The Devilish Exploits Of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

Leonard Thomas Lake was an American serial killer who, during the mid-1980s, raped, tortured, and murdered an estimated eleven to twenty-five victims at a lonely cabin outside Wilseyville, California, located 150 miles east of San Francisco, with his accomplice, Charles Ng.

Leonard Lake Before The Crime

Leonard Lake was born in the California city of San Francisco. When his parents divorced when he was six years old, he and his siblings moved in with their maternal grandmother. Lake was reputedly a clever child, but after photographing his sisters naked on a regular basis, which his grandmother allegedly encouraged, he got hooked on pornography.

He then allegedly coerced sexual acts from his sisters. Lake also captured mice and killed them by dissolving them in chemicals, just as he would later dispose of the corpses of his human victims.

Lake enrolled in the United States Marine Corps in 1964 after graduating from high school. He did two tours of duty as a radar electronics technician in the Vietnam War. Lake was first diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder during this period. Following a "delusional breakdown," he received psychotherapy and a medical discharge in 1971.

In 1975, he married. His marriage ended when his wife learned he was producing and participating in amateur pornographic films, most of which involved bondage or sadomasochism. He later married Claralyn Balazs.

The Crime

Lake met fellow ex-marine Charles Ng, who was born in Hong Kong, through a survivalist magazine advertisement he posted in 1981. After serving time for theft and desertion, Ng was dishonorably released in 1984, and Lake asked him to share a cabin near Wilseyville that had belonged to Balazs' family.

Lake had created a "dungeon" next to the house, which he described in his writings. He had most likely already slain his brother Donald and his best man Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and Gunnar's identity.

The Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture, and murder the next year. It was confirmed Leonard Lake and Charles Ng murdered at least eleven people and, based on the large amount of charred, fractured bone fragments discovered at Lake's cabin, the victims are estimated to be up to twenty five.

Their neighbors, Lonnie Bond, his girlfriend Brenda O'Connor, and their infant son Lonnie Jr., and Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their little son Sean, were among the victims. According to court documents, they promptly killed the males and infants but kept the women alive, raping and torturing them before killing or leaving them to die from their injuries.

Lake and Ng preyed on ladies but were not afraid to kidnap entire families. After killing the men and children, they would hold the women captive, tie them up, and torture and rape them while videotaping each other.

They also brought men to the site with promises of jobs, robbed them, and then stole their identities. They would generally bury the victims in shallow graves on the property after strangling or shooting them; however, there is evidence that some were also dismembered, burned, and their remains dissolved in chemicals.

The End Of Their Activities

Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco on June 2, 1985, and fled the scene. Lake later returned to the store and attempted to pay for the vise, but police had arrived by then. Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's license, which had the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family some weeks before.

Lake was detained after a gun with an illegal silencer was discovered in the trunk of his 1980 Honda Prelude, and he was later definitely identified through a fingerprint search. He died four days later after swallowing cyanide capsules he had sewn into his clothes.

Lake's license plate was registered to him, but the Honda was registered to Paul Cosner, who had vanished from San Francisco in November 1984. Lake's automobile registration led detectives to the Wilseyville property, where they discovered the dungeon. Police discovered forty pounds of charred and crushed human bone fragments in a nearby makeshift burial site, corresponding to at least eleven bodies. Two bodies had been gagged and executed by gunshots to the head.

A hand-drawn "treasure map" was also discovered, leading police to two buried five-gallon buckets. One had an array of ID papers and personal belongings, implying that the total number of victims could be as high as twenty-five. Lake's handwritten journals from 1983 and 1984 were in the other, as were two videotapes capturing their abuse.

Ng fled to Canada after he learned they had been busted.

Ng, who had never legally earned US citizenship, was apprehended in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 1985 for shoplifting and injuring a security guard. He was imprisoned there for four and a half years and attempted to avoid extradition to the United States on the grounds that he would face the death penalty.

He was extradited to California in 1991 and charged with twelve charges of first-degree murder. Despite the video evidence and comprehensive material in Lake's diaries, Ng maintained that he was only an observer and that Lake planned and carried out all of the kidnaps, rapes, and murders on his own.

Ng was convicted of eleven of the twelve homicides in February 1999 and sentenced to death. Ng is still incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison