Ballarat BEL Be-In, Easter Sunday '71

From the Nevada State Journal, April 8 1971:  "the gathering was called for by participants in the Laguna Beach Christmastime Happening as a religious experience. They denied later reports that the gathering would be a rock festival saying no live music was planned for the Easter sunrise observation."

*Special thanks to Michael Channels for permission to use the image at left.

Here are two more from the same event that DebS recently found in the LA Freep. One has a map showing festival attendees how to arrive at Ballarat from Laguna Beach:

"According to Superintendent Murphy of Death Valley National Monument, no arrangements have been made with his department for the festival...As we see it, this festival has all the makings of a very bad trip."


Promoters jumped on board and rumors floated that bands like Jethro Tull would be in attendance. BEL member Dion Wright who painted the Taxonomic Mandala made the following statement: "An Easter gathering will take place in Ballarat California, an eighty acre privately owned ghost town...(that) has been offered free of charge. We have represented to (Inyo County) a pilgrimage...including the placing of a Book of Life in the Panamint Valley." 

  Book of Life, not Book of Death (as in Leary's and the Manson's manifestos). Patty has heard the Goler Wash referred to as the "Holy Goler" and has always wondered why: perhaps this is part of the answer. Interesting, no?

Missing Link Wrap Up

Click here to read parts 1,2,3 and 4 of this series.

Wasn't that last discussion about Grant's Pass interesting? BEL, DeCarlo, Ruby Pearl and maybe even George Spahn livin' all up in there? Another pink dot for Patty's gynormous western road map.

Anywhoo, back to Charles Manson. Charles knew about running shine, he knew about pimping women, and he knew a hell of a lot about human psychology. He was good at selling drugs before he even began. He hoped to become a big player: to be appreciated for the genius that he felt himself to be. In the beginning, this appeared to be a real possibility in both the drug and music worlds, as Charlie made more and more connections. Psychedelics from San Francisco and Boston were trendy, sexy, a great social equalizer from, say, 1965 to 1968. Charlie got to run with the big dogs during this time. He was the candyman, and the more wasted you got, the better his music sounded.

By 1969, folks like Michael Caine started complaining that the hippies were "dirty," as pointed out by JohnnySeattle on Katie's Blog About Nothing. What the elite used to consider participating in the social revolution was once again viewed as "slumming." The Family was going out of fashion, and found themselves being snubbed more and more often as carefree hippiedom gave way to the next big thing. They likely had fewer and fewer opportunities to make big deals, as evidenced by the independent deals gone wrong with Gary and with Lotsapoppa. People did not want to go to a smelly ranch or to a biker bar to get high any more, they wanted to do it in their upper class neighborhoods with their upper class friends. They wanted to go to night clubs, beauty parlors and health food stores to score, instead. This cultural shift cut out the lower class, mid-level managers (bikers and hippies) who had maybe a good three- or four-year run.

Tex Watson claims to have ingested a substantial amount of cooked belladonna root the day before the murders, as well as LSD and some sort of speed. Tex was high as a kite that night as per his testimony of September, 1971 available at Charliemanson.com: "Then he said something about writing on the walls, and we were walking over to the car that the girls were in and I said -- the first words that I had spoken -- and I said, "Now, what did you say?" or something to that effect. I wasn't real clear on what was to be wrote on the walls or clear about the whole thing, really." 

Patty always wonders if Charlie actually told Tex to write on the walls that night, or if Charlie was metaphorically saying that the writing was on the wall? Tex, who purportedly ate the drugs because he wanted to and not because Charlie told him to, must have felt to his very core that it was all "coming down fast." Charlie must have felt this way too, but for a different reason: his scene was coming apart at the seams. It would have been an ideal time for him to make a move to the desert, where the living is anonymous and dirt cheap. In the desert, many of the things you need can easily be taken from someone else. 

The leader of the old BEL regime, a very well intentioned man named John Griggs, died on August 3 from bad synthetic psilocybin that was supposedly making the rounds. Bloggers Cybot and Sherm maniac suggest the poison that killed Griggs and/or made Bobby's biker clients sick may have been a belladonna derivative, or even PCP (aka the PeaCe Pill, aka synthetic mescaline). Patty has also suggested that perhaps the bad trip was PMA. It is probable that drugs were marketed on the street as synthetic mescaline, psilocybin, or THC when in fact they were not. This is what the Hell's Angels had done up north: they sold "acid" that was really STP, and synthetic THC which was actually PCP. The old switcheroo is what street dealers of Molly still do today: they will tell you that Molly is a purer form of MDMA when actually, it's the same old shit.

There was a huge shakedown going on that summer: who would control the manufacture and distribution of the growing psychedelics trade in California and beyond? Whoever won that season of Survivor, Patty supposes. Most sources claim that Johnny Gale and Ronald Stark were the big financial winners in the end. The counterculture was of the general opinion that the "piggies" were trying to profit in one way or another from the drugs that had helped to define the grassroots hippie movement. The piggies were greedily taking it all away: the counterculture's adopted way of life and one of their major means of financial support, aka the distribution of marijuana and LSD. This seemed, to the hippies or slippies or whatever the heck you want to call them, highly immoral because the rich were only getting richer while the poor got poorer. The piggies did not need a bigger piece of the pie, but they were taking it anyway.

Many leftist organizations actually praised the Family's actions: most notably at the December, 1969 meeting of the Weathermen's Students for a Democratic Society in Flint, Michigan. Bernardine Dohrn is quoted as having said "First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate's stomach! Wild!" Yes, some of the details in her description are off. Nevertheless, the stunning result of her words for the rest of the meeting involved attendees flashing each other a finger "fork" as a symbol of solidarity and resolve. Believe it or not, today Bernardine Dohrn is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all.

If Patty was to elucidate her theory in 300 words or less, she thinks that Gary Hinman and John Griggs got caught in the middle of a huge turf war, and perished. Presumably this was due to their trusting and kind dispositions, chemical talents (or, lack thereof), business connections and affinity with the fairly peaceful, pre-1969 scene. Voytek, according to Roman himself, had stayed at Cielo "a bit too long:" the implication being that Voytek was into something dangerous. Indeed, even though Voytek went to film school and came from a wealthy family, he was at the time of his murder quite broke, which must have been psychologically difficult for him. He attempted to get a writing career going to no avail. He was well connected, and he needed money, FAST. He and Gibby had ingested an MDA-like compound within days or hours of their death according to their autopsies, which is telling. Roman immediately suspected John Phillips and apparently ransacked his car looking for the proof. Is it possible that Roman was not completely oblivious to the situation that led up to the murder of his wife and child? Could he have stopped what happened? This has actually been suggested to Patty by a somewhat reliable source.

The staff at Jay's fancy hair salons apparently heard about his death well before the public did, went to his home, and "cleaned" it. Jay's salons and Rosemary's dress shops would have made great dealerships in the new regime, but it was not meant to be. Leno likely funded Rosemary's shady business with shady money he made with his shady banking and gambling friends. Like Steve Parent's death, the deaths of Sharon and Gibby were incidental to the main goal of the evening. But because they were rich and beautiful, a (flawed) argument could be made that they were piggies, too. If it is true that Katie Krenwinkel and Bill Garretson were friendly, then he was not killed, presumably because he was not a piggie. Rather, he was "us," not "them."

Why were we so comfortable with swallowing the Helter Skelter thing, hook line and sinker? Patty has a hypothesis that is instructed by her 25 year old, dual major in political science and religious studies. Both disciplines have to do with understanding how the beliefs, behaviors and resources of a given population are managed by its leaders. In the East and at the Vatican, people know intuitively that religion and politics are the same damned thing.  They do not try to divorce the two, like we do here in the US. So, if what happened with the Mansons was not about "rational" politics or business dealings, then it had to have been about "irrational" religion. Our culture decided to demonize them rather than examine them more closely. This was a cult, we decided, and as such, the Manson Family's actions have been easily discountable as irrelevant and irrational for the last 40-plus years. Many careers were born of this premise, including that of The Bug.

Anywhoo, This is Patty's last post on this subject for now because obviously she has a lot more work to do: documents to find, people to interview, timelines to make. Won't you join her? She needs some damned help, please.

The Missing Link, Part Penultimate

Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series can be found here, here and here.

Blogger Cybot asked, "did drug trade start by hippies and then go to the organized crime, or were drugs traded by o. c./mafia from the beginning? - and when did the trade start?" Patty was thinking about his questions the other night while watching the Ken Burns documentary on prohibition. Was that when organized crime started in the US? Of course not.

From the very minute folks got off the Mayflower, they started forming alliances just like they do on Survivor. Even before that, the natives likely did the same. Those who are the most organized, have the most resources, make the best alliances, always win. Those who overstep the boundaries created by the dominant group are marginalized and punished. When one season is over, another rises to take its place. This is the way the world has worked since the very beginning.

We are interested in a very short capsule of time when studying the murders, which might be described as the proverbial "perfect storm." We know that up north, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL) had deals with the Panthers, with the Gypsy Jokers and also with the Angels (see here). To the south, the mob had been in Hollywood for quite some time, but were not really involved in the trade of psychedelics. If anything, they were supplying cocaine, but not on the scale that they later would. In the summer of 69, there was a market for psychedelics, and there were many competing parties who wished to be the fulfillment arm of the BEL drug empire.

The BEL began as a group of high school students in Anaheim. You will remember that John Griggs, founder of the BEL, hadn't tried LSD until he and his friends dropped acid near Palm Springs. Griggs relieved a "famous producer" of his cache of Sandoz LSD during a Hollywood Hills dinner party in 1966. That experience was the birth of his organization, which he preferred to call a church rather than an organized crime syndicate.

By all reports, Griggs was well intentioned about using LSD to the betterment of humanity. The BEL lobbied to become an official, tax-free religious organization: when it was accomplished, he named California Governor Ronald Reagan as an honorary member!

Anyway, Patty digresses. The point of all off this is that the identity of the producer who had a kick ass, laboratory grade connection and who did not prosecute Griggs may be relevant. Who and what the famous producer actually produced is unknown. Patty has compiled a short list of guesses, as follows:

Bob Evans was very close friends with Roman and Sharon and had produced Rosemary's Baby.  He hosted a large, lavish funeral reception for Sharon. Bob was an infamous partier who, with his brother Charles, was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980.

Clive Davis was general manager of Columbia Records by 1965. He is responsible for signing Janis Joplin after the Monterrey Pop Festival of 1967, and for bringing the Grateful Dead to the Arista Label in the 70's. Bob Weir would occasionally change the lyrics of Jack Straw in concert from "we used to play for silver, now we play for life," to "we used to play for silver, now we play for Clive."

Terry Melcher and Bruce Johnston formed the vocal duet Bruce & Terry in the early '60s. Later, Johnston joined The Beach Boys and Melcher went to work with the Byrds for Columbia Records. There, he produced  "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!" Melcher also performed on Pet Sounds as a background vocalist and was a producer of the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967.

Chuck Barris, of all people, is a weirdly compelling shortlister. Wait a sec, hear Patty out before you start L'ing YAO. Chuck Barris married Lyn Levy, whose father founded CBS, in 1957. He first became uber-successful during 1965 with his creation of The Dating Game on ABC. He also produced the Canadian-based Bobby Vinton variety show and infamously claims to have worked for the CIA.
Brian Wilson would be the most expeditious and direct choice for the "famous producer" in question. The Beach Boys were signed to Capitol Records in 1962. They released their groundbreaking single "Good Vibrations" and album Pet Sounds in 1966. According to many sources, brother Dennis was a hub around which many relevant relationships centered. The Neil Young connection is said to have been through Dennis. Bryan Lukashevsky knew Dennis, too. Strangely, Lukashevsky (who now lives in Honolulu) told Brian Davis in March, 2012 that one day soon, the time will be right for the real story to come out. He did not elaborate on why that is. 

Is it safe to say now that everybody absolutely did know everybody else on the scene in 1969? How to the LaBiancas fit in to all of this?

According to police investigation reports, Leno was part-owner of nine thoroughbred horses. He liked to make large bets at the track, frequented Las Vegas as late as March, 1969 and had misappropriated about $200,000 from his Gateway Markets since 1964. When he met and married Rosemary, she was a waitress at the Los Feliz Inn. At the time of her death, she had two dress shops: one having just been opened on Figueroa Street in LA. This is not a nice area. In fact, it is within yards of noisy Interstate 5 which runs from Mexico, where Rosemary was born, all the way to Canada.

Leno was a board member at the Hollywood National Bank. It is long gone, but it used to sit a block south of Hollywood and Vine at Argyle. Today, this is next to the Pantages Theater and within view of the Capitol Records Building (see left). According to an article at TOTLB, Hollywood National opened to much applomb in 1964 with appearances by celebrities and government officials. Wouldn't you just love to know which ones? Patty sure would. She would also love to see Hollywood National's books, or at least a copy of the local and federal investigations into them. By 1967, Leno's colleagues were being investigated and convicted for laundering "hoodlum money." By 1971, the bank was bought out by United States National Bank of Portland; by 1973, it became a part of Wells Fargo.

The BEL's ability to produce Orange Sunshine was financed by Billy Hitchcock, a richie rich from the East Coast who rented Millbrook in 1963 so that Tim Leary, et. al. could perform their "research" there in peace. He was a member of the Carnegie Mellon family on his mother's side: "old money" they call it, with ties to huge companies like Gulf Oil, Alcoa, New York Shipbuilding, Westinghouse, Newsweek, U.S. Steel and General Motors.

He had large deposits at The Castle Bank & Trust, an infamous Bahamanian bank founded in the 1960s by a former member of the US Office of Strategic Services and a tax lawyer friend. In 1967, the bank's clients were celebrities, organized crime figures and wealthy business owners like Hitchcock, Credence Clearwater Revival, Tony Curtis, Hugh Hefner, the Pritzker family (Hyatt Hotels), and Las Vegas gangster Moe Dalitz.The Mary Carter Paint Company, one of the the bank's shell companies, later became Resorts International which built a luxury hotel in the Bahamas called Paradise Island. President Richard Nixon stayed there on many occasions. Castle Bank contributed quite a bit of money to his re-election campaign, as discovered by the Ervin Committee in 1972.

In 1968, Hitchcock purchased land just north of one of his homes in Sausalito, then put Nick Sand and Tim Scully on retainer. Shortly thereafter, Hitchcock and Owsley hired a New York law firm called Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard to look into the possibility of legally producing LSD and hash in the Bahamas. Soon thereafter, the IRS' "Operation Tradewinds" revealed that Castle Bank was involved in tax evasion. It was also covertly funneling funds for CIA military operations including the anti-Castro maneuvers at Andros Island.

By this time many investors including Billy Hitchcock had moved their funds elsewhere. The IRS planned to initiate a new investigation called Project Haven into the affairs of individual Castle Bank clients like Billy's college chum, Sam Clapp. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the investigation was dropped because of "pressure from the CIA." Castle Bank collapsed in 1977 leaving poor John Fogerty and many others in the lurch. You can draw your own conclusions about that. In any case, Patty would love to find a connection between Hollywood National and The Castle Bank or any of its shell companies, and she is still looking into it.

Phew...that was a lot. Are you still with Patty? Let's sit on that for a while. She promises the next post will be the last in this series.  Happy New Year, and PEACE.

More on the "Missing Link:" Bikers and Meth

Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here.

We cannot go much further with Patty's current line of inquiry without addressing methamphetamine (aka meth) and biker culture. Admittedly, Patty doesn't know shit about any of it firsthand. However, she once had biker neighbors who were probably cooking meth. She knows this because of the weird foot traffic, the weird hours, the weird smell, and the rather large, glass shattering explosion at 2am several years back. Patty became peripherally friendly with them, and they protected Patty's property from harm on more than one occasion. She felt that they were good people with bad habits and worse friends.

Her attitude is likely influenced by the fact that Patty grew up in a Southern California town known for its abundance of meth: it was freaking EVERYWHERE, she remembers. In the early eighties, a lab down the street from her junior high blew up violently, and became the butt of many a schoolyard joke. A local bar called The Starlight purportedly distributed it via table service ("I'll have a beer and a bump!"), but Patty was too young back then to know if that is actually true. Patty cannot imagine anyone actually liking that messed up, tweeked out, way-too-much-coffee feeling. But, a lot of people apparently do. Or, they get started so they can work harder, thinking that they will kick after they make the big money. Um, BAD IDEA.

There was also a spaceship cult in Patty's town called Unarius (pictured at left) that had property out in Jamul (pronounced "huhMOOL"). Patty recently found out on facebook which of her high school friends' parents were involved: she never had a clue at the time, so it was a real shocker. Jamul is conveniently located on Highway 94, a desolate back road that leads to the US/Mexico border crossing at Tecate (see below). Yes, that is where they make the beer of the same name. Patty remembers going to the dulceria there as a child: it was her treat for waiting patiently while Mom and Dad Patty haggled over the price of terra cotta garden pottery with the locals.

As a teen, Patty was forbidden by Mom Patty from going to Jamul and beyond because of its bad reputation: it is not uncommon for hikers or sportsmen to find dead bodies in the surrounding areas. Sometimes, people die from exposure while trying to cross the border; other times, people have been shot for one reason or another. Supposedly, "Stephanie Schram's sister" (she has two: Susan Jane who was married three times between '69 and '76, and Sally Joanne who seems to have been a bit more stable) lived in Jamul, and this is where she and Charlie were going in early August, 1969. Oh. by the way, you know Charlie speaks pretty good Spanish, right? Si! Esta es la verdad! Whether or not there were also bikers in Jamul back then, Patty knows not. But she is beginning to think that Jamul may have been one of the 40 regional BEL distribution centers written about in Schou. At the very least, it would have been a convenient stop just north of a very sleepy, low-security border crossing well known to dealers on both sides.


Another place that a friend of the blog has suggested is involved in our story is Carbon Canyon, which is just east of Brea in Orange County. He says that "after getting LSD in Laguna, kids would go to Carbon Canyon and drop it." There was a bar there at the time called "La Vida" which was part of an old hot springs and soda pop factory. It became dilapidated by the 1960s: it was a hippie/biker hangout until the late 70's, at which point it became a notorious underground punk club. Patty is not sure if you can still get a beer there or not, but she thinks not. Patty's friend compares Carbon Canyon to Topanga and (like Patty, Mom Patty and Jamul) remembers that he was forbidden to go out there. He would anyway, but it was "wild," and you NEVER went alone. This may be because La Vida was purportedly a bar that served "many patches."

In Northern California, the Hell's Angels made a deal with Nick Sand to distribute his leftover cache of STP by selling it as "acid" on the street. In return, Sand would make methamphetamine for them. As you know, this is what the Angels were messed up on at Altamont. As we discussed last time, meth is very similar to MDA, as are the starting materials. Sand just put some of the batch aside to be processed in a slightly different way to give a slightly different product. In this way one could make a case for the California methamphetamine trade having risen from the earlier trade in psychedelics.

As a result of the deal made with Sand, the Angels got a bad reputation for their bad "biker acid" (Patty wonders aloud if the Woodstock catch phrase "don't eat the brown acid" was some of the same stuff?). As a result, by 1968 the BEL was shopping around for new distributorships or franchises to peddle their wares. This created a large part of the internal chaos within the BEL that culminated with the death of founder John Griggs who ingested a bad (or over-) dose of "synthetic psilocybin" that was making the rounds just days before Cielo.

Bob Ackerley states that an old friend from Anaheim, Elliot Miller (aka The Joker) was "another brother from Anaheim that nobody knows about, and he had a whole network." Whether or not Miller was a Gypsy Joker is unknown to Patty. She has learned however that The Gypsy Jokers were formed in San Francisco in the 1950's, and were forced out of the bay area by the Angels in 1967 (this is, coincidentally, around the same time that the Angels made their business arrangement with the BEL to sell STP). The Jokers later relocated to Oregon and Washington. They are still active up north selling meth, and they are still scary as hell. We will absolutely have to come back to speaking about Oregon at some point.

Anywhoo, in Southern California around the same time, there were Satan's Slaves and the Straight Satans. According to DebS' research here, the Slaves were legitimate 1%-ers. In the US, they eventually patched over to become Angels. They still exist abroad in the UK and elsewhere. While they are not much discussed in Helter Skelter, the Straight Satans are discussed therein quite a bit. Deb believes that they were not nearly as tight and as legitimate of an organization as the Slaves were.
At least one gentleman was murdered in 1971 for the offense of impersonating a Satan according to an article found by DebS. Another that was written by Sue Marshall infers that the impersonators were police informants who used confiscated Satans membership paraphernalia as credentials. It also infers that Satans were not big time dealers: rather they only traded in small quantities. Supposedly, Danny DeCarlo was a Satan. This idea fits with the material contained in the following interview blogger Cybot referenced with Bobby Beausoleil, that was conducted by Oui Magazine, circa 1981:

Q. Why did you go to Gary Hinman's home on July 25th, 1969?
A. I didn't go there with the intention of killing Gary. If I was going to kill him, I wouldn't have taken the girls. (Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins). I was going there for one purpose only, which was to collect $1,000 that I had already turned over to him, that didn't belong to me.
Q. When had you given him the $1,000?
A. The night before.
Q. You paid Hinman $1,000 for 1000 tabs of mescaline and then returned to the Spahn Ranch?
A. Right. The whole transaction with the Straight Satans motorcycle club took place at Spahn's Ranch. There were a few Satan Slavers hanging out there as well. The Straight Satans took the mescaline back to the motorcycle club at Venice where they were intending to party, they were really mad about it.
Q. How did you know that it was strychnine instead of mescaline in such a short time? If you didn't try the drug yourself, how could you be certain that it was bogus or poison?
A. I don't think that those guys would have lied to me. They wouldn't have been that mad.
Q. How long had you and Hinman been doing these transactions?
A. Very rarely. I just happened to know that he had something. I was trying to be a nice guy, trying to be in with the fellows, trying to impress somebody.

Bobby, who knew Gary as far back as at least October of 1967 according to evidence found at the murder scene, has perfected the art of looking the part of the pathetic victim of circumstance. Here, he is talking about a relatively small deal conducted for a small, loose-knit biker club with a tiny little manufacturer of "synthetic mescaline." This was an independent deal, not a "syndicate" deal, as Shreck would call it, which may also explain why Bobby handled the whole situation so ineptly. Why would the bikers think that it was strychnine? It is not a product of the chemical processes in question if the synthetic mescaline was STP or PMA. However, Robert Hendrickson suggests that Gary may have been experimenting with extracting scopolamine from Atropa belladonna.  Strychnine and belladonna have an established historical connection: they used to be packaged together in Victorian times to treat a host of internal ailments, and can still occasionally be found together in over the counter "homeopathic" preparations. Either way, the experience would still have been extremely unpleasant.

It is also interesting to Patty to hear that there were also Satan's Slaves at Spahn, who had known ties to the BEL during a very unstable time in California's drug trade for all of the reasons mentioned above, and more. Were Satan's Slaves the source of the chaos that ensued when someone realized that established territory was being impinged upon? Was Bobby auditioning for a larger role in an already established organization, or maybe just filling in for someone else like one of the two Charleses, since the stakes were pretty low?

As for Gary, what was his motivation? As Leary suggested, was he trying to raise a little money for his trip to Japan: a one-off kind of thing? Was his intention to become more involved at some point, or at least, did someone believe that was his intention? Did his being a buddhist with ties to Santa Barbara have anything to do with the BEL and/or his death?

That's enough to think about for now. Does Patty even need to say that THERE'S MORE?!

More on "the missing link"

If you have not read Part 1 of this series, it is located HERE.

Patty has a sneaking suspicion that PJ Tate actually DID know what happened at Cielo in August of 1969, but that he couldn't do or say anything about it, because there was a federal investigation going on into the workings of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (aka "The Hippie Mafia" or BEL). Up until a few years ago, nobody talked much about this huge federal investigation because it was, and perhaps still is to some extent, being actively pursued.

Supposedly, the federal investigation into the BEL is "wrapping up" now: The last BEL-related arrest was Brenice Lee Smith (pictured at right) in 2009. Another member was recently located near Lake Tahoe, but since he is a "family man" and has stayed out of trouble for many decades, he was not prosecuted.

You probably know that Colonel Tate was retired, but that he had been fairly high up in army intelligence. There is a passage in Restless Souls where Alisa Statman writes that PJ staked out Cielo for weeks until some "bikers" showed up and taunted the dogs there from behind the fence. PJ then purportedly followed them back to Spahn Ranch. Why didn't PJ go any further with his investigation? He had suspects, he had experience, he had connections. Patty does not wish to trivialize his pain: she has only the greatest respect and admiration for this man whom she never met. Surely, he must have been PISSED: Sharon's acquaintances' involvement with drugs put her in the worst possible place at the exact wrong moment in time. Because he was a man of honor, he would not have been able to divulge details to which he may have become privy if indeed a federal investigation was ongoing. Viewed in this cold, hard fluorescent light, the look on Colonel Tate's face (above, left) screams "monkey trial" to Patty.

In 1972, there was a large law enforcement conference in a "hotel ballroom" somewhere in San Francisco, according to Tendler & May's BEL and Schou's Orange Sunshine. At this conference, a list of 750 known associates of the BEL is said to have been revealed. These associates were loosely organized into maybe 40 separate distributorships up and down the coast. Where is that list now? Perhaps lead investigator and professional creepy crawler Neil Purcell has a copy of the list, because he was supposedly there. Neil was not only instrumental in breaking up BEL operations in California, he is also the officer who arrested Tim Leary, his wife and his son Jack on 12/26/68 in Laguna Beach. The Learys were in possession of a rather small amount of weed for which Tim was sentenced to ten years in prison. You know the rest of that story, right? Anyhow, that list may end up being the holy grail if Patty can find a copy.

It was this document that Patty was searching for when she found copies of the 1972 and 1974 US Senate Hearings on the "Marijuana and Hashish Epidemic," instead. Patty was interested to learn that the BEL was heavily involved in a passport fraud operation in order to mask their comings and goings abroad. This, the hearings read, was confirmed by Interpol, who once investigated Bruce Davis' presence in London at the time of Joel Pugh's death (above). This statement in the Interpol letter caught Patty's eye: "The local police...understand that he has visited our country more recently than April, 1969. However, this is not borne out by our official records." Interesting, no? Patty was also interested to learn that Bruce (pictured below in 1961) was also an early adopter of LSD, as per his parole hearing from October 4, 2012:

"PRESIDING COMMISSIONER FERGUSON: And you say other psychedelic drugs, did you use LSD? 
 INMATE DAVIS: I started in 1965. 
...PRESIDING COMMISSIONER FERGUSON: Other psychedelic drugs as well? 
INMATE DAVIS: Mescaline...Psilocybin.
...PRESIDING COMMISSIONER FERGUSON: Okay...You've mentioned hallucinogens, how about depressants or stimulants? 
 INMATE DAVIS: Very seldom. Sometimes some stimulants. 
PRESIDING COMMISSIONER FERGUSON: What kind, like cocaine?
INMATE DAVIS: No. Methamphetamine."

These are the drugs that Patty was talking about in her first post, which bring us back to Gary, and to Patty's stalker having another cow. Why have the 48 color photographs associated with the investigation into Gary's murder (here) been lost to us? CieloDrive has promised to keep his eyes peeled for the photos, but at last report, there has been nothing. WHY?

Patty believes that drugs figure very heavily into the overall motive, and apparently Sandy Good does too. Friend of the blog "Giselle" found Sandy's old ATWA site on the wayback machine (see here). Sandy, pictured above right with an (evil-)lizard, stated on her website as late as 2000 that although "seriously flawed," the Shreck book is the closest account to what really happened. The Shreck book is very pro drug motive, as you know.

Kimchi at lsb3.com shared that the LASD arrest report of 5/2/68 states that "Suspect Good was again shown evidence held item #1, #2, #3 and #4 and asked if it was hers, suspect stated, no, never saw it before. When asked if she smokes marijuana suspect stated, yes, but I don't like it. When asked where she got the capsules, suspect stated from Gary Hinman in Topanga.(see here)." Is it a coincidence that Tex and Sadie had a baby food jar full of white powdery speed at Spahn right after Gary's murder, which Tex wrote about in his book, "Will you die for me?" It wasn't in the form of pills (aka "reds"), it was POWDER. The stuff Sandy said came from Gary was also powder in a capsule, not pressed. Gary was an amateur and would not have had a pill press like the one at left, which was recovered from an actual MDMA lab. Was the "speed" in the baby food jar methamphetamine (trade name methedrine), an MDA precursor that Sadie got from Gary's basement?

It is very interesting to Patty that places that the Family have been known to frequent parallel places where the BEL had business at around the same times. Family members were driving up and down the coast all the time, Mexico to Canada. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Phil Kaufman who wrote Road Mangler Deluxe states that he met Manson at Terminal Island, where he was serving time for smuggling marijuana from Mexico. At one time Charlie gave Kaufman's "Joint Venture" address as his own, when he applied for a Union Oil Company credit card (see here).

It is also Phil who was with Graham Parsons when he died in Joshua Tree. Phil stole Graham's body to burn it near Joshua Tree rather than let him be buried at home in New Orleans (see here). Joshua Tree was also home to a large commune that Onjya Sipe stayed at (see here), as did a woman who told Nicholas Schou that she saw Charles Manson at a Haight-Ashbury free Diggers' kitchen called "The Living Room."

The guy who was the main BEL cook around the time of the murders was Nick Sand, a Brooklynite who jumped bail and ended up in Canada. Furthermore, Pic Dawson was a purported drug dealer from Canada. In the Robert Ackerley clip, he says that he never intended to end up in the Haight, because he and a friend were originally driving to Canada. (as an aside: He also mentions hanging out with Eric Clapton in the Haight. This blog has a photo of Clapton at Cass' house, eating BBQ next to Pic Dawson: see here).

Ruth Ann was either travelling with or picking up on Hawaii a large amount of LSD at the time she dosed Barbara's hamburger. We know she disappeared and left Barbara in her hotel for several hours before she returned, then high tailed it back to the airport. The BEL was there at the same time, dealing acid and creating what later became known as "Maui Wowie." Did Ruth Ann bring the acid with her in a premotivated plan to murder Barbara, or was it an offhanded stunt she pulled in the process of picking up or dropping off some sort of shipment? (Hey Stoner, the bong babe is for you). If this was the case, it is entirely possible that Barbara was brought along as an unwitting, disposable "mule."

Clyda Dulaney was murdered in Ukiah, halfway between where the Witches of Mendocino were living in Navarro and where the BEL relocated to from the Haight (namely, Potter's Valley). Who is/was Johnny's "weird aunt," who may know what actually happened according to Johnny himself (see here)? And what about Santa Barbara? and Malibu? and Oregon? and Mexico? and San Diego? and Esalen? And....a bunch of other places that come up again and again? Stay tuned, because of course, THERE'S MORE.

Ginny Good: The Missing Link?

Patty recently got a copy of Gerard Jones' loving tribute to his ex girlfriend, Ginny Good (older by three years sister of Sandra). The book was enlightening for Patty because of the many details that it contains. You can read or listen to the book yourself, here.

Ginny had an aunt in Laguna Beach that she would visit with some frequency. Laguna Beach is the home of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and former location of their Mystic Arts World headshop (pictured at right). Ginny and Sandy's dad George lived at 265 Hilton Drive in Boulder Creek (below: thank you DebS) which backs up onto the Boulder Creek Golf and Country Club.

George lived at this address until he died in 1973. Gerard writes that he, Ginny, Sandra and Joel Pugh went there for Christmas, 1964. Sandra and Joel are also in a photograph together at Christmas 1967, so it is interesting to Patty to learn that Joel courted Sandy for at least three years.

Boulder Creek is fairly close to where the Chateau Liberte once stood at 22700 Old Santa Cruz Highway (pool pictured below is still visible on Google Earth) until 1975. "The Chateau" was known in the very early days as Chateau Boutisse, from 1965-1967 it was called the Redwood Chateau, and from 1967-1971 it was the Chateau Regis. It was a known BEL, Gypsy Joker and Hell's Angels hangout where the Grateful Dead, The Doobies, Hot Tuna, Quicksilver, et al would perform.

Ginny was on a first name basis with the Grateful Dead, and she got her acid from a guy who got it directly from Owsley, the Grateful Dead chemist known to history as "Bear." In fact, Ginny's acid connection goes back to at least 1964, because Gerard remembers her introducing it to him in early 1965 at La Honda (she had already tried it at this point). La Honda, which is near Stanford University, was the home of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksers: Gerard claims that Ginny hung with them, too.

The timeline in which Ginny lived in San Francisco spanned from at least 1963 through her college graduation in 1968. She had roommates on Clayton Street during this time who were studying chemistry at SFSU and/or UCSF, which is walking distance from the Haight. Ginny had emotional problems every Christmas that either landed her in jail or in a mental hospital like the lockup at UCSF, or Scripps down south in La Jolla. As such, it took her at least six years to finish her bachelor's degree at San Francisco State University. Her troubles were so extreme that she may not have made it through college at all, had it not been for a substantial amount of help from George's (unnamed) lawyer.

She had at one point a boyfriend named Hank Harrison, who was the original manager of The Dead when they were still called The Warlocks (he is also Courtney Love's father). He formed a group called "LSD rescue" that he claims later became the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. Bob Ackerley of the BEL claims that they helped found the Free Clinic, as do the Folgers. As you know, the Mansons were regular fixtures at the clinic. Not only were they frequently treated there for the various STDs they picked up along the way, they were also written about by Dr. David E. Smith in the scientific literature regarding their "common marriage."

The free clinic, unlike most other reputable caregivers of the day, had no issues with their clientele being on crazy amounts of drugs. It was accepted and even expected. Today's Rock Med, which is solely dedicated to caring for people who freak out at bay area rock shows, is today's outgrowth of the free clinic. Patty distinctly remembers seeing these people help a soaking wet deadhead with an infant who'd been dyed bright blue in one of the ladies' rooms at Autzen Stadium (June, 1994). It's a long story.

By now, you are probably saying, "so what?" Let Patty backtrack a bit.

Abigail and Voytek had MDA in their systems when they died, which was not a common drug back then. Patty has been working backwards to try and figure out where the MDA came from.

About MDA: it is the precursor for MDMA, aka ecstasy, aka "N-methylated MDA." It is closely related to STP (aka DOM), which freaked out the entire Haight Ashbury during the summer of love. Another variation is called PMA, which is just one molecule different from MDA, but can be fatal because it causes severe hypertension. All of these were referred to as "synthetic mescaline" back then, and they all contain an amphetamine component which alone is known as methamphetamine (trade name methedrine). Patty is a bit stymied here because MDA is a common biological metabolite for the entire cluster, and therefore, it's not very clear what the drug was when Gibby and Voytek ate it. What the coroner found was likely already metabolized.

Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin (pictured at left), the famous drug researcher and author of PIKHAL, claims that MDA was first introduced to him by a grad student in SF, circa 1964. Shulgin also taught at UCLA where Gary was studying chemistry. (By the way: remember that van that's supposed to be Gary's in a remote area of LA? It DOES NOT have a UCLA parking sticker on it: it's a gate pass for gate 9, or maybe 8, pictured below. What was at gates 8 and 9? Patty is still looking into it.) The feds not only knew about Shulgin, they tolerated him and his research until his PIKHAL (and, later, TIKHAL) started showing up in clandestine labs all over the world. The feds shut Shulgin down in the '90s. He is doing fairly well for a man of his advanced age (87), but his memory is probably not what it used to be. You can see his original laboratory notes, here.

All these years, people have assumed that local law enforcement was totally inept when they conducted their murder investigations. But, what if it's not that, it's that these investigations were consumed into a larger investigation of global drug smuggling and manufacture? MKULTRA, as overused as it is in conspiracy theories, was an actual thing, and many of the drugs in question are confirmed MKULTRA test drugs. Patty was also interested to hear that when Brian Davis called the LAPD recently to inquire about the "Tex Tapes", he was told that they are part of an ongoing investigation. They did not specifically say MURDER investigation, which sent a chill down Patty's spine.

Can you see where Patty is going with this? Of course you can. But, what evidence does she have?

Howz about we let the above sink in for a little? Patty will be back because, of course, THERE'S MORE.