Letter from Joanne to Sandy Good

One of the main tasks I set myself during the writing of "Coming Down Fast", was to determine any possible connection Joel Pugh may have had with the Manson collective prior to his death in London on December 1st 1969. Of particular interest, I wanted to get to the root of the letter that contained the ominous passage, "I would not want to happen to Joel happen to me" (sic). First reported in Vincent Bugliosi's "Helter Skelter", the extract gave the impression that Joel's death was suspicious, and in some way connected to the sensational "murder" toll attributed to members of the Family.

Ultimately, Bugliosi's brief and pat summary of Joel's death stripped him of any personality, rendering him as nothing more than an anonymous "victim". This set me a task in building a personality around Joel, something I felt was vital to assemble some sort of reality.

To be honest, I never thought that despite my well-honed research skills I would be able to find the letter that kick-started the investigation into the circumstances of Joel's death. Remarkably, following a long trail of tip-offs, emails and phone calls, I was led to a library where a file of paperwork left by a detective had been archived. Within the reams of reports and other pieces of ephemera was the letter that ultimately fell on Bugliosi's desk which in turn, went on to imprint Joel's name in the Manson phenomena.

It didn't take more than one read of the letter from Joanne to Sandy Good to see how detectives had twisted an otherwise innocuous part of the letter to turn it into a possible link to a Manson related "murder" - the echoes of which have rattled on over the years. As you will read, the letter's most contentious line was (a) rewritten and (b) taken wholly out of context, allowing spectacular conclusions to be hastily drawn. As I am at pains to point out to fellow students of the case, despite activity at the highest level of officialdom, no attempt was made to contact the Pugh family to check on Joel's mental health status at the time of his death. Indeed, the first they would read of the investigation by police was in "Helter Skelter" in 1974.

This is the full letter from Joanne to Sandy Good.

Joel Pugh's Death Abroad and His San Francisco Address

When an American citizen dies outside of the United States a Report of a Death of an American Citizen form is filled out.  This form falls under the purview of the US State Department and is filled out by the American consulate or embassy officials in the country where the American citizen died.

Such a form was generated upon the December 2, 1969 death of Joel Pugh in London England.

A few years ago Simon Wells posted  Joel's activities leading up to  his unfortunate death at his blog.  Wells interviewed friends and family of Joel who gave candid insight about Joel's mental decline.  It goes a long way to debunk the notion that his death was a murder.  It seems fairly clear to me that Joel's death was indeed due to suicide.  It was not another death supposedly at the hands of a Family member, namely in this case, Bruce Davis. 

Joel Pugh's last known address in the US was 27 Carl Street San Francisco CA.  This address is considered to be in Cole Valley in the Haight-Ashbury district according to real estate websites.  The Zillow listing for this property, which is "off market",  says that it is a condo with 1000sf,  --bedrooms and 1 bathroom.  It looks like the home was converted to 2 or 3 condos.  The current market value of this particular condo is $1,022,814.  and it has a rental estimate of $4,395.!!!

Joel's unit is accessed through a gate to the right of the home.  A big thank you to Stoner for getting the pictures for the blog while on a day "trip" to Haight-Ashbury!

I wondered whether or not the Carl Street address was associated with the Family in any way even though there is no evidence that anyone connected to the Family other than Sandy Good knew Joel.  Surprise, surprise!  I found a distant connection to Carl Street.  There is no limit to the degrees of separation or synchronicity when it comes to the Family.

The connection came in the form of a post made by Matt, here at the blog back in October 2014.  Remember Jan Holstrom, the man that threw a flammable liquid on Charlie Manson and set him afire while in Vacaville Prison in 1984?  After Holstrom, a Hare Krishna devotee, was released from prison he first lived in Berkeley at a Hare Krishna temple.  When that temple moved to San Francisco Holstrom moved with them.  Holstrom made the news in 1995 when he stabbed a fellow Krishna. The new temple was located at 84 Carl Street, on the same block, across the street and down a few doors, from Joel Pugh's old home. What are the odds?

The Krishna temple sits between a café and small city park, it is still functioning as an academic center for the group.

5000 miles from Spahn - Dormer Cottage and the Talgarth Hotel

The following contribution is courtesy of MHN:

Recently I took my wife and daughter out to a children's farm centre in Surrey, south of London, and afterwards we ate at a restaurant that was only a few miles from East Grinstead. Realising that I might never again find myself so close to a Manson-related site here in the UK I left them to enjoy their dessert, jumped into the car and drove until I found East Grinstead. It took me a bit of hunting around in bushes but I eventually found Dormer Cottage - the Scientologist-owned property where Bruce Davis is thought to have stayed during his trip to England in late '68 and the Spring of '69.

I spoke to the man who has owned the neighboring cottage for ten years, who told me that until two or three years ago Dormer Cottage had been occupied by a man named Nick and his Russian wife, who were Scientologists, slightly eccentric, and liked to hoard things. Sometimes, he told me, the downstairs was so full of junk you couldn't open the doors. He said he thought the property was built in the mid sixties by Nick's mother, though he wasn't sure of that fact.

He says after the Scientologists moved out a couple of years ago the property fell into complete dereliction and has now been bought by property developers, who will presumably demolish the cottage and build something more lucrative in its place.

One odd thing is that according to the official Land Registry here in the UK, Dormer Cottage was legally sold twice in the space of one day. It was sold for £54,000 and then again for £62,000  - both sales listed on Nov 27th 1998.

(Macabre Bonus: the restaurant near Dormer Cottage at which I briefly abandoned my wife and daughter was pretty much a Longhorn Saloon wild-west mock-up, and - I kid you not - the ribs my wife ordered came complete with unintentional reference to both the Tate and LaBianca crime scenes - the wife's ribs arrived at the table with a steak knife sticking out of it (Leno) and a US flag (Roman and Sharon's sofa).

I also took a trip recently to West Kensington, London - to see the Talgarth Hotel where Sandra Good's ex boyfriend Joel Pugh committed suicide by slashing his wrists, and his throat, twice - while Davis was allegedly in the UK. It's a depressing dump. I have tried its telephone number many times without anyone ever picking up, and I spent a good hour periodically ringing the front buzzer - but nobody ever answered. Access to the rear is currently closed-off for construction work but from across the train tracks you can see that access to the ground floor rear-facing rooms (which is what Joel Pugh had) would not be at all difficult for an experienced creepy-crawler. Do I think Davis had a hand in Pugh's death? No idea. There is no evidence that he did, and that's all I can say. Simon Wells  has looked into it as much as anyone I think, and he clearly thinks it was nothing more than a suicide.

Interpol report on Bruce Davis/Joel Pugh

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/6425/interpol22.jpg

I have included the link in case it is to small to read here.  Image Shack is a really great place to view Manson documents.

Since we are on the subject of Image Shack what I find fucking hilarious is:

Other Manson sites get most some of their resources from Image Shack and then mark them as there own. To prove my point here is another Image Shack link to a Manson article.

I am sure you recognize the watermarked articles from other sites that post Image Shack pics. Go figure...

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/8964/barbarahoyttestifiesinm.jpg