In October 1946, thirty-two-year-old Parsons moved out of Pasadena. The grand estates of Orange Grove had been replaced by condominiums and garden apartments, and the mountains were covered with smog. Parsons and Candy relocated to Manhattan Beach, and Parsons took a job with North American Aviation in Inglewood. Although their relationship seemed distant, they married the same month they moved from Pasadena.
On December 1, 1947, Crowley passed away at the age of seventy-two. He had been injecting himself with as many as eleven grams of heroin a day.
By 1948, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) became reactivated. The FBI planted an informant into the LASFS group to investigate science fiction fans with Communist sympathies, and Parsons' immediate circle of friends began to worry. Malina, suspecting harassment by the FBI, took a post in Paris with UNESCO. Other friends lost their security clearance. Eventually Parsons' own security clearance was stripped and his job at North American Aviation suspended.
Candy left Parsons a month after he lost his clearance, moving from Manhattan Beach to an artists' colony in San Miguel de Allende. Jobless, friendless, and single, Parsons began pumping gas at a filling station and working as a car mechanic. He even briefly held a staff position in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Southern California. Dejected, he turned again to his magick rituals, carrying them out over forty days of what he later described as "madness and horror." He became obsessed with thoughts of suicide.
His mania seemed to settle down by 1949, and he was able to get the restriction on his security clearance reversed. He was soon put in touch with Herbert T. Rosenfeld, president of the Southern California chapter of the American Technion Society, an organization providing technological knowledge to Israel. Parsons hoped to begin a new career building rockets in Israel, and to this end he used data from his new position at Hughes Aircraft Company, owned by Howard Hughes, to write a proposal for Rosenfeld.
In 1950, Parsons was interviewed by the FBI about his links to Sidney Weinbaum's Communist group. He had initially given vague answers but finally told the FBI that Weinbaum had "extreme Communist views," which led to Weinbaum being arrested for perjury and sentenced to four years in prison. Tsien Hsue-Shen, a member of the Suicide Squad, had his security clearance revoked after a grilling by the FBI about his Communist sympathies. He lost his professorship at Caltech and was arrested at the airport on his way home to China and held without bail.
On September 26, Parsons was fired from his job at Hughes for removing confidential papers without permision and was once again subjected to scrutiny by the FBI. Herbert Rosenfeld also came under investigation. Parsons grew increasingly disturbed, referring to the FBI as the "Black Brotherhood" and convinced that the man living in the apartment next to him was spying on him.
Candy became sympathetic to his troubles and moved back from Mexico. The couple returned to Orange Grove Aenue, renting a coach house on the same block as 1003. Parsons made the laundry room his new home laboratory. He went back to working at the powder companies, and the couple began throwing house parties, at which Parsons was sociable but aloof. He was 36 and considered a bit square by the twentysomething attendees, who saw him as a member of the generation that played piano duets as opposed to the bongos. Parsons was also growing increasingly heavyset.
In January 1952, the Industrial Review Board revoked Parsons' security clearance forever, dashing his hopes of returning to the field of rocketry. Parsons and Candy began preparing financially for a move to Mexico. In the meantime, Parsons took a job at the Bermite Company in Saugus developing pyrotechnics and explosives for the film industry. In preparation for the move, Parsons began moving his collection of rare and volatile chemicals from a warehouse in Pacoima to the coach house on Orange Grove.
On June 17, 1952, the day he and Candy were to leave for Mexico, Parsons received a rush order from the Special Effects Corporation. He began working on it at the coach house, using a tin coffee can as a mixing bowl. At 5:08 p.m., the sound of a terrific explosion ripped through the air of Pasadena. Mutilated but still conscious, Parsons was discovered beneath a large cast-iron tub wedged against a wall of the demolished laundry room. He was declared dead by the time Candy arrived at the hospital. He was thirty-seven years old.
When news of his death reached Parsons' mother, she downed an entire bottle of Nembutal and was declared dead less than four hours after her son.
There was no funeral for Parsons, although the OTO held a service to honor him. Candy scattered his ashes in the Mojave Desert.
Malina remained in Paris, working for UNESCO. The only founding member of Aerojet not to sell his shares, he eventually became a very wealthy man. Hsue-Shen was eventually deported to China in 1955. Over the next forty years he became a national icon, supervising the development of China's intercontinental ballistic missile program. He never returned to the U.S. and is believed to still be alive. Apollo Smith worked at the Douglas Aircraft Company as chief aerodynamics engineer for most of his life, and Forman moved to Northern California where he found work as a test engineer on missile systems for Hughes Aircraft and Lockheed.
Candy Cameron grew more involved with the occult and appeared alongside Anais Nin in Kenneth Anger's "Inaugeration of the Pleasure Dome."
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