Aug. 8 – There’s nobody home now at Barker Ranch, in the jaws of Death Valley just north of the San Bernardino County line.

It’s deserted. A ghost house.

A lot of bad things happened there once, and a number of people who lived there are now in prison.

Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and their hero.

Charles Manson.

The Manson murders, which shocked the world 20 years ago this week, were planned at Barker Ranch. After the deeds were done, the killers fled back to the ranch, cutting across the northwest corner of San Bernardino County.

They hid there for two months. Then they were arrested there in a three-day raid that netted an astonishing total of 24 suspects, all of them followers of a short, scruffy man with wild staring eyes.

Manson was one of the last to be nabbed. He was found hiding in the cupboard under the bathroom sink, a telltale shock of hair poking out the crack of the cupboard door.

Nobody lives at Barker Ranch now. Quite likely, nobody ever will again.

“It’s government property now,” said John Kalish, chief ranger for the Ridgecrest Resource Area of the Bureau of Land Management. “We aren’t likely to see any re-enactments. Fortunately.”

The government, in fact, patrols the isolated ranch on a regular basis to keep out squatters. There have been a number of them in the 20 years since the Manson “family” called it home. “It’s been associated with mining claims, and throughout time different people who owned mining claims it the area have claimed the cabin,” Kalish said.

​​A shaky claim, because the primitive ranch has been on government-controlled land from the beginning.

The most recent inhabitant did some extensive renovation a couple of years ago, then “sold” it for a reported $14,000 to a group of buyers in Los Angeles. The notoriety of the place helped fetch the inflated price, Kalish said. “It had a history, and I understand that this was appealing to the buyers.”

The government intervened, however, disputing the squatter’s right to sell the property and the buyers’ right to buy it. “We just came to an agreement,” Kalish said. “They (the buyers) realized early in our contacts that they were on real shaky ground and that it would be very difficult for them to come into lawful occupancy.”

Kalish doesn’t know how the disputed sale was settled between the buyer and seller, he said, but he does know the government now has “absolute indisputable title to it – free and clear.”

The BLM has no plans for the ranch. “We haven’t made a determination on the future of the cabin,” he said. “But we wouldn’t do anything substantial without getting public input. We’re not going to start tearing it down.”

While the ranch house is structurally unchanged from the Manson years, there is no evidence of the ranch’s notorious one-time occupants. A ramshackle bus, which brought Manson and his disciples to Southern California from their former home in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, remained parked at the ranch for years, and old clothing, dishes and debris were also left undisturbed for several years after the arrests. But the bus was hauled off a few years ago by another desert rancher, and other items belonging to the Manson family are long gone.

“It’s doubtful there are any artifacts left over from that time,” Kalish said. “I’m sure they’ve all disappeared by now.”

The Barker Ranch, once the home of a pioneer miner in the area named Jim Barker, is in Goler Wash, a near inaccessible dry wash gouged into the foothills of the Panamint Mountains some 25 miles northeast of Trona. A stone and cement house, with butane-powered lights and refrigerator, it was home to the Manson family for the better part of a year.

They discovered it in the fall of 1968. It was ideal: empty and isolated. As Kalish puts it, “They picked a good spot for what they were doing.”

Manson had dreams, it was reported after his arrest, of mounting an army of dune buggy warriors, armed with machine guns. They would launch an attack that would provoke a widespread race war. Then, they would pull back to their remote desert citadel and enjoy the revolution that would follow.

The Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, in August 1969, were part of the early strategy. The killers may have gotten away with the murders, too, except for a stupid act of vandalism that led to their capture.

In September 1969, the Wildrose Station of Death Valley National Monument received a report that arsonists had damaged a $20,000 government-owned earth mover used for land clearing.

Park ranger Dick Powell isolated tire marks belonging to the suspects, then several days later spotted a Toyota 4-wheeler in the area with tires that matched the marks. He reported the license number to California Highway Patrol Officer Jim Purcell, the resident officer at nearby Shoshone, who quickly determined that the vehicle was stolen.

Together, Powell and Purcell scouted the area and on Sept 29 discovered evidence of habitation at the old Barker Ranch. They also found evidence of a car-stripping operation.

On Oct. 10, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department joined the Park Service and the CHP in a raid on Barker Ranch. They arrested three men and 10 women on suspicion of grand theft auto.

A second raid Oct. 12 netted 11 more suspects, including Charles Manson, who was found by Purcell wedged into a bathroom cupboard. Manson emerged, dressed in buckskins, and grinned at the officer.

On the way to jail in Independence, north of Lone Pine, he tried to talk his captors into joining his revolution.

Big talk for an auto theft suspect.

Soon, though, after a jail-house confession by Atkins, Manson and his disciples were not only auto theft suspects, but suspects in one of the century’s most notorious murder cases.

That was 20 years ago. The case has long been resolved. The murderers were convicted, and they are still in prison.

Twenty years later, Barker Ranch is quiet. But the dark shadow of its history still lies unquietly over the place.

“People know about it and ask about it,” Kalish said. “If Manson had not used the cabin. I suspect there wouldn’t be much interest in the place. There’s another place nearby called the Myers Ranch, and nobody asks where the Myers place is.”

By JOHN WEEKS