Fourth Reich Archaeology - She Harvey Oswald 3: Sex and the Spectacle

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

We are back with another installment of our ongoing miniseries about the two women who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in the fateful month of September 1975.  This week we continue our exploration into the life and times of the first of these two, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. One of our goals with this miniseries has been to trace the events and experiences that ultimately led these women to their actions, and weaving their lives and would-be assassinations into our larger narrative of the integrated spectacle.  As for Squeaky, we started out by setting the scene of her dystopian suburban upbringing in the 1950s and 60s.  Her father worked for weapons manufacturer, Northrop Aircraft, and was a weird guy to say the least.  He was abusive to Squeaky and the rest of his family (as well as anyone around them).  The tension that this created in the house led to regular blowout fights which ultimately led Fromme into the arms of Mr. Helter Skelter himself, Charles Manson.  When we left off last, Squeaky, Charlie, and the fledgling flock of Mansonites were living a nomadic life, traveling to various parks and remote wilderness locations, as well as cities and towns throughout the American West, as their “family” grew. In this episode we link up with Squeaky as the Manson family gives up the nomadic life and takes up residence in LA, first at Beach Boy Dennis Wilson’s estate, and later at the Spahn movie ranch in Hollywood. We discuss Squeaky’s unsettling role in the family’s sexual grooming of teenagers, and her later role as caretaker for the elderly George Spahn, pondering the parallels between Charles Manson and Jeffrey Epstein, and between Squeaky and Ghislaine Maxwell.  Finally, we will discuss how Squeaky - who claimed she never saw anyone kill anything in her life - lived through, processed, and pontificated about the family’s various homicides and highly spectacular trials therefore. Buckle up because this magical mystery tour is heading in some dark directions.

Now, the first requirement of any mafia, wherever it may be, is naturally to prove that it does not exist, or that it has been the victim of unscientific calumnies. And that is the first thing it has in common with capitalism. But in these particular circumstances, this mafia was so irritated at being the only one placed under the spotlight that it went so far as to give details of other groupings who were trying to cover themselves by illegitimately using it as a scapegoat. It declared, We ourselves don't belong to the mafia of politicians and bureaucrats, bankers, financiers, or multi-millionaires, nor to the mafia of fraudulent contracts, monopolies, or oil, nor to the media mafia.

We can doubtless assume that the authors of this statement have, like all the rest, an interest in diverting their own activities into that vast river of troubled water, whose course irrigates the whole of present society. a river of crime and more banal illegalities. But it is also correct to assume that here we have people who, by their very profession, know better than most what they are talking about. The mafia flourishes in the soil of contemporary society. Its expansion is as rapid as that of all the other products of the labor by which integrated

spectacular society shapes the world. The mafia grows along with the swift development of information technology and industrial food processing, along with urban redevelopment and shantytowns, secret surfaces, and illiteracy. Colonialism are imperialism, imperialism, imperialism, As the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses, The masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law.

For example, we're the CIA. Now he has a mile. He knows so long this is to die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers.

We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a day. This is a world. This is North Reich. I'm Dick

and I'm Don. Welcome back to another installment of our ongoing series within a series she Harvey Oswald which is

our exploration into the two female would-be assassins who targeted President Gerald Ford in September of 1975, just 17 days apart. So we've been, as of late, focusing on the first of these two, Lynette Squeaky Fromey, that weirdo hippie, manson, chick who was brought up in Charlie Manson's family and who, by all accounts, not truly intending to kill President Ford, but just wanted to send a message. And we're going to pick up and continue pulling on that thread in this episode. But first, as always, we want to say thank you very much for tuning in. Thank you very much to our subscribers and our patrons. We are so glad to have you here with us. We are always looking forward to hearing from you. We have an email, forthrightepod at gmail.com, and we are on social media at forthrightepod on Instagram and

X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And I guess we should say we have some big news over on Patreon. We officially have a tiered patronage. So for those of you who are really on board with this project and have thought about maybe doing a little more to help us get going, we do now have some premium tiers and with them some premium perks. available on our Patreon so please head on over and take a look at those and if you're able to and if you're willing please do throw us some cash and if you're not able to that's all right continue listening please enjoy the program that we've put together we do ask that if you do enjoy what we are laying down please do everything you can to spread the word

You know, we don't really advertise our program, and we don't want to go down that road. And so we really are relying on every single one of you to spread the word about the podcast. Tell your friends, tell your family, hell, tell your enemies, tell everyone who will listen about the Fourth Reich Archaeology train. That's right. And like, rate, review, subscribe on your free podcast apps because that also helps us reach a larger public. Absolutely. And before we get started on today's episode, Don, do you want to give us a little recap of where we left off? Absolutely. And I will note that if you're listening to this on the free feed, you'll know. notice that the side B of our first episode on Lynette Fromey is still unreleased to you. And we'll cover a little bit of that in the recap.

And don't worry, side B, it'll come out at some point. But we've got to leave a little something for the patrons. And that is one of those little somethings. so something to find. Leave a little something for the patrons, leave a little breathing room for us because remember folks, we do have full-time jobs

and we are doing this fully in our free time out of love for the project, out of love for the message, and out of love for every single one of you out there. That's right. And to recap, we last left

Lynn Fromey with the Manson Gang, the so-called family and remember that she had joined Charlie after leaving her family home in Southern California at the age of 18 years old. She had enrolled in but quickly dropped out of community college because of a fight one of the last in a very long line of such fights. with her abusive father Bill Frommi, a aeronautics engineer for the defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, although back in those days it was still just Northrop Aircraft.

And we discussed in the first installment this real expansion of the military industrial complex in Southern California after the Second World War and the popping up like so many mushrooms around the military industrial complex of these real, we think of them now as dystopian, but they were sold at the time as utopian housing communities, the cookie cutter houses, the tract housing, the manicured lawns, the white picket fences.

Think that scene from Edward Scissorhands or from David Lynch's blue velvet in the beginning scene, right? The idyllic Americana landscape that conceals something darker. It's just ubiquitous in media now. It's like the quintessential suburbia, right? You think of even more recently, right, that movie, Don't Worry Darling. The idea of these communities, these sort of utopian suburbs in the southwest, in the west, it's, I mean, it's all over in the movies. Right.

And so that was the birthplace. That was the crib, if you will, for Lin Frommi. and from an early age she was nonconformist and part of that was driven by her father who was a bad guy by all accounts and part of it was driven by her brain right she was a clever girl she had a knack for dance for performance for theater for literature and poetry, she was a free spirit confined. And what set her free, at least in her mind, was Charlie Manson. So she goes up, spends the Summer of Love, 1967, with Charlie and with Mary Brunner, who had already joined up with Charlie up in San Francisco. And they do. acid in the woods in Mendocino, and Lynn's life will change forever.

We discussed in the last episode also, and this is the part that you will not have heard if you're listening on the free feed, but we discussed quite a bit of the involvement in the Manson family by what you might call CIA adjacent mind control researchers, namely Dr. Lewis Jollyan West, who used the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic as a laboratory or recruitment ground of sorts, and David Smith, who ran the Hate Ashbery Free Medical Clinic, who had an interest in his own right in the induction of violent behaviors, with drugs, and Roger Smith, who was Charles Manson's parole officer, who also kept an office in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. So this was kind of the headquarters, if you will,

the command center for certain deep state or deep state adjacent operatives with their eyes on the growing click around Charlie Manson. We also demystified what we called the Manson schstick, right? We debunked a little bit this idea that he's some kind of a Superman or a Christ-like figure or even a psychopath with powers of. control. We talked about how Charlie was not the originator really of anything. He was an ex-con, spent most of his life behind bars, and got a PhD from prison university in the study of human behavior. And that enabled him to chameleon-like treat every person he interacted

with as a very special audience of one. And through that technique, through that practice, he did develop an ability to influence people, to exert charisma on the people around him, whether through his dancing, his singing, or just his hijinks. Totally. I mean, Manson was as much of a fond of. follower of Dale Carnegie as he was of like guru Deva or some shit right like he was a con man who shows up in the hate in Ashbury in San Francisco at a time where all of these different

gurus were hawking their lifestyle and their teachings much like if anyone seen the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, the scene in Palestine where there's all these doomsday prophets hawking their revelations in Jerusalem. And the whore of Babylon shall ride both

on a free head and ziphant and throughout the lands and be a great rubbing a path. You are the women shall bear a nine-bladed four, nine-bladed, not two or five, five.

or seven but nine. This sort of thing was going on in the hate in the 1960s where everyone was very much interested in self-betterment in sort of expanding their mind and their views. And, you know, Manson saw this as a business opportunity. He saw this as another way to make his nut. And, you know, and he was successful. to some extent, right? He was able to start with just a small flock that grew very much

by the time the crew was down in Los Angeles. And as the so-called family grew, we'll point out that Lynn and other members of the Manson family insisted that they never really called themselves the family much less the Manson family but we can't help but use the name because of the ease of reference because of how the phrase Manson family has permeated in all of our you know in our lexicon uh we're going to use that a shorthand so you know come at us in the comments if you want but this is our disclaimer about that and when we left off in our last episode this the Manson family, they were becoming more nomadic. They were moving around, bopping around California

and what they were calling the magical mystery tour named after the Beatles song, of course. And even though they were on the surface doing this hippie-dippy sort of free love and spreading the word tour, you better believe that Mr. Charlie was always hustling. He was continuing his pimping and buying and selling and taking and stealing and ripping and running.

And, you know, he was in all of the seedy businesses of the criminal underworld and, you know, dealing drugs, making connections with people in that world, you know, biker gangs, cons, criminals, largely thanks to the connections he made while he was in prison. And that is where we left off in the last episode. It was early 1968. And the family was getting ready to settle down, at least, you know, relatively speaking. And on just, you know, one point on the family, you know, the Manson family and this idea that there were, they were a cult and a commune and whatever, and we'll get into it in this episode.

But I think our take is that this Manson family really was more a criminal enterprise than anything else, much like any other gang or a criminal network of cells that work for some broad common goal, like taking care of each other or whatever. but you know it was a money-making operation and they were interested in doing things that were illegal yeah this is a very forthright archaeology take on the Manson phenomenon that will be developing in this episode and the next because as we'll lay out in this episode which will be partly narrative, but behind the narrative here, we're never too far away from our old friend Guy Debord. And as you were just talking, I was reminded of Guy Debord's concept in comments

on the society of the spectacle where he focuses in on the mafia as the model and talks about how governments and how corporations emulate the structures of the mafia. And I think the Manson family was not immune from this almost universal process of the post-war 20th century because, you know, you have your hyper-violent components to the operation. Right. And then you have your fronts, your legit fronts. Your social outreach, right? You also have a little bit of the social outreach stuff. A hundred percent. Your charitable activities. You know, your good causes. And for our purposes, because this is not a Manson podcast, but a squeaky, fromey podcast, that function, she was the face of it.

Squeaky Fromey was the squeaky clean front for this operation for a long time. And so, you know, what we're really tracing here is how does she get from that role, from the person who's kind of serving as spokesperson for the family during these trials to yet another life sentence for a violent crime, albeit in this case, in her case, an ultimately victimless one. So keep that in mind. Keep that mafia worldview in the back of your mind as we get through this stuff and join us as we.

We follow the family from the sunny Hollywood streets of Sunset Boulevard at the lavish estate of Beach Boy, Dennis Wilson, to the Spawn Movie Ranch, to the remote outpost of the Barker Ranch in Death Valley. And as we follow the acid trip in its descent into madness, what do you say? Let's get to get good. The spirit is Come to help me Give up you with you Want to be with me I'm your kind

I'm your kind and I see Come on come Come on What we called straight people were, I mean, everything that they thought had to do with either sex or that we were all on drugs or that, not just us, but, you know, everybody in San Francisco. People who were in the lifestyle weren't calling themselves anything, and that's how it was with us. We weren't calling ourselves family or hippie or anything. We were living life, and we were living music, and just experiencing what we saw our parents give up. they seem to be stuck in our lifestyles that were designed just to acquire whatever was on television or whatever people told you you should have.

Because without an earth, we have nothing. We have no place to enact our little dramas and our rituals of any kind. You know, he was not ritualistic at all. So as we previewed, going into the year 1968, the Manson family was nomadic. They had their bus, they are driving it from place to place, and remember, scrawled onto the side of that bus was Hollywood productions, albeit misspelled, because I think the story is that it was. a French girl who wrote Ollywood and spelled it

H-O-L-I-W-O-O-D but these folks are firmly living in the spectacle they are performing the role of hippie-dipies their flower children on display and

they eventually pick up several new recruits, many of whom, as we mentioned in the last episode, were on the younger side as Donald Trump commented about Jeffrey Epstein, his very good friends taste in women. And I believe we made that parallel that you do see quite a bit of Epstein in Charlie Manson. And that's a theme that will also be developing here. Suffice it to say that the nomadic lifestyle

eventually becomes somewhat incompatible with Charlie's longer-term goals. And those goals really revolve around his love for, or at least his belief that his musical talents could bring him to the top, could get him super stardom, a bunch of money, all the women, all the drugs, all the things that he loved so well. And so in that regard, the family sets its side south once again, and they make their way, they're staying at Topanga Canyon outside of Los Angeles, around a lot of these entertainers, these cultural personages, another foment, another cauldron of artistic creation, of experimentation in lifestyle at the so-called spiral staircase house.

This was a house that was kind of an open-door policy. It had once been owned by the actor Bella Lugosi, and it was later owned by the band Love. One of my personal favorites, or at least a favorite album, their album Forever Changes. The frontman, Arthur Lee, thought he, was about to die when he wrote this album and if you haven't i would definitely suggest giving the whole thing a listen you can kind of pick up from that music the types of spiritual conversations and

the realization that there was this crisis facing humanity in the 1960s and I think part of what all of these experimentations in different styles of living were geared towards was to figure out a way out of what they perceived as the bourgeois trap, right? The suburban hellscape that shielded this military industrial complex at the heart of the American Empire. but also present were occultists, satanists, motorcycle gangs, swastikas, and the like. And so it's all mixed up into this to throw in a shitload of drugs, and you're going to get some weird scenes. And then, by coincidence, perhaps, they meet. a very special patron.

You want to talk about that, Dick? Sure thing. So the story goes that Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson was out and he picked up a couple of the Manson girls and he brought him back to his place and after some sexy time, they told him all about the rest of the crew and before long, Mr. Wilson was telling everyone around him that he lived with 17 women.

and The Wizard, which was his nickname for Charlie Manson. Dennis Wilson would also later say that he co-founded the family with Charlie. And so, you know, after a while in the canyon at the Spiral Staircase House, a substantial contingent of the family sort of moved into Dennis Wilson's estate. And this was really his end to the music. industry, Charlie's into the music industry. He got Charlie a slot at Brian Wilson's private recording studio and introduced Charlie to names, even someone with a passing familiarity with the Manson story would recognize these names, Greg Jacobson and Terry

Melcher, the latter of whom was then living at the infamous Cello drive house where Sharon Tate and her friends would later be butchered by Manson's followers. So the exchange was pretty simple, and you'll see this coming up over and over again. It was basically the Manson family gets to live at Dennis's house, and Charlie would facilitate Dennis' access to girls who they not only did. took care of Dennis in the bedroom, but also cooked for him, took care of the house, and would clean up the place. Of course, the food that they would get for him would be from dumpster diving, but that's a completely different story. And all the while in this mix, Lynn was there.

she was sort of stepping into the role as mother hen to this growing group of women. And she got close to Dennis too, driving around in his role's Royce, accompanying him to Beach Boys' concerts out of town, even one in Colorado, and of course having sexy time with Mr. Wilson. And then what's this story about Ruth Ann Morehouse? Yeah, so I think we might have. mentioned in the last one. I'm not sure. One of the Manson girls who went by the name Whish. That was, I think, is that how it's supposed to be pronounced? Her name was Ruth Ann Morehouse and she joined up with the family with her father who had been a pastor and

did acid with Charlie, you know, fell kind of in thrall to Charlie, did Mr. Morehouse, and would be kind of popping in and out of the family's life. But meanwhile, weesh was a permanent fixture in the family. She was, I believe, a young underage teen at the family. At the the time, 14 or 15 years old when she first joins up in 67, 68, and there's this anecdote that she was making love to Dennis Wilson and Charlie sent Lynn into bed with them. And this is mentioned here because it's one of many anecdotes over which there is a real disparity in the tellings, right? Yep. And this goes for so much of all of this stuff.

And it's why, you know, ultimately for this entire portion of the series, it's hard to focus on a factual narrative. because you get a different factual narrative with every narrator that tells a version. And so, you know, according to Lynn in her memoir, Charlie never directed her to sleep with anyone and never directed anyone to sleep with anyone else. And in fact, it was all self-driven except that perhaps Charlie would make a suggestion, but nobody would do anything against their will. And I don't know about you, Dick. It sounds like some grade A cope to me. Yeah, sounds like some real bullshit. Sounds like some granola bullshit. Yeah. Some of that crunchy stuff. Yeah, no doubt. And so here, again,

you can take the family's experience living at Dennis's pad and view that from two different angles. You know, there's the transactional angle, which you just laid out very well, Dick. But then there's the way that the defenders of the family tell the story, which is that these people were all just of a similar mind. to reject the materialist trappings of the moneyed society of Los Angeles. And that Dennis gave everything away to these people that were his friends. And he did so because of his spiritual connection to them all. and for his part dennis apparently went to his early grave saying you know repeatedly throughout his life

someday i'm going to tell the truth about the manson story and it's going to blow the lid off of a whole can of worms and nobody really knows the real story and it's bullshit what's been told to the media. It's bullshit what's been adopted into the official narrative. And me, Dennis Wilson, I'm going to spill the beans. Man, that is so Jack Ruby coded. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know that there was any foul play in Dennis Wilson's early death, but he did drown after jumping off of his own boat in Marina del Rey in L.A. at a pretty young age. I think it was in like the early 1980s that he died. And that death, I don't about you, Dick, but it reminds me of the death of another yacht jumper, guy called Robert Maxwell, the Israeli super spy, and father of

Gilane Maxwell and to bring it back full circle to the metaphorical world building that we're undertaking here you know we've discussed perhaps squeaky was the Gilane to Charlie's Epstein in other words the anecdote about her getting into bed with wish and Dennis, or the several stories about her and or other Manson girls going on assignment into the city to not only dumpster dive for food. And you could imagine, like, these cute, young, carefree girls driving into L.A. in a Rolls-Royce and getting into trash bins

singing yeah singing along the way like holding each other and skipping and stuff and they have a magnetic presence for sure which they use to bring more and more young girls into the fold and Charlie was not at all mincing words words when he said, you know, all of the people that gathered around me, they were all broken

people. They were all people that had been kicked out of their homes, people that had been abused, beaten up, basically misfits who didn't fit into the society. And in other words, vulnerable young people sounds a lot like our old dead jeff sending gillane maxwell to the poor side of palm beach to the high schools to mara lago where they were working as waitresses and in the spa and scooping them up and taking them to Jeff's place. I have a great spa. One of the best spas in the world at Marlaka. And people were taken out of the spa hired by him.

In other words, gone. And other people would come and complain. This guy is taking people from the spa. I didn't know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him. I said, listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa. I don't want him taking people and he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said out of here

and not too much change well it's the playbook much like the mafia playbook actually I think it is just the mafia playbook yeah yeah but let's keep it moving so what happens next is the family does eventually move out of Wilson's place so one take is that they overstayed they're welcome The way this story goes is that Wilson fled his own home to escape the bad situation, apparently. And this is according to the, ultimately the prosecutors who tried Charlie Manson and to some extent Wilson's testimony or whatever. But it's really the prosecutor, Vince Bugliosi, it's like his narrative. But the story goes that Wilson fled his own house because he was terrified of Manson. He then had his manager give the family the boot in August 1968.

And Wilson would later say that the Manson family stay cost him $100,000, including a trip to a local sex health clinic to take care of an ST. D. And maybe you want to talk about whether there are other takes. Because at this time in August 68, did Manson still have like the prospects of a record deal? Oh, big time. Yeah. And it's, you know, the Beach Boys obviously a massive act, right? One of the biggest most popular bands in the United States certainly considered themselves and were at the same or close to the level of a Beatles. And so when we're talking about the family hanging out with Dennis Wilson and to some extent the circle of people around the beach boys, you know, there was a huge amount of star power that

was in and out of their life. And it's interesting that of all of these LA musical acts, a pall of silence fell over the whole milieu after the murders because nobody wanted to admit any association with Charlie Manson and with the family. But even this story about Dennis kind of getting in over his head with the family is a little bit, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Because like you said, that story is that Manson got booted in August of 68, but the article and the interview that he gave to that British paper was in December of 68. praising the wizard. In a December 1968 article in the British music newspaper, Record Mirror, Dennis said he lived with 17 girls and all he did was he sang Charlie's praises. And so it's hard to tell exactly what the timeline really was, what the breakup between Wilson and the family really was like.

even to what extent Wilson and his big shot music industry buddies stayed in Charlie's life and in the life of the family after their departure from his house. Because certainly, you know, Terry Melcher, who was Doris Day's son and who was a big time, really big time record producer he produced for example the birds among other major acts i think he was close with sly stone he was right in the center of the 60s rock and roll scene and he made at least one and i believe multiple visits to the spawn ranch after well after of course the family had left Wilson's place. And that kind of brings up this hidden or rather concealed aspect of the story that, you know, we mentioned Vince Bugliosi. He, of course, wrote the official narrative of

the Manson story in his book, Helter Skelter, purportedly based on his prosecution of Manson. But as Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos, really exposes, that narrative was fictionalized to a great, great extent, and it was done so in order to protect interests like Terry Melcher, like all these big money movie industry people who also had their dirty little fingers in this mafia-like atmosphere of drug and human trafficking, and that's what it was, right, that the family was involved in, and that, in fact, may have been the real motivation for the Manson murders in 1969. I lived in Hollywood, and I had all that, the Rose Royce and the Ferrari

and the pad in Beverly Hills. I had the surfboard and the beach boys and the biscuits and the Neil Diamond and the Rob Skob and Jimmy Griffin and Elvis Presley's, and Mesquette Bessleys and all them guys. The Dina Martins and the Nancy Sinatra's and the Gats for Suffren. Will you do it to me? I hear you do it good, honey, and all that kind. Will you come up to my house later?

So I went through all that and I seen that was a bigger prison than the one I just got out of and I really didn't care to go back to prison. The prison doesn't begin. in and end at the gate. Prison is in my mind. In any event, the family does leave Wilson's place and they physically settle at the Spawn Ranch. Yeah, so they moved on over to the Spawn Ranch and actually many of them were already there. So some of the Manson cohort was already living with George Spawn, I think as early as the spring of 1968. Now, let's talk a little bit about the Spawn Ranch.

George Spawn bought the place from Lee and Ruth McReynolds in 1953 with an ex-circass performer partner by the name of Ruby Pearl. And to do this, George left his wife and 11 children. behind and moved on out to Chatsworth, a pretty remote area right outside of Los Angeles. I think actually maybe even then and now, certainly now it's like a suburb of L.A. But he moved out there to start this business where George and Ruby would supply livestock and props to the movie industry. And again, they bought the ranch from the McReynolds who owned.

owned the what was called the Iverson Ranch across the canyon. And I should say these ranches, they are your classic, what we'll call movie ranches. These are sprawling acreages where you have movie sets, basically, Western-themed, of course. And it's where movies were shot back in the early days of film. and in fact, if Iverson ranch sounds familiar to you, that's because you may well be a cinephile. Because Iverson ranch is probably, I would say, one of the most, if not the most historically significant movie ranches for early cinema. Names like Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, right? These are movies like The Three Ages, the Flying Duses.

Of course, John Wayne, you have these big, big. big productions being shot these movies that basically shifted our culture around you know their message and of course when Hollywood shifted to television Iverson ranch was right there and this is where it gets crazy right like the biggest names in TV the Lone Rangers Zorro the Cisco kid the Roy Rogers show Buffalo Bill these are shows and like they're all Westerns but they were all so big in the 50s and 60s and indeed even when I was growing up like I would watch reruns of Zorro as a kid you know I would watch reruns of the roy rogers show as a kid because they were so entrenched in American culture you know we've talked about it in the past and this is just one close-up example of it but it's like we're often talking about how in this mid-century era the focus on the cowboy narrative on this pioneer narrative and the explosion of media around that like i just listed off a half dozen shows and movies pretty much all of

them about cowboys and it was all happening here in this valley at this ranch and now spawn ranch it was owned by the mc reynolds but it was sort of like their property next door like spillover you know it wasn't where all the main pictures were shot but they used it for like their bee movies that they had or commercials and sort of lesser productions and it was you know i say next door but it was just like an adjacent plot of land in this valley and the reason i think i'm going on in this it's like it's just so interesting this connection this through line that lynn and her manson family cohort like all of whom were born and bred on this media, the westerns of the 50s, the media that's like glorifying the cowboy, that's glorifying

the indispensable man who's willing to fight the Mexicans and the Native Americans and get rough and tumble with it, right? This is the media they grew up on. And it's just so like poignant or I don't know what the word would be, but like that this family, this group of people, they come to live and eventually settle in the rubble and the ruins of that era, right? Because by the time they get there in the late 1960s, the ranch is like, not in disrepair, but pretty much just in disuse. It was years and years since it had actually been used in any sort of major production. Yeah.

I think it is fair to say it was in disrepair. Yeah. It wasn't being really used for films anymore. It was still largely being used as a lot for horses. Right. So they would keep horses, rent them out for productions, or just rent them out for tourists. Right. People could come and take a ride in the trails on a rented horse from the Spawn Ranch.

Yeah. and stuff like that. Yep. And so, yeah, so the ranch was pretty crusty and old, and at that time, so was George. Maybe, do you want to talk a little bit about what George's shape was like at the time that the Manson's come over? Yeah, old George Spahn was 80 years old, I believe, when they arrived.

He was functionally blind. and basically immobile. He spent most of his time in his house or on his porch and was hardly able to attend to the business. So the business side of things was entrusted to some old ranch hands, some of whom were veterans of the movie industry, some of whom were old stuntmen, kind of like the Brad Pitt character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I almost forgot to say, fuck you, Tarantino, live in an Israel, pervert, hack, motherfucker, genocide-loving bitch. Kind of washed up guys who did whatever they could on the property with very little, if any, oversight from George. And so when the family arrived at the Spawn Ranch, for George, they really endeared themselves and ingratiated themselves with George, and he in turn took a real shine to them, especially the girls. For example, the girls cleaned up his house, you know, and again, Squeaky is leading the charge as the motherly

figure here, the housekeeper figure. She is described as George's caretaker, almost his functional wife, even though she is at this point, like 20 years old, and he's 80. She's cooking. She's cooking for George. She's fixing his appliances. She's repairing his kitchen cabinets, you know, cleaning up the windows. She's sitting there with him and keeping an eye and reporting back to him on what's going on elsewhere in the ranch, what the ranch hands are up to. All this stuff falls onto, or I should say, is scooped up by Squeaky, who I think really did get a satisfaction out of the whole deal. You know, the way that she writes about it in her memoir, reflection, is that she

had a real kindred spirit in George, that he was a guy who was a curmudgeon when they first met him but really opened up and had a great sense of humor you know he loved to tell stories about all of his experiences in hollywood in the cowboy movies you know he would talk about jean aughtry and what an asshole he was and a drunk and that you know they had to put a stick in his shirt so he wouldn't fall down drunk while riding the horse and stuff like that and he was the one that gave her the nickname Squeaky because she would make a squeaky noise when he would run his 80-year-old hand

up her thigh and this brings me to the point that it was often rumored and reported in many sources that Squeaky was having sex with George Spahn and she denies this in her memoir and I don't know actually what to think about Squeaky and George having a sexual relationship. I almost believe her. Well, the nickname comes from him rubbing his hands on her thought.

man but at the same time like an 80 year old dude who's like practically blind like rubbing a hand up her thighs might be about all the sexual activity he's up for I'm not sure that's true this predates Viagra right yeah he ran the ranch we gave him that ability it was his ranch and when we started listening to him and trying to help him out to do the things he wanted to do as an 80 plus year old guy. He just brightened up. He became just funny in his own way. And most of us, Liz, had a very good relationship with him. He's like our grandfather. The girls will come in the house, give him a hug, and talk to him. And he would speak to each individual.

He was not very good with the guys. I don't know what he thought. He did not tell me, but I know that we had a really good relationship with him, and we were not sleeping with him. Whoever thought that that was a titillating piece to write about, It didn't enter into our reality The point is

George Spahn He's a character on the scene here They are very much playing roles The existence within the spectacle Is so total here in their time on the Spawn Ranch, it really calls to mind if the listener is familiar with performance studies, performance theory, because they really are playing out a kind of fantasy, and it's incredible to think that the buildings, that they are doing their life activities,

are all fake buildings. There's a saloon where they have their parties and play their music. That's like an old West saloon designed for movies. I mean, the whole thing, right? It's like it's the movie sets, but also it's like these hippies that are programmed as like, you know, suburban, suburban middle class teenagers that come out west and sort of play hippie for however long they're doing it.

but it's all sort of role play. Yeah. At my house, I've got no shackles. You can come and look if you want to. There's nothing that has ever made an impact on me as much as his love of life, his respect for the natural world, and his acknowledgement of,

of each and every moving thing around him. And it's all real to touch, to smell, to feel, to know where you are here. What do you think of it? Oh, I like it. Yeah, that's nice. They're put together, well, and everything, and they're soft and spicy.

Yeah, they're nice. As long as they keep them all shut and do what they're supposed to do. I've never had any followers. I had a lot of friends. And I learned everything that you do in prison. And I talked to all the guys and asked him everything they knew. And they told me all the things they knew. And then the old man would be ready to die.

And he'd say, well, son, sincerity is the best gimmick. Remember that. Sincerity and honesty. He said, it'll do it. I'll trick them every time. I said, well, sincere and honesty. I never tried. I did not hear anything from the girls.

Like people would come in the house. come in the house, in Georgia's house, and talk to me, and nobody said that he was up to say, and by the time that come through singing, the bells from the schools of walls will bearing in. More confusions, blood transfusions, the news today will be the movies for tomorrow. I said, look here, girl, here's our problem. What are we going to do about it? Now, if you've got to give up a little something on the side and do what, there ain't no jealousy in me. What you do is your affair. But we're hungry here, moms.

She didn't want to see it. So as Braddon went out and she made a few dollars. She'd come back and said, here, some money. That's what we need. So I took the money. Now, the law and the government calls that puping, puping. It was me who went out and found a young runaway girl one day who didn't have a place to stay and said, come on home with us.

It's just a bunch of intelligent people. trying to put some order into their existence. They're trying to get out from underneath what their parents left them. They're trying to get unlocked from the Second World War. They're trying to get out from the burning monk that's in the street burning himself to death because there's something's not right. Do you ever take it back upon yourself

to say that you're responsible for a helter sculptor? Did you feel bad about the Second World War and your power bodies up to the sky? Did Jerry Rubin and Avery Hoffman and Dr. Timothy Leary take any responsibility for the children that they said that I influenced? You guys live in the old world. I live in the underworld.

It's like you think the Second World War is over. Second World War is not over. Do you understand what I'm telling you? The Second World War is not over. As the numbers on the ranch tilt towards members of the family, in other words, you know, very quickly, the ranch hands and the sort of old fixtures on the ranch are outnumbered by Charlie and the girls and the new guys that are joining them there as well.

They really take the place over and by they, I really mean Charlie. And it provides a perfect environment for Charlie. to, I guess you could say, direct the movie of their life. Right. It's remote. It's outside of the city. It is cut off. You know, there's not a lot of neighbors nearby.

There's not easy access from the outside world, except the occasional visitor. and the reputation grows as well such that those visitors come for a purpose. And as any mafia, right, there's many purposes that might be served. And so the crowd of people that's coming through is of a certain type. What type is that, Dick? You want to talk about some of these seemy? characters that are passing through? We've talked about it a bit, but you have.

Of course, the motorcycle gangs that were becoming so prevalent in the 1960s, they were pretty much the channel in which Manson was doing a lot of his drug running, drug trafficking, drug dealing. But there were also other hardened criminals, right? like folks who were into you know grand theft larceny folks that were coming hatching up schemes to steal and rob and loot uh to fund the manson project and to line their own pockets yeah so it's like part drug dealing nexus point and part party palace you know the And it's interesting because ostensibly Manson and the family shun money.

They shun commerce and they talk about. And they shun and they shun like the ego, right? They're like free spirit and free love and there's no me. There's no you. It's like all of that shit. And then meanwhile it's like what is Manson chasing very openly? like fame and fortune right right exactly but i should say the third pillar too right is like the sex work right so i'm talking about when i was talking about like you know they're doing all

sorts of you know drug deals and stuff they're stealing shit but then also there's the whole sex work angle and if you're looking at just their lines of trade it's like they're a criminal organization you know these aren't this isn't a cult yeah that's a great point You know, you think about it as a cult where it's all supernasticious, it's all spirit and this stuff. And that may describe the experience of a squeaky Frommi who is cordoned off from a lot of the uglier sides of the business here. and like we said, she is kind of spending a lot of time with George Spahn. She's over there taking care of the property. She's taking care of the business.

She's keeping track of the ranch hands. She's playing this managerial role. And like in the mafia, it's like the front, right? this the the squeaky clean the charitable side and meanwhile behind the scenes

you know you have the straight satans is one of the big biker gangs that's spending a lot of time there the hell's angels are passing through and you got to distrust

Squeaky's narrative in her memoir to a great degree and even question her subjective experience of Manson and his whole ethos because we know from other points of view into that world the types of really disgusting and criminal activity that's going on. And this plays into the broader 60s picture where you have this growing awareness of the kind of evil at the core of the American Imperial Project

that's papered over by all of this superficial maintenance and beautification of the surface and the creation of the surface and the creation of these spectacular forms, whether it's the subdivisions in the housing or the idealized media representations, your leave it to beavers, right? Andy Griffith show. the innocence portrayed. And with the Vietnam War, with the civil rights movement, and its repression, the young people are painfully aware that that superficial narrative is bullshit. And so the rejection of what their parents are saying and doing

is total. And it's so perfect for somebody like Manson, a predatory type of a guy, to come in and take advantage and exploit that rejection of the bourgeois social norms to introduce and to steer this innocence in these dark directions. And, you know, once again, his agenda from his personal point of view dovetails almost too nicely with the agenda of the American deep state,

with things like the CIA's Operation Chaos looking to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the anti-war movement and the civil rights. movement or co-intel pro whereby the FBI is similarly trying to create internal conflicts between different black radical civil rights groups and manson whether by design whether by programming or whether by happenstance and coincidence is playing right into that broader, what we might say, you know, counter-insurgent agenda. Yeah, and the spawn ranch is sort of the perfect place to do it, right?

Like, we're not, I'm not going to, I don't want to just rely too much on Vince Bugliosi, but he does say something that I think for his, you know, to give him some credit, it does sort of ring true, right? He says, there were no newspapers at Spawn Ranch, no clocks, cut off from the rest of society, he, this is Manson, created his timeless land and a tight little society of his own with its own value system. It was holistic, complete, and totally at odds with the world outside.

And on this point, it's like, yeah, I agree with Bugliosi. It's like actually write out the playbook. You isolate folks. You sort of make them feel seen, right? You make them feel valued. And then you have them partake in these rituals that either through shame or whatever, they are sort of bonded to you because of what you have done together. And of course, there's going to be drug use.

And of course, there's going to be like late nights and sleep deprivation. And just repeat this day after day after day. And eventually you can do something like, you know, tell someone to go out and kill someone else. And the Spawn, I mean, Spawn Ranch was sort of, I think, whatever you want to say, it was the perfect sort of incubator for the Manson project to really take off because it was this place that wasn't really well known at the time. It was sort of forgotten to history, to, you know, Hollywood history. And it was remote. It was a place where not many people would ask questions. And the few people that were there were, you know, these loan.

weirdos anyways, right? There is this quote from a chats word census taker that I liked. He's describing the place as, he says, it's a place of Indian trails, boulders, rotten roads, and individuals whose names in the register bore annotations such as, quote, he carries a gun, or don't approach suddenly, or quote, very fierce dog. You know, so these are people that it's like, you know, they want to stay out of your business and they want you to stay out of theirs. but you know who didn't stay all the way out of the business at the Spawn Ranch are good friends the CIA adjacent mind control researchers I think it's time you want to I know you had annotated some stuff maybe you want to

yeah so I mean there's the one figure that that we didn't mention in the last episode, but who really comes into play as a connection point between the old CIA milieu at the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and the Spawn Ranch is this guy called Alan Rose. And O'Neill writes quite a bit about him in chaos and describes how Alan Rose first came into contact with the family way back in 1968 when they were on one of their acid trips among the Redwoods in Mendocino.

And so he really gloms on and enjoys their company. O'Neill heavily implies that he was also having sex with some of the girls. doesn't name which ones, but he follows them down to the Spawn Ranch, and at least according to Rose himself, spends several months there and takes his observations back to David Smith at the Haid-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, and together they write up as research. Let me get the name of the article one second. Okay, so Rose is spending apparently four months with the family doing field research, comes back and is writing a paper that's eventually published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in September of 1970. And they,

are talking about the group marriage commune, a case study, co-authored between Rose and David Smith and focused on the social dynamics, the drug use patterns, and the sexual morays among the family, which Rose was purportedly really participating in. He was a participant researcher in that study. And, you know, on the one hand, you could kind of view this in the most innocent light of a guy who's getting his rocks off among all these young girls under sort of a pseudo-scientific auspices. And on the other hand, you could view it through a more annoyed lens as Alan Rose keeping tabs on the group and possibly doing more than just keeping tabs if he is in any way directing or making suggestions or making other sorts of interventions

on behalf of this group that we know to be very nefarious. especially Jolly West. That's, of course, speculation. And for her part, interestingly, Squeaky says that those four months were more like four days and that Alan Rose wasn't a presence at all. But yet once again, we can't know because how would Squeaky even know? If she's in the back inside this house,

like remember the spawn ranch it consists of many buildings that aren't connected to each other and so if you spend all day in one building you might not have any clue what's going on in another building and it also bears mentioning that throughout this period of time charlie was leaving the ranch whenever he felt like it they had plenty of access to vehicles plenty of ability to get into the city, to travel around, to go wherever. And so people are always moving in and out. So while you're right and while Bugliosi is not wrong in the way that he describes the ranch, it's also true that unlike what we think of as like a cult compound, you know, something like the Waco, Texas compound of the branch Davidians,

where you could actually encircle the whole thing and it's just one building and everybody's in there together all the time, that is very much not what the scene was like on the spawn ranch. The other indicia of a... actual involvement by law enforcement, counterintelligence agencies, whatever, is the degree of catch and release law enforcement activities in and around the spawn ranch

leading up to, and even after the Tate La Bianca murders. So again, this is not a Manson podcast, so we're not going to do, a play-by-play here, but suffice it to say, the drug-dealing activities, the interactions with gangs, all of these criminal networks were right under the nose of the very spooked-up LAPD. remember it was in June of 68 that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and anyone who has read Lisa Pease's book A Lie Too Big to Fail about the Bobby Kennedy assassination will know very well that the LAPD was hand in glove with the CIA.

at this time, that Phoenix program operators from the Vietnam Theater were coming home and applying their skills right in Los Angeles. And so that entire body was right there. Same with the Cointel Pro folks that the FBI arranged assassin. of Bunchy Carter on the UCLA campus in 1969 was right at the same time as the Manson family's criminal activities were escalating in that summer. And this drag net, this massive presence of intelligence even bears down on squeaky. herself. She was arrested with a large number of other members of the family in April of

1969, April 19th, which will be a date that stands out to those of you tuned into Oklahoma City bombing. Big right-wing day. Well, there was one of many mass arrests of family members on that date for Grand Theft Auto, but everybody was released after just three days. You know, the murders famously take place in early August, and on August 16th, about a week after the murders, there's, I believe at the time, it was the biggest law enforcement raid ever in California history. of the Spawn Ranch. Yep. And they weren't there for the murders, right? Like didn't they get arrested for like vehicle charges? This is once again, we probably will never know because if you ask

10 people, you'll get 10 different answers about why were they there? What were they looking for? What were they doing? Clearly they were not there for the murders, but it might have even been to mess up the investigation into the murders or at least it had that effect yeah right exactly in any event that august 16th raid which was the largest at the time it brought it all crashing down not for squeaky not not for squeaky and not for anybody else either because i mean even the killers that were taken into custody yeah were also let go right and that's what when they really leave, most members of the family leave the Spawn Ranch around that time and head to the desert.

Should we talk a little bit about the helter-skelter and the race war and the... Yeah, yeah. So I think it's at this point, or before, I guess it's before the murders, right? So it's before August 69, where things sort of dry up for Manson and his record deal. Things don't really work out. And this was something that Manson very much was hedging on. And I think those in his close circle were very much looking forward to. But ultimately, I mean, if you've listened to his music, he, Manson doesn't have musical chops, really.

he plays sort of offbeat and sings a little out of tune and there isn't really a wide appeal to his style and it doesn't work out for him right the record deal falls apart but manson is a people person so he doesn't really let that stop his crew he just sort of evolves his goal right the slowly the goal becomes through these acid trips or whatever the goal becomes uh this weird weird prophecy that the apocalypse is coming and there's going to be a race war and we're going to take on the you know we'll be on the side of the blacks right because the whites they're the fascist or whatever So Manson's, you know, the theory evolves, this prophecy evolves into, you know, what Manson says is that there's a race war coming, it's going to be apocalypse, the blacks are going to take over. They're going to fight the whites, and they're going to take over. And we during the race war will go into hiding. And once the blacks, you know, succeed, which it's inevitable, they will, we will surface. And we will. And we will succeed. join them in living in this harmonious society and the role we will play is as they're leaders

because everybody knows that black Americans can't govern themselves that is a crazy crazy line of logic to take someone through right like like we're free spirit we're free spirit love everyone and you know we're on the side of the blacks but also we don't think that they're smart enough to take care of themselves. So they're going to need us. Yeah. And again, you know,

put a big a heaping portion of salt, whatever caveats you want around all of this because the whole idea has been so manipulated, written and rewritten, and used for any, number of purposes, anywhere from selling books, the prime example being Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, the number one selling true crime book of all time, or at least it was up until a certain date, I don't know if that record has been broken, but needless to say,

Bugliosi is not a reliable narrator on the contours of the helter-skelter mythos, but that is not to say that there's no there there because even Squeaky in her memoir talks about race relations in be kind and say a bizarre way like there's this whole discussion at some point where she's talking about you know she didn't call police pigs

she just called them cops but she was alarmed by the chantings of the Black Panthers, and by their taking up arms and marching with guns to the California State House famously, right? That was the impetus for the first ever gun control legislation under the governorship of Ronald Reagan in California, and its purpose was to criminalize the Black Panther Party for self-defense that had formed basically as a group of black young people who would follow the cops around with guns open carrying to prevent the cops from brutalizing their communities.

And they showed up to the state house. It was a huge spectacle. And then old. Ronnie said enough and put his foot down. And Squeaky, what she writes about all of this is, you know, she's telling these anecdotes in her memoirs about, I'll read a portion here. She says,

A babysitter for a family of black children told me that after she saw an automatic weapon in the case their father carried, he candidly told her that the time was coming when he would have to kill white people. You would kill me? She asked him. Notting in the affirmative, he said, it's nothing personal. And she writes, there were fundraisers for the Panthers all over Hollywood. So clearly, even as of this book's publication in 2018,

Squeaky is still holding on to some very uncomfortable racial politics where she really believed that black Americans were on the verge of just wiping out the white race. And so I have waffled a little bit back and forth and I, you know, might change my mind tomorrow. But I do think that you can't throw the whole baby out with the bathwater with respect to the helter-skelter myth because, you know, they talked about it. Charlie talked about it as well. Talk about an unreliable narrator. But they, I think to make the long story short, I think you put it well, right? Their plan was not necessarily to kick off the race war. I think that is where Bugliosi used the whole helter-skelter idea to reverse engineer

a motive for the Tate-Labianca killings that may or may not have been the actual motive. You know, he said that the Manson family wanted to spark this race war and that I really do not believe. But nevertheless, I do believe that their plan of hiding out in the desert to ride out the race war that they believed inevitable, I do think that that was in all of their minds as they wandered around Death Valley in and around the Barker Ranch looking for the hole in the desert where they could tunnel basically into the earth and survive almost in a way that's not so different from what your Mark Zuckerbergs and your Peter Teals are hoping to do in their billionaire bunkers when the shit hits the fan and their their

day in the sun is finally up. Oh, for sure. I mean, in this day and age, I got to think there's going to be a Manson family enthusiast bunker, right? Oh, yeah. We've got to add that to the list of bunkers. Yeah, maybe they'll even play the old Manson records. Okay, well, what do you say? We're talking tunnels. Maybe it's time to tunnel our way out of here. Yeah. I know we've meandered a little bit, but I suppose to sum it all up, right? The family is taking up residence in these remote locations and trending every time more remote, more removed from society with the interest in setting up a parallel society that is apart from the rest of the world

Charlie is running his game and doing his thing hustling and the shit gets violent all the way starting in the summer of 69 first he shoots a guy who I think was his friend Bernard Crow aka lotsa papa who was a black drug dealer that was in a feud with the family over some drugs

Charlie shoots him non-fatally and that kind of augments the paranoia later on the family kills another drug dealer Gary Hinman who was a Buddhist, a peaceful guy, also in the music scene. And finally, the killings on Cello Drive of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Vojtek Freikowski, and Steve Parent, and Jay Sebring, right? All of these very fancy Hollywood types and then the La Bianca killings. And I think the motivation and details of those crimes is not so relevant to Squeaky because she was again cordoned off from all of that.

stuff. She didn't take part in any of these crimes. She wasn't on the scene in any of these crimes. There's some stories that she was maybe making clothing for the people that were going out on these runs, but it's unclear if she knew what they were actually up to. And, you know, my take for whatever it's worth, it's tangential. to our subject matter, but I think that, you know, there was this bigger underground that intersected many different criminal underworlds, and the Manson family was just one player in that world, and these crimes up to and including all these killings were motivated by, various aspects of that world, you know, there's a lot of indication that there was also

pornography rings being run, including some of the residents of Cello Drive and maybe involving Manson and the family. Manson and the family famously had robbed some video recording equipment which they used to make films that have been described as everything from just sort of hippie-dippy occultic dance performances to animal sacrifices to beastiality porn to snuff films to you name it and who the fuck really knows what what happened you know I hope you won't hold it against us for not delving deeply into this. Once again, if you want that content, there's plenty of places that you can find it. And I think we are planning to do an episode with the great Dana Duda, who has done tons of research into all this stuff to kind of

condense a great deal of her research and discuss those intersecting points but you know for us really the point is that all this shit's going on right next to squeaky and yet she's able to come away and with her whole chest spend her adult life to today singing the praises of what a unique and a novel

worldview Charlie and his whole scene brought to the world and how it was liberatory and how it could help us to get out of the materialistic anti-environmentalist

polluting industrial shit world that we live in and to see things in a different light and to imagine a better world and you know from the bigger picture foreclosing

the emergence of that better world is exactly the plan that the enemies of humanity have been pursuing since well before that time and continue pursuing today. I love the colorful question around.

this some light place upon your head. All right. Tune in next week as we pick up right where we leave off here. Thank you for giving us your time and your attention. For now, I'm Dick. And I'm done. saying farewell. To digging.

I'm going to keep on. I don't know. What?