

When my daughter woke up, I announced my decision. Responding in a calm and clinical voice, the kind of voice you use with someone you’re trying to coax down from a ledge or a bad acid trip, she said that perhaps my lack of sleep had made me a bit overwrought. She said she wasn’t frightened and she didn’t think I should be.

So we embarked on our journey, following the homemade wooden signs to Golar Wash, the area where the Ranch was located. It was slow going; the sandy road was arduous, with deep potholes and giant boulders, but we were doing it. We had gone about ten miles when we came to a fork in the road. No signs, hand-painted or otherwise. We studied the maps. We studied the directions. Neither provided a clue.

We got out of the car and I looked up at the rugged Panamint Mountains. In my concerned state, they were casting deep, sinister shadows as the sun seemed to be sinking toward them at an alarming rate. We had just about decided to turn back when a pickup rambled up behind us.

A couple, Joe and Maggie, stopped and got out of their truck. She was a big-boned, freckled thirtyish blonde wearing short cutoff jeans and Frye boots. He was a burly forty-something man with pumped-up muscles and his shiny black hair in a modified mullet. He was short and very sweet and, best of all, because he was a Manson buff and lived in the area, he’d been to Barker Ranch before. He knew which fork to take and invited us to follow. Not only that, his pickup, a fire-engine red, four-by-four, Dodge Ram included an off-road winch on its front bumper, which came in handy when our car did indeed get stuck in a particularly deep rut. We caravanned the ten miles, and whatever fears I’d had the night before were completely erased. I was pretty sure neither of us was going to have to drink our pee that day.

Barker Ranch sits high on a hill at the end of a canyon, with lookouts perfectly situated to spot any strangers coming up the canyon. Those of us of a certain age have all seen many hideouts for hole-in-the-wall gangs like this in Western movies—where scouts were assigned to watch for the U.S. Marshal. Golar Wash is a desert oasis and one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen. The homestead is surrounded by rocks and boulders and fed by crystalline streams that nourish cottonwood trees. I had not expected it to be beautiful.

I remember feeling this kind of surprise, on a much broader scale, when I visited Rwanda post-genocide. The verdant beauty of the country was disorienting. It seemed utterly impossible that people had been hacked to death with machetes in such lush surroundings.

The Tate-LaBianca murders hadn’t taken place at Barker Ranch, but the evil was hatched here. This was where Manson socialized or, rather, de-socialized, his acolytes, stripping them not only of their consciences, but also of their ability to think rationally, and this is where he trained them to be murderers. This is where they, in turn, nurtured him and surrendered their very humanity to him.

The main house was a wood and stone structure and looked to be sturdily built. It was clear that, in the decades since the murders, it had been home to campers passing through and to squatters who stayed awhile. It was generally tidy—the concrete floor swept clean, the tiny assortment of dishes and pots on the shelves appeared to have been washed—and there was a note on the kitchen table asking people to keep it that way. Someone had put a bedspread, pillow, and pillowcase on the single bed.

As the four of us walked around, Joe started taking photos of Maggie in various poses to suggest she lived here—stoking a pretend fire in the stone fireplace; sitting at the kitchen table pretending to read an issue of Life magazine with Manson on the cover she’d found on the shelf: December 19, 1969, “The Love and Terror Cult.” At one point, she stood at the stove holding a wooden spoon and pretending to stir soup. Maggie in no way resembled Pat, but the little drama she was acting out brought to life domestic scenes Pat had described to me.

We moved on to the bathroom, where a non-functioning toilet had apparently been used anyway, but someone had removed the sink and vanity. The vanity had been Manson’s hiding place when the ranch was raided by Inyo County officers two months after the murders. The raid was not connected to the murders but the result of auto thefts, primarily of dune buggies, and of arson fires, which seemed to be motivated by vandalism in and around Death Valley. At the time of the raid, most of the group of seven had been sitting at the kitchen table, but Manson was not among them. When a sheriff’s deputy went into the bathroom he noticed long brown hair peeking out of the bathroom vanity. He opened the cupboard door to behold Charles Manson, dressed in fringed buckskin, hiding in the very cramped space.

Outside, there was a stone and concrete structure—either a very small pool or a very large bathtub—that looked to be spring fed when there was enough water to feed it, and nearby, a corroded porcelain bathtub. I wondered if this was the bathtub Leslie had described when she told me one of her jobs was to read the Bible to Manson as he bathed.

After their photo session, Joe and Maggie went to their truck to eat lunch. My daughter and I retrieved our sandwiches from our car and sat down in a couple of wooden folding chairs on the veranda where we had a panoramic view of the little valley. Amidst the sagebrush, there was a scattering of tiny yellow flowers, desert gold, I think, and the leaves on the cottonwoods were a dusky ochre. I again thought about the juxtaposition of the beauty and the grotesque history of the place. But the longer we sat there, the more my focus shifted from the beauty to the isolation, the desolation. And then I knew why I’d come: for the first time I understood the extent of the group’s primitive, regressive existence. This was a world unto itself, suspended from temporal, familial, societal considerations. The little oasis was buffered by the rugged primeval and empty terrain of Death Valley, so empty and so rugged it looked like a moonscape and served as a virtual moat. The sky, washed out by the sun, felt higher and more infinitely infinite.

I thought of the Be Here Now credo of the ’60s. Such a total emphasis on the present is a fine goal if you’re practicing mindfulness, but Manson used it to strip away all other influences but his. As both Pat and Leslie report, he banned clocks and he openly chastised (and worse) manifestations of the life led by the young people before they hitched their wagons to his star.

This was exactly what Zimbardo meant when he described what can occur when people are trapped in what he calls “an expanded present moment.” “When we stop relying on our sense of past commitments and our sense of future liabilities,” he writes in The Lucifer Effect, “we open ourselves to situational temptations to engage in Lord of the Flies excesses.” He explains that under normal circumstances, when you experience an abusive person, you are able to resist by relying on a temporal perspective that stretches beyond what he calls “present-oriented hedonism.” When your behavior is guided by the past, it is informed by your personal values and standards. When your behavior takes the future into account, you automatically engage in what he calls a “cost-benefit analysis,” which evaluates your actions in terms of future consequences. Situations where both past and future considerations are obliterated can result in what he calls deindividuation. This, he writes, was responsible for the abuse in Abu Ghraib and in his own faux prison experiments at Stanford. And this, I believe, is what happened under Manson’s rule where the goal was to erase all traces of the people his subjects had been.

As we sat eating our lunch, except for the periodic rustling of a squirrel or the plaintive whimper of a quail, there was total silence. The hushed emptiness seemed to blot up everything into itself, even the passage of time.