Who let the dogs out?
Last year Mammoth Lakes police officer Sergeant Paul Dostie took his human remains detection dog Buster up to the Barker Ranch above the Panamint Valley where Charles Manson and his cohorts were captured in 1969. The dog honed in on two sites where Dostie claims there's a possibility of human remains being buried. Whose remains? According to forty-year-old hearsay and other dubious sources, there were at least two individuals who visited Barker Ranch and disappeared. "One was a girl who wasn’t really fitting in at the Ranch, and was taken for a walk by Manson and Tex [Watson]. According to the stories, she allegedly never came back. The second story is of a boy who was backpacking the length of Death Valley and stopped at the Barker Ranch for a few nights. The boy disappeared, but left all his gear behind. When one family member asked Clem Grogan, another family member, where the boy was, Clem is reported to have said, 'He got homesick.'" Other than stank, so far no remains have turned up.
The current interest in uncovering a secret high desert sepulcher actually started in 1998 when self-proclaimed Family hanger-on Larry "White Rabbit" Melton led Inyo County Sherriffs on a treasure hunt for a victim he saw murdered and buried just outside the kitchen window of the dilapidated ranch house back in the Family's glory days. No body was ever found and Melton later claimed he "purposefully misled" the searchers.
Last year however, the fuzz was better prepared. Aiding Buster in his search were four other Historic Grave Detection dogs. Even the media got involved. TV crews from the Discovery Channel with nothing better to discover, drove up from Hollywood to film the hunt. They plan to air it as an episode of their "Most Evil" series. Presumably the other episodes will deal with such other notorious bad guys as the Hillside Strangler, Donald Trump, and Dick Cheney.
Dostie's pretty sure there’s something down there. Buster’s a pro. He’s been cramming for years on the specifics of human remains detection, using human placentas as well as human bones as learning aids. "The surgeons at Mammoth Hospital have been very helpful, and patients sign release forms so that he can receive the femur heads from total hip replacements to train Buster," explained Dostie to the Mammoth Times. Buster's sense of smell is so refined that he can pick up on the remains of a carcass several hundred years old, which unfortunately for this investigation means that what Buster's so fired up about could just as likely be a dead Indian as a dead hippy.