SAN FRANCISCO -- Investigators have shovelled dirt back into the trenches they dug to look for bodies at Charles Manson's last hideout, but the ghosts haunting the case may not rest as easily.
Family members of victims, prosecutors and researchers -- many of them touched by the murders that shook Los Angeles in 1969 -- were disappointed that no bodies were found in the four holes dug this past week at Barker Ranch on the fringes of Death Valley National Park.
"I'm hoping they can figure out what went wrong with the calculations," said Patrick Sequeira, the Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney in charge of the Manson family parole hearings.
"A body could be two feet from where they are. It's looking for a needle in a haystack. You can be digging within inches of your target."
Like any criminal investigation, this one was restricted by the resources available.
The Inyo County Sheriff's Department, which has jurisdiction over the site, is a rural law enforcement agency with limited funds that were stretched by the expense of the two-day dig in the remote high desert wasteland.
It's still unclear how much money was spent on the excavation, but it needed to be done, Sheriff Bill Lutze said.
"It's the job. It's what we had to do," he said after declaring the investigation closed.
For those whose lives and careers were deeply affected by this case, the thought that investigators might have narrowly missed evidence is unnerving.
"The real sin here, the crime, is to scratch the surface and not give it 100 per cent, not let the scientists follow all options," said Debra Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate, an actress who was eight months pregnant when she was murdered by Manson's followers.
"The investigators needed to be more pliable because it is new science," she said. "They needed to dig deeper, wider... they needed to give the search a little more room."
Tate has followed the re-examination of the property closely, hoping that any other families who may have lost someone to the cult could find answers to their questions.
She came to Barker Ranch in February along with a police investigator with a cadaver-seeking dog, two scientists bearing instruments that detect the chemical markers of human decomposition, and an anthropologist armed with a magnetic resonance reader.
All of this expertise was put to work on the area around the ranch.
At four sites, chemical analyses of the soil, underground anomalies and magnetic disturbances seemed to point to a possible grave site.
Later, more cutting edge technology was applied to the suspected sites: ground penetrating radar, lasers that detect bone fragments, and a three-dimensional mapping equipment that would allow investigators to re-examine the pits, slice by slice.
The group of experts believed the evidence was strong enough to merit an exploratory dig -- advice followed by the local sheriff's department.
At the end of two days, the searchers were exhausted from working in temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius and winds that whipped the dust into their eyes and every crevice of their equipment.
They closed the four gaping holes. Researchers had found some animal bones, an ash pit and a rodent burrow -- but no clear explanation for exactly what led their equipment astray.
The sheriff then closed the investigation, for now.
The Associated Press
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