Forensic experts say of Manson site: Dig

Retracing his steps nearly four decades later, the search group stopped at the dilapidated house. From the porch, the view was clear for miles, broken only by the long twisted stems of creosote bushes and knee-high bunches of desert rabbitbrush.

"After the murder, my mom became a shell of herself," said Debra Tate, who was 17 when her sister, actress Sharon Tate, was killed. Her younger sister Patti was 11. "I filled in at home, as best I could."

Debra Tate's mother, Doris Tate, emerged from years of depression when she heard that a Manson family member was seeking parole.

She gathered 350,000 signatures, helping keep the murderer in prison. She also lobbied successfully to change state law to ensure the rights of victims' family members to make statements during sentencing and parole hearings.

Doris Tate died in 1992. Her youngest daughter, Patti, followed in 2000. Now Debra Tate, 10 years younger than the glamorous, doe-eyed Sharon, whom she grew up admiring, attends the parole hearings alone.

"My mother specifically asked me to carry on," she said, adding, "It's my life."

She has given herself two tasks, she said: making sure her sister's killers never go free, and helping other families find the peace that has eluded her.

"If there are bodies here," she said at the ranch, "we need to find them and send them home."

Areas identified
About 100 yards behind the house, Dostie readied his trained dog, Buster, for the search.

"Go find Fred!" Dostie said, releasing the dog on the command that sends him searching for human remains.

The dog bounded away, zigzagging over the terrain. Then he lay down in a depression in the ground, quivering, ears upright. Buster looked at his trainer and emitted a high-pitched whine.

"He's alerting," Dostie said, throwing the dog his reward and planting a flag on the site.

Meanwhile, Arpad Vass and Marc Wise, senior researchers from Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were readying the first of the instruments they'd brought, capable of chemically detecting evidence of decades-old human bodies. It was a hand-held device shaped like a gun.

"It's a crude sniffer," said Vass. "It gives us a quick indication of areas we want to come back to."

The machine detects fluorinated hydrocarbon compounds, one of the approximately 400 types of volatile organic compounds emitted by human bodies during decomposition. Focusing on these compounds is important because Vass believes they're formed as the fluoride added to urban drinking water is released after death.

Their presence helps differentiate a human bone from bones from wild animals, explained Vass, who has spent years developing a decomposition odor database using bodies donated to the Oak Ridge lab.

The instrument beeped at regular intervals. As it approached the ground, the beeping accelerated until it was a steady stream of sound.

"That's impressive," said Wise, a senior researcher at Oak Ridge specializing in environmental analytical chemistry. Vass agreed.

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