No human remains found so far at Manson ranch

Inyo County sheriff’s investigators said today they had failed to find human remains in the most promising site at a remote Death Valley National Park ranch used in 1969 as a hideout by Charles Manson and his followers.

“One bullet casing was found in the site,” said Inyo County Sheriff’s Lt. Jim Jones, “but forensic testing indicates that there were no human remains in or around that site.”

Excavation of their second most potentially rewarding site yielded only remnants of ash and small animal bones. That location was turned over to the National Park Service to be handled as an archaeological site.

Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze is scheduled to give a progress report later today.

On Tuesday, it didn’t take long for a posse of Inyo County sheriff’s deputies and forensics experts to mark their first find while searching the sun-scorched ranch once used 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.

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.

louis.sahagun@latimes.com