J. Gonzalez - They

Released to the custody of his parents in the middle of 1969, Jesse took work with his brother-in-law, who owned a cleaning service. He wouldn’t talk of the incident that led to his breakdown, and on the advice of Jesse’s psychiatrist the family refrained from asking him. Jesse was supposed to have continued therapy sessions, but he stopped going after a few weeks, and no amount of persuasion could get him to return. While he appeared to improve upon his release from the hospital, enthusiastically smiling and hugging family members, engaging in conversation, he appeared troubled, as if something had been released inside him that held him back emotionally. Mike saw this on a visit to El Paso that summer with his wife and two children. He’d suggested the trip to his wife as an excuse for her to finally meet his extended family, but he really wanted to pay Jesse a visit. What he’d seen was shocking.

“He just wasn’t the same man,” he told Vince as the three men sat in the den that evening. “He appeared to be the same, he talked the same, we had the same conversations we always had. But there was something missing. Something… some part of his personality that was dead.”

If Jesse showed signs of improvement, those signs were dashed in December of 1969 with the arrest of Charles Manson and “The Family.” Diane later told Mike that Jesse was seated at her kitchen table when it happened. Her husband Carlos had passed the El Paso Times to him nonchalantly as he always did, and Jesse took one look at the front page, Manson’s long-haired, demonic figure grinning evilly at the camera, and he’d lost it right there. He began shaking, the newspaper crumpling in his hands as he gazed down at the story. Diane had asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Jesse hadn’t replied. He put the paper down and stared out the window into space. His eyes had gained that faraway look of catatonia again.

Carlos had noticed the sudden change and at the time didn’t pay much attention to what could have caused it. Diane rang Jesse’s psychiatrist. Before she could get him on the phone, Jesse rose from his chair and skirted out the side door. Leaving again.

This time for good.

John Llama and Mike Peterson did all they could to search for their friend, but to no avail. They put out missing-person bulletins, scanned newspapers, put out the word of Jesse Black’s disappearance with flyers with his picture on it. None of it helped. The years went by. In 1980 John Llama, who was now the senior partner in the law firm, started up the investigation again. With a wealth of investigators at his fingertips in his law office, he felt he had the resources to make this effort more professional and not the half-hearted attempt he and Mike had tried previously. In the decade that passed they’d kept in touch with Jesse’s family, hoping to gain some kind of insight to their friend’s disappearance and final years in Los Angeles. The closest they’d come was some of the investigations Diane and Carlos had launched in the years following Jesse’s final disappearance. “Gladys was involved with some dangerous people in California,” she told Mike at one time. “People who were involved in a huge underground crime cartel. I don’t know what kind of activities they were involved in, but it was huge. And dangerous. I think Jesse found out about it and they did something to him.”

Diane and Carlos did some minor poking around on their own, contracting the help of a business acquaintance of Carlos’s who was a private investigator. The investigator worked for them for about six months in 1976 and came back one night in December of that year breathless. “You have to take me off this case,” he’d said after they let him in their home upon his return from California.

Why ? they’d asked, alarmed.

The investigator laid it all out. While he couldn’t gain solid proof for this theory, he was fairly confident that the people Gladys was involved with were members of a dangerous satanic cult. At least that’s what he learned from the people that would talk to him about it. He’d talked to police officers, detectives, people in the Haight Ashbury district, and while he hadn’t talked to anybody directly tied to Gladys herself, the people he interviewed told him the same thing. A large satanic cult was in operation, had spread nationwide and had members in various parts of the world. The private investigator showed Gladys’s photo to a few of the people he’d interviewed, and the ones that recognized her admitted that the company she kept was cult related. She might even be a member of the group herself. When the investigator tried to learn more about the cult, everybody clammed up. Nobody would talk to him about it. You don’t understand , they all said. These people are bad. They know all, they see all. They have heavily infiltrated modern society and they are everywhere. Especially here. If I tell you anything more about them they might find out and I don’t want to even think what might become of me .

The police hadn’t been much help either, neither denying rumors of a cult nor confirming one. Despite vague rumors of a cult compound in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the investigator wasn’t able to learn much else. He was just about to launch into phase two of his investigation when he woke up one morning to the sound of a knock on his hotel room door. Upon opening it, he’d found a gift-wrapped box in front of the door. Curious, he’d brought the box in and carefully opened it.

Carefully wrapped in tissue paper was a severed human finger. Along with a single note, written in a blocky script on a tattered piece of notebook paper. Cease your investigation , was all it said. The investigator heeded the warning and took the first flight out of Los Angeles back to Texas.

This troubled Diane and Carlos. They’d been in the process of trying to gain custody of Frank, who’d just been released to his parents after the criminal charges against them were mysteriously dropped. Now with the new information that Ray Allman—their private investigator friend—had learned, they were prepared to use it against the couple. But before they could get started, two things happened.

In early January of 1977, two men in ski masks forced their way into the house. Carlos was at work, the kids at school. Diane and the maid were at home, tending to chores when the gunmen broke in. They herded the cowering women into the bathroom and locked them in, telling them that if they didn’t shut the fuck up they would be shot in the fucking head. Diane had quickly quieted Maria down, and the two women sat in the bathroom clutching each other fearfully as the sound of footsteps traveled through the house. The men seemed to know exactly where they were going, for there were no sounds of ransacking as would have been prevalent in most home burglaries. Five minutes later they heard the front door open and close, and then the sound of receding footsteps. The women sat in the bathroom for another forty-five minutes before Diane tried opening the door, which was locked from the outside. It took the women another fifteen minutes to break the lock on the bathroom door and, once they were out, Diane headed for the phone in the master bedroom and called the police.

The only thing that was stolen was twenty-five thousand dollars in cash that Carlos had stashed in a metal box, stored on the upper shelf in the closet. The men had taken the box with them. Nothing else in the house was touched or stolen.

The police questioned them extensively. Were they certain that nobody but Carlos and Diane knew about the money? Had they mentioned the whereabouts of the cash to anybody outside of the family? The answers were no. The police checked out Carlos, thinking he might have hired one of his workers to steal the money for some illicit purpose, but could find nothing to support this theory. The night after the robbery, Diane had turned to her husband in the darkness of their bedroom. “This was a warning, Carlos.”