When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone, disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost him his job.
