If the basic facts around Charles Manson’s lucky desert arrest seem strange, then the specifics will seem even stranger. Having murdered around 35 people around Hollywood — and intending to murder more like Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Steve McQueen — Manson and his devotees retreated to their desert hideout, Barker Ranch. There, they believed they would wait out the apocalypse in a hidden, subterranean city dubbed “the bottomless pit” and emerge onto the ravaged Earth to rule the planet, as Life explains. As we can see on Google, Barker Ranch is now a scrabbly patch of hard desert littered with broken shacks. It’s also a tourist site.
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Back then, Barker Ranch didn’t look very different. CNN says that the drive out to the “last redoubt of the gaggle of hippies” — as The Guardian puts it — requires four-wheel-drive to traverse the craggy terrain of a narrow Death Valley passageway called Golar Wash. Police made the journey to Barker Ranch in 1969 and found Manson hiding in a cupboard under a sink. As we can read in “The Last Charles Manson Tapes: Evil Lives Beyond the Grave,” it was Manson’s followers themselves who attracted authorities to the cult’s remote hiding spot. They went in and out of Barker Ranch, tearing up the desert on dune buggies fastened with roll bars and machine gun mounts.
