Leonard Lake was born in San Francisco on October 29, 1945, into a family he was passed around in as a child. He served two tours as a Marine in Vietnam and was discharged in 1971 after psychiatric treatment. He lived in communes in northern California, made pornographic films, was obsessed with survivalism and with the coming nuclear war, and kept meticulous diaries. He took his plan for what he intended to do from a novel: John Fowles's The Collector, about a man who keeps a woman in a cellar. He called it Operation Miranda.
He met Charles Ng, an ex-Marine from Hong Kong facing charges for stealing weapons from Kaneohe Bay, and the two moved in 1984 to a property at Wilseyville in Calaveras County, in the Sierra foothills, where Lake built a concrete bunker beside the cabin with a cell in it and a one-way mirror.
They killed men for their money and their possessions and took the women. Whole families disappeared, including infants. Some of what was done in the bunker was filmed, and two of the tapes, in which women are told what is going to happen to them, were played at Ng's trial and are the reason the case is remembered as it is.
Those named in the record are Harvey Dubs, his wife Deborah and their infant son Sean; Lonnie Bond Sr, his partner Brenda O'Connor and their infant son Lonnie Bond Jr; Clifford Peranteau; Jeffrey Gerald; Michael Carroll; Kathleen Allen; and Scott Stapley.
It ended over a shoplifted vice. On June 2, 1985, Ng was seen taking a bench vice from a lumber yard in South San Francisco. Ng ran. Lake, waiting at the car, produced identification in the name of a man who had been dead for a year, and was taken to the station. There he asked for a glass of water, took two cyanide capsules he had sewn into his lapel, and collapsed. He died four days later without saying anything. The registration on the car led police to Wilseyville.
The dig ran for weeks and produced roughly forty-five pounds of burned bone fragments, along with the bunker, the tapes, the diaries and the identity documents of the missing. Twelve victims were eventually identified with certainty and investigators have put the likely total as high as twenty-five.
Ng reached Canada and was arrested in Calgary on July 6, 1985, after shooting a security guard during a shoplifting. Extradition took six years, because Canada would not surrender a man to a possible death sentence, and was granted in 1991. His trial did not conclude until 1999 and cost California somewhere near twenty million dollars, among the most expensive in the state's history.