Bishop - Desert ranch holding Manson Family secrets?

Mammoth Lakes Police Sergeant Paul Dostie and his K-9 partner, Buster, a Human Remains Detection dog, read a vintage copy of Life magazine and the cover story on the cult of Charles Manson. The two are using Buster’s keen sense of smell to get to the bottom of rumors surrounding Barker Ranch (below), an old Manson Family hangout in Death Valley. Mammoth Times photos by Sue Morning

2-2-2008

A dog’s nose could be the first step in connecting more victims to the most notorious family of murderers from the late 1960s.

When Charles Manson and his “Family” members were put behind bars after the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969, Human Remains Detection dogs had yet to be put on the map. Close to 40 years have gone by and these dogs have gained notoriety from people who believe in their abilities and those who question them.
Today, local Mammoth Lakes police Sergeant Paul Dostie and his K-9 partner, Buster, a black Labrador retriever, are using Buster’s keen sense of smell to stir the pot at the Barker Ranch, an old Manson Family hangout in Death Valley.
On Feb. 24, 2007, Dostie, Buster and several other Human Remains Detection dogs and their handlers visited the Barker Ranch. It was Buster’s first real search and Dostie chose the Barker Ranch because of his intrigue with the local spot.
“It all started in the fall of 1998 when I was at our local fair and an Inyo County sheriff’s deputy told me about a dig for bodies at the Barker Ranch that summer,” Dostie explained. “They had been contacted by an author named Bill Nelson. Nelson told them that he was talking to a former Manson Family member who claimed that there were murder victims buried behind the Barker Ranch. They went out to the Barker Ranch with Nelson and his witness. They dug and found nothing. The person who claimed that he was a former family member was Larry Melton, aka White Rabbit.”
Dostie believes that Nelson was duped by Melton and Melton was a fraud who had some brief contact with family members after the arrests.
Once at the ranch in February, Buster led the charge in “alerting” on a spot and another dog in the group “alerted” on a second spot. (When dogs “alert” they run to a spot and lie down.) All of the dogs were sent to both sites and they all alerted on those two original sites. In subsequent visits, Buster alerted on two other sites for a total of four sites; however, when the same group minus Dostie and Buster went back on Nov. 8, 2007, the dogs came up empty.
“When they went back in November, the dogs had difficulty pinpointing,” Dostie said. “Two dogs alerted 30 feet either side of Buster’s site and one dog alerted on the other dog’s site. The others did not. None of the dogs were able to alert on Buster’s other two sites.”
The symbolic spot
It was called the end of the flower era almost 40 years ago. Charles Manson and his “Family” committed some of the most gruesome and surreal murders that the world had ever seen at the time, all in the name of Helter Skelter, Manson’s plot to have the black man rise up against the white man and overthrow him.

The Barker Ranch was the famed hideout where Manson himself was finally captured by the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department in the fall of 1969. The ranch is located in the Panamint Mountains of Death Valley, 25 miles away from the nearest town of Ballarat and surrounded by nothing but mountainous walls. The fact that the ranch is in such a desolate spot lends credence to the idea that people could have been killed out there and no one would have been the wiser, especially if the victims were young, wandering runaways looking for a place to fit in.
Now sitting behind bars, Manson and the Family members involved in the killings are serving life sentences. It does not seem likely that Manson will be set free one day, especially since he doesn’t even make the effort to attend his parole hearings anymore, but there are concerns that some of the other family members could one day be released.
Those concerns could be allayed somewhat if new evidence is brought forward against them through the nose of a dog.
Dostie thinks he and Buster may be onto something that could keep the bunch behind bars for good, that the sites that Buster and the other dogs alerted on could end up being the crude graves of several more victims killed by Manson or his followers.
Background
The history on this case runs deep, and Dostie has been using every resource he can get his hands on to try to see if he can bring some peace to a few more families regarding the whereabouts of their children, something that the sister of one of the previous victims is anxious to do, as well.

Life magazine shows the kitchen as it was when the Manson Family lived at the Barker Ranch, in contrast to how it is today. Mammoth Times photo by Sue Morning

Debra Tate, the younger sister of actress Sharon Tate who was killed by Manson family members during those “two nights of madness” four decades ago, has lived with the murders her entire life. To this day she makes sure to go to the parole hearings for all of the family members to remind parole officers what was taken from her and from others so many decades ago.
“I would love to see this (Dostie’s investigation) go forward,” Tate said in a phone interview. “There are so many stories from Manson family members about these areas. I would like to help some other families come to closure.”
But the fact that the dogs once again did not alert on the sites out at Barker Ranch when they went the second time, has made agencies that might have been interested in helping Dostie and Tate back off.
The land falls under the jurisdiction of the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department, and when Dostie first went to Inyo officials they said they would be willing to take a backhoe out to the area to dig and see what they could find. A dig such as the one that is needed would be very costly, and Inyo County is a small department with limited resources. A dig also would be only the first step in a very lengthy, and again costly, investigation to try to find out who the victims were and if they could be connected to Manson, if anything were found at all.
“It would mean nothing if human remains were found out there,” said Stephen Kay, now the city prosecutor for Redondo Beach, but formerly the assistant to then-Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi during the Manson trials. “Who would you connect a murder to? I don’t know of any evidence of anyone being killed up there.”
Which is true; all there are now are rumors of at least two possible young people who disappeared from the ranch. One was a girl who wasn’t really fitting in at the ranch, and was taken for a walk by Manson and Tex. According to the stories, she allegedly never came back. The second story is of a boy who was backpacking the length of Death Valley and stopped at the Barker Ranch for a few nights. The boy disappeared, but left all his gear behind. When one family member asked Clem Grogan, another family member, where the boy was, Clem is reported to have said, “He got homesick.”
As stated above, these stories are all rumor and hearsay at this point, but one source, who asked not to be named for fear Manson and his family members would not speak to them again in the future, interviewed Manson in prison several years ago. The source asked Manson about the Barker Ranch, but before Manson could answer, his jail house lawyer cut him off, saying that Manson would not talk about any crimes that do not have statute of limitations, and could result in further indictments of people. According to Dostie and the source, in California there are only two crimes that do not have a statute of limitations: murder and embezzlement of public funds.
John Eropkin, undersheriff for Inyo County, and the rest of his department are still as skeptical as Redondo Prosecutor Kay.
“There is not enough evidence from other experienced dogs,” Eropkin told the Mammoth Times. “There are a lot of rumors flying around, but no credible evidence. At this point we are standing on what the last four dogs did. You can always shop around for a dog that is going to hit, but we won’t.”
How the dog’s nose works
On a visit to the Barker Ranch in September 2007 with Dostie, Buster and a photographer, the day was spent the day examining the old building, which is still used by Manson fanatics today. Buster again went on alert on the sites he had alerted on last February. The intensity that Buster showed as he energetically searched at Dostie’s commands made it difficult not to trust his natural, animal instinct.
Dostie has trained Buster for human remains detection with human placentas as well as human bones. Dostie claims that the surgeons at Mammoth Hospital have been very helpful, and patients sign release forms so that he can receive the femur heads from total hip replacements to train Buster. It is important to remember that once a dog is trained to find an old grave scent, it can alert on sites that are several hundred years old. The Park Service has told Dostie that Native Americans were living in the area up to 500 years ago, which means that ancient Native Americans could also be what the dogs smell.
Dostie explained the dogs work like a “hardware/software” system.
“A significant portion of the dog’s brain is devoted to analyzing the data that their nose collects,” Dostie said. “The nose is the hardware and the brain is the software. The most amazing thing is the dog’s ability to instantly discriminate between thousands of volatile chemical compounds (odors). The dogs are proofed off animal remains and usually do so without any additional training. They only alert on human remains.”
Dostie claimed that on their first trip to Barker Ranch in February 2007, the very first site that Buster found seems to be the most plausible for having remains for several reasons. There was a lot of scent at the site and Buster got into the “scent cone” from several yards away. Buster was very sure of the spot even though there were hundreds of other bushes of the same species (sage) in the area. The other dogs also alerted on the same site.
After Buster’s alert at this site, Dostie took a piece of the bush home in a plastic bag. On the way home, about 100 miles from the Barker Ranch, Dostie hid a small piece of the bush sample in another bush. According to Dostie, Buster had no problem alerting on the small piece of bush once again.
After that, Dostie sent the soil sample he had collected along with the bush to a cadaver dog trainer in West Virginia. None of the cadaver dogs alerted on the soil sample, but they did locate on the bush sample.
“We know that bushes will uptake human remains as fertilizer and exude cadaver scent through the leaves,” Dostie said.
Debra Tate, who has also been to the ranch with Dostie and Buster, was amazed at the K-9’s abilities.
“I work with animals and I know it is against their behavior to jump and sit in a prickly bush,” Tate said. “And yet I watched him (Buster) do it several times.”
So what about the fact that the same dogs did not alert again later in the year when Dostie and the others went back in November?
Arpad Vass, a senior research scientist for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was able to give some feedback on this. Vass studies the decomposition of human bodies at a lab at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research facility, dubbed the Body Farm. His specialty is studying the odors and compounds that are released during the decomposition period, and at what stages different odors are released. At this point he has discerned that about 500 chemicals are released during decomposition. His next step will be to present the 30 top chemicals to a dog to see which one, or combination of several, it is alerting on.
While Vass is more an expert on the decomposition process than on the dog, he did have a piece of information to offer that may explain the dogs’ failure to alert in November.
“Dogs don’t do well in a dry environment,” Vass said. “The chemicals are hydrophilic, which means they will attach to the dog’s nose better when the dog’s nose is wet. It would be difficult to have success in the desert dryness because more humidity is needed.”
Vass said that 30 percent humidity seems to be the cutoff for the dogs; below that it would be tough for them to make an alert.
The humidity in Death Valley was most likely higher in Feb-ruary than it would have been November, since February would have been during winter when moisture is a little more abundant and November is coming off the end of the desert’s very dry summer season.
A report from the Institute for Canine Forensics, which accompanied Dostie and the others on their Nov. 8, 2007 excursion to the ranch, showed that the humidity levels ranged from 10.5 percent to 12.7 percent.
According to a report from Weather-Warehouse.com, humidity in Death Valley on Feb. 24, 2007 ranged from 16 percent to 60 percent throughout the day. The humidity report was taken from the China Lake Naval Air Force Base, which is 3,100 feet in elevation below the Barker Ranch, but was the closest weather station the Mammoth Times could locate. The humidity may have been higher at a higher elevation.
“Overall, I always trust the dogs,” Vass said. “It may not sound very scientific, but they know what they are doing.”
What now
With even the slightest possibility that bodies could be found out there, Dostie and Tate feel an investigation is needed to find out if the dogs are right or wrong, and if there are bodies out there, whether they belong to Manson family victims or to ancient Native Americans. The two realize, however, that Inyo County is a small department with limited resources, and they understand the reluctance to dig.
The peace of mind that many would undoubtedly receive from digging at the Barker Ranch just to see what is out there would be enough to make a dig worthwhile, at least that’s what Dostie and Tate believe. Therefore, the next step for them is to find someone willing to fund a professional and scientific dig for the areas where the dogs originally alerted. Once a benefactor is found, Inyo County will still need to give its consent.
Dostie has gone ahead and sent soil samples from all the sites along with negative control samples to NecroSearch in Colorado for checking by their blood-hounds. NecroSearch is a non-profit organization that specializes in the search for clandestine gravesites.
On Monday, Jan. 28, Dostie had received word from NecroSearch that it would be a while before it could test the samples.
“As an experienced forensic investigator, I feel that the K-9’s scenting ability is one our most important forensic tools to locate evidence,” Dostie said. “I also believe that in any forensic experiment we must use the scientific method. Use of the scientific method dictates that we use methods that are repeatable to get accurate results. In order to get an accurate picture of the possibility of graves containing human remains at the Barker Ranch, we would have to use different, similarly trained dogs under similar conditions – i.e. humidity – in double-blind searches of the indicated areas.”
He added that just as you ask for a second opinion regarding a health question, so should different dogs be used for a second opinion on the sites.
Dostie has lectured on the use of advanced forensic techniques at the National Institute for Justice in Washington D.C., and the FBI’s Advanced Homicide School for Indian Country in Phoenix, Ariz. He will be in Houston, Texas, at the Conference for Crimes Against Women from Feb. 11-13. Dostie will be making a presentation about the use of advanced forensic techniques including the use of forensic dogs in homicide investigations.
If nothing happens, the Family members behind bars and those who are free will, one by one, pass away, and their secrets will be buried with them, and perhaps remain buried in the desert around the Barker Ranch.