BusinessTN

Interest in the Manson family murders was renewed this past year as one of its members was being considered for parole in the state of California. In July, Susan Atkins was denied that parole despite being terminally ill and given only a few months to live. Atkins contributed to the stabbing of the eight months pregnant Sharon Tate and six other victims. In response to the possibility of parole, Tate's sister Debra began a crusade to look for additional victims of the Manson Family's murder spree.

Arpad Vass was contacted to perform the task of searching for the bodies. Vass, a senior researcher at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, is no novice corpse canvaser. A collaborative researcher at the Forensic Anthropology Center at UT-Knoxville, Vass' models have been relied upon by prosecutors throughout the nation. Last summer, Vass took a small crew, a lot of equipment and some cadaver-sniffing dogs to the Barker Ranch in California. Manson and his followers spent a great amount of time at the ranch, and there is suspicion that many fell victim to the murderous clan at this location. (The ranch is now part of a public park system.)

In his search for the buried bodies, Vass and his team tried everything from simple visual observation of the land to using magnetometers to testing the vegetation changes of the area. After thorough testing, Vass believed that there were chemical markers indicative of decompositional events. Despite this finding and the initial positive reactions by the dogs, no bodies were found.

"Knowing what we know now," Vass says, "we would have done some things differently. We would have dug deeper." The cemetery sleuth thinks that he and his crew probably went about as deep as what the topsoil would have been 40 years ago.

Elizabeth Agin, an associate at the Oak Ridge engineering firm Fanning, Phillips and Molnar, is considered one of the nation's top experts on unmarked graves. She is quite interested in the work that Vass and the Oak Ridge National Lab are doing with the body search. "I think that they could really benefit from near surface aerial photography," Agin states. Agin agrees with the use of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and the magnetometer. "GPR works great, depending on the depth of the buried body," she concurs, "and the magnetometer should pick up if a body has any metallic objects on it, like jewelry or a belt buckle."

Vass anticipates a return to the ranch for further investigation. This time, he will be testing out new, patent-pending technology. "The desert is a horrible place to work. So if this works out there, it will work anywhere," Vass says.

According to Vass, the trip to the Barker Ranch presented a far more complex environment than he expected; however, he sees it as a challenge and a great way to test his equipment. More importantly, Vass just wants to help. "For me," Vass compassionately admits, "it's about bringing closure to families who have no clue what happened to their children."