On June 2, 1985, Charles Ng was caught shoplifting a bench vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco. He threw it into the trunk of a brown Honda and ran. The man with the car tried to pay for it, but the police had already arrived. His driver's license was in the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing weeks earlier, and he looked nothing like the photograph. In the trunk officers found a gun fitted with an illegal silencer, and he was arrested. At the station he was left in an interview room with a pen, paper and a glass of water. When a detective came in he was convulsing on the floor. He had written a short suicide note and swallowed cyanide pills sewn into his clothes. He never regained consciousness and died on June 6. A fingerprint check identified him as Leonard Lake. The Honda was a 1980 Prelude whose identification number belonged to Paul Cosner, missing since November; its plates belonged to Lonnie Bond; and a utility bill in it led San Francisco homicide detectives to a cabin near Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles east of the city.
Lake was born in San Francisco on October 29, 1945, the first of three children of Elgin Lake and Gloria Williams, whose divorce when he was six sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother. He took nude photographs of his sisters, by accounts with his grandmother's encouragement, dissolved mice in chemicals, and in his teens read John Fowles's The Collector, about a man who keeps a woman captive, and could not let it go. He joined the Marines in 1964 and served two tours in Vietnam as a radar technician; diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder after a delusional breakdown in Da Nang, he received psychotherapy and a medical discharge in 1971. A brief first marriage ended when his wife found he was making amateur bondage films. For eight years he lived at Greenfield Ranch, a back-to-the-land settlement near Ukiah, where in 1975 he met Claralyn Balazs, who appeared in his films and later married him, and where his fear of nuclear war led him to start building a bunker until the owner stopped it.
He met Charles Ng, a former Marine from Hong Kong who had escaped from a military prison after a weapons-theft conviction, around 1980 or 1981, reportedly through an advertisement Lake placed in a survivalist magazine while managing a motel in Philo. In April 1982 both were arrested on weapons charges; Ng was sent back to Fort Leavenworth, and Lake jumped bail and lived as a fugitive under a string of names. In December 1982 he took his younger brother Donald, disabled since being hit by a train as a child and resented by Leonard for the attention he needed, to a supposed house-sitting job. Donald was never seen again, and Leonard began cashing his disability checks. In May 1983 he drove off to Las Vegas with his friend Charles Gunnar, the best man at his wedding, came back alone in Gunnar's van, and took his name; Gunnar's remains were dug up on the Wilseyville property in 1992. Lake moved into the cabin, owned by his in-laws, and built beside it a structure his journals called the dungeon. Ng joined him after his release in July 1984.
The killings came to be called the Miranda Murders, after the woman in The Collector. According to court records, the men and infants were killed at once and the women were kept, raped and tortured first; Lake killed some of the victims without Ng, and wrote that Ng had at first been "very hesitant" about the plan. On July 25, 1984, Harvey Dubs, thirty, his wife Deborah, thirty-three, and their son Sean, one, vanished from their San Francisco home after two men came to the door. Maurice Rock and Reginald Frisby, whose remains were identified only in 2025, disappeared that summer. Randy Jacobson went missing in October after a business deal with Lake; Paul Cosner, thirty-nine, in November, after showing his Honda to a buyer he called weird; Cheryl Okoro, twenty-five, the same month. In 1985 came Clifford Peranteau, twenty-three, and Jeffrey Gerald, twenty-five, both workmates of Ng's at a moving company; Michael Carroll, twenty-two, who had served with Ng at Leavenworth, and his girlfriend Kathleen Allen, eighteen, last seen getting into a car with Lake after a call telling her Carroll had been shot; and on April 19 Lonnie Bond Sr., twenty-seven, Brenda O'Connor, twenty, their son Lonnie Jr., one, and their friend Scott Stapley, twenty-six, from Wilseyville itself.
At the property detectives found the trucks of Stapley and Bond, the dungeon, and in a makeshift burial ground more than forty pounds of burned and crushed bone from at least eleven people. A hand-drawn map led them to two buried buckets. One held names and identification documents suggesting as many as twenty-five victims. The other held Lake's journals for 1983 and 1984 and two videotapes. On one, labeled "M-Ladies," Ng cuts Brenda O'Connor's shirt off and tells her, "You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won't do any good." On another Lake tells Kathleen Allen that if she does not go along, "we'll probably take you into the bed, tie you down, rape you, shoot you, and bury you." Balazs cooperated under a grant of immunity. The only known survivor was Richard Carrazza, shot in the chest in San Francisco in July 1984 in the attack that killed Donald Giulietti; he identified Ng as the gunman.
Ng was caught in Calgary on July 6, 1985, after shooting a store security guard who stopped him for shoplifting, served four and a half years in Canada, and fought extradition because he faced a death sentence. He was sent to California in 1991 and indicted on twelve murders. Claiming he had only watched while Lake did everything, he was convicted in February 1999 of eleven, six men, three women and two baby boys, and sentenced to death; the jury deadlocked on Cosner. "Mr. Ng was not under any duress," the judge said, "nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake." Lake himself was never tried for any of it.