Leonard Lake

• 1. Introduction

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  Leonard Thomas Lake was born on the 29th of October 1945 and died on the 6th of June 1985, four days after police arrested him. He had swallowed cyanide pills that he sewed into his own clothing. Because of that, no jury ever weighed a murder charge against him.

  Investigators would later tie him and a partner to an estimated eleven to twenty-five victims. Those killings took place between 1983 and 1985 at a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California. The cabin stood 150 miles east of San Francisco.

  Who was this survivalist, who also went by Leonard Hill and a variety of other aliases? How did a bright child, a Marine and a back-to-the-land settler become a killer? What did police dig up in the hills, and who were the people he took? And how did a man never convicted of murder still shape a capital trial in 1999?

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• 2. Boyhood Obsessions

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  Leonard Lake was six years old when his parents, Elgin Leonard Lake and Gloria May Williams, divorced. He was born in San Francisco, the first of three children. After the split, the siblings moved in with their maternal grandmother. His mother's second marriage later produced two half-sisters.

  According to reports, Lake habitually photographed his sisters nude, and his grandmother apparently encouraged it. That habit fed an obsession with pornography, even though he was reportedly a bright child.

  Mice figure in the allegations from his youth. Lake allegedly killed them by dissolving them in chemicals, the same way he would later dispose of his human victims' bodies.

  In his teens, Lake read The Collector, a 1963 novel by John Fowles. The book left him fascinated with the idea of holding women captive. That novel would one day supply a name for his crimes.

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• 3. Marine to Survivalist

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  After attending Balboa High School, Lake enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1964. He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War as a radar electronics technician.

  It was during this period that he was first diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. In Da Nang, he suffered what was termed a "delusional breakdown." He received psychotherapy and, in 1971, a medical discharge.

  Lake then settled in San Jose and enrolled at San Jose State University, but he left after a single semester. San Francisco's hippie community had captured his imagination. He moved to a commune in San Francisco and married briefly in 1969. The marriage dissolved when his wife discovered that he made, and appeared in, amateur pornographic movies, usually involving bondage or sadomasochism.

  For the next eight years, Lake lived at Greenfield Ranch, a 5,600-acre back-to-the-land settlement near Calpella, north of Ukiah. In 1975, he met Claralyn Balazs, nicknamed "Cricket." She accepted his fantasies and appeared in many of his pornographic films.

  His growing fear of nuclear holocaust led him to start building a "bunker" on the settlement grounds. The property's owner learned of the project and ordered it halted. Within a few years, a fellow former Marine would reportedly answer an advertisement in a survivalist magazine.

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• 4. Lake and Ng

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  Charles Ng, a former Marine originally from Hong Kong, met Lake in 1980 or 1981. Sources claim the two connected through an advertisement Lake placed in a survivalist magazine. By then, Lake was managing a motel in Philo.

  Ng had escaped from a military prison after a conviction for weapons theft, and he stayed at that motel. He eventually moved into a house with Lake and Balazs.

  Several witnesses testified that Lake was the domineering figure in the partnership. Ng himself said he looked up to Lake "like a brotherly, fatherly figure."

  In April 1982, police arrested both men on weapons charges. Ng went back to Fort Leavenworth to finish his sentence. Lake jumped bail and lived as a fugitive, using various aliases and disguises to hide his identity.

  In July 1984, Ng rejoined Lake and his wife after completing his sentence and receiving a dishonorable discharge. He first stayed in an apartment rented by one of Lake's sisters. That autumn he moved into an apartment on Lenox Way in San Francisco.

  Lake, meanwhile, had moved into a remote cabin near Wilseyville that his in-laws owned. Beside it he built a structure that his journals call a "dungeon."

  Over the next year, the pair began kidnapping and murdering men, women and children. The crimes became known as the Miranda Murders, after a character in The Collector. According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately. Women were first enslaved, raped and tortured.

  Lake is known to have committed several murders without Ng. In his journal, he wrote that Ng was initially "very hesitant to get involved with my plan." Some of the earliest names on the victim list belonged to people Lake had known for years.

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• 5. Stolen Lives

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  Donald Steven Lake, 31, was Leonard's younger brother. A train had hit him as a child, leaving him mentally disabled. Leonard resented him because the disability demanded their mother's full attention, so Leonard was raised by his grandparents. He called Donald a "leech" in conversations with Balazs and said he did not deserve to live.

  In December 1982, Leonard stopped by the San Francisco home where Donald lived with their mother. He asked Donald to come along to a house-sitting job. Donald was never seen again.

  On New Year's Day in 1983, Leonard rented a room in a house under the name "Alan Drey." He had taken Donald's identity and begun cashing his disability checks. He also forged a letter to their mother, posing as Donald, claiming he had moved to Reno, Nevada, to live with drug dealers.

  Charles Donald Gunnar, 34, had been the best man at Lake's 1981 wedding to Balazs. About four months after Donald vanished, Lake moved in with him. On the 20th of May 1983, Lake invited Gunnar on a road trip to Las Vegas. Several days later, Lake returned alone in Gunnar's van and told acquaintances that Gunnar had run off with a woman.

  Lake took Gunnar's identity, too, and cashed his government checks. He introduced himself as Gunnar to most people he met in Wilseyville. Police did not find Gunnar's body during the first investigation in 1985. It was unearthed in 1992, when a later owner of the property dug a footing for a new garage.

  Maurice Anthony Rock, 37, disappeared from a San Francisco rooming house in July or August 1984. Lake rented a room there as "Alan Drey." Afterward, the woman in the next room saw a man remove a refrigerator from Rock's room. The man called himself "Steve" and offered to photograph her. She agreed, but felt unsettled and changed her mind when he arrived with camera equipment. She later identified him as Lake. Rock's remains were recovered from Wilseyville.

  Randy Vern Jacobson, 35, vanished from another San Francisco rooming house on the 15th of October 1984, after a business deal with Lake. Lake stole his identity and tried to take his van, but it was towed before he could move it. Jacobson's remains were buried at Wilseyville.

  Cheryl Lynn Okoro, 25, who was born Sheryl Lynn Porter, disappeared from Rock's old rooming house on the 16th of November 1984. Photographs, personal belongings and an 11-page letter by Okoro were recovered from the Wilseyville property. Her remains were never found.

  Clifford Raymond Peranteau, 23, went missing from San Francisco on the 20th of January 1985. He worked alongside Ng at Dennis Moving Company. In April 1985, Lake sold Peranteau's motorcycle to a man in West Point, California. Several of Peranteau's belongings later turned up in an apartment Ng owned.

  Paul Steven Cosner, 39, was last seen in San Francisco on the 2nd of November 1984. He had advertised his brown 1980 Honda Prelude in a local newspaper. He left to show it to a buyer he described as "weird." Cosner's remains have never been found, but his car would turn up again the following June.

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• 6. The Others Who Vanished

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  Jeffrey Dean Askren, 30, was reported missing on the 1st of May 1984 after he failed to appear at work in Santa Clara. His late model Honda was found three days later in the West Point area of Calaveras County, six miles from Lake's home. His disappearance falls within the time range of the killings. His remains have not been identified among those recovered at Wilseyville.

  On the 11th of July 1984, Donald Albert Giulietti, 36, a disc jockey from San Francisco, was shot in the head by a gunman with a pistol. His housemate, Richard Carrazza, was shot in the chest but survived and called police after the shooter fled. Carrazza identified Ng as the shooter. He is the only known victim of Lake or Ng to survive.

  Harvey R. Dubs, 30, Deborah Ann Dubs, 33, and their son Sean Christopher Dubs, 1, went missing from their San Francisco home on the 25th of July 1984. Deborah was on the phone with a friend when the doorbell rang. She said she had to hang up because two men had arrived. The family was never heard from again. A receipt in Harvey's name and video equipment from their home were later found at Lake's cabin.

  Reginald "Reggie" Frisby, 29, was killed in 1984. He was never reported missing, and it remains unclear how he met Lake and Ng. He had disappeared from public records after January 1984. His body was buried alongside Maurice Rock's, which suggests they died around the same time.

  Police recovered Frisby's remains on the 7th of June 1985, but they could not name him for decades. In 1993, a forensic anthropologist examined the remains because they formed the only complete skeleton on the property without an identity. A sketch of his likeness was prepared. Investigative genetic genealogy finally identified him in January 2025.

  On the 12th of April 1985, Michael Sean Carroll, 22, and his girlfriend Kathleen Elizabeth Allen, 18, were spending time in a motel room in Milpitas, California. Carroll had served with Ng at Fort Leavenworth. At 10 p.m., he told Allen he had to leave and never returned. On the 15th of April, a call reached Allen at her workplace saying Carroll was at Lake Tahoe and may have been shot. She told her boss she had to go and was last seen getting into a car with Lake. Her last paycheck was mailed to a town near his cabin. Carroll's driver's license was found on the property.

  On the 19th of April 1985, four people went missing from Wilseyville. They were Lonnie Wayne Bond Sr., 27, his live-in girlfriend Brenda Sue O'Connor, 20, their son Lonnie Wayne Bond Jr., 1, and a family friend, Robin Scott Stapley, 26. Police found the bodies of Bond Sr. and Stapley in a shallow grave about a mile from Lake's property. O'Connor was identified among the remains from the cabin only in 2025, and her son has never been found.

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• 7. Arrest and Buried Evidence

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  On the 2nd of June 1985, Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco. He fled on foot and threw the vise into the trunk of a brown Honda. Lake tried to pay for it, but police had already arrived.

  Officers noticed that Lake looked nothing like the photo on his driver's license. The license carried the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man his family had reported missing several weeks earlier. A gun with a prohibited silencer turned up in the trunk of Lake's 1980 Honda Prelude, and he was arrested. A fingerprint search later confirmed his identity.

  At the station, Lake was placed in an interrogation room with a pen, paper and a glass of water. A short time later, a detective entered to conduct an interview and found him convulsing on the floor in evident panic, showing signs of asphyxia. The notepad held a brief suicide note. Lake never regained consciousness.

  The license plate on the Honda was registered to Lonnie Bond. Its vehicle identification number, however, belonged to Paul Cosner. A utility bill inside the car led detectives under San Francisco Police Homicide Lieutenant Gerald McCarthy to the Wilseyville property. There they found the trucks of Stapley and Bond, along with the dungeon.

  At a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed over 40 pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments from at least 11 bodies.

  A hand-drawn "treasure map" then led them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One held an envelope of names and identifications, which suggested the toll might be far higher than the bones alone showed. The other held Lake's handwritten journals for 1983 and 1984 and two videotapes documenting the torture of two victims.

  One tape was labeled "M-Ladies." On it, Ng cuts Brenda O'Connor's shirt off with a knife and tells her it will do no good to cry. Kathleen Allen appears seated in a chair as Lake threatens her with rape and death. Deborah Dubs is shown being assaulted so severely that she "could not have survived."

  Because the women endured prolonged torture that was often videotaped, the pair became known as the Sex Slave Killers.

  Claralyn Balazs, Lake's ex-wife, cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution. Court records say she turned over weapons and other material. She would be summoned years later as a key witness against Ng.

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• 8. The Trial of Ng

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  Charles Ng had never obtained U.S. citizenship. On the 6th of July 1985, he was captured in a department store in Calgary, Alberta. A security guard suspected him of shoplifting, and in the confrontation Ng shot the guard. Though wounded, the guard disarmed him and held him until police arrived.

  Ng served four and a half years in a Canadian prison. He tried to fight extradition to the United States on the grounds that he would face capital punishment. In 1991, he was extradited to California and indicted on 12 counts of first-degree murder.

  Despite the video evidence and Lake's diaries, Ng maintained that he was merely an observer. He said Lake planned and committed all of the kidnappings, rapes and murders alone. Those tapes, the human remains and the journals were the evidence used to convict him.

  Balazs took the witness stand at Ng's 1999 trial, expected to shed light on what happened inside the cabin her parents owned and rented to her and Lake. In a surprise move, Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, dismissed her without asking a single question. She was on the stand for only a few minutes while Kelley read sections of her immunity agreement. Kelley later declined to explain his decision.

  In February 1999, Ng was convicted of 11 of the 12 homicides: six men, three women and two male infants. Jurors deadlocked on the 12th charge, the murder of Paul Cosner. Ng was sentenced to death. The presiding judge noted, "Mr. Ng was not under any duress, nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake."

  As of 2024, Ng was held at California Medical Facility. The last execution in California took place in 2006. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty in the state.

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