The Snitches of Spahn

".. somebody was watching every move he(Manson) made..."
      --Preston Guillory, ex-LASO Deputy who participated in the Spahn Ranch raid


In the wake of the Aug 16, 1969 Spahn Ranch Raid, Charlie and Family thought that someone had ratted them out to the cops.  At the top of their list was ranch hand Shorty Shea, who got murdered because of it.  Frank Retz, a neighbor who allegedly wanted the Mansons gone, is also mentioned in this regard.

But there is evidence that the Family may have had an abundance of snitches:

 www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6001083595175224919&postID=1928290903518938341
sbuch113 said...
"I know a man who was a Jr. Fireman at the fire station near the Spahn Ranch during the Manson era. Years ago he told me of some of the strange goings on at the ranch.  He went into quite a bit of detail about how the ranch was being watched by law enforcement....... Including an on site informant and from strategic hilltop locations. He also talked about the frequent contact fireman had with Manson and others."


Who was it?  Some names:

Ruby Pearl Molinaro

Her obituary said, “She ran the Spahn Ranch where the Manson Gang was caught. She noticed lots of guns and knives in Charles Manson’s dune buggy and called the sheriff. He was then taken into custody.”
www.mailtribune.com/news/20170918/medford-mans-memoir-has-charles-manson-connection
 [Credit to DebS]

Kitty Lutesinger

On page 9 of the Spahn Ranch Raid Report/PDF file we read :

"On the date of August 10, 1969, at approximately 12:15 p.m., your affiant, William G. Gleason, received information from Informant No. 1"
 https://www.scribd.com/document/63876301/Spahn-Ranch-Raid-Report

Author Ed Sanders makes clear that 'Informant No. 1' is Lutesinger::

"On August 10, Sunday, Sergeant William Gleason of the Los Angeles sheriff's office visited Kitty Lutesinger at her parents' ranch where she had fled following Manson's kill-threats. Sergeant Gleason was compiling a file of disturbing information about the Spahn Ranch preparing for a huge police raid to come the following week. He had become aware of Miss Lutesinger when she had run away from the Spahn Ranch on July 30 and Frank Retz had driven her to the police station."
www.mansonblog.com/2017/08/get-shorty-tragic-tale-of-don-shea.html
[Credit to poster 'Jax' and  mansonblog contributor 'Brian G']

Bill Vance.

 It's possible he got pinched in one of those Family burglaries or auto thefts and the cops made a deal with him:  "You be an informant on the goings on at Spahn or you go back to prison!"   Then after all the arrests he just drops from sight.  I have never come across any interview with him, either by media, police, or prosecutors.

Gary Hinman

https://youtu.be/w5FvQFgA2H8
Charles Manson BBC Interview Part 4 8:30 mark
(re Hinman) "He was an informant for the government. He was playing all kinds of treacherous games that he shouldn't have been playing. See when you're in the underworld you got to be truthful. If you lie and you're faking and you're snitching and it catches up with you, it bites you... "

Danny DeCarlo

Bikers are notorious for their hatred of snitches, and everybody knows they operate under a strict 'no snitching' rule.  Though there are apparently exceptions, as this article from 1973 shows:

www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/angels-in-court-the-strange-tale-of-baby-huey-19730215   Feb, 1973

...(Sonny)Barger(of the Hells Angels) testified that over the past few years, he has frequently dealt with the Oakland police to turn over weapons or the locations of weapons to them in return for the release of jailed Angels. It was simple as that; the Angels paid off the police in guns they themselves had peddled to radicals or revolutionaries and in return the police let the Angels operate.

One of the more murkier aspects of the Manson case is where they got all the guns they collected in the spring of '69 and kept up at Spahns, until they were all seized by the Sheriff after the Aug 16 raid.  I think the conventional wisdom says Danny DeCarlo supplied most of them, and DeCarlo, of course, was a member of a biker gang.

So it is entirely possible, then, that the Straight Satans were playing the same game and had the same deal with the law as the Hells Angels did up in the Bay Area.  Supply the guns to the 'radicals' and then snitch them out to the Fuzz.

One could even take it a step further and say that it was 'suggested' to DeCarlo that he hang out with the Family and keep an eye on them, in return for certain favors to be granted to him or his club mates by the court system--like charges to be dropped in other matters.  Certainly it is true that DeCarlo never faced any charges for his activities at the ranch.

Karate Dave Lipsett

Covered in a previous thread:
 https://www.mansonblog.com/2018/09/was-this-family-member-also-undercover.html



 And from the "OO-ee-OO" file, we have

Field Marshall Cinque DeFreeze of the Symbionese Liberation Army

aadl.org/node/200649

Who Ran The SLA? by Dick Russell
Ann Arbor Sun, January 22, 1976
(Donald) DeFreeze, as an informer for a special Public Disorder Intelligence Unit(of the LAPD), did not want for "useful" tasks. During the fall of 1969, police sources recall DeFreeze informing on the Charles Manson family concerning a planned arms burglary. He next surfaces in Cleveland on October 11...

Now the big question is, if they had an informant within the Family's ranks, why weren't they able to finger the Mansonoids for TLB long before they did?  Or prevent TLB by arresting Charlie and his minions for the murder of Gary Hinman or the attempted murder of Bernard Crowe?


----------------------------

Post-Barker arrests snitches:

One thing is certain-- during the trials, the information received from one or more informants was absolutely reliable:

http://www.cielodrive.com/manson-family-activities-09-16-71.php

Captain A. R. Stoyanoff, Homicide Bureau, advises:

On 12-2-70, information was received that the Manson Family were attempting to purchase or obtain hand grenades.

On 12-9-70, the Intelligence Bureau advised that hand grenades had been stolen from Camp Pendleton and were in the possession of the Manson Family (not confirmed).

On 12-14-70, information was received from an informant that Charles Manson had pulled a string attached to a number of hacksaw blades up through the window from the outside of the Hall of Justice. Information was relayed to the jail and hacksaw blades were recovered on approximately 12-17-70.

On 7-9-71, information was received that Charles Manson had bragged of having the telephone numbers and addresses of investigators, District Attorneys and jail deputies. On that same date, Deputy Stevens, Hall of Justice Jail, received a phone call at his residence from a person he believes to be a female member of the Manson Family.

On 7-14-71, information was received that Kenneth Como, MC/31, a Folsom Prison inmate serving life for robbery, was to be returned to Los Angeles County as a witness for the defense in the Shea murder trial. Further, that Como had been visited by the Manson Family and was a high escape risk.

On 7-22-71, Kenneth Como escaped from the 8th floor of the Old Hall of Records.

[They were warned he could escape.  And then he escapes.  Twice.   Hmmmm...]

On 8-15-71, information was received that Kenneth Como and members of the Manson Family did obtain guns from an unknown location to help free Charles Manson.

On 8-21-71, Kenneth Como, along with members of the Manson Family, robbed the Western Surplus Store in Hawthorne of 67 guns and ammunition and were subsequently arrested in a shoot out.

On 8-24-71, information was received that Judge Raymond Choate, Department 106, would receive a package containing a watch without hands signifying his time was running out.

On 9-3-71, Judge Choate received the package containing the watch with missing hands.

Some names:

Kenneth Como

All you need to know about Kenny-boy Como is that he is transferred from Folsom prison into the LA jails to testify in Charlie's Hinman/Shea trial, despite the fact he had no knowledge of Charlie and Family, nor the victims,  nor the crimes committed.  This did not cause the prosecuting attorney nor judge nor various judicial and prison officials to object.  So the whole transfer was obviously arranged by those who wanted to use Como to act as informant and provocateur.

The acid test was that Como, doing 20 to life for armed robbery in Folsom before he was transferred, gets out in 1981, doing 10 years.  For the two jailbreaks, the armed robbery, the shootout with cops, and two more subsequent attempts to break out of state prison, he got no extra time.  From a convict's standpoint, it was a pretty sweet deal.

"Kevin"

This is the name of some guy who attaches himself to the Family during the TLB trial.  Some suspect he may have been an informant:

"beauders said...
   Hendrickson said that he believed "Kevin" was a police informant. "Kevin" started hanging with the Family due to the press coverage of Manson and the Family's commission of the murders and then up and disappears one day."
https://www.mansonblog.com/2018/09/was-this-family-member-also-undercover.html



-----------------------------------

"To whom shall I speak and give warning That they may hear? Behold, their ears are closed And they cannot listen."
    --  Jeremiah 6:10

Was The Hawthorne Shootout a Copycat Action Too?

Contributed by Dooger

The Manson case has an enormous amount of parallels and interesting little happenings that have kept us talking about it for nearly 45 years. It seems that we all can find interesting little facts on the case that can lead us to an investigation "eureka!. " but usually these little things that we find are merely coincidences.

Charles Manson and his gang didn't always have the most original ideas. One can argue that his entire "Family" was merely an idea taken from Krishna Venta and the Fountain of the World. One can go even further and say that the entire Helter Skelter theory was stolen from Krishna Venta.

However, this interesting little tidbit that I found came when I was checking out dates on the case timeline. What struck me was when I later picked up the August 21, 1970 issue of Life Magazine that had a huge article on the Family titled "Just Waiting for Charlie."

Since I am fascinated with the Black Panthers, I also realized that article right before this one was the story of the Marin County Court House shootings. These shootings happened August 7, 1970 and were masterminded by seventeen-year-old Joshua Jackson, little bother of Black Panther George Jackson who was at trial for murder.

Joshua Jackson and others stormed the court room armed with assault rifles in an attempt to liberate their "brothers" who were on trial for murder. Joshua and his three accomplices took Judge Haley, the District Attorney Gary Thomas and three jurors hostage. This lead to a shootout that left Judge Haley and two of the jurors dead and Thomas barely clinging onto life. Joshua Jackson was also killed.

George Jackson was found guilty and was sent to San Quentin Prison.

August 21, 1971--exactly one year later--Catherine Share, Kenneth Como, Mary Brunner, Larry Bailey, Dennis Rice, and a "sixth suspect that fled on foot (Charles Lovett) drove a van to Hawthorne, California to the Western Surplus Store in an attempt to rob the store and acquire firearms. The firearm heist is foiled by a silent alarm, followed by police cars and a shootout leaving Brunner, Share, and Bailey with gun shot wounds.

Motives for this heist include the guns being used in a hijacking of an aircraft where passengers would be held hostage and shot every hour until Charles Manson was freed. I highly doubt this was the true motive.

Another motive--and probably the more accurate motive--was that they were planning on raiding the court room and freeing Charles Manson while he was on trial for the Gary Hinman and Shorty Shea murders. This motive makes more sense and would have been a mirror image of the Marin County Courtroom incident.

The parallels do not end here.

On this same day, Black Panther George Jackson met with his attorney Stephen Bingham to discuss a lawsuit against the prison. On Jackson's way back to his cell, guards noticed a 9mm handgun wedged in his afro. This eventually lead to a hostage-shootout leaving 4 guards and 2 inmates dead. Jackson was shot by a guard and killed.

This was planned as Jackson had written a will and manifesto.

Nearly six years later in Folsom Prison, June of 1977, Kenneth Como was involved in a similar incident with inmate Bobby Davis. The two had a 9mm handgun in their possession and planned to kill guards, members of the Aryan Brotherhood--who they were fighting with--and then escape. A shake down of the cell block came back with as many as 16 armed inmates ready to riot and a CB radio used to communicate with the outside.

Something tells me that when Life Magazine ran the August 21, 1970 Family story, that someone from the Family possibly could have read the article and read the article on the Marin County Court House shootout, giving them an idea to do something similar.

Charles Manson and the Aryan Brotherhood.

So, how and why did Charles Manson become involved with the Aryan Brotherhood?  This was something I had wondered about, and found some answers in a OUI magazine article written by Ed Sanders, March 1976.  Most of this article is about Squeaky and her assassination attempt on President Ford but there are bits and pieces of other information in the article, too.

"When Manson was found guilty, it was reported that he was greatly depressed over impending transfer to death row.  Maybe he was projecting his own hostilities over to potential black cellmates, but the story is that he felt in danger because of the racial issues: the PIG written in blood on Sharon Tate's door, his theories of Helter Skelter race war and so forth.  As the Tate LaBianca trial was drawing to a close, Manson, scrawny and measuring 5'2", could be seen practicing karate in the holding tank, preparing in case Black Muslims (who seemed to constitute the prime Family fear object) attacked him on the row at San Quentin.  It should be remembered that Manson was sent up for things that were not considered high-class crimes inside the prison system.  Not only had he planned a race war but he had been  convicted of ordering the death of a pregnant woman.

Law-enforcement officials believe that Manson, wanting to do "easy time" and not wanting to have some guy looking to establish a killer rep try to stick the sharpened tines of a chow-line bread fork into Manson's stomach - just as someone in the Family had done to Leno LaBianca -  negotiated with the anti-black, all white prison society known as the Aryan Brotherhood to protect him.

The Aryan Brotherhood has been described in "The New York Times" as a "neo-Nazi band of young toughs recruited largely from the motorcycle gangs of California's urban slums."  According to a source in a California law-enforcement agency, the Aryan Brotherhood began about 15 years ago, and at one point required as an initiation test the killing of a black; around 1967, this requirement was dropped.

The Aryan Brotherhood reportedly has connections with the so-called Mexican Mafia, an organization also situated within and without the California prison system, dealing in drugs, weapons and killings.  Its murder contracts are given to the Aryan Brotherhood to fulfill, according to prison officials.

Although he now denies it, the story goes that Manson ordered his remaining Family women to send nude photos of themselves to Aryan Brotherhood members in jail.  They were apparently to provide sexual and, one supposes, housekeeping favors to Aryan Brotherhood members who left prison.  And there is at least one known case of an Aryan Brotherhood member, Billy Goucher, being met by a Family associate as he left the prison.  The couple subsequently lived together until he was picked up for a decapitation murder.

Manson must have thought it was tactically smart to join forces with the Aryan Brotherhood, because in addition to his personal safety, he could keep track of wobbling followers on the outside.  The move turned out to be a great blunder, however, because, just as if there had been an Aryan Brotherhood operation ordered against the Family, the Aryan Brotherhood (particularly Kenneth Como) was subsequently able to split the remnants of the Manson group into two bitter factions: the Comoites and the Mansonites."

"Meanwhile Manson's problems with the Aryan Brotherhood began to move towards violence. Oddly enough, it appears that part of Manson's hassle with the Brotherhood was due to his not taking a violent-enough position in the anti-black movement.  As Squeaky wrote in a letter of June 1973: "Aryan Brotherhood moves much on pure hate, as they want him (Manson) to kill black because black is black.  He will not do this, and they are against him."  Around the summer of 1973, someone slipped Manson rat poison in a glass of Tang.  He chugged it down, but later was able to note in a letter that rat poison does not affect him very much, although it did provide him with a new experience.

As Manson lost the goodwill of the Aryan Brotherhood, Como, one of its leaders, was able to woo key women away from the Family, including Mary Brunner, Gypsy Share and Brenda McCann, by out-machoing Charlie.  In late fall of 1973 and early 1974, I began to hear reports from several law-enforcement sources that Manson was regressing.  He apparently was loath to leave his cell at Folsom Prison.  His fingernails grew long, and he was hesitant to bathe.  Prison officials, the reports indicated, had to use force to cut his hair.  They felt he was not communicating, that he was regressing, a common enough ailment in jails and prisons, which, if advanced enough, can turn a person into a staring vegetable."

Como Captured After Jail Break

murderpedia.org

POLICE NAB MANSON PAL IN  JAILBREAK

 

 

Kenneth "Curly" Como, a reputed member of Charles Manson's hippie-style clan, was captured today seven hours after a daring predawn escape from a 13th floor cell at the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles.

 

Sheriff's deputies said Como, 31, was arrested in a residential are of West Hollywood where he had been the object of a massive door-to-door manhunt in a six-block residential area.

 

Deputies said Como was found hiding in a small shed behind a garage by Deputy Roger Anderson.  Anderson said Como offered no resistance and had no weapons.

 

The deputy said he just opened the door of the shed and shouted: "Freeze! Come out."  He said Como uttered a brief obscenity when he surrendered.

 

Mass Search

 

The shed was located behind a small wood-framed house occupied by Mrs. D.B. Trad, an elderly, partially blind widow who was in her home behind locked doors when Como surrendered.

 

Nearly 100 sheriff's deputies and policemen had taken part in the search, accompanied by a small army of newsmen and cameramen.  It was their second search of the area- one was made before dawn- and scores of residents still in their bathrobes and slippers watched from their doorsteps.

 

Como was awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault.  He and four other reported Manson Family members were arrested Aug. 21 following a brief shootout at a Hawthorn Calif. surplus store in what police said was an attempt to steal guns.

 

They said Como escaped from the facility in a waiting car.  The car was spotted by a police mobile unit in Hollywood and a brief chase ensued until the stolen car crashed.  Police said Como escaped on foot through an alley and a person in the car, Sandra Good, a clan member, was arrested for investigation of aiding and abetting an escape.

 

An all-points bulletin was issued for Como and two other alleged Manson Family members, both women.

 

The Sheriff's department issued an all-points bulletin for Como and deputies conducted a house-to-house search for him in a sealed off two-block square area of West Hollywood, where he has escaped.

 

Deputies also arrested five more persons, in addition to Miss Good, all said to be Manson clan members.  They were booked for investigation of conspiracy to aid and abet an escape.

 

They were identified as David Lee Stauffer, 20; Susan Bartel, 20; Katherine Lutesinger, 19; Lynn Alice Fromme, 23; and Nancy Pitman, 23.

 

Los Angeles police said prior to his arrest in the Hawthorne robbery incident, Como had escaped once before while being brought from Folsom to testify at Manson's trial in the slaying of a Malibu musician.  Como had been serving a term for armed robbery, police said.

 

 

Star News Pasadena CA October 20, 1971

Kenneth Como was born in Morrison County Minnesota November 22, 1939 to Ernest and Mae Como.  He died September 4, 2004 in California.  The Social Security Death Index does not give the county where he died.  The last known address for him was in Rialta CA.

According to the 1940 US Census Como had three older sisters and his father was employed as a foreman for WPA Park Improvement.  The family was living in Little Falls, Minnesota.

Mary, Gypsy & Como

I had these once without the blur-outs. Sorry I can't find them. Does anybody have those??? 

Mwah!

Looks like Gypsy's packin' more than automatic fire.

I wuv you...

Now I know I was right!


Thanks, candy and nuts

Kenneth "Curly" Como-escape artist

Como's cell bars after he was smuggled in a piece of carborundum string used by jewlers. 
Carborundum is a very hard substance composed of silicon carbide.  One of the girls smuggled it inside the prison while visiting Como.
Como passed away in September of 2004.

kenneth como

Gypsy and Ken

Interesting articles about Gypsy and Como.

http://www.preterhuman.net/texts/people/manson_family/sacramento_bee.txt

Cancer from Spahn's Ranch?

I remember reading or hearing somewhere about Family members getting cancer from being at Spahn's.  Susan, Como (was he at Spahn's ever?) and Ansom.  I researched my little heart out and can not find anything but this.
It seems that there was a location near Spahn's that leaked hazerdous materials into the ground.  I might be wrong, don't quote me.



http://www.dtsc.ca.gov/SiteCleanup/Santa_Susana_Field_Lab/index.cfm


If any one knows anything else about this, please fill us in.

Ken Como, Gypsy's man called as a witness for Charlie. Short little bugger.

Dennis,Como and Bailey

Idiots

Left to right Dennis Rice,Ken Como and Larry Bailey.
On the way to court for the Hawthorne robbery/shootout.