Steve Grogan aka Garth Tufts and the Shotgun

 

Grogan and Todd courtesy of lapl.org

Inyo County District Attorney Frank Fowles had an agenda. I expect that he was a bit miffed that Los Angeles County had swooped up most of the people arrested in the Barker Ranch Raids. His county had spent a lot of time, manpower and money on the Manson Family and Los Angeles was getting all of the press. Few, if any, of the people arrested in Inyo County were convicted of anything in that county. They had either been released for lack of evidence or transferred to LA to face more serious charges.

By December 3, 1969 only 11 of those arrested remained in the Inyo County jail and the announcement had just been made that Charles Manson and a few of his Family members were responsible for the Tate and LaBianca murders.

 

One person that Fowles set his sights on was Steve Grogan. This letter sounds like he wanted Grogan in the worst way. By this time Grogan had been transferred to Los Angeles to answer for the stolen truck charges and the wanted charge for the escape from a mental hospital in Ventura County. Grogan settled both of those charges and had been frequenting the Los Angeles County Court House with other Family members.

August 3, 1970

 

Sergeant Paul Whitely

Homicide Bureau

Los Angeles Sheriff's Department

Hall of Justice

Los Angeles, California

 

Dear Paul:

                             Re: Randy J Morglea

The last time you were up here I mentioned that there was a Randy Morglea who was apprehended with Tufts during one of the California Highway Patrol raids which occurred on October 10, 1969.  Enclosed is a California Highway Patrol report concerning the particular raid, and on page 3, in the last paragraph, you will see Morglea's name mentioned.  Morglea was charged with possession of a sawed-off shotgun and when it appeared he was 15 years old he was certified as a juvenile.  Subsequently, he was sent to Patton State Hospital along with Dianne Lake under a conservatorship.  His treatment was terminated at Patton and he was released by our court into the custody of his mother.

I have received a request from Vincent Bugliosi to recharge Tufts, aka Steve Grogan, with the possession of the sawed-off shotgun.  The only possible defense would be that the shotgun was actually possessed by Morglea instead of Tufts.  A statement from Morglea would be very interesting and even an admission that the shotgun was possessed by Tufts would give me perhaps all I need to put Tufts away following a conviction when I re-file.

Sgt. Paul Whitely

Page 2

August 3, 1970

You indicated that you had never talked to Morglea, who also was known by the name Scott Bell Davis and Todd.  He was with the Family for quite a while and might have some interesting information for you.  In any case, when you question him, I would appreciate it if you slip in a question or two about who possessed the shotgun.  This would be very helpful to me and any statement in that regard would be valuable as the least I could do is use it as a prior inconsistent statement when he called as a witness.

His mother is a member of the "Fountain of the World" religious sect.  She appears to me to be a very nice lady although rather strange.  She is totally against Manson and I am sure she would help us any way she can.  Morglea is supposed to be with Mrs. Todd at this point.  Her address is as follows.

Mrs. Todd

Route 5 Box 523

Box Canyon Road

Canoga Park, California

 

Her phone number at her employment is Area Code 213-348-5161.  She also has a friend where she may be reached and her address is as follows:

Harriet Irving

27 Box Canyon Road

Canoga Park, California

Phone: (213) 347-9281

I am also including a psychiatric report on this boy for background information for you. If you have any luck and can help me out let me know.  We are all anxious to see Tufts put away.

 

Very truly yours,

Frank H. Fowles

District Attorney

*The psychiatric report on Morglea was not with the documents I received.

 

Apparently Frank Fowles did get his wish. Grogan was to appear in court, in Inyo County, for possession of the sawed-off shotgun November 11, 1970.

Fowles victory was short lived because on December 18, 1970 Grogan was released from the Inyo County jail to Los Angeles County to be charged and prosecuted for the murder of Shorty Shea.

By the time Grogan was paroled in 1985 the statute of limitations for the sawed-off shotgun charge had long since run out.

While I knew that Dianne Lake aka Diane Bluestein had been sent to Patton State Hospital, I did not know that Hugh Rocky Todd aka Randy Morglea had also been sent there. The first article in this post is dated December 3, 1969 stating that all 11 with charges pending were still in Inyo County’s custody, it was quite some time before they were sent to the state hospital apparently.

A previous post about the Fountain of the World quotes a December 11, 1969 article where Rocky Todd’s mother says that she has not seen or heard from her son since around October 1, 1969. That’s a long time for a juvenile not to have been identified and reunited with a parent. Rocky did not look particularly old for his age, he was only 15 years old.

Millie McCormack

This is a human interest story about Millie McCormack who was a secretary in the Inyo County District Attorney's office at the time that Charles Manson and other Family members were arrested. Millie passed away in 2008 in her hometown of Lowell MA.

In The Middle Of The Manson Mess

The Sun- Lowell MA
Monday November 8, 1976
By David Sylvester Sun Staff

LOWELL- Inyo County California is a wild desolate desert lit by spectacular sunsets but still is sometimes cold at night.  Millie McCormack remembers she could drive 200 miles before stopping for a red light or seeing a building with an elevator.  In her conservation Commission office at city hall, she also remembers some of the four years she spent living and working in Independence, the county seat, with the District Attorney's office as a secretary.  But she has forgotten when it was that the lid of secrecy descended on the D.A.'s office, sometime in the fall of 1969.

Office work had been relatively routine: an arrest of hippies for a stolen dune buggy, some work on where marijuana plants were growing in the desert.  But one day, the office was locked from the inside, no telephone calls were accepted and Millie was told not to discuss a particular case with her fellow workers.

Investigators from Los Angeles had visited the District Attorney Frank Fowles, early in the morning to question the suspects in the dune buggy theft, particularly the leader of the seemingly religious cult, Charles Manson.  For several months Millie would have a close-up view of one of the decade's most bizarre murder cases: the murder of Sharon Tate, her friends and the LaBianca family.

Millie is the blond-haired, sunny smiling woman at the conservation commission office who always answers the phone calls cheerfully but can be exacting with the official minutes she types.  She grew up in Lowell but moved to California with her family in 1955 and had worked for a year at San Quentin prison typing psychological reports before landing the job in the Independence District Attorney's office.

She returned to her native Lowell in 1971 and is now working full time in the basement city hall office, answering questions and typing letters and minutes for three city commissions, the conservation commission, the zoning board of appeals and the housing review board.  Next June she will graduate from the University of Lowell with a bachelor's degree in business management and psychology.  "It's something I have always wanted to do for 20 years, " she says.  "Call it motivation."

Looking back on the Manson case, she remembers details, sometimes vividly, sometimes vaguely.  "I think about it if a new book comes out, a new movie," she says.  "I think it's something I want to forget."  At home two books "Helter Skelter" and "The Family", lie unread.  She didn't even watch the recent television show about the Manson case.  After living with the events for months, she knows enough about the case already.

Even though the trial of Charles Manson and his family occurred in Los Angeles, the case actually began in Independence where Manson and 24 followers had been arrested in October at Barker Ranch in southern Death Valley. A lead on unrelated of a blue-flecked dune buggy and a red Toyota had lead Inyo County officers to the Manson ranch.  No one thought the arrest had anything to do with the shocking murder of Sharon Tate and four friends at home August 9 and the similarly brutal murder of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca the night after.

All this was just front-page headlines in Los Angeles, 225 miles away from Millie in Independence.  But a slim connection between the girlfriend of a suspect in a murder case and the Barker Ranch suspects led Los Angeles investigators to Independence to visit the Barker Ranch, some 80 miles away.

Millie remembers the movies taken by the Los Angeles police and Fowles which showed the huge boulders and the rough terrain on the trip to the inaccessible Barker Ranch.  "You wouldn't believe anything would go over them," she says.

She also remembers the babies that had been picked up during the raid, and particularly on in the office.   "The baby looked like he had been bruised," she says, "But he was very healthy.  That's why they couldn't understand the bruises."  Finally, health officials found that the babies had been kept in the desert below cactus plants but had not been hurt.  In fact, Millie remembers the baby she saw was "the healthiest baby you would ever want to see."

Some of the 24 family members arrested on the October raid were released on insufficient evidence, such as Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sandy Good.  But the others including Manson remained in the Independence jail while the Los Angeles police tried to fit the pieces of the murders together.  So many times Millie heard the officers talking about how they couldn't let the statute of limitations run out on the stolen dune buggy charge, just in case Manson got off on the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Even though the case would be sensational later as the connections were slowly made, Millie says other small incidents caught her attention more.  Once an F.B.I. agent was showing her how he drew his gun from the holster.  "It was hard to type because they'd be showing the fastest way to draw a gun," she says with a laugh.  "They'd be down on their knees showing how to hold a gun steady."

She remembers different episodes of the case before anyone knew how important it would become: when the suspects had their Miranda jail rights read to them in jail when the father of one visited them in the office and wore a necklace of flowers.  Millie thought, "No wonder they are the way they are..."  I was very biased back then, very straight laced myself," she grins and admits freely.

But so much of the usual business kept her busy that she was distracted from the case.  She still typed reports, subpoenas, writs, took dictation and notes when the D.A. investigators questioned the suspects, wrote the state and even Scotland Yard and Interpol.  "It was exciting but at the time I didn't realize the magnitude of it, " Millie recalls.  But she vividly recalls being left to watch the babies and Sandy and Squeaky once.  A baby dropped its pacifier on the floor, so the girls asked Millie to wash it.  "I thought it would take 10 seconds to go and wash it because the baby had started crying," Millie recalls, "And when I got back, they were going through the files."  Resourcefully enough, Millie just went over and sat on the folders they were looking through.

Of course, she doesn't forget Manson himself who she saw about five times, walking into the Independence courtroom just down the hall from the D.A.'s office.  He had tiny pupils, so his eyes appeared almost totally white, and wore a long unkempt beard.  He had been chained at his wrists and shackled at his ankles so that he shuffled looking small and frail.  "Usually they don't shackle the legs of a prisoner and that's what made such an impression on my mind.,"  Millie says.  "It's kind of shocking to be close to someone shackled and chained."

In Los Angeles, a rumor was going around that family members were going to Independence to either bail Manson out or shoot him out of prison.

The D.A. Frank Fowles, sent his wife, Cathy, out of the county and the Assistant D.A., Buck Gibbons, bought a German Shepard to guard his house.  Millie's husband taught her how to shoot a 30-06 which they kept in the bedroom.  Millie remembers it coolly but says she was "surprised" when the attorney's wives were sent away.

As Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles District Attorney prosecuting the Tate-LaBianca cases reports, a lot of reporters showed up in Independence that holiday weekend but no bail money and no escape attempt.

While Manson was in jail, Squeaky and Sandy stayed in a motel in Independence and loitered around the corner park near the jail.  Millie says the high school kids were especially attracted to the two girls and they would "talk to anyone who would listen."  Millie had to warn her own children to stay away from the Manson girls, although she let them have three days off school to attend the court hearings.

"There was an awful lot of publicity and I think some glory was being attached to them," Millie says seriously.  "I wanted them to see the real side, that there's no glory."  My son said he was glad he had the chance to see him, but there was a lot of irate people who thought the school shouldn't have let the kids out," Millie says.  She wrote a note specifically so her children could be excused from school.

On December 9, 1969, Manson, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Charles Watson were charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder by the Los Angeles County grand jury.  They were transferred to Los Angeles leaving Independence in peace.

But discoveries in the case continued and in one final way, Millie became involved in the case even more.  A friend who worked in the motel where Squeaky and Sandy had stayed called her saying she had found letters in the girl's room.  Millie's friend thought of selling them to the Los Angeles Times, but Millie convinced her to turn them over to Fowles.  The investigators were interested in the letters enough to want Millie to photocopy them.

Ed Sanders.... On Death Row part 2



 

 

Los Angeles Free Press Vol. 7 No. 45 Issue # 329  Nov. 6, 1970 

continued....





Frank Fowles, the District Attorney of Inyo County, testified about some sound tests he conducted recently at Myers Ranch in the Death Valley National Monument.  His testimony was given to add strength to Barbara Hoyt's testimony that she heard Susan Atkins say that Sharon Tate was the last to die because she had to watch the others die first.  The overheard conversation allegedly took place inside the Myers Ranch, which is about a quarter of a mile up the wash from the famous Barker Ranch.

Fowles really wasn't needed at the trial, but probably was brought down by the prosecution as a courtesy measure.  He did not testify about the famous file of nude photos of the Family, including the whispered-over Manson-Little Patty-Clem Brenda circle slurp.  Nor did he testify about the camera equipment confiscated at the Barker Ranch in October of 1969 or the film therein which, according to authorities, when developed turned out to be blank.

The continued search for the head of Shorty O'Shea(sic) continues unabated.  There once was a stuntman ranch hand at the Spahn Ranch who disappeared.  His car, loaded up with all his gear (minus his matched pistols) was discovered in Canoga Park after he disappeared.  According to many sources, he was beheaded after a few weeks of friction with certain people.

Anyway, one Vern Plumlee, a former "member" of the Family who is currently held for some stabbing in Long Beach, led the police recently on a skull search of the burnt Spahn Ranch, which included a search of a large water tank high on the hills north of the ranch.  Vern claimed to the fuzz that Clem told him that Shorty was buried by a campfire down by the creek by the cave, but only chicken bones were discovered.  This is about the fifth time that a massive search for Shorty's body has been undertaken.

We checked with Thomas Noguci, the LA County Coroner, when the rumors about the Sheriff's Office looking anew for Mr. O'Shea(sic) were spreading about.  It is known that Devil's Canyon was held to be sacred long ago when Indians lived nearby.  Well, evidently when they were digging in Devil's Canyon early this year for Shorty, they uncovered some sort of Indian burial ground, a fact that hampered operations in that each skull had to be examined as to its age and likeness to the one sought.  They have not found Shorty.

Vern Plumlee is famous in Mansonian circles in that, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, he creepy crawled the homes of Jack Jones, the star, and Marvin Miller in July of 1969.  From the home of Jack Jones, creepy crawled at 2AM even though the lights were on, the c.-c.-ers took only a cowboy hat.  For verily they creepy crawled only to experience the tidal wave of the Great Fear.

One of the last prosecution witnesses is to be Dianne Lake, who had lived with Charlie Manson for almost two years prior to her arrest in Death Valley in October 1969.  After her arrest and after further arrests regarding the murders, she was placed in an insane asylum through a frightening police state-like collusion of the Los Angeles District Attorney, the Inyo County District Attorney and hospital authorities.

In late December 1969, Dianne Lake (known as Snake to the Family) was extensively interviewed by one Jack Gardiner and one Buck Gibbons (famous in that he confiscated Sandy Good's breast pump during the Barker Ranch raids) about activities of Manson and the Family.  Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Gibbons. who are employees of the Inyo County District Attorney's office, came up with some interesting data.  However, what power on earth could have predicted that the pretty and nubile Miss Lake would turn up a year later with Mr. Gardiner as her foster father!?

Anyway, early this year she was admitted, as a minor, into Paton State mental hospital.  Her legal parents tried to visit her and to claim her but were told to fuck off.  Hospital lackeys diagnosed her as follows: "Diagnosis: 295.0 Schizophrenia, chronic undifferentiated type (with group delinquent reaction). 308.58 Behavior disorder of childhood and adolescence. 304.7 Drug dependence, hallucinogens (prominent).  Prognosis: Extremely guarded for any improvement in this girl."

A Conservator was appointed for her- the Inyo County Coroner.  She remained in the nut hatch until this past August, even though she was reported by her captors to be sane about a week after she was committed.  After her release from Paton Hospital she has lived with her foster father.  In coming to court to testify the other day she bore a startling resemblance to the English cousin in the Patty Duke Show, with her hair combed in a similar manner, her faced scrubbed shiny and a white sailor shirt and blue skirt covering her body, which seems to be tending towards chub-chub.

In honor of her impending testimony the x-browed girls vigiling outside moved inside- the group of snuff sub-alterns moved inside to wait for Snake Lake.  As she walked into court escorted by her "Father" and by one of those smiling deputy DA's who took the place of Aaron Stovitz, Squeaky yelled out, "You ain't plastic and you know it. You can't turn your back on love."  As I write this Snake hasn't actually testified but as of a hearing on her ability to remember events of summer-fall 1969, she has been adjudged competent to testify.  She is expected to testify regarding conversations she heard about the death of Rosemary LaBianca and also about the disposal of certain items pertaining to the LaBianca crimes.

In addition, as of certain interviews we have undertaken over the months, Miss Lake has some interesting data in her mind regarding the Gary Hinman murder, data which would in our opinion cast considerable light on the reality of that grim tragedy.

On Friday, October 30, there was a hearing to declare Tex Watson insane. Everybody knew that Watson was out of it.  The former all-district halfback for Farmersville, Texas High School was down from 190 pounds to 110!  One kept hearing from various officials, "Aw, he's just malingering!"  But there was and is some danger that he will die, and the last thing Sheriff Peter Pitchess wants is for Tex Watson to die of malnutrition in the Los Angeles County Jail.  So the human skeleton of Charles Watson has been shipped to Atascadero State Hospital, where probably they will thorazine him up for a few months and feed him some sort of liquid mounds bar through the nose for a while and then ship him back for trial- that is, if he doesn't die; and the secret gossip in the Hall of Justice is that death is imminent. The report to the court reads that he is "rapidly reverting to a fetal state."  And you can better believe the DA is not going to let Tex Watson into a nut hatch unless he is really in heavy orbit.  Even now, however, officials are very hesitant to say he is really insane, but rather say that "he's doing it to himself."

If he dies, it will be the fault of the District Attorney's office- because Charles Manson in front of witnesses, offered to bring him out of it.  Manson is alleged to have said, "Just give me 20 minutes with him alone and I will bring him back." 

Where was Sharon Tate on August 2, 1969?