3/14/08

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Searchers find possible graves at Manson compound

who:Charles Manson
what: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.
where:DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, California
what happened:Now, as then, few venture into this alkaline wilderness -- gold-diggers, outlaws, loners content to live and let live.
But a determined group of outsiders recently made the trek. They were leading forensic investigators searching for new evidence of death -- clues pointing to possible decades-old clandestine graves.
And the results of just-completed followup tests suggest bodies could indeed be lying beneath the parched ground. The test findings -- described in detail to The Associated Press, which had accompanied the site search -- conclude there are two likely clandestine grave sites at Barker Ranch, and one additional site that merits further investigation.
Next step, the ad hoc investigators urge: Dig.The same jailhouse confessions that helped investigators initially connect the band of misfits living in the Panamint Mountains to the gruesome killings that terrorized Los Angeles hinted at other deaths. Manson follower Susan Atkins boasted to her cell mate on November 1, 1969, that there were "three people out in the desert that they done in." Other stories surfaced. In the absence of bodies, they were forgotten.