Search for bodies at Manson ranch

Nation & World News

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.

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

Dr. Mike Karch looks over an abandoned miner's truck that has Helter Skelter written on the back of it behind the Barker Ranch in California. The CSI-style team that went to the ranch included two national lab researchers carrying instruments to detect chemical markers of human decomposition, a police investigator with a cadaver-seeking dog, and an anthropologist armed with a magnetic resonance reader.

Charles Manson is escorted at the Los Angeles courthouse in Dec. 11, 1969, for arraignment on conspiracy charges in connection with the slayings of actress Sharon Tate and seven others.

Marc Wise (left) and Arpad Vass use cutting edge technology to measure the gas coming from a target site. Forensic investigators are searching for new clues pointing to possible decades-old clandestine graves.

Original lookout chairs used by Manson family members still stand sentinel above the abandoned ranch.

"After the murder, my mom became a shell of herself," said Debra Tate (above), who was 17 when her sister, actress Sharon Tate, was killed. Her younger sister Patti was 11. "I filled in at home, as best I could."

Trash litters the breezeway at Barker Ranch House, refuge of Charles Manson in this Dec. 5, 1969, file photo.

Charles Manson, who headed up a cult of misfits, believed that the end of the world, which he called "Helter Skelter," was near. Manson was convinced that through murder, he had a role to play in accelerating that chaotic time.

Charles Manson on the cover is left on a the kitchen table in the abandoned Barker Ranch house in the Panamint Mountains west of Death Valley National Park, Calif. Barker Ranch was one of several hideouts used by Manson and his followers.

Original Caption: Arpad Vass pokes around a target site looking for buried bodies behind the abandoned Barker Ranch house as Buster, a human remains grave dog, takes a break.

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

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