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knives—‘Everybody is afraid of getting cut’ be good: “They got a whole Volks full of ap- ples, plums, Iettuce, avocados and candy out of two or three bins of trash.” The family stayed at the movie ranch for 12 months. Charlie gave its blind old owner, George Spahn, $5,000— perhaps the same bills donated by Linda Kasabian, He also terror- ized George and got a good deal of it ba One night, Spahn says, Charlie forced him to sit in a chair for three hours, held lighted matches before his eyes and swung punches within an inch of his face to discover whether he licd about his sightlessness. (After it was all over Spahn heard the door open and close and sat there in the dark for an hour. He hear a breath. Then he reached around—and put his hand right on Manson's head. “That's right, George, I'm still here.") Ranch hands remember Charlie provided for everybody, sometimes by instructing girls to work their families for money. He passed out marijuana—if he felt like it. He had a plas- tic Baggic full of LSD tablets; these were for visitors from whom he wanted gifts or favors couldn't or recruits he wanted “to capture.” There were seldom more than six or seven male members and usually four times as many girls. The boys got girls —as gifts from Charlic, Charlie had any girl he wanted, The family slept on com- munal mattresses, but Charlie and his choice of the evening slept in a room of their own, Charlie's word was law: he carried and fon- dled a Bowie knife, his scepter. ‘He really loved knives,” recalls an acquaintance. **He used to say, “Man, everybody in this world is afraid of getting cut.’ Healso collected guns and ammunition. The family, he prophesied, was one day going into Los Angeles to set off the apocalypse foreor- ained for them in Revelation, Chapter 9: “They were given the power of scorpions .. . the noise of their wings was like the noise of di A popular ‘all-everything” at high school in Farmersville, Texas, Charles Watson (at left in picture at right) ushered at graduation in 1964, Above, Watson after his arrest for murder. many chariots . . . and they have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit.” There was no doubt who was king. Charlie Manson talked about it to visitors: “He was going to shoot all the white people he saw, all the es- tablished people; then the black people would get enthralled and destroy everybody while he would retreat into the desert.” Charlie did not just talk. He took incredible pains, with the aid of the family’s males, to prepare for the day. They stole Volkswagens, stripped them and turned them into reinforced dune buggies, some with machine gun mounts. The Spahn Movie Ranch lies only a few miles north and west of Burbank, but beyond it are sere, rug- ged and unpopulated hills and beyond them, eventually, the Mojave Desert. Charlie cut the padlocks off fire roud gates and substituted locks of his own. He and his dune buggy driv- ers snarled, skidded and ground their way up the roadless draws and gulches and laid out caches of food, gasoline, tires and sleeping bags across an astonishing area. One youth who was almost but not quite “captured” was told and believes—that Charlie got two Army half-tracks and burned them out establishing a roadless route, 300 miles long. across the Mo- jave and into hills edging Death Valley. This was the site of the so-called Barker Ranch, a huddle of abandoned shacks, a last, remote hole-up which Charlie had gotten on a sort of loan from a rich Burbank widow. The apocalypse did not occur last August de- spite the fact that the newspapers were black with news of the Tate murders. There is no knowing yet just what part Charlie played in trying to set off his Armageddon. Susan At- kins told the grand jury that he planned the at- tack on the house in which he had been slight- ed by Terry Melcher, but took no part in mur- dering Actress Tate and the others who died asa result. Linda Kasabian, on the other hand, told a friend, and may well have teld the jury, that he actually led the raid. Either way, how- ever, Charlic and his helpers spent the next 48 hours with a welding machine, “popping ben- nies” to get on with the job of conditioning the desert buggies. Even though the blacks did not artse to begin the destruction of Los An- geles—and his seeret desert route was thus un- necessary——he loaded up trucks, cars and the bus and took the family on a roundabout trip to the mesquite-dotted hideout above Death Valley. The Barker Ranch is all but inaccessible ex- cept for a route in from Nevada, but the fum- ily’s encampment in its abandoned shacks, the naked girls’ sunbaths by its crude swimming pool, lasted hardly more than a month. They camouflaged the buggics, set up a defense pe- rimeter with two field telephones and put look- outs on watch, but two raids by state police and Death Valley National Monument rangers instigated by complaints of local car thefts scooped up 26 of them. The police took them to Independence, the seat of Inyo County, and put them all in jail on charges of theft. The girls, many of whom were later released, did not lose faith in Charlie Manson. They de- manded that their jailer supply them with pea- nut butter and honey for a “purification cer- emony” and insisted on going naked. Forced to wear dresses, they took to raising them over their heads when exercising outside. Charlie did not forget them, either: he vipped like a coyote in his cell—and they yipped back in chorus. But last week as authorities considered the Los Angeles crimes, and police investigated other deaths—a boy killed last July near the movie ranch, a girl's slashed body found in the Death Valley hills—there seemed to be scant chance that Charlie Manson would ever again put the family beneath his spell.