Spahn Ranch

Um, so while D- his dad is working, uh, Rohde spends a lot of times on film sets in these ranch shoots.

Uh, if you've ever seen Once Upon a Time in America, you know that they used to film on ranches, like the Spahn Ranch and all that stuff.

So Joe Rohde is seeing, like, castles and trains and Davy Crockett forts and all this other stuff.

He basically grew up inside 3D storytelling.

Killed Gary Hinman, a musician.

And Donald Shea, a stuntman who worked at the Manson Ranch in Chatsworth.

The infamous Spahn Ranch.

Did they give tours up there? That seemed like a ghoulish tourist attraction.

Yeah.

And around that same time, he meets some young women who are hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard, since that's where the Manson Family liked to hang out when they weren't at their compound at Spahn Ranch out in the valley.

Yeah.

So the story goes, recently divorced Dennis Wilson sees these attractive young hippie girls hitchhiking, and he's like, "I should offer them a ride."

Yeah.

The Mansons on the Spahn Ranch, on the abandoned movie set.

So it's the same kind of setup.

But that's where they had the people, you know, they had been in other areas and they kind of got chased out.

You know, I might have a lecture on the Helter Skelter theory or the Helter Skelter myth, but the first 10 minutes would be devoted to talking about conceptual history.

Or I might have a lecture on, uh, the Manson Family's life at Spahn Ranch, but I would precede it by talking about spatial history.

So it sort of...

That was anyway the direction I think in which the book was going, that I was trying to do both at the same time.

The third chapter, which is maybe the most chronological, right? And it gives you, you know, I, I know it's a particular take on the facts of the case, but it does give you a kind of overview of the case.

So I first thought that should open it up, but I just, I think I wanted something a little bit stranger, you know? I wanted to kind of de-familiarize the case from the very start and to undo as quickly as possible the idea that the narrative that we know is, is, is, is the right one.

And so the mapping chapter, it is a mapping chapter, and it is a kind of spatial history of Spahn Ranch, but it, like, the different sections give you different ways of thinking about how the family radicalized towards violence and why they committed these crimes, and it is open-ended, I think, in, in the e- at the end of that chapter.

So it was just supposed to kind of, yeah, n- not explode, but just to sort of undo the, the, the conventions and I thought that that might work best, um, through these, like, contradicting maps or these overlapping maps.