Leonard Lake was arrested on June 2, 1985, because a store clerk saw his companion walk out of a South San Francisco lumber store with a vise. Within hours Lake had swallowed cyanide at the police station, and four days later he was dead. He was a former Marine who called himself a survivalist and who had been living under other men's names. He was never tried for anything.
What police found after his death led to the prosecution, which Gale's Great American Trials calls the most expensive homicide case in California history, of the man who had walked away from the lumber store, Charles Chitat Ng. On Lake's property in Wilseyville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Calaveras County, investigators dug up thousands of burned fragments of bone and teeth, found two men shot and buried in sleeping bags, and opened a bunker with a hidden cell. In 1999 an Orange County jury convicted Ng of 11 counts of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death. The prosecution's case was that Lake and Ng had acted together. Ng's defense was that Lake had been the one in control. Because Lake died before any charge was brought, every killing linked to him remains, in law, an attributed killing: proved against Ng in 11 cases, and never proved against Lake in any court.
Lake was born in San Francisco on October 29, 1945, according to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime. The encyclopedia says his father left his mother, who had three children, when Leonard was about three. When the boy started preschool his parents reconciled, but Leonard was left to be raised by his grandparents. His relationships with his mother and with his younger brother, Donald, were strained; he was later on good terms with two half sisters from his mother's second marriage.
He finished high school and joined the Marine Corps in 1964. He married in 1969, and soon afterward, the encyclopedia says, he was diagnosed with a mental and psychological disorder. He returned to California in 1970 and was medically discharged within a year. The marriage ended in divorce in 1972. In 1981 he married again; his second wife was never charged with any crime.
By 1981 Lake was living in Philo, in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County. A McClatchy News Service report from Philo in June 1985 said he had lived there in 1981 and 1982 and had briefly run a motel. Neighbors who spoke to the reporter described him as intense and unsettling; one gas station owner said he had kept his distance. A teacher said the couple rarely mixed with others. Another McClatchy account described him as a loner, a "self-styled survivalist" and a former Marine "obsessed with weapons."
Ng arrived in Philo in the spring of 1982. He was then a fugitive from the Marine Corps. According to McClatchy, on October 13, 1981, Ng and three other Marines had broken into the armory at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station on Oahu and taken weapons and gear valued at 11,406 dollars. He disappeared after questioning in November. In Philo, Lake introduced him as an "old service buddy," although their time in the Marines had not overlapped. Accounts differ on how they met: Gale's Great American Trials says it was through a survivalist magazine, while McClatchy quoted Lake's former mother-in-law as saying the two met through a mutual friend. Ng later testified that he met Lake when he was 22 or 23, that he looked up to him and trusted and respected him, and that he knew Lake was a survivalist who built shelters and stockpiled supplies.
A Philo neighbor, Ernie Pardini, testified for the defense at Ng's trial that Lake often reprimanded Ng, spoke to him in a "degrading and domineering manner," and that Ng seemed "very timid" around him.
On April 29, 1982, an FBI SWAT team came to the Indian Creek Ranch in Philo. It arrested Ng for the armory theft and Lake for an unrelated weapons theft, McClatchy reported. A military court convicted Ng in 1982 of conspiracy to commit larceny of government property, larceny and unlawful entry with intent to commit larceny, and he was held at Fort Leavenworth until June 29, 1984. Lake was released and jumped bail on the Philo charge. From then until his death he was a fugitive.
Two men close to Lake disappeared before the killings for which Ng was tried.
His younger brother, Donald Steven Lake, was last heard from in a 1983 letter sent from Reno, Nevada, McClatchy reported in June 1985. Reno police said they had no information about him. The same report said Leonard had regarded his brother as "a leech." No charge was ever brought over Donald Lake's disappearance, and his remains have not been reported found.
Charles Gunnar, 36, was a former postman and drama coach from Morgan Hill and had been best man at Lake's wedding. Police said in 1985 that Lake had used Gunnar's name as an alias in Calaveras County. The Union Democrat, reporting in 2021 on the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office's renewed work on the case, listed Gunnar among the identified victims linked to Lake and Ng.
A third man, Jeffrey D. Askren, 30, of Sunnyvale, was listed by McClatchy in 1985 among the missing people tied to Lake or Ng. He had vanished in April 1984, and his car was found near Lake's home with its camera equipment gone. No later finding about him was reported.
In 1984 and 1985 Lake was living on a fenced property of about two and a half acres in Wilseyville, an unincorporated community of fewer than 500 people near Highway 26 in Calaveras County, about 150 miles east of San Francisco. There was a house, and Lake built a bunker. Ng testified that while he was being court-martialed, Lake sent him photographs of the bunker under construction; photographs of the bunker being built were later found in Ng's San Francisco apartment.
The bunker, as described in the California Supreme Court's opinion, had three rooms, two of them behind a hidden doorway. One hidden room held a bed, a desk, dressers and some food. The other measured about seven feet by three, with a wooden door that could be opened only from outside, and held a small bed, a plastic bucket, toilet paper and a small lamp. Investigators also found an incinerator on the property.
Lake's ideas about the bunker came out at Ng's trial. Defense witnesses said he talked about building a bunker for a nuclear war and had fantasies of keeping women hostage there. Ng testified that he "did not know that Lake was building a place to keep sex slaves." Investigators later recovered a 250-page diary kept by Lake, the Associated Press reported. William Weir's account of the case in Gale's Great American Trials says the diary set out plans to survive a nuclear war in bunkers and to capture young women as slaves. Those writings were used as evidence at Ng's trial.
Ng was released from Leavenworth on June 29, 1984, and the two men were together again that year; Ng was present at the Lake family's Thanksgiving dinner in 1984, according to evidence summarized in the California Supreme Court's opinion. Ng kept a basement room in San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood and, McClatchy reported, apparently rented a second place in San Leandro. In October 1984 he was arrested in Daly City on a petty theft charge involving 52 dollars' worth of waterbed sheets.
Harvey Dubs worked at Petrov Graphic Types World in San Francisco and ran a videotaping business from the family's apartment. His wife, Deborah, was from the Bay Area. Their son, Sean, was 16 months old. McClatchy gave Harvey's age as 29 and Deborah's as 33. A friend of the family, speaking to the columnist Debra J. Saunders in 1998, remembered Deborah as "a dear, gentle person," and said of the family, "It is as though they never existed."
On July 25, 1984, Harvey left work early to meet someone who had answered his advertisement selling video equipment. Deborah told a friend she was expecting a visitor that evening. At about 5:45 p.m., a neighbor, Dorice Murphy, saw an Asian man struggling with a suitcase on the family's front steps; he put it in the trunk of a waiting car, which a second man had opened, and they drove off. Two days later, at about 11:30 a.m., another neighbor, Barbara Speaker, saw Ng closing the Dubs's front door. He left the keys in the lock and carried a flight bag and a duffel bag down the stairs to a car. Ng later testified that the driver was Lake.
A caller who gave the name James Bright telephoned Harvey's workplace to say Harvey would be away because of a family emergency in Washington State. The co-worker who took the call found it odd and asked for a number, and the caller became irritated and hung up. Deborah's father filed a missing persons report on July 26.
Ng told the jury he was not the man Murphy saw. He admitted being the man Speaker saw, but said he had gone to the apartment because Lake asked him to help with a "job." A VCR and other equipment from the Dubs apartment were later found in the Wilseyville house; a map with the Dubs's street circled was found in Ng's apartment. The jury convicted Ng of murdering all three members of the family.
Paul Cosner, a San Francisco car broker whom McClatchy gave as 40, lived with his girlfriend, Marilyn Namba. On or about November 2, 1984, he told her he was going to deliver a car he was selling, a gold Honda Prelude. He missed a date with her that night and a meeting with his sister the next morning, and his sister reported him missing. A defense witness testified that a neighbor had seen Cosner talking with Lake a few days before he disappeared. Seven months later, Lake was arrested driving the Honda.
Cosner's remains have never been identified. Ng was charged with his murder, and the jury deadlocked on that count. His death is therefore attributed to Lake and Ng but was not proved against either.
Clifford Peranteau worked on a moving crew at Dennis Moving Company in San Francisco, where Ng also worked. In January 1985 he went out with a close co-worker, Hector Salcedo, to celebrate the 49ers reaching the Super Bowl. He did not come to work the next day, and later his motorcycle disappeared. His employer received a letter, said to be from Peranteau, claiming he had a new job; it had been typed on a typewriter later found at Wilseyville, and a police investigator testified that Lake had forged it. In April 1985 Lake sold Peranteau's motorcycle to a man in Wilseyville, telling the buyer it belonged to a friend in San Francisco who had asked him to sell it.
Jeffrey Gerald, 25, also worked on a crew with Ng at Dennis Moving Company. McClatchy described him as a mover and a drummer. He lived in San Francisco with a roommate, Terry Kailer. In February 1985 he told Kailer he was going to meet "Charlie" at a bus station for a side job helping someone move, for 100 dollars. He never came back. His guitar and amplifier were found at Wilseyville, and his Social Security card was buried on the property.
Neither man's remains have been identified. Ng denied involvement in both disappearances. The jury convicted him of murdering both men.
Michael Carroll, whom McClatchy gave as 23, lived in Milpitas with his foster brother, John Gouveia. Gouveia told reporters in 1985 that Carroll had served time at Fort Leavenworth with Ng. Carroll disappeared around April 12, 1985.
His girlfriend, Kathleen Allen, was 18 and from San Jose, and worked at a Safeway store in Milpitas. On April 14 she took a telephone call at work, was told that "Mike" had been shot, and left. She got into a gold Honda with a white man who was to take her to Lake Tahoe. She did not return.
Carroll's Mercury Capri turned up in the Safeway parking lot in Milpitas. Lake telephoned a friend in San Jose, George Blank, asked for help with a car stranded in Milpitas, said it belonged to friends, and said he would send a man named Charles. On April 26 Lake went to Blank's house to look at the car and take some items out of it, and asked Blank to repair it and try to sell it. He also sent Blank a letter with instructions for selling it. A barrel buried at Wilseyville held belongings of Carroll and Allen, and books with Carroll's name were found in the house. A check from Allen's account, dated May 2, 1985, was made out to Randy Jacobson; a handwriting expert testified that Lake wrote the body of the check and probably signed Allen's name.
A videotape found buried on the Wilseyville property was shown to the jury at Ng's trial, and Ng acknowledged that he had taken part in it. Ng testified that he and Lake had not planned to kill Allen, and that she was alive when he left Wilseyville. He said he knew nothing about Carroll's death. The jury convicted him of both murders.
In January 1985 Lonnie Bond Sr. rented the Carter house, next door to Lake's property in Wilseyville, sharing a common driveway. He lived there with his fiancee, Brenda O'Connor, and their infant son, Lonnie Bond Jr. Robin Scott Stapley, known as Scott, a friend of Bond's, often visited from San Diego, where he lived with his girlfriend, Tori Doolin.
Lake had complained to the Carter house property manager that someone was firing guns at the house and that Bond was leaving the shared gate unlocked. A Wilseyville neighbor testified for the defense that Lake called the Bond family "pests" and had said it was all right to kill someone who was bothering you.
Doolin last saw Stapley on April 19, 1985, when he was loading Bond's belongings in San Diego. On April 23, Ng was driving Stapley's truck when it was in an accident in Kern County. The next day, April 24, Lake and Ng went to Doolin's San Diego apartment, Ng waiting in the car. Lake told her he had found Stapley, Bond, O'Connor and the baby dead in the Carter house, and that he had burned and buried the bodies and cleaned the house. He asked for Stapley's belongings, to make it look as if Stapley had moved out, and Doolin gave him some of them. She never saw Stapley again. In May, Lake called the property manager to say he thought her tenants had left town and that Bond had left his car with Lake because he owed him money.
O'Connor's mother never heard from her daughter again. Stapley's mother, Lola Stapley, told Saunders in 1998, as the trial was about to begin, "We hope we live long enough to see the trial." She and her husband, Dwight Stapley, later testified at the penalty phase.
On July 8, 1985, officers found the bodies of Bond and Stapley in separate sleeping bags, buried about a quarter of a mile from the property. Both had been shot. Ng testified that he was not present when they were killed, but that Lake showed him their bodies under a porch and that he helped bind Bond's body and put it in a sleeping bag. He admitted taking part in the videotape but said he did not intend to hurt or kill O'Connor. The jury convicted him of the murders of all four.
O'Connor's remains were among those found in 1985 but could not be identified for 40 years. In April 2025 the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office announced that the Calaveras Cold Case Task Force had identified them through forensic investigative genetic genealogy. "These additional investigative efforts have finally provided answers to the family of Brenda O'Connor," the office said.
On Sunday, June 2, 1985, John Kallas, a reserve police officer, saw Ng carrying a vise out of South City Lumber Company in South San Francisco. McClatchy put its value at 75 dollars. Kallas found the vise in the open trunk of a gold Honda parked outside. While he was on the phone, a bearded man, later identified as Lake, came up and started talking to him, and said he had paid for the vise his friend had taken. While Lake talked to the police, Ng walked away.
Officer Daniel Wright of the South San Francisco police found a backpack holding a semiautomatic gun and a silencer. Asked his name, Lake said he was R. Scott Stapley. Wright ran the Honda's license plate and found it registered to Lonnie Bond; Lake said the car was Bond's and that Bond was "up north." Wright also checked the serial number of the gun, which belonged to Stapley. Lake was carrying Stapley's credit cards and bank card. Wright arrested him for possessing a firearm fitted with a silencer.
At the police station, Lake swallowed cyanide and began to convulse. Before he did, he wrote a short note that read in part: "I love you. I forgive you. Freedom is better than all else." Saunders, writing in 1998, described the cyanide as a pill he kept for emergencies. Defense witnesses at Ng's trial said Lake carried cyanide and had said he would take it if he were caught. Weir's account says he took two capsules with water.
He was taken to a hospital and placed on life support. He remained in a coma for four days and was pronounced dead on June 6, 1985, according to the SAGE encyclopedia and McClatchy. No charge was ever filed against him for any killing.
The Honda's vehicle identification number traced to a missing person: Paul Cosner. South San Francisco police turned the car over to Inspector Irene Brunn of the San Francisco Police Department's missing persons unit, who had been investigating Cosner's disappearance. Inside it she found a Pacific Gas and Electric Company bill with a Wilseyville address.
On June 3, Brunn met Lake's ex-wife at a cafe and was given a key and permission to search the Wilseyville property. Inside the house Brunn found a VCR and other equipment, and confirmed by its serial number that the VCR had come from the Dubs apartment. Permission to search was then withdrawn; officers secured the house and obtained a warrant.
The search lasted five weeks and involved four agencies. Investigators found thousands of fragments of bone and teeth buried across the property, many hundreds of them burned. Two forensic anthropologists concluded that they came from at least four adults, one child and one infant, and at least four of the dental specimens came from a child under three. Weir's account puts the bone fragments recovered at 45 pounds. The AP later reported that investigators also found shallow graves and bloodstained tools, and Lake's 250-page diary.
On June 7, police searched Ng's apartment in San Francisco. They found items belonging to Bond and Peranteau, the map with the Dubs's street circled, .22-caliber ammunition, a pamphlet about silencers and the photographs of the bunker under construction.
By June 12, McClatchy reported, at least four bodies had been found in Calaveras County and about 20 more people linked to Lake or Ng were unaccounted for. San Francisco's police chief, Cornelius Murphy, said the case could not be solved without Ng, who was by then the most wanted fugitive in the country. The paper listed at least ten people, some from as far away as San Diego, who were tied to Lake or Ng or had been in contact with them shortly before they disappeared. Lake's former neighbors in Philo told reporters they were not surprised.
Ng had gone to Canada. A 14-year-old boy saw a man living in a lean-to in a wildlife park in Calgary, Alberta, and a detective later found the lean-to and a dugout. The dugout held Stapley's camera and a towel from Peranteau's apartment. On July 6, 1985, Ng was arrested for shoplifting in Calgary. Weir writes that a store security guard grabbed him and Ng shot the guard in the hand before a second guard subdued him; CBC News reported that he wounded a store guard. Officers seized handcuffs and a key, a .22-caliber handgun that had belonged to Lake, and ammunition. An AP account at Ng's conviction described the arrest as taking place on a fugitive warrant while he was camping in a park on the outskirts of Calgary.
Ng was convicted in Canada and, according to Weir, sentenced to four and a half years for robbery and assault, which Canadian authorities required him to serve before any extradition. While he was held in Canada he met another prisoner, Maurice Laberge. Laberge testified at the extradition hearing that Ng had admitted taking part in several of the killings. According to Laberge, Ng described the killing of Sean Dubs as "just business, a part of the operation," said that Cosner was killed because Lake wanted his Honda, and said that he and Lake had burned the bodies of Peranteau and Gerald. Laberge died before Ng's trial, and his earlier testimony was read to the jury. Ng denied making the statements.
In February 1987 the United States asked Canada to extradite Ng to California on 19 counts, including kidnapping and 12 murders committed in 1984 and 1985. An Alberta judge ordered him extradited in November 1988. In October 1989 Canada's Minister of Justice decided to surrender him without seeking assurances that he would not face the death penalty, which Canada had abolished.
Ng challenged the decision. On September 26, 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada, in Reference re Ng Extradition, ruled 4 to 3 that surrendering him without such assurances did not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He was extradited the same day; Weir writes that he was flown to California within minutes. His first appearance in Calaveras County was on September 27, 1991.
In 1993 the United Nations Human Rights Committee, considering a complaint Ng had filed, found that Canada had not violated the right to life by extraditing him, but that execution by gas asphyxiation, then California's method, would be cruel and inhuman treatment, and that Canada had breached the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by extraditing him without assurances.
By 1998, Saunders reported, Ng had been in custody within a month of the crimes but had still not gone to trial 13 years later. He went through five judges, Saunders reported in 1998, and the state supreme court ruled on questions about his representation eight times. He filed a malpractice suit against two of his public defenders and made repeated motions to replace his lawyers; the California Supreme Court later counted 37 of these Marsden motions, and found that some had been made to delay the trial. His lawyers argued that news coverage made a fair trial impossible in Calaveras County, and the case was moved to Orange County in 1994; Weir gives the date of the venue change as April 8, 1994, and the parties first appeared in Orange County on September 30, 1994.
Jury selection began on September 14, 1998, in Santa Ana, with more than 1,000 prospective jurors to be screened. The cost was already a public issue. The Calaveras County administrator, Brent Harrington, put it at 9.3 million dollars in 1998. California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, cited "more than $11 million in public expenses" after the verdict, and the Union Democrat later put the total at about 14 million dollars.
The prosecution's case rested on the property, the belongings of the missing found there and in Ng's apartment, the eyewitnesses, the videotape, Lake's writings and Laberge's account of what Ng had told him. Ng was charged with 12 murders: seven men, three women and two baby boys, the AP reported.
The defense put Lake at the center. Ng testified that he had been young and adventurous, did not "exercise independent judgment," and saw Lake as a caregiver. He denied taking part in most of the killings. Witnesses described Lake's controlling and abusive relationships with women and his interest in nude photography, including photography of minors. A psychologist, Dr. Abraham Nievod, testified that Ng scored very high for schizoid, avoidant and dependent personality disorders and had "latched onto Lake" as a caregiver. A psychiatrist, Dr. Stuart Grassian, testified about the roughly ten years Ng had spent in solitary confinement and agreed that he had dependent personality disorder; Weir quotes him calling Ng "a classic dependent personality."
On February 24, 1999, the jury found Ng guilty of 11 counts of first-degree murder, with a special circumstance of multiple murder. The clerk, Terri Walsh, read each verdict. Ng, 38, showed no reaction. The jury deadlocked on the count for Paul Cosner, which was dropped. The 11 convictions were for the deaths of Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs, Clifford Peranteau, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Kathleen Allen, Lonnie Bond Sr., Brenda O'Connor, Lonnie Bond Jr. and Scott Stapley: six men, three women and two baby boys.
"Charles Ng has been found guilty of the murders of 11 innocent victims," Lockyer said, adding that the verdict helped "move the families one step closer to closure." His office was assisting the Calaveras County district attorney, Peter Smith, who sought the death penalty.
The penalty phase began on March 8, 1999. The prosecution presented Ng's military convictions, his escape and recapture, and his arrest in Canada. Relatives of the victims testified, among them Sharon O'Connor, Sandra Bond, Roger and Denise Gerald, Diane Allen, and Dwight and Lola Stapley. The defense called family members who described a harsh upbringing in which Ng's father beat him. On April 30, 1999, the jury returned a verdict of death. He was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999.
Ng's automatic appeal went to the California Supreme Court, which affirmed the judgment unanimously on July 28, 2022, in an opinion by Justice Groban. "We affirm the judgment in its entirety," the court wrote. In a 181-page opinion, the AP reported, the court found that Ng had received a fair trial, that the change of venue had answered the problem of publicity, that his extradition was proper, and that he had repeatedly tried to delay and disrupt the trial. It upheld the trial court's decisions to revoke his right to represent himself and to deny his repeated requests for new counsel. Ng could still seek review in federal court.
"This is one of those stories that's been passed down through time in this community," Lieutenant Greg Stark of the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office told reporters after the ruling.
After Ng's conviction, the unidentified remains from Wilseyville were sealed in a granite vault in a cemetery in San Andreas, the county seat. On August 17, 2021, the Sheriff's Office, working with the California Department of Justice and two volunteer forensic anthropologists, removed them for DNA testing. "The primary focus of this investigation is to identify the remains in the crypt," Stark said. More than 1,000 pieces were examined.
The first result was a man no one had connected with the case. Reginald Frisby, known as Reggie, was born in New York State in 1956. He had been living in San Francisco in January 1984, had been out of touch with his family since that year, and had never been reported missing. Some of his remains had been autopsied in 1985. A DNA profile developed by the state in 2022 produced no match in the FBI's CODIS database; a private laboratory in Utah, Intermountain Forensics, then built a profile suitable for genetic genealogy, and the group Identifinders International found a lead. The Delaware State Patrol obtained a DNA sample from his mother, and the identification was confirmed on January 15, 2025. Investigators believe he was the victim of a homicide. In July 2025, at a ceremony attended by task force members and a Sheriff's chaplain, his remains were returned to his family. The Sheriff's Office called it "a profound honor to help restore Reggie's identity and return him to his family."
The identification of Brenda O'Connor followed in April 2025. In October 2025 the Deseret News reported on a woman still unnamed, called the Wilseyville Jane Doe, whose DNA pointed to family roots in the Sevier Valley of Utah. She was probably born between 1960 and 1965 and may have gone missing in the early 1980s. Her birth father had been identified by DNA but had died. Captain Tim Sturm, who leads the task force, said its aim was to restore her name: "nobody's name is Jane Doe or John Doe." The task force is a nonprofit collaboration of county agencies, and all of the laboratory and genealogy work has been paid for with donations, more than 300,000 dollars by mid-2025.
Leonard Lake died on June 6, 1985, without being tried. Charles Ng remains under sentence of death. He was listed among condemned prisoners from Orange County on the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's condemned inmate list updated October 2, 2026, with six offense dates and a sentence date of June 30, 1999. After California closed San Quentin's death row and moved its condemned prisoners to other prisons, the Lancashire Post reported in June 2026 that Ng had been moved to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville in May 2026. The AP reported in 2022 that Governor Gavin Newsom had imposed a moratorium on executions for as long as he remained governor.
Lake's legal status: he was never charged with, tried for or convicted of any killing. Every one of these deaths is attributed to him by investigators, by evidence presented at Ng's trial, or by his own writings as reported; none was proved against him in court.
Proved against Ng: 11 counts of first-degree murder (verdict February 24, 1999; affirmed July 28, 2022). The prosecution's theory was that Lake and Ng acted together; Ng's defense, rejected by the jury, was that Lake was the dominant or sole offender.
Charged against Ng but not proved: the murder of Paul Cosner (jury deadlocked).
Never charged against anyone: the disappearances of Donald Lake and Jeffrey Askren, and the deaths of Charles Gunnar, Randy Jacobson and Reginald Frisby. Gunnar is listed by the Union Democrat among identified victims; Jacobson's body was found at Wilseyville, according to the California Supreme Court; Frisby's identification was announced in 2025. The Union Democrat's 2021 list gives the name as Randy Johnson; the court opinion gives Randy Jacobson.
The number of dead: investigators have said the property may have held the remains of as many as 25 people. Saunders put the number believed killed at as many as 19 in 1998, and the AP has said the two men were initially suspected of up to 25 deaths. Only the 12 counts against Ng were ever tested in court.
Details that vary between sources: how Lake and Ng met (a survivalist magazine, according to Weir; a mutual friend, according to Lake's former mother-in-law in 1985); the date of Ng's 1982 military conviction (August 15, 1982, in McClatchy; July 1982 in the court's summary of the record); whether Ng was arrested in Calgary for shoplifting (court record, CBC, Weir) or on a fugitive warrant while camping (AP, 1999); when the bodies of Bond and Stapley were found (July 8, 1985, in the court opinion; June 1985 in a 2025 Union Democrat report); the age of Lonnie Bond Jr. (an infant in the court record; 2 in a 2025 Union Democrat report); the cost of the prosecution (6.6 million dollars in Weir, 9.3 million in 1998, more than 11 million in 1999 according to the attorney general, about 14 million in later local reporting); and how many murder counts Ng was charged with (12 in the court record and the 1999 AP report; 13 in the AP report of 2022).
October 29, 1945: Leonard Lake is born in San Francisco.
1964: joins the Marine Corps after high school.
1969: first marriage; diagnosed with a mental and psychological disorder soon afterward.
About 1970 to 1971: returns to California and is medically discharged.
1972: first marriage ends in divorce.
1981: marries again; lives in Philo, Mendocino County.
October 13, 1981: Ng and other Marines break into the Kaneohe armory in Hawaii; Ng disappears in November.
Spring 1982: Ng arrives at Lake's home in Philo.
April 29, 1982: an FBI team arrests Ng for the armory theft and Lake on a separate weapons charge; Lake later jumps bail.
1982: Ng is convicted by a military court and held at Fort Leavenworth.
1983: Donald Lake's last known letter is sent from Reno.
April 1984: Jeffrey Askren of Sunnyvale disappears.
June 29, 1984: Ng is released from Leavenworth.
July 25, 1984: Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs disappear from San Francisco.
November 2, 1984: Paul Cosner disappears while selling his Honda.
January 1985: Clifford Peranteau disappears; Lonnie Bond Sr. rents the Carter house next door to Lake.
February 1985: Jeffrey Gerald disappears.
About April 12, 1985: Michael Carroll disappears; on April 14, Kathleen Allen leaves work and does not return.
April 19, 1985: Scott Stapley is last seen in San Diego.
April 23 to 24, 1985: Ng crashes Stapley's truck in Kern County; Lake tells Stapley's girlfriend the Bond family and Stapley are dead.
June 2, 1985: Ng takes a vise from a South San Francisco lumber store; Lake is arrested with a silenced gun and swallows cyanide at the police station; Ng flees.
June 3, 1985: Inspector Irene Brunn goes to the Wilseyville property; a five-week search begins.
June 6, 1985: Lake dies.
July 6, 1985: Ng is arrested in Calgary.
July 8, 1985: the bodies of Lonnie Bond Sr. and Scott Stapley are found near the property.
February 1987: the United States requests Ng's extradition.
November 1988: an Alberta judge orders extradition.
October 1989: Canada's Minister of Justice decides to surrender Ng without death penalty assurances.
September 26, 1991: the Supreme Court of Canada rules 4 to 3; Ng is extradited the same day.
1993: the UN Human Rights Committee issues its views on Ng's complaint.
1994: the trial is moved to Orange County.
September 14, 1998: jury selection begins in Santa Ana.
February 24, 1999: Ng is convicted of 11 murders; the jury deadlocks on the Cosner count.
April 30, 1999: the jury returns a death verdict.
June 30, 1999: Ng is sentenced to death.
August 17, 2021: the Wilseyville remains are removed from the San Andreas crypt for DNA testing.
July 28, 2022: the California Supreme Court affirms Ng's convictions and death sentence.
January 15, 2025: Reginald Frisby is identified.
April 2025: Brenda O'Connor's remains are identified.
July 2025: Frisby's remains are returned to his family.
October 2025: the task force reports progress on the Wilseyville Jane Doe.
May 2026: Ng is reported moved to the California Medical Facility, Vacaville.
October 2, 2026: the CDCR condemned list still includes Ng.