PANAMINT SPRINGS, CALIF. — It didn't take long Tuesday for a posse of Inyo County sheriff's deputies and forensics experts to mark their first find while searching for buried human remains at a remote, sun-scorched ranch once used as a hangout by the notorious Charles Manson family.
Just 2 inches beneath the surface of a 3-by-6-foot plot lay a .38-caliber bullet casing.
A forensic investigator stuck a little yellow flag with the word "evidence" on it, then photographed the corroded metal shell labeled "No. 1."
Given that nearly every chunk of metal, wood and corrugated tin siding on the isolated property at the southwestern end of Death Valley National Park is riddled with bullet holes, old and new, the find seemed minor. But they continued to dig, in the forbidding heat and scouring gusts of wind.
"It may be good evidence, or it may not," said Arpad Vass, a scientist from a research facility at the University of Tennessee who specializes in the study of the decay of human remains. "But everything we find here must be considered evidence."
Vass surveyed the work from beneath a portable shelter that was repeatedly uprooted by the wind. "I think there is something decomposed there," Vass said. "But I don't know if an animal died here, or a Native American or a dinosaur way back when."
Manson and his followers holed up at the ranch in 1969 after the massacre of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in the Los Angeles area. A member of the Manson family later suggested that there were bodies buried at Barker Ranch.
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, later emerging as leaders of some new world order.
Manson was arrested by law enforcement authorities who discovered him hiding beneath a sink in the ranch house.
On Tuesday, the 20-member team arrived at the Barker Ranch in a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles about 8:30 a.m. and quickly set to work with a goal of sifting out every piece of evidence they could from the sandy soil. They began with a grave-sized plot in one of five areas where a cadaver dog had apparently responded to the smell of decay. Sensitive high-tech devices also had detected chemical compounds of a kind emitted by decaying bone and tissue and an area of disturbed soil 18 to 27 inches underground.
