Paul Watkins (Manson Family) - Joining The Family

Joining The Family

On March 16, 1968, several months after his departure from high school, Watkins met Charles Manson in Los Angeles County’s Topanga Canyon, at a house where Manson and several Family members were squatting. Watkins had come to the house to visit a friend who turned out no longer to be living there. After enjoying a candy bar, root beer, marijuana, and a night of group sex, Watkins left.

For Watkins, there followed three-and-a-half months of hippie desultoriness, most of it spent taking care of a farm that was near Big Sur and whose owner had picked up the hitchhiking youth before going on to Hawaii. Watkins returned to the Los Angeles area, where, at a San Fernando Valley street corner, he was recognized and picked up in a battered car driven by the same two Manson girls who had greeted him at the door of the Topanga Canyon house. As the girls took him to the Family’s new camp at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, near Chatsworth, one of them remarked that Manson was Jesus Christ. It was July 4, 1968.

Watkins remained with the Family and became Manson’s chief lieutenant. On October 31, he set out with the others in the group's school bus to Golar Wash, near Death Valley. There, over the next few days, Manson set up additional Family bases at two unused (or little-used) ranches, Myers and Barker.