By Nathan Baca, News Channel 3

The search for more victims at Charles Manson's former desert hideout is over. Inyo County Sheriff's deputies ended their search early Wednesday afternoon. No human remains were found.

The secluded Barker Ranch is in the Panamint mountain range in Death Valley. News Channel 3 was the only local station with an inside look at the remote ranch house.

Frozen in time, the inside of the Barker Ranch house shows few clues identifying its former occupants: notorious mass murderer Charles Manson and his "family."

Now, a team of Inyo County Sheriffs deputies is digging up the grounds around the Barker Ranch, looking for other murder victims at four possible burial sites. The search begins with gold prospector Emmett Harder. Forty years ago, Charles Manson was his neighbor.

"When these hippies showed up then, why, they were just some of the people that came in and out. They came to our mining camp. Carl and I were brining high grade gold off the top. We have a mine that we opened up," said Harder as he showed a 1969 photo of Charles Manson. "This is Carl Rona, and this is Charles Manson, then. And I kinda described him as a self-styled evangelist because he kept talking to Carl about the Book of Revelations."

As we drive towards Manson's hideout, this canyon brings a whole new meaning to 'secluded.' Its remoteness in the Death Valley National Park gave manson the chance to live by his own rules.

The Manson Family came to the secluded desert ranch to wait out the coming race war they believed would come in 1969 between blacks and whites. They were also looking for "the bottomless pit," an underground city they believed existed underneath Death Valley.

Emmett recalls, "Charles Manson said, 'We're not hippies. We've escaped from Haight-Ashbury and we're down here where we get away from the troubles of the world.'"

When police officers came to arrest Manson, he was found hiding underneath a cabinet. After Manson was convicted for seven murders, Manson family member Susan Atkins told Emmett that bodies were buried close to the Barker Ranch.

"I was told about by this girl another graphic account of members of the family who decided to escape and when Manson and the rest of the boys find out they had taken a dune buggy and were getting away, they went after the, and she gave me a graphic account of that they'd come back with trophies to demonstrate they'd murdered them," said Harder. "The other murders, nobody was concerned about them. One was a boy who's Volkswagen car broke down."

After hearing the account in Emmett's recent book, Sergeant Paul Dostie of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department brought "Buster," a dog specially trained in finding buried remains. The dog found five sites.

Scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee brought equipment that can effectively smell the dirt for dead bodies. It also found some possible burial sites.

But the digging is slow, one inch at a time.

"I think our greatest fear is that we're three feet off and we can't dig up the whole desert," said Sgt. Dostie.

Harder adds, "My first visit there in years and I got misty eyed and I felt the horror of what they had done to themselves and what they had done to other people. When I had been there with them, why... They were a happy group of young people, enjoying the desert and enjoying the freedom."