Charles Manson Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

(Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

LOS ANGELES – Next year’s recipient for the Cecil B. Demille Award just leaked, and it’s none other than famous musician and murderer—Charles Manson! In an official press release, the Hollywood Foreign Press issued this statement:

“We apologize for spoiling the surprise, but I think we all knew that it was about time such a prolific entertainer got the recognition he deserves.”

Not everyone was happy with the announcement, including the family members of the people Manson conspired to kill, and pretty much ever other decent human being on the planet.

“Sure, Manson’s done some questionable things, but we need to look at the recipient’s entire life when we bestow this honor,” said HFPA president Theo Kingma, “I think we can forgive a few measly sins when the person has given the public so much joy with their entertainment—I mean, have you heard ‘I’m Scratching Peace Symbols on Your Tombstone’ or ‘Garbage Dumb’?”

The leak  occured soon after actor, director, and alleged child molester, Woody Allen, received the same award at the 2014 Golden Globes. Both his ex-wife Mia Farrow, and his son, future MSNBC host Ronan Farrow, tweeted their discontent about Allen receiving the prestigious award:

(See the article for the Tweets)

Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn when she was 19, was accused of molesting his adopted 7-year-old daughter “Dylan” in 1992. He denies all allegations.

“It’s just so great that the HFPA can look past some of my past blemishes,” said Manson while blushing. “To be in the ranks of someone like Woody Allen, I’m just such a huge fan of him and everything that he stands for.”

Original Story HERE

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.

Ruby Pearl Redux

My last post on Ruby prompted orwhut to ask who the wrestler was that Ruby Pearl married.  That question got me going again to try to figure out Ruby's background.  I went through dozens of newspaper articles until I found one with her last name.  It's in an article about her little dog Tinker Toy, written when he died in 1961.

Ruby's last name was Molinaro!  With that information I searched for and found her marriage to the wrestler, Michael Angelo Molinaro,  although I was not able to find out anything about Molinaro's wrestling career.   The two were married October 22, 1950 in Los Angeles.  Michael Molinaro was born August 31, 1913 in Pennsylvania and died November 6, 1978 in Grants Pass Oregon.  I'm guessing, given his age, that his wrestling career was in the '30's and '40's.

The California marriage records as well as being in the groom's name are in a woman's maiden name and also in her previous married name if she had been married before.  So I was able to learn her first husband's name, too.  It was Vern Sylvester.  They were in the 1940 US Census listed as living in Minneapolis Minnesota.  Ruby's occupation was listed as a waitress.  Her husband had no occupation listed.

The marriage records I found for Ruby were in her given first name of Pearl.  She was born Pearl Stella Oliver in Sandstone, Pine County, Minnesota on May 18th 1912.  Her parents were Dalton G and Stella S (Hillard) Oliver.  She had two sisters and four brothers.  On the 1920 US Census the Oliver children are listed in order of their ages.  Cecelia, 15; Delbert, 12; Ray 10; Pearl, 7; Irene, 5; Glenn, 2 years 3 months.  By the 1930 US Census there was another brother, Everett, 6; and Cecelia and Ray were not on that census.

Both of Ruby's parents died in Los Angeles, her father Dalton, at 103 years old on September 27, 1963 and her mother Stella, at 93 years old on December 19, 1978.  Ruby herself was rather long lived too, passing away at 98 years old in Grants Pass Oregon on May 29, 2010.

Ruby's obituary from the Aitkin Independent Age, Aitken Minnesota, June 6, 2010.

Ruby Pearl

This is from a Gay Talese article written for the March 1970 issue of Esquire magazine.

The article talks about George Spahn and the ranch saying......

"Spahn bought it. [the ranch]  Spahn and his wife parted company about this time, but there soon appeared at Spahn's side a new leading lady of the ranch, a onetime dog trainer and circus performer named Ruby Pearl.

She was a perky redhead of about thirty with lively blue eyes, a petite figure, and lots of nerve.  She had been born on a farm in Sandstone Minnesota, and had a desire to get into show business somehow, an ambition that was a confusing as it was shocking to her mother, a Christian preacher's daughter, and her father, a conscientious routine-oriented railroad man.  After graduating from high school, where she had acted in school plays and won first prize in the girls' hundred-yard dash and broad-jumping competition in a county-wide track meet, she traveled to Minneapolis on her father's railroad pass, presumably to attend secretarial school and embark on a respectable career in that city.  But one day scanning the classified ads in The Minneapolis Tribune, she saw a job opportunity that appealed to her.  She applied and got the job, that of being a cocktail waitress at Lindy's, a local club patronized by, among other distinguished figures, Al Capone.

When Capone and his men were in town they were invariably accompanied by very attractive girls in ermine or mink, and were always given the large table at Lindy's in the back room where drinks were served all night.  Ruby Pearl liked serving the big table, not only because of the generous tips she received but because of the sense of excitement she felt in the Capone party's presence.  But she had neither the desire nor the time to become further involved, devoting all her free hours and earnings to the dancing school she attended every day, learning ballet and adagio, tap dancing, the rumba and the tango.  After Lindy's was raided by the police and closed down, Ruby Pearl supported herself as a bus girl in a cafeteria, pouring coffee and clearing dishes.  Soon she caught the eye of the assistant manager, an engineering student at the University of Minnesota.  He became her first lover and husband, and after his graduation he was hired by Lockheed in Burbank, California, and the newly married couple set up housekeeping in a motor court on the fringe of Hollywood.

On certain evenings, together with other young engineers from Lockheed and their wives, Ruby and her husband would go to The Brown Derby and Ciro's and various night spots where there was live entertainment and dancing.  Ruby invariably became restless and tense on these occasions, seated around the table with the others, sipping her drink, and wishing she was not with the dull wives of engineers but rather that she was in the spotlight on the stage, and kicking up her heels.

Her marriage did not produce children, nor did she want any.  She wanted to resume with her dancing, and she did, attending classes conducted by a sleek French-Indian adagio dancer who later gave Ruby a part in his touring trio that featured himself and his jealous girlfriend.  Ruby also danced in a chorus at a Hollywood club for a while, as her marriage deteriorated and finally ended in divorce.

About this time, approaching an age when she could no longer maintain a dancer's pace, she was introduced, by a man she had met, to a new career of training dogs to dance, sit, jump through hoops, and ride atop ponies. She had a facility for animal training, and within a few years had perfected an act with three dogs and a pony that was booked at several community fairs in Southern California, in addition to a number of schools, circuses, and local television shows.  At one community fair, in Thousand Oaks, she met a man, a wrestler, who would become her next husband.  He was a burly, strong, and tender man, who had done quite well financially, and he also owned a restaurant on the side, a subject of interest to Ruby because of her days as a waitress.  Not long afterward, Ruby met another man with whom she had much in common, a proprietor of a pony riding ring for children and a movie ranch--- George Spahn.

This just in.....an ad from the Van Nuys News December 19, 1954.

Clem Without a Hat!

Thanks to Dooger for this pic!

Home Movie Clips of Clyda Dulaney

The narrator is Johnny's childhood friend, Ginger.
Thank you, Ginger and Johnny!

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.

A Happy Ending for Jeff K

Get your mind out of the gutter...not THAT kind of happy ending!

Friend of the Blog Jeff K wrote to Patty on January 2 to let her know that he got his money back from Auction Doctors. They are the company that ran Susanna Lo's ebay auctions for walk-on roles in the ill-fated Manson Girls movie. See here for the rest of the story.

Jeff wrote: "So Todd from Auction Doctors contacted me today and gave me back all my money through Paypal. Thank you, I feel like your blog post helped me out a lot with this. If you feel like posting an update about the case that would be great. Todd did the right thing. He was scammed out of $17,000 by Susanna Lo and will never get that money back. But at least he made things right with me. Happy New Year, Jeff"

Thank you Auction Doctors! You get the Patty seal of approval. :)

Manson Family Scabs

Imagine......you are in a dark, hot, cramped room with 20 or 25 other people, sweating, coughing, feeling down-right dusty, dirty, itchy, and feverish while trying to sleep after a night of passionate, but uncomfortable group love-making. Although you haven't had access to a shower, bathtub, or even a regular toilet in months, you stay, even if the discomfort is overwhelming. This group of people you call your brothers & sisters have shared everything, including food, clothing, bedding, sex partners & body fluids. The stench coming from the stained mattresses is enough to make a monkey puke, but you just can't think of any other place you would want to be. Of course, slowly the physical discomforts start to outweigh the camaraderie you have shared with your special family. You notice in the morning, after not sleeping a wink from the intense itching & burning coming from your buttocks that tiny, red pustule-like blisters have appeared in the webs of your fingers, and toes. You really start to feel ill now, especially after you try popping one of many hot, hard boils that have constantly been appearing & reappearing on your body throughout the last, few months. The group you have been with over the last year seems to have the same thing, and it has become common place to see pustules, blisters, scabs, bites, and lesions on the skin of just about everybody you are near, not to mention hearing all the complaints of frequent, burning sensations while urinating, and yellow/green discharge coming from the genitals of just about everyone. Your family seems to be grouchy, constantly hungry, itchy & dirty, and feeling like shit most of the time, but nobody seems to want to leave. The music, drugs, and oneness with each other is all that matters! And, of course, you couldn't ever abandon Charlie, could you?

The above narrative is probably an accurate description of a "day-in-the-life" of a typical Manson-Family member starting in the summer of 1969. Things really started turning ugly for this group of people, and their kinky, fairy-tale lifestyle started giving way to a more commando, militant life, that wasn't all flowers, music, good sex & fun. These people were living in cramped, dirty "shacks" with no running water at times. They also had a poor diet, eating food from dumpsters, and a lot of sugar. All of this could not have helped their health. In writing this piece, I really started to wonder about the different ailments some of them (or all of them) suffered from, so....I contacted Dr. David E. Smith of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, who was kind enough to answer some of the questions I had concerning this topic. As he remembers it, this group suffered from..... you guessed it, scabies, and staph infections due to poor hygiene, along with everyday, old-fashioned STD's. He said the skin ailments were treated with medications, soap & water, and pHisohex, which was a medicated cleaner used in the 1960's primarily to treat acne. He did say that these conditions appeared in a lot of communes at the time, and weren't unique to Manson's group. We would like to thank Dr. Smith for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions!

Here are a few examples of where I read about skin problems, infection & personal hygiene:

1.) Sadie, during her grand jury testimony was asked if she was barefoot the night of the Tate murders. She answered "Yes, I was. I had quite a few sores on my feet from infection, and I couldn't wear shoes. 

2.) During one of many police interviews, Stephanie Schram is asked by a Detective Gleason if she remembered seeing a girl out at Spahn's ranch that had infections on her legs that never healed, and left scars. Stephanie told the detective that she did, indeed remember who it was that had these. It was a girl by the name of Gypsy. She also told the detective that Gypsy was fat, and was staying out at Devil's canyon all the time. Was she banished, I wonder because of her weight? That seems a little bit egotistical. I thought they weren't supposed to have egos anymore?

3.) In Paul Watkins book "My Life With Charles Manson" he mentioned seeing boils all over Bruce Davis's neck while they were out in the desert.

4.) In Paul Watkins book he said that starting in the spring of 1969, the Family no longer had access to bathroom facilities, and were living in tents down by the creek at Spahn ranch. They did rinse off in the creek, but didn't have access to showers/bathtubs. Imagine the smell. Wouldn't have been pleasant. He did mention that they had, at one time been very clean, because Charlie demanded that everyone pay close attention to personal hygiene, and keep themselves, clothes, and the musical instruments spic & span. Things changed, though.

Happy New Year!

A Happy, Healthy & Prosperous New Year One and All!

Trilby, that's the best I could do...