Cold Open:

Big true crime tale today. A serial killer double feature. Two men who very possibly killed separately - one for SURE did - and then they joined forces to kill, in all likelihood, at least 25 people, and probably quite a few more than that in central and Northern California in the early and mid-80s.

Leonard Lake was a former Marine obsessed with preparing for a nuclear apocalypse, taking nude photos of as many women as possible, having sex with as many of those women as possible, and pursuing what he called, “Operation Miranda” - a sick plan based on the novel The Collector, that involved kidnapping young women to imprison and train to be sex slaves. Lake was obsessed with building a bunker to both imprison these women and also, hopefully, survive the nuclear apocalypse he believed was about to happen any day, so that he could then continue to sexually imprison women to be sex slaves after society collapsed.

Leonard Lake was a complete and total psychopath.

And his murder-buddy, Charles Ng, was arguably scarier than he was.

Charles Ng was an immigrant from Hong Kong who was really good at coming up with paperwork to create new identifies for himself. Good enough to join the Marines less than a year after making if to the US. Like Lake, he also would become obsessed with apocalyptic survivalism and he’d be arrested for trying to steal and smuggle military weapons, then escape and meet up with Lake who’d meet through another man interested in survivalism.

And then, when Ng wasn’t behind bars, he would help Lake with operation Miranda, and, in all likelihood, also kill and rape and torture a lot of other people.

These were two very, very scary dudes.

Two men, trained in how to use military weapons, two weapon who had a large stockpile of these weapons who weren’t afraid to use them on anyone who got in their way. Anyone who tried to shut down Operation Miranda.

And now one of these men is dead and one is behind bars in a California prison. Find out who lives and who dies, and learn about all the crazy shit that leads up their arrests in a “how is this story not more well known,” fascinating true crime edition of Timesuck!

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome!

A. Happy Monday: Happy Monday, Meatsacks!

Hope life is well in whatever facet of the multiverse you’re living in today. I’m doing well in this one.

I’m Dan Cummins, the Master Sucker, the Mush Mouth King, Lucifina’s Plaything in a ton of universes, and just a regular dude doing the best he can to understand something new every week in this one.

I’m feeling better this week. I feel a little more unhinged than normal the past few weeks. Our new normal had me all shook up but I’m recalibrated. Got my head back down, focused on work and family, and plowing ahead.

Hail Nimrod - give me strength! Hail Lucifina - give me fun! Praise Bojangles - give me courage! And Triple M - keep me silly you Yacht Rock demigod.

B. Thank You For Reviews: Thanks for the good feed back on the new standup special Get Outta Here; Devil, out on Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and more. Thanks for the ratings and reviews across various platforms.

C. Additional Announcements: Very cool knowledge and truth tee in the store today at Bad Magic Merch dot com. Gotten so many compliments on the store and on the merch today. Thank you Logan and Kate at Spicy Club for running our store, and giving us the sickest shit, I think, in the whole podcast came.

And now we have Timesuck phone cases! 13 different phone models to choose from. Hard cases with a rubber plate. Logan has one on his iPhone now and it looks so good. A variety of color options.

D. Charity: Quick reminder that we gave $5400 to the PenFed foundation this month. Thank you, Space Lizards!

PenFed was the first national Veterans Service Organization to launch its COVID-19 Relief Program for emergency financial assistance in March.

The mission of the PenFed Foundation for Military Heroes is to empower military service members, veterans and their communities with the skills and resources to realize financial stability and opportunity.

They help veterans buy homes, go to school, and, help them pay their bills when times get tough, like right now.

Go to https://penfedfoundation.org/ to find out more.

Link in the episode description.

E. Segue to Topic: And now for another crazy ass tale. A tale of two men, both twisted and horrible on their own, who found each other and together, brought even more pain to a lot of innocent people who ended up in their crosshairs in Central California.

True Crime Suck starts now. Yip, yip, yaw!

PAUSE TIMESUCK Interlude

II. Intro/Establish Premiss:

We don’t often end up knowing exactly why certain people do certain terrible things.

They either refuse to admit guilt or speak to their motives once they’ve been caught, or the do choose to speak to their motives but obviously lie to either make themselves look better than they are of inflict further pain on society.

With one of today’s two serial killers - we know exactly why he did what he did. He put a very candid confession to his motives on tape that investigators found. A confession that lines up perfectly with what he confessed to others, and what investigators know he did.

Leonard Lake didn’t care about the wants and desires of almost any other people. He didn’t care about his victims feelings or desires. He wanted a sex slave. Pure and simple. He was, arguable, a sex addict who didn’t have a problem finding women to sleep with, but he didn’t enjoy the other aspects of relationships with women. He wanted someone to have sex with him when he wanted it and how he wanted it, and then he wanted them to leave him the Hell alone.

Like Bob Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher from a few weeks ago, he was heavily influenced by The Collector. He loved the book that the movie Bob watched was based on. A book about a man who kidnaps a woman and makes her live as his captive in the hopes that she will fall in love with him. Except, Lake didn’t need her to fall in love with him. He just wanted to have a woman who didn’t try to escape and understood it was in her best interest to satisfy his needs, whatever they happened to be.

He also didn’t want to work.

Work got in the way of his sexual desires. He’d rather kill people, steal their money and sell their belongings and do things like collect their disability checks so they could continue to provide him money after their deaths so he could not work and instead focus on Operation Miranda - kidnapping women and keeping them as sex slaves. The name Miranda coming from the Collector - that was the name of the woman protagonist captured.

Lake was evil and he knew he was evil and didn’t care. He only cared about pursuing his desires. The cost to others didn’t bother him.

And he enjoyed bringing Charles Ng along for the ride.

As bad as Lake was, I think Ng was probably worse. Maybe Ng made Lake feel better about himself. If he was bad, he at least wasn’t as bad as his buddy, Charlie.

So let’s get to know these two pieces of shit.

Let’s find out what they did and glean further insight into what may have made them tick in a big old Timesuck Timeline that will cover both from the time they were born to the death of one and the incarceration of the other.

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE

III. TIMESUCK TIMELINE

1. October 29th, 1945: On October 29th, 1945, in San Francisco’s St Francis Hospital, Leonard Thomas Lake was born to Gloria Lake - age not listed in any sources and twenty-one year old US Navy sailor Elgin Lake.

And little Leonard was NOT born to a happy couple. Elgin and Gloria argued constantly, and Elgin was an alcoholic who constantly got drunk.

Still, they stay married long enough for Leonard to have a little sister, Sylvia, born in 1950, and a little brother, Donald, born in 1951.

And everything was GREAT after that!

When a couple with one child can’t stand each other, the best thing to do is, obviously, to have more kids.

That ALWAYS fixes everything.

2. 1951: Shortly after Donald was born, Elgin bounced. He left his wife and kids and moved to Seattle to start a new life and not pay child support.

So, he was an awesome dude. Leonard clearly had a great role model for a biological father and it’s crazy he turned out the way he did.

Abandoned, with three small children, Gloria barely managed to scrape by for the next several months, living in some cheap public housing. Constantly worried about how she’s going to survive, she reaches out to Elgin to repair the marriage.

And they agree to have her and two of the three kids come up and live with him in Seattle.

Not all the kids. Just 2/3rds of them. They continue to make awesome decisions.

Leonard had started kindergarten, and Gloria decided she didn’t want to interrupt the beginning of his education, which is so stupid.

Seriously.

Fuck kindergarten. No parent should ever worry about uprooting their kids social life when their kid is in kindergarten because, you know, it’s KINDERGARTEN.

I went to three different grade schools in two different states between kindergarten and third grade and no part of me has ever felt sad that I didn’t get to remain close with my kindergarten buddies because I don’t remember them. I may have been friends with a kid named Steve. MAYBE. We may have argued about coloring books or something.

Gloria decided to leave her first son in San Francisco, to stay with her parents while she and his two siblings headed North.

Cue future abandonment issues.

According to her vague recollection of the event, Gloria had asked Leonard if he wanted to go with her to Seattle, and he said he didn’t.

Also stupid.

You don’t give kindergarteners choices like that because their brains aren’t ready to make them. You don’t ask them if they want to stay or go. You tell them. “Great news! We’re going to Seattle to see daddy! Yay!” And then, odds are, they get excited because you’re excited and because little kids are easy to trick because their brains aren’t very developed.

At the train station, Leonard changed his mind because he’s a little kid and doesn’t know how shit works and he tearfully begs not to be left behind.

Too late.

Gloria had reserved space only for herself and Sylvia, planning to carry the infant, Donald, in her arms.

If only she could have rescheduled!

Nope.

Leonard pleaded hysterically, sobbing and screaming, clinging to his mother’s skirt and she left anyway and he stayed behind with his grandparents.

Many think this permanently emotionally scarred Leonard. I bet it did.

Leonard would never again live with either of his parents, even though his mother and siblings would return to San Francisco within the year.

And Leonard would never fully forgive his mom for being abandoned.

3. June 1956: For the next several years, Gloria and Leonard’s little brother and sister struggled and lived in poverty while Leonard continued to live in the more stable home of his grandparents.

How strange - to be separated like that from your siblings and mother like that. Maybe even more strange because they live in the same city. It would be so easy to live with them.

While his siblings struggled, sometimes having enough to eat, sometimes not, wearing thrift store clothes and sharing a room, Leonard had his own room, plenty of food, and new fashionable clothes living with grandma-mom and grandpa-dad in the middle- class Glen Park neighborhood.

And while I would think this arrangement would tend to create resentment of Leonard from his brother and sister living with less than he had, it went the opposite way. Leonard looked down on them for being poor. Looked down on his mother for being poor.

4. June 1956: In June, 1956, Gloria remarried and ten year-old Leonard now had a step-dad. Kind of. He didn’t live in the guy’s home and his grandparents were in charge of him, so he never really developed a relationship with the guy. He’s only given the briefest of mentions in his biography.

His mom and new guy went on to have two children together, two girls, Janet and Patty.

Now, Leonard has two half-sisters, only once of which he’ll have a relationship with.

While Leonard’s four siblings, three sisters and brother Donny struggle in poverty, he goes to summer camps full of mountain hikes and takes swim lessons and lives a nice middle class life. 5. 1960: In 1960, when Leonard is fourteen and his younger brother Donald was nine, Donald is struck by a train and suffers a massive head injury that leaves him with permanent brain damage.

And Leonard will never forgive him for it.

Seriously.

His little brother suffers a massive head wound and Leonard’s reaction is “Fuck Donny! I wish that train would’ve just killed the boy THAT MOMMY ALWAYS LOVED MORE THAN ME!”

Fourteen year-old Leonard, who already wasn’t close with Donald, despises Donny for having a disability for the rest of Donny’s life.

According to half sister Janet, Leonard just had no use for incompetent people. He looked down on anyone who collected welfare. People like his mom.

He talked often about how people who “took from the system” should be punished. As Janet recalled, Leonard once said that if he could poison the water supply of everyone on welfare, he would gladly do it. And based on what he’d do later in life, I don’t think he just talking shit here.

Lake regarded Donny as a welfare cheater because he collected Social Security disability payments. Leonard allegedly said of his brother, “He’s a leech. He’d be better off dead.”

Strange statements from a guy who would later kill and steal so he wouldn’t have to work.

Leonard’s cousin Chester, nine years younger than Leonard, would also later recall Leonard despising Donald. As would many other people when news of Leonard’s murders broke years later.

Chester would also later recall some animal cruelty in Leonard’s childhood, something that seems to come up quite a bit in serial killer biographies.

He said he’d come visit Leonard when he was eight and Leonard was towards the end of high school. He remembered Leonard having a chemistry lab where he would use acid to dissolve various materials. Chester remembered being fascinated with the the hoards of mice Leonard collected. He said Leonard just had a few, initially, but then they just kept reproducing over and over again and he ended up with too many too count.

He had a little world of mice. And he was their God. And initially, he was a good god.

Leonard build a little city for his mice-children. A whole mouse world full of tunnels, castles, mazes - even a little train for them to ride on. It took up most of his room.

And then, eventually, he no longer wanted to live in a room full of mice. The mouse god grew angry and he decided to smite and destroy his furry children.

He used the acid from his chemistry set to completely dissolve their dead bodies. He’d use acid to burn them alive.

And unlike a fair amount of kids who engage in animal cruelty and then almost immediately regret it and feel horrible, burning up those mice didn’t bother Leonard one bit.

The most disturbing thing I came across regarding Leonard’s childhood are rumors that either Leonard’s mom, or his grandma, encouraged him to take nude photos of his little sisters and half- sisters when he was growing up.

No age comes up but this is mentioned in several articles and in at least one book.

Supposedly, this was done under the guise of teaching him to not feel any shame about the nude human body. And as crazy as it sounds, I believe it.

He grew up to become OBSESSED with taking nude pictures of women. Like, SUPER obsessed. And he’d take nude pics of grown women and young girls alike.

And, this introduction to nude photography would’ve happened in the late 50s/early 60s in San Francisco when and where social norms were a lot more counterculture than they were virtually anywhere else in the nation.

If this rumor is true, then another rumor associated with these pictures may also be true - that Leonard later used this pictures as blackmail against his younger sisters/half-sisters, and coerced sexual favors out of them.

And I while Lake never admitted to this and neither did any family member, it would not surprise me one bit if this were true. Sex with a much younger first cousin did get brought up at the murder trial of his murder partner Charles Ng after his death. She admitted to having sex with him on the witness stand and letting him take nude photos of her. A first cousin isn’t a sister, but, it’s getting close.

6. STEFF COXSCURVEY: And his childhood is starting to feel like a Steff Coxscurvey routine now.

“If you’re momma had five kids and only abandoned YOU… AND you dissolved hundreds of mice in acid… AND took nude photographs or your sisters… AND maybe blackmailed your sisters for sex… AND definitely took nude pics of your cousin who you had sex with….. you might be a killer.”

https://www.ranker.com/list/charles-ng-and-leonard-lake-facts/ harrison-tenpas - referenced in “The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers: A Study of the Chilling Criminal Phenomenon from the Angels of Death to the Zodiac Killer (Facts on File Crime Library)” by Michael Newton.

Now let’s take a break from exploring the childhood of one soon- to-be horrific piece of shit and travel across the Pacific to dig into the origin of his future murder-partner, Charles Ng, born almost 15 years after Leonard in 1960, the same year Lake’s little brother Donny is struck by a train.

7. Christmas Eve, 1960:

On December 24th, 1960, Christmas Eve, Charles Chitat [chee tah] Ng [eeng] is born.

And at the moment of his birth, the Devil himself gets the chills and thinks,

“What the fuck? Did I just get SCARED?? How??? I’m the DEVIL! What the Hell was that about? Are those goosebumps!?!”

Charles is the third child and first son born in British Hong Kong to hardworking Japanese immigrant and camera salesman Kenneth Ng and his wife Oi Ping. Charles would be the younger brother of oldest daughter Alice and middle child Betty.

Kenneth came from nothing and had fled Japan after it was ravaged in WW2, going from selling trinkets to American soldiers on the streets to getting a sales job for Leica [like uh], a German camera company.

He travelled for work to provide for his wife, three kids, his mother, his wife’s mother, and two aunts. And they all lived together in an apartment.

As his children grew, Kenneth worked even harder to produce respectable living conditions. He even bought a car - a true luxury among Hong Kong residents. He bought a piano so his children could take lessons.

The Ngs were like the Hong Kong Jeffersons.

JEFFERSONS BUTTON

Outings in the car, picnics, and good food became an important part of the Ng family routine.

Early in his life, Charles discovered martial arts guru and movie star Bruce Lee, and he’d try to copy the actor’s moves for the next few decades and become a skilled martial artist.

When his parents wouldn’t allow him to have real martial arts weapons, such as nunchaku [ nuhn-chah-koo ] sticks aka nun chuks, young Charlie made his own. He packed tightly twisted paper into a pair of cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls, and connected them with twine.

To harden his small fists, he filled a cloth sack with sand, attached it to a wall, and repeatedly punched it with all the strength he could muster.

Cute if I didn’t know how murderous and sadistic this dude would later become. From an early age, he wanted to dish out pain.

Charles’ older sister, Betty, would later recall fond memories of Ng home life, as related to her brother, saying “Charles would always prepare snacks for me to come home to after school. Many hot and humid nights he slept on the top level of the bunk bed and I below. He would fan me to sleep before himself.”

With a soft giggle, she remembered Charlie’s pet, a chicken. “He always looked after his chicken very well, always feeding it with goodies like cheddar cheese.”

I guess he had some good in him at one point.

Actually, he always would have.

That’s the one of the scariest aspects of human monsters, they can be so horrific to one person and be so kind to another. They’d be so much easier to spot if they just went full evil.

Kenneth worked extra hard to give his children opportunities he never had. He was able to get all three kids into private schools.

He expected all three kids to honor his sacrifices by getting good grades. Alice and Betty lived up to his expectations - Charles did not.

When Charles brought home bad report cards, Kenneth punished him severely, using a cane to beat him.

Obviously, this would be viewed as blatant child abuse today.

In Hong Kong in the 1960s, a good ol’ cane-whooping was still within the range of normal parental punishment. Kind of.

After his son was found guilty of murder years later, Kenneth would admit to thinking he’d taken things too far with Charles.

He said he would actually tie him down for beatings so he couldn’t escape them. Said he beat him so severely that his wife Oi Ping begged for him to stop - but he wouldn’t because he was so angry that his son had disappointed him so greatly.

Sooooo… MAYBE dad was pretty abusive actually.

Young Charles Ng reacted to this punishment by withdrawing. He interacted with few people, mainly his sister Betty and a cousin, Benny Chung.

Other traumatic events may have wounded him even more deeply. then being caned.

His mother, Oi Ping, later recalled two such incidents.

She said, “Charlie loved pets. He used to have a chicken, which he raised from very small to over a pound. My mother thought that [the] chicken was ... very smelly. She suggested to kill it.”

When his pet chicken wound up in a cooking pot, Charles, obviously, burst into tears and retreated to his bed, brokenhearted.

Oi Ping also said, “And then later on he had a turtle, and he would not let us lock it up, so the turtle was all over the place in the house. Every day, he would buy fish to feed the turtle.”

Unfortunately, said Oi Ping, the small reptile relieved itself in the house. “It was very smelly. So [we] wanted to bring it to a pond very far away where Charlie could release it himself.”

The loss of his second pet again distressed Charles.

At least they didn’t eat it. Someone else may have though. In 1960s Hong Kong, all kinds of turtles were eaten. Good ol’ turtle jelly! Powdered turtle shells and bellies are still boiled for up to twelve hours, mixed with herbs and lotions and served up as a type of jelly-like soup.

And then there was a time when he brought home a stray dog and his parents made him get rid of it.

And they didn’t eat that either. Someone else may have though. Eating dogs was banned in Hong Kong in 1950 but older generations were still eating the occasional dog in the 60s. So there’s a chance all three of his pets were eaten, which I do have to admit is extremely unfortunate.

Now Charles Ng’s young life is starting to feel like a Steff Coxscurvey joke.

(Steff) “If you’re parents killed and ate one of your pets, and made you get rid of two other pets, that also MAY have been eaten, YOU might be a killer.”

Charles faced life without the companionship of any pets, and with few friends. He spent hours in his room, alone and reading. Early on, it also became apparent that Charles was nearsighted, which required him to wear strong, thick, corrective eyeglasses which did NOT help him get friends.

Another thing that may have made it difficult for Charles to make friends was being a violent, sticky-fingered psychopath.

In an article for Penthouse magazine, journalist Rick Mofina revealed that Ng’s family sought psychiatric treatment for Charles by the time he was ten after he stole a photograph from a friend’s home.

Mofina found out that young Charles liked to dish out beatings as well.

He’d seek out Western children in parks to assault them, he’d hurl Molotov cocktails from rooftops and try to set various buildings on fire. He was arrested for trying to start a fire.

At school he also got in trouble for writing obscene letters to a teacher about a bunch of deviant sexual shit he wanted to do her, and then when he lit a classroom on fire by mixing some chemicals, he was expelled by the age of fifteen.

(Steff) “If you wrote a note to your teacher about how you wanted to fuck her every which way buy Sunday, AND beat up kids who looked different than you, AND set a variety of fires in the neighborhood, AND got kicked out of school for setting your classroom on fire…. YOU might be a killer!”

8. 1976: Ng’s uncle, Rufus, his dad’s brother, had become a teacher in Preston, England, on the western coast, north of Liverpool and Charles’s sister Betty moved in with him while attending an English school, and in 1976, Kenneth sent sixteen year-old Charles to England as well to study at High Bentham Grammar School.

During the week, Charles would live in a dorm, and on the weekend, with his uncle.

After just a few months, Charles wanted to come home. Said his uncle didn’t want him.

And he was right.

Uncle Rufus wanted him out of his house.

Why? Maybe because Charlie was still stealing shit and causing problems. He stole 40 pounds from a classmate as an act of revenge for ignoring Charles while paying more attention to a different pal amongst several other petty crimes and whatever he was never caught for which was probably a lot.

9. 1978: Still determined that his son Charlie would receive an education, Kenneth Ng pushed him to get his high school diploma equivalent, which he did so in Hong Kong in 1978 when he was eighteen.

Now - let’s jump fifteen yeas back to 1963, and cover Charlie’s future murder mentor Leonard Lake graduating high school and slowly and steadily becoming more and more of a piece of shit.

10.1963: In 1963, while in high school, Leonard would read The Collector, by John Fowles. John Fowles would actually testify about the book at Charlie Ng’s murder trial many years later.

We talked at length a few weeks ago about the 1965 movie of the same name based on this book that Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella became obsessed with. Quick refresher now.

The book came out in 1963, and Leonard read it when he was seventeen or eighteen.

The plot follows a lonely, psychotic young man, Frederick Clegg, who kidnaps a woman named Miranda, a young female art student he’s attracted to in London and holds her captive in the cellar of his rural farmhouse. Frederick holds Miranda captive for over a month, thinking she’ll eventually fall in love with him and want him to please him. Instead, she gets sick and dies and he buries her in the garden and the book ends with him preparing to kidnap another girl, hoping that she’ll want to please him.

And just like Bob Berdella got really turned on by the thought of holding an attractive, young woman hostage for a long period of time, so did Leonard.

He started to masturbate to fantasies of a young woman he had trapped in a cell, a woman who fulfill any sexual desire of his. A woman available for his sexual gratification any time he wanted her. A woman completely under his control.

And years later, he’ll devote his life to “Operation Miranda.”

Yikes.

11.January 27, 1964: In the Spring of 1963, a seventeen year-old Leonard graduates from high school, and then in January 27th, 1964, three months after turning eighteen, he enlists in the Marine Corps.

And he adapts quickly to military life. He loves it.

He learns how to use of chemicals in combat, how to conduct guerrilla warfare, how to use explosives.

Marine Corps training gives Lake the opportunity to drive large and small vehicles, and provides him with instructions on how to expertly read maps.

Field survival techniques lodge themselves in his memory for future use when he will define himself as a survivalist.

He learns military jargon, and in the future, he’ll refer to any project as an “operation” or “ops.” Projects like killing people. Projects like raping people. Just “ops”! Not being evil - just knocking out some ops!

He loves wearing camouflage, and will wear it often for the rest of his life.

After graduating from basic training, he enters and completes specialized classes and becomes a radar technician. The Corps transfers him to Camp LeJeune [luh shern], North Carolina, where he takes advanced courses in aircraft radar work.

On weekend passes and during leaves of absence, Lake often visited relatives at the home of an uncle who lived in South Carolina.

12.April 1965: At one of these gatherings in April 1965, Lake was pleasantly surprised when another guest showed up. Karen Lee Meinersman, eighteen, the daughter of his uncle’s friend, had traveled from Delaware, where she attended college, majoring in math.

Homesickness motivated her decision to spend spring break with her parents. And while home, she made one of the worst decisions of her life and met Leonard Lake. As soon as they met, both Karen and Leonard felt a certain attraction to one another and before he returned to the Marine base, they agreed to correspond by mail.

Lake LOVED to write letters. Holy shit did this dude love a letter. And he liked a diary entry. Because of that, we know way more about him than we do about a lot of serial killers.

Leonard and Karen exchanged many affectionate letters during the following months, until President Lyndon “Jumbo” Johnson decided to send more Marines to Vietnam and Lake was one of them.

13.Christmas 1965: Leonard Lake arrived in Southeast Asia not long before Christmas 1965 and spent most of the following year “in country.” .

14.Late 1966: Then, in late 1966, Lake was reassigned to duty in California at the Point Mugu [magoo] Naval Air Station just south of Oxnard and north of Malibu. BEAUTIFUL area. Oh my god is that area gorgeous.

Lot of gorgeous California girls too, but Lake didn’t care. He wanted a girl back East.

15.1968: In 1968, Karen confided in Lake that she was lonely. She wrote that she didn’t feel “very worldly at the age of twenty” and that she hoped to find “someone to direct her.” And that she thought Leonard might “fill the bill.”

And Leonard responded by furiously beating off so many times. Then he wrote back something to the effect of, “Fuck yeah, bro. Can do. CAN do!”

Karen wanting Lake to show her the ways of the world fed into his Operation Miranda-type fantasies.

16.March 1969: In March 1969, Lake used his leave to seal the deal with Karen Lee, flying to Delaware and directing her in how to do a variety of shit. This is how this fits in that hole, this is how it goes in this one. This is where you put your mouth when I stand here. You stand on your hands in that corner and face the window and then I stand in front of you and do jumping jacks while you stick your tongue out… I’m not sure exactly what they did.

Lake proposed marriage, Karen accepted, and she accompanied him back to California. Before the month was over, they were married. Leonard was twenty-five and she was twenty.

And for the first few months, things were fine. And then, shit got weird. This pattern will be repeated in some of Lake’s future relationships.

Lake started to joke with fellow Marines about selling Karen’s body to them. And she tried to laugh it off. At first.

But then she got the feeling he was serious because he was.

Lake constantly wanted her to wear more revealing clothing. And he kept pressuring her to try kinkier and kinkier stuff in bed. And he also started to become more domineering, treating her not like a partner, but like a possession.

17.Summer 1970: Luckily for Karen, a little over a year into marriage, Lake left.

He volunteered midway through 1970 for a second tour of duty in Vietnam. And Karen went to live with his grandparents.

In the green hell of Vietnam, Lake would later say, he really “enjoyed” the experience.

He also may have lied his ass off about his Vietnam experience.

He’d boast of “killing a lot of people” when he got back and said that the toughest thing he had to do was zip up body bags.

But according to his records, he didn’t see any action. He served as a radar technician stationed in Da Nang where he repaired radar machinery and was never saw any action.

He also lost his shit in Vietnam, literally and figuratively, becoming convinced that his wife, who was living with his grandparents, was cheating on him all the time. She wasn’t.

But he got so worked up thinking about it he saw a military mental-health expert who diagnosed a serious condition of “impending schizophrenia” along with “hysterical neurosis” and recommended that Lake return home to undergo treatment in a hospital.

He was shipped back to California at the end of 1970.

A psychiatric evaluation resulted in Lake being declared “a danger to himself and to others.”- NAILED IT! And he spent the better part of two months in the hospital’s psychiatric ward and it’s too bad he couldn’t have spent the rest of his life there.

Karen would later recall a bizarre incident during Lake’s psychiatric confinement.

She said that Lake invaded a storage area one night to steal government property.

He failed to find the object of his search, which sent him into a deep depression and he blamed the failure on an attack of diarrhea.

I told you he lost his shit.

He returned to his bed and began eating all the chocolate he could find because he thought that chocolate caused constipation and if he became constipated, he could return to the storage area and carry out his original mission.

And the doctors, when they found about this, were… concerned.

They performed further psychiatric examinations and recommended that Leonard Lake be discharged from the Marine Corps for medical reasons, which he was in January 1971.

Now let’s jump ahead eight years and reconnect with Charlie Ng, who has just graduated high school and continue with his life until he is ALSO done with the Marine Corps.

CHARLES NG- 1979:

In 1979, Charlie’s parents consulted his aunt Alice who had moved to San Leandro [lee-ann-dro], on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. She agreed to let Ng live with her and attend Notre Dame College, a small parochial school on the bay’s west side.

With a student visa, Charlie arrived in the US in early 1979.

His aunt taught him to drive that summer, and Ng bought his first car, a big cumbersome station wagon.

When school started at Notre Dame College, he moved into a dorm room.

And he’d last about a month before dropping out.

18.October 1979: And then, in October of ’79, without informing any of his relatives, he marched into a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting station two months before his nineteenth birthday and enlisted.

He wasn’t supposed to be able to do that since he wasn’t a citizen, but he was somehow able to claim he was from Bloomington, Indiana.

Ng would later claim that the recruiting sergeant helped him fake documents needed to prove citizenship. Not sure if that is true.

Charlie enjoyed boot camp and passed with flying colors.

Advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, taught him how to proficiently use a variety of guns.

The whole process ignited in Ng an interest in the ability to survive nearly any challenge or hardship. Like Lake would do after he left the Marines, Charlie began to read publications on the subject of survivalism and to seek out other men with the same interest. A path that would later lead him to Leonard Lake.

A fellow Marine, Ray Guzman, recalled that Ng was a loner at Camp Pendleton who often kept to himself, making few friends during his six months at Camp Pendleton. He also recalled that “Charlie liked to practice martial arts,” and that he would show off by asking someone to hold a pencil at face level, and then he would kick the pencil from the person’s grasp.

Upon completion of his training at the sprawling base in Southern California, Lance Corporal Ng was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Weapons Company, at the Marine Corps Air Station, Kaneohe [ kah-ney-oh-hey ] Bay, Hawaii.

Located on Mokapu [ moh-kah-poo ] peninsula, the base was the home of 5,000 Marines. Ng received training as an “A gunner,” - he helped the lead gunner in the team operation of an antitank missile device.

Intensive practice sessions, designed to prepare the team for combat, involved carrying the ammunition, helping to set up the weapon, and assuring the lead gunner’s safety during his vulnerable process of zeroing in on the target.

According to Hugh Daugherty, Charlie's team leader, he did great.

David Burns, a sergeant during Ng’s tour of duty in Hawaii, saw him almost daily, and rated Ng as an “outstanding” weapons handler, who was a Marine “of the best order.”

Hugh also remembered him to be a “quiet loner,” who sometimes practiced martial arts in the barracks. “I never saw him drink, use drugs, or chase women,” said Daugherty. “He was usually alone, even when I bumped into him on leave.’

The quiet loner. Gotta keep your eye on them!

Wait!

I’m often a quiet loner when I’m not doing this.

Shit.

Don’t worry about what I’m up too. Forget what I said.

Now let’s return to January, 1971, after Leonard Lake is discharged from his second tour of duty in Vietnam for psychiatric reasons.

19.January 1971 - LAKE’S LIFE AFTER THE MARINES:

In January of 1971, Leonard Lake is out of the psychiatric facility, he’s no longer eating tons of chocolate to plug up his butt so he can steal stuff, and he’s back with his wife Karen.

He’s the most stable he’ll ever be again.

Within a few days of his getting home, Lake and his wife, Karen, looked for a place to settle, and buy a home in San Jose, at the lower tip of San Francisco Bay back when young people who didn’t have wealthy parents who weren’t IPO millionaires could buy homes in Silicon Valley.

According to Karen, the first few weeks were “fairly normal,” and both she and Leonard enrolled at West Valley Junior College to prepare for the future.

Lake looked for a job and found a bunch of temporary ones. For a while, he drove a truck for a veteran’s organization. He worked as a laborer for a bit. He couldn’t find anything that paid much more than minimum-wage jobs, and the couple had money problems.

They had problems mostly because Lake really just didn’t care to work. I’m guessing he felt a day job was beneath them.

Lake came up with a brilliant solution to his not having a job - Karen could dance at a local topless bar.

BOOM!

Problem solved! Karen made great money and the two of them lived happily ever after. When in doubt, take out those titties and dance! It ALWAYS works! You can’t lose doing that.

In reality, Karen at first was offended and rejected the idea.

But Lake was pushy and persuasive and soon she reluctantly auditioned and accepted.

And soon, she was working forty-five to fifty a week, dancing for dollars.

And while she worked, Leonard stayed home and relaxed. He lived leisurely, and started growing an organic garden.

He also, being the champion of man he was, started beating his wife.

He became super controlling again and began to administer what he called “controlled” beatings. He’d first strike her lightly to the face with his open hand, then later use his fist. And he’d ask her if she liked it. And then they’d have sex. The beatings were his idea of foreplay. Karen, not surprisingly, was not as into them.

Lake also took all the money she made. Karen worked, he controlled the finances.

Lake also started taking a lot of nude pics of Karen. Dude LOVED a nude pic. He filled an album with revealing photos of his wife. This is just the beginning of adult Lake’s nude photo taking. You’re gonna get sick of hearing about all the pics he takes pretty soon.

Lake also starts suggesting they meet another couple and swap partners.

Leonard also gets a little paranoid. He gave the phone company a fake name so no one could look them up. He said it help them screen out telemarketers.

Karen would also say that Leonard insisted she read “The Collector”, the only book he ever pressured her to read. He told her it was different than any other book.

Not long after Lake had made an album of nude photos of her, Karen found out her husband had been using his free time to take naked pictures of other women while she worked at the strip club when she found some other albums.

So, basically, married life is going GREAT for Karen.

20.November 1971: And then, in November, just ten months after he’d been discharged from the Marines, an incident at the strip club leads to the end of Karen and Lake’s young marriage.

Karen was being walked to her car by a strip club customer when Leonard pulled up, saw her walking with another man, and became furious. He accused her of cheating and said he was gonna throw her out of the house - the place where her income paid their rent.

He peeled out and by the time she made it home all her shit was on the lawn.

She loaded what stuff she could fit into her car and slept in her car that night. And when she went to work the next day, Leonard broke into her car and took most of her stuff.

She found a new place to stay and for weeks, Leonard would routinely break into her place, doing weird shit like pouring acid onto her clothes and calling her and telling her what she’d done that day - what she wore and who’d she’d visited. He wanted her to know he was watching her. He’d call and leave threatening messages.

21.1972: After months of harassment, Leonard finally moved on and Karen divorced him in early 1972. And Karen, when she would later hear what Lake did, had to felt super thankful for Lake tossing her shit out on the lawn. She got off easy in comparison to other women who’d meet Lake.

Leonard’s half-sister Janet later recalled that Leonard cried when he found out that Karen had divorced him - she said it was the only time she’d ever seen him cry and she thinks this is when his hatred of women truly began.

(Lake) “Why, Janet!?! How could she do this to me?!! All I ever did was beat her and talk her into stripping and then not work or look for a job and take nude pictures of other women when she wasn’t home?? How could she LEAVE ME?? I’m such a good guy!”

Leonard was a piece of shit in 1971 and he’d only become a bigger piece of shit as time went on.

22.Late Summer 1972: After his divorce, Lake gets evicted from his place since he can’t seem to just get a job and he does some couch surfing, staying with various relatives including his grandparents.

He also puts out a personal ad in “the Berkeley Barb” - 1972’s version of match.com or Tinder. The Barb was a big counterculture newspaper - one of the nation’s first.

23.October 1972: In late 1972, twenty-eight year old Jennifer Gordon responded.

By October of ’72, the two were dating.

Gordon later recalled. “At first, he was like someone you see in the movies. Sweet, gentle, caring. He seemed concerned, like someone you would really like to know.”

Within three months, the intimacy turned, in Jennifer’s words, “kinky” - bondage and swinging.

Eventually, Lake even convinced Jennifer to earn money for them through prostitution. She’d later say she agreed to make her happy.

Taylor Helzer from the Children of Thunder Cult from two weeks ago would be pissed to read this.

“WHAT!?! He actually got her to work as an escort for him? Less than two years back from ‘Nam?

Shit! I tried SO HARD to get a woman, any woman, to work as a prostitute for YEARS! Nothing!”

Lake also took a shit ton of nude photos of Jennifer. Three albums worth.

She also helped convince a few of her girlfriends to pose for Leonard’s camera.

She’d later say that Lake even took nude photos of her while she slept. Dude couldn’t get enough of those pics.

Despite Jennifer doing whatever Lake asked of her in bed, despite her paying their bills through prostitution, he still wasn’t satisfied.

And then, when Lake decided to give up the prostitution, she said, “Leonard became irate. We argued a lot.”

Their relationship was getting rocky and then Jennifer realized things just weren’t going to last when Lake started talking about “snuff” films. She said he confessed he wanted to make a movie where two people were having sex and then one of them kills the other during climax.

Lake told her he thought it would be the “ultimate sexual high.”

And when she told him that wanting to do things like that land him in prison, he told her that if he was ever arrested, he would escape the consequences by taking cyanide.

Years before he would eventually caught and he’s already planned his escape.

After some snuff film talk, Jennifer somehow doesn’t leave Lake.

Always leave when your partner says that what they’d REALLY like to do in bed is kill their sexual partner so they can cum harder. That should ALWAYS be a deal breaker.

The two argue and fight constantly in the Spring of 1973, and then in June, the day after Jennifer worried that Lake was going to kill her when he’d pinned her to the floor after an argument, she finally moves out.

In late 1973, Lake continued to develop more and more dark sexual fantasies - most of them revolving around having a sex slave. He also started to think a lot about the end of the world.

He’s super stable.

He thought the world would likely end in a nuclear holocaust, and he thought that to survive it, he needed to get out of the city. Needed to get out into the country, where he could rely on his survivalist training to survive.

He began to dream of building a remote Apocalyptic bunker, some place where he could wait out the initial period of nuclear radiation by having protective gear, a filtered air supply, tons of water and provisions.

He started to scope out Ukiah [ yoo-kahy-uh ] - about 130 miles North of where he lived in the city.

And then one day, he just grabbed what few possessions he had, got in his car, and drove up to the then 12,000 person town to start a new life.

In the Suck-verse, if you have an incredible memory, you may remember Ukiah from the Jonestown Massacre Suck that we did three years ago, way back in May of 2017. Can’t believe it’s been three years since that topic!

Jim Jones had read an article abut Ukiah being a top ten place to ride out a nuclear apocalypse, and had moved 140 Jonestown followers from Indiana to the Redwood Valley just North of Ukiah in 1965.

Jones would establish a socialist compound there and followers of his would stay there until 1974, leaving the area when Guyana down in South America became the new primary compound.

In late 1973, when Richard Lake moved to the area - Jones and his People’s Temple followers were splitting between San Francisco and Ukiah - I’m sure Lake knew of them.

I say all this to establish that the area in and around Ukiah was used to different kinds of people moving in and living in new ways when Lake moved there.

The following year, in 1974, the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association purchased the defunct Mendocino State Asylum for the Insane and began building the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, the largest Buddhist community in the Western Hemisphere on nearly 500 acres of land. A theistic city with housing for monks, dining halls, educational centers, and all kinds of stuff.

Ukiah had all kinds of different people living in it.

Lake found a job at a government-funded firm that renovated low income housing and quickly worked his way up to become a crew leader, supervising a crew of other guys.

He also enrolled in nearby Mendocino College, taking classes in animal sciences and meat cutting. He learned how to use kitchen knives and carpentry saws, how to expertly slice through bone and flesh. He convinced college staff to let him teach as an adjunct professor, teaching a wilderness survival class.

He lived in a cheap pay by the week motel before moving to what locals called, “The Ranch.”

In the western rise of the Coast Range mountains that cast shadows over Ukiah early each evening, a winding road ascends just north of town towards the area of the former People’s Temple Compound.

A ten mile drive through lush forest lead to an unmarked that led to “The Ranch.” The Ranch was difficult to find, and the people who lived in the hidden hills and valleys like it that way.

It was founded in 1970 - a rural, ecological paradise for people who wished to escape pollution, noise, traffic, and social restrictions - ie there were a lot of nudists and swingers living there. “The Ranch,” consisted of 5,000 acres, approximately nine square miles.

Originally, 200 families bought parcels of The Ranch, varying from forty to 200 acres of the undeveloped land. Electric power for the scattered rustic houses, cabins, and mobile homes was generated by solar- or hydro-powered sources. Water came from wells, pumped by windmills, or from creeks, shared by all. No telephone cables or other utilities mucked up the landscape. A common area of 400 acres included a large barn with a ranch house, a pond, and a school. Roads on the property were maintained through the labor of residents and funded by the community.

The Ranch landowners’ association drew up bylaws prohibiting the use of pesticides or firearms. Generally, the people who chose to live on The Ranch were hippies who respected Mother Earth, and resisted anything that might pollute the land, water, or air.

They went by nicknames such as “Otter,” “Zephyr,” “Beaver,” and “Morning Glory.” They celebrated the summer solstice by donning medieval costumes, dancing and singing, and then skinny- dipping in a creek.

And good for them. If you want to be called “Otter,” and live in a nudist environmentalist compound of sorts - good for you. For the right person, I’m sure it was awesome.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t call people “Beaver” and “Morning Glory.”

I’m too much of a sarcastic asshole.

“Hey Beaver! How’s the windmill coming along? Looking good in that jester hat and medieval leggings, bud. Want to come over tonight and drink mead and howl at the moon and swap wives? Akum-uh-ma-ta-tah my man.”

One person who did love “The Ranch” was “Venus” Salem, a single woman in her thirties. One of those 60s Flower Power kids who wasn’t ready to move on from the 60s.

Venus bought a parcel on the ranch in 1970, and worked to improve it while she continued to live in Ukiah, earning her living as an occupational therapist.

By 1974, Venus had about ran out of money. She wanted to upgrade the cabin she’d built and plant an orchard, but she needed help. And then she met Leonard Lake at some sort of hippy festival where the two probably talked about summer solstice magic, holistic medicine, and light therapy or something.

Venus told Lake about her cabin and her wishes to improve it.

Lake knew a free ride when he saw it and he offered to do all of the work for six months in exchange for living for free on the property.

At first, Venus found Leonard “charming and helpful,” and they became romantically involved.

And then he showed her his nude photo albums and asked to take pics of her naked -

Classic Lake! Lake being Lake.

She didn’t care for any of it.

How the fuck do you bring all that up?

(Lake) “Damn baby, you are SO sexy! Seriously. FUCK you look good.

Hey… can I take some pictures of you naked? I mean - you could be in Playboy!

It’s not a big deal, I know lots of women who take naked photos. Like my ex, Jennifer. Check out this pic of her with some dude who paid to fuck her while I watched. Oh - and look at this pic of my ex-wife Karen. She’d just gotten home from the strip club and… hey - why are you upset?

What? I’m not supposed to look at all the photo albums of naked pics of women I used to sleep with anymore? Wow! Did NOT read you for a socially and sexually un-liberated prude, VENUS!!!”

In addition to showing her nude pics of women he used to date, Leonard also told Venus his mom abandoned him and that he hated his brother Donny and wanted to kill him for mooching off their mom.

He also told her he was excited for what he called his “Miranda” Project. Said he wanted to build some type of refuge for people driven from the cities during a coming environmental collapse he’d convinced her was possible. He, of course, didn’t want a refuge, he wanted a “fuck dungeon” where he could rape and torture women, and make some snuff films.

He began to dig a giant pit on Venus’s property for this “project.”

Venus later said Lake started to get mean with her a few months into their relationship. He criticized her constantly and alienated her from her neighbors.

When she finally got up the courage to confront him over his behavior be became enraged and pushed her off a ladder.

Argument settled! “What were you saying again, Venus? Having a hard time hearing you since I pushed you off the ladder!”

Venus wanted him gone but he refused to leave and instead offered to buy her interest in her property. He made her a terrible offer but she took it just to be rid of him. She might’ve saved her own life by doing so.

Now, Richard owned her Ranch property and quickly became a real headache for the rest of the Ranch community.

A neighbor would later recall meeting Leonard around this time.

She said he creeped her out when he brought up his albums of nude photos and said he’d like to take some of her.

Classic Lake!

“Hi, name’s Lenoard. Nice to meet you. Yeah, I live her now. Hey, you take nude photos? I’m a photographer and if you’re not busy I was thinking you could take your clothes off and I could snap some… hey - where you going?

(to himself) What the fuck? I thought this place was supposed be fulled with cool NUDISTS not all these Debbie Downers!!”

In another instance, this same neighbor said Lake saw her ten-year-old daughter outside playing, and hinted that he’d like to take pictures of her as well.

I picture this dude literally asking to take nude pics of every woman and girl he meets.

At the grocery store. “…I’m paying by cash. I can throw in a few extra bucks if you’ll get naked and let me take some quick pics.”

Holding the door open for a senior citizen, “You’re welcome. Love to take some nude pics if you ever have time. Take care!”

Applying for a job as a school bus driver, “As long as I’m not on the clock, can I use bus for group photos of naked kids?”

Lake sketched his neighbor out further when he referenced Operation Miranda and spoke of a nuclear apocalypse. He also said, worse case, if he couldn’t survive the nukes he wouldn’t suffer because he’d just take the cyanide pills he aways carried around. Told her, “I carry death in my pocket.”

This is still the beginning of this shit. Basically, for the rest of this story, Lake will talk about nude photos, cyanide pills, a nuclear apocalypse, and Operation Miranda to everyone he meets.

A guy who worked on one of Lake’s crews around this time remembered Lake talking about Operation Miranda as well. Said he also brought his photo albums to work to show his coworkers. Said he was always talking about sex.

Of course he was.

Shortly after Venus left, Lake threw a nude party at his house at The Ranch. Food, drink, and no clothes.

Also, to build his future sex dungeon, he started stealing from work. He’d order more construction supplies than were needed for jobs and take home the excess building materials. He’d use the machinery from work, like a bulldozer, to work on an apocalypse bunker.

He also let a local 18 year old dude, Bobby Barnes, live in a little one-room cabin on his property in exchange for Bobby working for him, excavating dirty and other jobs. Bobby would later recall Richard talking about how much he hated his mom and about wanting to kill his brother Donald. He also showed Bobby his nude photo albums.

Bobby would later remember Lake not getting along with any of his neighbors and how he talked about if any of them ever trespassed onto his property, he’d shoot and kill them and bury them in one of the pits he’d dug.

And Lake was NOT kidding when he said that. He would do exactly that in the future.

Bobby’s eighteen year-old girlfriend came to stay with him for several weeks and her 19 year-old friend, Gina Travers came to visit numerous times as well.

And Lake - of course - talked to the girls about cyanide pills, operation Miranda, he showed them the nude photo albums, he tried to fuck them, and tried to take nude pics of them.

He did talk Gina into taking some nude pics, and she’d say later she immediately regretted it.

When numerous Ranch residents were later interviewed about Lake after his arrest and subsequent suicide, they would universally talk about hating his fucking guts.

These open minded people - many of them nudists and swingers - thought he was a dirty creep and an asshole. That’s saying something.

Lake constantly broke The Ranch by-laws - he wasn’t supposed to use bulldozers to excavate the land. He wasn’t supposed to use firearms but shot his guns all the time anyways. And, he constantly said creepy shit about the women and girls living there skeeving everyone out. But almost no one confronted him because they truly believed he might kill them if they did and they were right to think that.

In the mid and late 70s, Lake was constantly trying to get more photos for his albums not just from women at “The Ranch,” but from other area women and girls was well.

Like Cindy Morgan.

24.Spring 1979: In the Spring of 1979, Lake took some photos of a sixteen year old, Cindy Morgan, whose mom wanted portraits of her daughter with “Sir Lancelot”, a goat a neighbor of Lake’s, that some hippy dude named “Otter” had attached a single horn too in some bizarre surgery.

Seriously.

Otter apparently had a homemade goat unicorn that people from all around Ukiah knew about. That sounds like something a dude called “Otter” would do.

(me) “What’cha working on, Otter?”

(Otter) “Oh, just trying to turn this goat into a unicorn.”

(Me) “Sounds about right. Take care and good luck, Otter!”

During the photo shoot, when Cindy’s mom stepped away, Lake asked her if she’d like to take more “adult” photos. She said no and then for weeks Leonard started showing up at places around Ukiah where Cindy would be, and hitting her up for pics.

Eventually she agreed, later saying she gave in “just to get him off my back.”

They met on a warm afternoon at an isolated spot by the Russian River and Lake shot several rolls of film and she’s lucky she made it out of the forest alive.

Lake had also been hitting up Darlene Davis for nude photos since 1977 when she was thirteen.

Leonard befriended her parents in 1977, and he soon offered her rides on his three wheeler ATV, and she accepted and for some reason her dumb-fuck parents let their thirteen year-old daughter go for rides, alone, into the forest, with the dude everyone knew was a perv who showed nude photos of women he’d taken to everyone in the area.

25.December 1979: In December of 1979, Lake invited now fifteen- year-old Darlene to sneak out of her parent’s house and meet him at his cabin, and the thirty-four-year-old took her virginity.

He also soon convinced her to pose nude for a series of photos and tried talking her into group sex.

The two continued to have a secret off-and-on sexual relationship for years afterwards.

Lake even gave her a necklace with a cyanide capsule in it to take in case the nukes started dropping but she refused to wear it.

26.Early 1980: In 1980, Darlene’s parents finally woke up to what was happening with Lake and their daughter and sent Darlene to a boarding school.

The two would continue to stay in touch, with Lake writing her often.

Around this time, when Lake wasn’t busy fucking or taking nude photos of local teens, he was focusing on survivalist training.

Why has this been coming up so much lately? I swear I had no idea that this dude was a prepper when I picked this topic.

Lake put an ad to meet other survivalists in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. He used the alias, “Tom Meyers” to maintain anonymity. And he met a twenty-year old soldier named Mark Novak stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, a man who would soon lead him to his kill-buddy, Charles Ng.

Novak stayed with Lake for a few days at The Ranch and heard all kinds of stories about what a badass Lake had been in ‘Nam and about his prowess with women and all kinds of other stuff. He saw Lake’s albums. He’d later characterize Lake as “a shit talker” and after three days, Novak left and never returned. But he did keep in loose touch with Lake.

After Novak left, Lake quickly got back to creeping Ukiah women the fuck out.

He tried talking a local young, cute shop owner named Pamela into taking some photos with him. When she wouldn’t take any pics after looking at one of his albums and seeing nude girls as young as ten in it, he went after her younger sister, Traci. And then Traci’s boyfriend, a member of the local Sheriff’s posse, found out and made it clear to Lake that he would end him if he didn’t go the fuck away. So he did.

Yay, Traci’s boyfriend! The world needs more men like him. If only he WOULD’ve ended Lake.

Also, around this time, Lake also stole a bunch of his neighbor’s shit.

During Lake’s extended residency on The Ranch, other members of the community suffered a mysterious rash of burglaries. A number of power tools disappeared, including chain saws. In Ukiah, and throughout Mendocino County, a lot of rifles, handguns, and ammunition would be stolen when Lake was around. A demolition firm even lost several boxes of dynamite.

27.Late summer 1980: And then, in the late summer of 1980, Lake met the love of his life at a renaissance fair in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge - Carolyn “Cricket” Balazs.

Perfect! First Venus and now Cricket. Lake was evil. He always wasn’t boring.

Sexually, Lake had met his match with Cricket. Cricket was bisexual and had no qualms about fantasies of sharing their bed with another woman, using sex toys, and participating in bondage and domination. Cricket also LOVED posing for his cameras.

When he took her to his house at The Ranch, she loved the isolation and natural setting.

Despite declaring his love for Cricket, he continued to write long letters to Darlene Davis at her boarding school.

According to Davis, he sent her “tons and tons” of nude photographs, including a bunch of his new girlfriend, Cricket. Many of them of the two of them having sex.

He informed Darlene that “Cricket is a bisexual, and wants a female partner, as well as a woman to have three-ways with.”

Clearly, he’s hoping Darlene and Cricket can both be his ladies at the Ranch. He can have multiple Mirandas. They can help him find more women to take nude pics and try to fuck. And Lake DOES continue to try and fuck and take photos of other women.

He also starts to REALLY wear out his welcome at The Ranch.

Around this time, one Ranch neighbor gets fed up with Lake’s constant target practice, pointing out that a stray bullet could kill someone. Lake responds by shouting, “I could kill everyone on the ranch, one by one . . . I could go to every house with an automatic weapon and no one would ever know.”

And the neighbor responds by shutting the fuck up and never confronting Lake again.

This dude was a NIGHTMARE for a neighbor. A true neighbor from Hell.

Shortly after this incident, a storage shed on Lake’s property erupts into flames one afternoon, and local volunteers rush to help him put out the fire.

And then the shed explodes.

The firefighters leap for cover behind trees trying to avoid flying bullets and shrapnel.

Lake almost kills people because of all the ammo he had stored in that shed. Ammo was not allowed under Ranch by-laws.

THEN, shortly after this no-no, Lake’s employers at the housing rehabilitation firm catch Lake stealing building material and call the police.

Lake gets fired and spends several days in jail before being released on bond.

A lenient judge sentences him to a year on probation and when a committee from The Ranch hears of his arrest, they ask Lake to sell his property and move out or they will have attorneys force him out.

Within a few days, he and Cricket pack up and leave. The Ukiah chapter of Lake’s life is over. Everyone at the Ranch breaths a sigh of relief and they return to tending to their unicorn-goats and talking about alternative energy sources, walking around nude, and forming drum circles.

28. Mid 1981: In mid-1981, psycho Lake and Cricket move to Philo [feel oh].

Philo’s [feel oh]a tiny hamlet located in the Anderson Valley, situated in the rolling foothills of California’s Trinity Alps, only twenty miles west of Ukiah.

It’s an area of a lot of wineries and yoga retreats that used to be a logging and farming town.

No more than 150 citizens lived in Philo [feel oh] in 1981, several of them employed by a lumber company.

Lake and Cricket rented a room at the no longer there Philo [feel oh] Motel.

The motel owner, Lake learned, needed someone to occupy and manage the place, so Leonard and Cricket decided to stay. She landed a part-time job at the Anderson Valley Elementary School as a teacher’s aide.

Settling into a routine at Philo, Lake met Robert Glover, captain of the Anderson Valley Fire Department. The two men hit it off, and Lake became one of forty unpaid volunteer firemen in the county.

Soon after settling in, Lake placed an ad in The Bay Guardian, a San Francisco publication that stopped being published in 2014.

His ad looked innocent enough, nothing more than an offer of employment for someone willing to relocate to a rural town to help operate and maintain a small motel.

Eighteen-year-old Connie Richards, read it and needed a job.

The attractive young woman rode a Greyhound 120 miles north and stepped off the bus and into the welcoming embrace of Leonard and Cricket.

They explained that she would receive room and board in exchange for helping with the motel chores. It didn’t take long for Connie to recognize that what the couple really wanted was a sex partner and that Lake wanted, of course, to take nude pics of her, which he did.

Richards recalled that she “wasn’t really into all the BDSM stuff that Cricket wanted.” She said they had all kinds of restraints and masks and whips and stuff.

She had one three-way with the couple and then had sex a few other times with Cricket who she said was the kinky one while Lake was more gentle. Interesting.

After Lake and Ng would be caught for rapes and murders many years later, there would be a lot of speculation that Cricket knew all about what they were up to, that she not only knew about Operation Miranda but was a big fan and that she may have participated in the sexual torture of captive women.

Leonard would also allegedly tell Richards that he wanted to have sex with his half-sister Janet.

And he made sure to tell her he hated his brother Donnie and wanted him dead and that he had cyanide pills he was willing to take at a moment’s notice. He also brags that he has $30,000 in silver buried on the property.

Lake also continued to send pics and steamy letters to Darlene Davis at the boarding school.

He’s consistent in his creepiness.

29. September 13, 1981: On September 13, 1981, Lake, Cricket, and Connie Richards drive to Morgan Hill, where Lake and Cricket take the vows of marriage.

Connie’s stay in Philo [feel oh] lasted three months. Feeling that she served no real purpose other than her role as a sex object, she says good-bye to Leonard and Cricket fourteen days before Christmas.

She also says goodbye to a short, quiet Asian man named Charlie who had arrived two weeks earlier.

Yup, Charles Ng! His timeline is connecting to Leonard Lake’s now.

How? Last time we checked in with him he was trying to make friends with fellow Marines in Hawaii.

Let’s back up a few months and show how Charlie meets Leonard, right after a quick break for sponsors.

PLAY AT BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=49AiqH-DuR0&list=PLDxTH_xflCJpV5d917x-HGKh- JiMQitVk&index=16

30.Fake Midroll: Today’s Timesuck is brought to you by Leonard Lake’s Quick Hit Nude-y Pics Mobile Photography Studio.

Photos are EXPENSIVE. Wedding Photos can cost you thousands of dollars. Prom pics can cost you hundreds! Graduation pics - who can afford them? Family reunions, Senior pictures! On and on. It never ends!

What if you want those photos but don’t want to spend ANY MONEY!

Well, if you’re willing to provide a slim, young female who will take some quick hit, nude-y pics, Lake will take the rest of your photos for FREE!

This offer is NOT too good to be true! Leonard Lake will be more than happy to meet your young lady for a quick hit, nude-y pic session at the location of her or your choosing - and then the rest of your photos are FREE.

And don’t worry, Lake will NOT try to fuck you. He WILL try to fuck your young Lady! Classic Lake Move! And he’ll try to fuck every other woman in your circle of friends.

And when he asks those other women for quick hit, nude-y pics, please, tell them not to be offended. It’s just Lake being Lake. And if they agree to take those photos - don’t forget to tell them, “He Gotcha! You’ve been Laked!”

And that of course is NOT our sponsor for today. Here comes the real ones.

Thank you for supporting our sponsors who support our show!

MIDROLL BREAK (Pause)

31. And now let’s continue by reconnecting with Charles Ng in 1981 shortly before he meets Leonard Lake in California.

CHARLES NG MEETS LAKE CONNECTION:

During his time in the Marines, Charlie Ng developed a strong interest in survivalism that led to an acquaintanceship in the summer of 1981 with a man from a different branch of the service, a young Army corporal stationed in the center of Oahu at Schofield Barracks - Mark Motherfuckin’ NOVAK!

Ng meet Novak in an Oahu military surplus store, where they bonded over talk of weapons, tactics, methods of staying alive in the wild, and then they grabbed some lunch together.

And Novak told Ng of an interesting survivalist he’d met in Northern California, at a place called “The Ranch”, the year before in the Spring of 1980.

Novak said the man introduced himself as Tom Meyers, but he later learned that his real name was Leonard Lake. And Lake, he said, may have been a “shit talker” about a lot of stuff, but he did know a lot about weapons AND he did have an impressive collection of nude photos of young women.

And Ng was like, “What was that last part?? You HAVE MY ATTENTION! Please, do tell me more…”

After this initial chance meeting, Ng and Novak stayed in touch for the next few months and became friends.

And then, that September, Ng planned his first known major criminal operation over the next few months - gun smuggling.

All of the weapons assigned to Ng’s Marine company were stored in a locked armory when not in use and armed guards were posted at the secured entry to the facility twenty-four hours a day.

32.Early September 1981: And in early September 1981, when Lake and Cricket are getting married back in California - Ng drew guard duty at the armory in Hawaii.

During his watch, an idea formed in Ng’s mind. What if he could steal some of the more valuable rifles, grenades, handguns, and other arms, and sell them?

Ng talked a fellow marine into helping him. And he threatened another one with physical violence to help him, too.

And they pulled off the theft of a bunch of weapons, took the guns to a man who was going to take it to a buyer, and then someone ratted them all out when the weapons turned up missing. I’m guessing the guy he threatened was the rat. Maybe not the best way to get someone to help you commit a major crime.

Several days after the theft, Naval Investigative Service officers arrested Charles and he was charged with conspiracy to commit larceny of military weapons; theft of weapons including machine guns, grenade launchers, rifles, and pistols; and burglary to commit theft.

November 13, 1981: On the cool morning of Friday, November 13, 1981, two Marine guards, called “chasers” in military jargon, delivered Ng from the brig where he was being held to the NIS office to be interrogated.

He was questioned until 2:30 the following morning.

And then no transportation was available to return him to the brig, so the chasers escorted him into a squad bay.

While one of the men sat down, allowing Ng to move about freely within the room, the other chaser stepped into the duty NCO’s office to call transportation authorities with a request for a vehicle.

The man closest to Ng, exhausted and drowsy, let his head drop for just a few moments, long enough for Ng to make a break for it.

He escaped out an open back window, and made it to the house of a fellow Marine who let him crash for the night. This friend gave him food, water, and clothing the next morning, and then drove him to a remote area where he could camp out.

In a jungle on Oahu, for two days, Ng huddled with no tent, afraid to make a fire, soaked and miserable.

Having nowhere else to turn, Ng called his Army pal, Sergeant Mark Novak.

He stayed with Novak for two days in the barracks and contacted his parents, who wired him three hundred dollars.

He used the money to buy clothing, a backpack, and a plane ticket to San Francisco. And then Novak gave him the name and address of Leonard Lake in Philo [feel oh]. Novak called Lake who agreed to help Ng out.

Ng left Schofield Barracks before dawn on a November morning in 1981 and caught a bus to the airport.

He hid in the airport bathroom until his flight boarded and then flew to San Francisco where he made it to his aunt’s house and then he called Lake who invited him up to Philo [feel oh].

When Charlie Ng showed up in Philo [feel oh], Lake realized that Connie Richards had already made a decision to leave, so he figured the newcomer could take over the chores she’d been doing.

And then he and Ng got to a know each other and became fast friends. Ng loved the idea of preparing for the end times, and he was more than willing to use his military training to commit whatever crimes were necessary to pull of Operation Miranda. Ng LOVED Operation Miranda.

Ng fueled the flames of Lake’s dark fantasies. They were two fucked-up peas in a very fucked-up pod.

The nature of just how well these two got along together would later be revealed in trial testimony.

According to a Bay Area police report, a woman who worked for an escort service in the city stated that a man calling himself Tom Meyers - aka Leonard Lake - had arranged to use her services in 1984

After paying in advance, he asked, OF COURSE, to take some nude pics of her.

Lake then first took her out to dinner, then to a motel where she posed for him. When she emerged from the bathroom, a short Asian man lunged at her with a knife, and forced her to lie down on the bed. While repeatedly stabbing at the mattress, within inches of her head, the woman told police, the Asian brutally raped her while Meyers watched. During the sexual assault, Meyers commented, “This is something we do all the time, but we usually kill the girls we’ve been with. But I like you, so we’re not going to kill you.”

The victim later identified Tom Meyers as, of course, Leonard Lake, and the rapist as Charles Ng.

And now for the rest of this timeline, there will be very little back and forth between Ng and Lake’s life now they they’ve joined forces.

33.December 1981: In December of 1981, shortly after Ng’s arrival at Philo [feel oh], Lake and Cricket gave up their motel management job.

A better opportunity came along.

A woman who lived nearby on a property called Indian Creek Ranch, wanted to start a youth camp, so she started looking for sex fiends, child pornographers, and doomsday rapists.

She didn’t.

But that is basically who she’d find.

She owned a secluded cluster of one-story wooden buildings, including a white house trimmed in red, detached guest quarters, and a barn-like structure used as a workshop, located near a meandering stream 300 yards off the highway.

When she learned about Lake’s military background and interest in survivalism, she decided he and his teachers’ aide wife would be well qualified to manage the camp.

Boy was she wrong.

Lake ended his arrangement at the motel, and happily accepted the youth camp offer.

The motel owner was glad to see him go.

He’d been dealing with complaints about Lake peeping on nude guests and trying to take their pictures. Lake and his fucking photo albums - my GOD this guy went hard on that fetish.

One time when the motel owner had dropped in to check on Lake’s work, he’d found several hand grenades on a table. He asked if they were live and Lake said, “Go ahead and pull the pin and find out.”

I imagine he added a creepy laugh at the end of that.

(Lake) “Go ahead and pull the pin and find out.”

A local man named Ernie Perdini and his wife helped Lake and Cricket and Charlie move into their new home.

And they quickly grew to hate Leonard. He had that effect on a lot of people.

Lake being Lake, he invited Ernie and his wife to come over and watch some porn with them and hinted about how he’d like to take some nude pics of Ernie’s wife.

Fuck yeah, bro! You thought you just came over to watch porn? Nah, son. You came over to DO some porn! You just got Laked, Ern!

Ernie and his lady weren’t amused and he ended up challenging Lake to a fight.

Lake told him, “I won’t find you, I’m a coward.” And then he alluded to how he could shoot them later and Ernie talked about how he had guns and could shoot them as well and the two never spoke again.

Yay, Ernie! Well done, buddy.

Shortly after moving in to their new spot, Lake, Ng, and Cricket got kicked the fuck out of Philo [feel oh].

The FBI, working closely with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, had received a tip that Charles Ng, a fugitive wanted by the U.S. Marine Corps, was hiding out with Lake in Philo [feel oh].

34.April 29, 1982: On April 29th, 1982, the task force, consisting of nine FBI men, a half dozen sheriff’s deputies, and Sheriff Steven Satterwhite—deployed in unmarked cars, a helicopter, and a fixed-wing aircraft and moved in on the trio.

They launched the operation at 9:15 in the morning, springing from the noisy chopper and several vehicles. As the officers surrounded the central camp area, one of them spotted Charles Ng vaulting from a bedroom window. Officers ran him down in an open field.

They hustled him into the helicopter for a quick flight to Ukiah’s county jail.

Agents also caught Leonard Lake after he sprinted inside a house to, everyone speculated, hide some evidence.

Inside Ng’s room were a pair of rifles, nunchaku sticks, and a billy club on a rumpled bed.

Lake was captured in a room containing a small arsenal of weapons. Lake said a few of the guns were his and the rest where Charlie’s.

Lake told agents that Charlie was “a guest who helped with odd chores.” He didn’t mention him being a rape and kill buddy. He forgot that part I guess.

Looking further around the property, agents turned up six handguns and six rifles, several of them fully automatic, along with hand grenades, TNT, a silencer, tear gas, and several boxes of ammunition. Lake also volunteered that Ng had brought in a MAC 10 assault weapon with a sound suppressor, converted to fully automatic operation, which he knew was illegal.

A few other stolen guns were found in Ng’s room, along with more martial arts weapons.

Cricket was detained but Lake Lake insisted she knew nothing of the weapons cache.

Most of the guns, Lake said, had been purchased by Ng through mail order. The dynamite, according to Lake, had been sent by Ng from Hawaii prior to his arrival in Philo.

Lake was placed under arrest and sent him with a deputy to the county jail in Ukiah. On the way to the jail, Lake asked a female deputy if they could pull over and he could snap a few quick nude pics of her.

He didn’t. But if feels like something he could do.

(Lake) “Look. I get that I’ve been arrested. And I understand you have to place me behind bars. You have a job to do. But, is having fun illegal? Is making citizen’s happy illegal? If I still end up in jail, what’s the big deal about taking a couple nude pics, Officer Sugar Tits. Let’s answer the million dollar question and find out how photogenic that puss is.”

Cricket was left at the compound. She immediately drove to the county seat and helped Lake post bail and they returned to Indian Creek Ranch the following morning.

Follow-up investigation by Sheriff Satterwhite revealed that several of the weapons had been stolen in recent Mendocino County burglaries.

Charged with seventeen felony counts, including firearms violations, and the violations of probation from the previous burglary and theft in Ukiah, Lake faced what would very likely be a long prison sentence.

Lake decided he could either take some cyanide or flee. Doing the time wasn’t an option. He chose to flee.

Lake wasn’t ready to give up on Operation Miranda.

He failed to show up at his scheduled court hearing and began living the rest of his life as a fugitive.

Cricket went to live with her parents in San Bruno but would frequently visit Lake for the rest of his life.

Charles Ng found himself on a military plane headed toward Hawaii to face a military trial.

35.Early 1982: Between being jailed waiting for his trial, his trial, and his sentence, he’d end up behind bars for two years and two months. He’d begin his actual prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas in early 1982.

He and Lake would correspond via letters during the entirety of his incarceration. Lake would send him nude photos of whatever various women and teen girls he was able to talk into posing naked for him, and he’d also sent pictures of a bunker he’d started building once that project began.

A fellow Marine incarcerated in Leavenworth with Ng, Johnny Carty, would later recall Charlie talking about all kinds of crazy shit while he was locked up.

He said Charlie wanted to get back to stealing weapons when he got out. That he wanted to steal missiles and shoot down 747s. That he wanted to rob banks and commit mass murder, and “Kill, kill, kill!” He also wanted to bomb a bus station and he, really REALLY wanted to sexual torture as many women as possible.

Johnny would later say, that it came to ways he could sexually torture someone, he “had a real imagination for it.” And Ng told Johnny once he got out he was gonna do what he wanted to do to these women in a bunker torture room full of video cameras. Another inmate, Ed Popovich, would also say that Ng confessed all kinds of dark shit to him in Leavenworth.

While Charlie settled into prison life, Lake initially moved from place to place, staying in various motels, lodging with friends, and sometimes rooming with relatives.

He made money by by committing petty thefts, burglarizing homes, and by selling marijuana. He referred to all these activities as operations, or “ops.” By assuming various aliases, he managed to avoid capture.

Lake still found time to see Cricket from time to time, and also to continue to correspond with young Darlene Davis.

36.July 1982: In July of 1982, via letters, thirty-six-year-old Lake and now seventeen-year-old Darlene arrange a meeting at Pacific Union College in Napa, California. They have a whole bunch of sex and renew their vows of of affection to one another. And then continue to meet every few weeks or month of so for the next six months until Darlene gets a new boyfriend.

Dude had an insatiable sexual appetite.

When he wasn’t hooking up with Cricket or Darlene, Lake hooking up with a variety of old acquaintances around the Bay Area. He was fucking everyone who would fuck him. Through selling weed, he was also meeting new girls he tried to seduce and take nude photos of. He also put out personal ads in papers to meet even more women.

He met twenty-six year-old Rhonda Railey that way when she answered an ad placed under the alias of “Tom” that Lake had placed asking for an eighteen year-old woman to accompany him to Hawaii for a fun, romantic week.

And that ad is kind of weird to me. Strange that A) Someone would put out an ad looking for a vacation fuck buddy, and B) That someone would respond to this ad.

It feels so different from a hookup app because if you don’t like their company, you’re stuck with them on vacation. Feels like a big gamble.

Commenting years later about it, Rhonda recalled that Leonard often talked about S&M and that she once had allowed him to tie her to the bed and spank her. Lake also, OF COURSE, showed her his collection of nude and seminude photos of women, and persuaded her to pose for him, as well.

He definitely took a camera on the trip. What was he supposed to do - NOT try and fill up another nude photo album?

When they got back from Hawaii, he and Rhonda and Cricket had some three-ways as well.

37.November 30, 1982: On November 30th, 1982, Cricket and Lake get a divorce. Cricket didn’t want to be legally tied to Lake, but, she did continue to see him and fuck him for the rest of his life.

38. Late December, 1982. Sometime around Christmas, 1982, Lake showed up at his mom’s house in San Francisco and shocked the family by wanting to reconcile with Donald, who he’d been telling everyone was a worthless piece of shit for years.

If this seems fishy its because it was.

Lake suggested that his brother accompany him on a trip up north to fill a job opening as a house sitter. Donny was PUMPED! He was overjoyed that his brother finally had taken an interest in him and he eagerly accepted.

And then no one ever saw Donny again. PRETTY suspicious. Vegas odds pretty in favor of him having been murdered quickly by big bro. That’s some cold blooded shit.

Just a few days later, a man looking a lot like Leonard Lake, like, EXACTLY like him, showed up at the Vantage Social Club in San Francisco - a brothel - introducing himself as Donald Lake and presenting Donald Lake’s driver license.

Leonard Lake had told several people over the years that he wished his brother was dead, that he was worthless, and he wasn’t kidding.

And killing his bro didn’t seem to shake him up.

After using Donny’s ID to get a membership at the Vantage Club, he took nude photos of several of the escorts working there.

Classic Lake! There’s no time to be sad! Not with so many nude pics to be taken.

39. January 1, 1983: On January 1st, 1983, Lake made the first entry in a daily journal he’d keep for the next two years. He also rented a basement room on 19th Avenue in a San Francisco house occupied by several tenants.

Four days later he visited his sister to pick up some of his stuff he’d had stored there. Told her Donald was doing great at his house sitting job that didn’t exist. He wrote of grabbing lunch at 18th and Mission, selling weed to some prostitutes and about getting a blow job.

For the next several weeks, journal entries were filled with mentions of selling some dope, taking some nude pics, hooking up with Cricket and other random women.

He also wrote of seeing his mother often. Helping her work on her home, borrowing her car, and dropping by to spend time with her.

He doesn’t write about anyone seeming to be worried that Donny hasn’t contacted anyone in days! No one seems to have cared much about poor Donny.

In addition to having taken Donny’s ID, Lake also begins to cash Donald’s disability checks from the government. What a great bro! We should all be so lucky.

40. Early February: In early February after just over a month in his basement room, after trying to fuck all of his female roommates and asking to take pictures of all of them nude, Lake was ready to leave the city again.

Sure, being a creepy, rape-y, murder-y fuck living in the city was fun, but, he wasn’t able to build a bunker/sound proof fuck dungeon in San Francisco, so what was the point of staying there?

41.February 19th, 1983: On February 19th, Lake watched the Collector again and recorded it. He wrote: “Ah, ‘The Collector.’ Has it really been near 20 years I’ve carried this fantasy? And Miranda ... how fitting ... my lovely little prisoner of the future. I suppose in my way I am the same wimp as ‘the hero,’ and in my way just as crazy. I have no doubt that we wimps have been compensating for our inabilities since the dawn of history. Sad, really. Still, how can we die if we never live? ...”

Uh. Okay. Whatever that means. Lake is thinking about Operation Miranda a LOT.

Cricket’s father owned a remote, out of the way cabin near Wilseyville, about three hours from San Francisco and seventy miles East of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

And Lake started taking a lot of trips to this cabin to scope it out as a possible bunker site, in early 1983.

42. March 30th, 1983: On March 30th, 1982, Leonard wrote some especially creepy shit in his journal:

“Once I had a wife. She was my connection to the world. Through her, I could love, trust, believe in things others are allowed to believe in. I could have died for her, killed for her, even gone to jail, give up my freedom in exchange for the security of her love. Once I had a wife. “Now I have no ties to the world. I am both above it and removed from it. Oh, there are those I love, my sisters, even Cricket still. But none of these bind me to the order of existence.

I am free to die, with no responsibility. All I love, I love alone. Freedom. An empty privilege [but] still one I must bear with determination.

“Amusing. Our ‘land of the free’ is not prepared to deal effectively with a truly free man. What can they do to one who carries cyanide pills in his pockets? When death holds no fears—when there are no responsibilities beyond the next meal?

Society. You are being socked and you don’t understand by who or why. And if you did, you are powerless against one who is not afraid to die.”

Fuuuuuck. Dude had no conscious and was willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs were centered around sexually abusing women.

Dude was a monster who knew he was a monster.

43. April 1st, 1983: In April, 1983, Leonard decides to murder a man he’d been in regular contact with off and on for over a decade - Charles Gunnar. They’d stayed at each other’s houses, Charles had known both his first wife, Karen, and also Cricket, and Leonard was was close to Charles’s wife and kids. Leonard had even slept with Charles’ wife once, and, I’m guessing, taken some nude pics.

Leonard called the plan to kill the friend he’d had the longest, “Operation Fish.”

Random detail about Charles - he volunteered as a birthday clown and actually was in charge of a local troop of birthday clowns.

Lake apparently didn’t hang around anyone who didn’t march to the beat of a different drummer.

44.May 24th, 1983: On May 24th, Lake wrote in his journal that the time was right to kill Charles.

A friend of Charles, Wendy Oatman, another part-time clown, agreed to watch Charles’ kids for a week, and Lake took Charles to Wilseyville and murdered him.

He never said how. Just like with his brother Donny, Charles took off with Lake and then was never seen again.

When Lake returned without Charles, he told Wendy that Charles had made a younger woman, fell in love, and had taken off with her.

And that was it for Charles.

Oh, and Lake asked Wendy if he could fuck her, if his ex-wife Cricket AND he could fuck her, and if he could take nude pics of her. She said no to all three offers.

Did he ever NOT ask to take nude pics of a woman he met?

(Denny’s waitress) “Alright, sir, are you ready to order?”

(Lake) “You bet. Samantha, I’d like the Moons Over My Hammy, a side of extra bacon, a cherry coke, and, can you pop that top off and let me snap some pics of them titties?

No? Alright - just the food and soda. Oh, actually, Samantha, would be interested after work in fucking me, or my wife, or both of us? No. Just the food and drink then.

You win some, you lose some.”

After killing Charles Gunnar, Lake started driving around his van and collecting his disability payments. Dude LOVED to collect other dude’s disability payments.

Lake also acted as a father figure to Charles two teen daughters. The man who killed their dad bought clothes for them, cooked for them, and didn’t even try and take nude pics of them.

45.Summer 1983: In the summer of 1983, Lake thought about maybe building his doomsday bunker in a sparsely populated un- incorporated community called Meyer’s flat in Humbolt County.

He brought a woman and her two daughters to a cabin he rented there a few times and of course showed her his many, many nude albums and talked to her about the apocalypse and about taking cyanide and she left.

That sister he wanted to fuck and maybe did fuck - Janet- visited him and found his albums as well and apparently did NOT ask him “But seriously, Richard, where the fuck is Donny?”

Why does no one care about DONNY??

He wrote all kinds of creepy shit in his journal, like about meeting a twelve year old girl he wanted to take nude pics of, a girl he called, “Jail bait.”

Such a creep.

By October, he gave up on Humbolt County, and decided that Cricket’s dad’s place in Wilseyville was the best place for his apocalyptic rape dungeon.

Cricket joined him in Calaveras County for the first weekend in October.

Calaveras County is shaped like a giant arrow point, aimed northeast toward Lake Tahoe, 135 miles away over the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevada range.

It is a torturous journey of more than twenty miles to Wilseyville along a twisting two-lane road from the closest real town - the unincorporated community of San Andreas.

Wilseyville consisted of a post office, a small general market, a cluster of two or three other buildings and about three dozen little homes.

The entire area is shaded by towering ponderosa pines and a scattering of live oak trees. In the winter, snow often covers the rugged, hilly terrain. Leonard Lake, in order to reach the property belonging to Cricket’s father, took a small, windy street called Blue Mountain Road to an unpaved driveway.

About 200 yards up the dirt road, he pulled into a clearing where the house stood. A one-story, rectangular, yellow wooden structure, topped by a low-angle light-green roof, stood at the top of a steep slope. On two sides, an expansive redwood deck projected over the hillside.

Inside, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a combination kitchen- dining room filled 1,100 square feet.

And right after moving in, he put an ad on a community bulletin board in the little nearby town of West Point, looking for women who wanted their pictures taken and he added more photos to his albums.

He also got started on his bunker. It was finally time for Operation Miranda. He rented a backhoe to scoop dirt out of a slope only fifteen yards from one corner of the house.

46.October 23rd, 1983: On October 23rd, 1983, Leonard Lake laid out EXACTLY why he wanted to do what he and Charles Ng DID end up doing to who knows how many young women in Operation Miranda.

At home in Wilseyville, this sick fuck put a video camera on a tripod, hit record, and sat down in a well-worn, brown recliner and looked into the lens.

Dressed in a long-sleeved black-and-white patterned shirt, faded jeans, and brown boots, Lake clasped his hands in his lap, and, emotionless, starting talking:

“This tape, which you’re hearing now, is going to be the lead-in of the various phases of construction of a building which, hopefully, will be the first of a series of underground buildings.”

He then went on a bit to describe that the public purpose of the above-ground portion of the building was to be a tool room and storage room. A shop, basically.

And then he spoke about the REAL reason for its construction.

Still showing no emotion, he said: “The main emphasis of the building, the whole justification for its expense and its effort, will be a hidden portion . . . a secret room, if we can call it that, that will house a cell . . . a jail cell, if you will.”

The purpose of that cell . . . will be the imprisonment of a young lady who probably, at this moment, is unknown to me.”

Then the Doomsday prepper switched things up to speak about other purposes for building a variety of underground buildings, talking about living in “troubled times,” and “the imminent holocaust” he believed would soon wipe out most of humanity.

The only survivors, Lake theorized, were those who possessed the foresight to build bunkers in the mountains and stock them with food, weapons, and money.

His personal bunker, though, he said, would also provide a place to live out his dark sexual fantasies. And this is the REAL reason he was building all this.

He said:

“For anyone that is interested, anyone who needs my justification and my rationalizations as to why I would want to imprison, and, in fact, enslave [a woman] they have only to look closely at me… I’m a realist.

I’m thirty-eight years old, a bit chubby, not much hair and losing what I have, not particularly attracting to women.

All of the traditional magnets, the money, position, power, I don’t have. And yet, I’m still very sexually active, and I’m still very much attracted to a particular type of woman who, almost by definition, is totally uninterested in me….

I’m attracted to young women. Sometimes even as young as twelve, although to be fair, certainly up to eighteen to twenty-two is a pretty much ideal range as far as my interests go.

I like very slim women, very pretty, of course petite, small- breasted, long hair.

[But] such a woman, by virtue of her youth, her attractiveness, her desirability to ... the majority of mankind, simply has better options. There’s no particular reason why such a woman should be interested in me. But there’s more to it than that. It’s difficult to explain my personality in twenty-five words or less, but I am, in fact, a loner. I enjoy peace. The quiet, the solitude. I enjoy being by myself, and while my relationships with women in the past have been sexually successful, socially they’ve been almost always a failure. I’ve gone through two divorces, innumerable women, fifty to fifty-five, I forget exactly the count.

I’m afraid the bottom-line statement is the simple fact that I’m a sexist slob. I enjoy using women and, of course, women aren’t particularly interested in being used. I certainly enjoy sex. I certainly enjoy the dominance of climbing on a woman and using her body. But I’m not particularly interested in the id, the ego, all the things that a man should be interested in to complement a woman’s needs…

And then he talks a bit how he can fake non-sexual interest in a woman but that he’d rather not, and he says:

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. I want to be able to use a woman whenever and however I want. And when I’m tired or satiated or bored or not interested, I simply want to put her away. Lock her up in a little room and get her out of my sight…

“Such an arrangement,” he confessed, “is not only blatantly sexist, but highly illegal, there’s no doubt about that it. It violates all of the human rights and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I’m going to spare posterity my concepts of other people’s morality.

I’m explaining my morality, what I feel, what I want, and as of this moment, I’m going to try to get. The advantages of such a situation are, of course, obvious and, even beyond sexual, such a woman, totally enslaved, would be useful for the mundane chores I have to do, but am not particularly interested in doing: clean house, washing dishes, et cetera. A slave. There’s no way around it. Primarily a sexual slave, but nonetheless a physical slave, as well.”

Still expressionless, still not showing any emotion, speaking barely above a whisper, Lake said,

“And I believe that if I can construct a holding cell, a place where I can put such a woman, where I can walk off and feel secure that she can’t escape, that I can create a facility that is so stark, and so empty, so cold, so quiet, so totally removed from the world, that fairly quickly, by a combination of painful punishments when I’m displeased, and minor rewards such as music or magazines or some such stuff, that I can quickly condition—this is my belief— that I can quickly condition a young woman to cooperate with me fully, and in fact, even look forward to cooperating with me, simply for no other reason than such cooperation would be a relief from boredom.”

Taking a breath, and pausing no more that a few seconds, Lake added,

“Whether I can do this or not will remain to be seen. Obviously, I’ve never done such a thing before, and it may not work. However, I want to try. I want to try.”

Then he talked about the costs and logistics of constructing his bunker for a few moments, before staring straight into the camera and saying… “Life, as I am living it, is boring. The challenge of this project, the excitement, the thrill of it will be an exciting experience even if it fails. As long as I don’t get caught, it’s very attractive. It’s something that I’ve fantasized daily about. We’ll see. I don’t think there’s much more to say on the subject…I can hardly wait.”

Holy SHIT! Well, there you go.

He doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. The is the purest, most honest confession I can remember any of the dirtbags we’ve covered on Timesuck ever giving.

Why did Lake imprison and sexually torture women? Because he wanted a sex slave, pure and simple. He wanted to try and create a Stockholm syndrome situation with a woman - a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during their captivity.

That term - by the way - came from a 1973 bank robbery in Sweden where Jan-Erik Olsson, a convict on parole, took four employees of the bank - three women and one man - hostage during a failed bank robbery in Stockholm. He negotiated the release from prison of his friend Clark Olofsson to assist him. They held the hostages captive for six days in one of the bank's vaults.

And when the hostages were released, none of them would testify against either captor in court; instead they began raising money for their defense. They liked them.

Lake wanted to create his “The Collector” version of this. Hold a woman hostage, get her to somehow like her captor, do what he wanted to her sexually, and not have to care for her.

Talk about BRUTAL honesty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Soon after making this tape, Lake wrote of getting nervous about being caught. He wasn’t able to continue cashing Charles Gunnar’s state checks, writing, “Op Fish will terminate soon. Paperwork is arriving that I can not comply with. Must start scouting around for suitable replacement. Should have already been at this.”

47.December 15th, 1983: Two weeks before Christmas 1983, needing help on the construction project, Lake places an ad in the local newspaper. Randy Stuart, fifteen, responds and accepts an invitation to the cabin. Lake introduces himself as “Charles Gunnar” and hires him.

Randy would later recall that while he worked for Lake, Cricket brought several young girls, age sixteen or seventeen, to the cabin so that Lake could photograph them.

And that one time Lake showed him three videos of girls disrobing and putting on new garments. Randy realized that the girls didn’t know they were being recorded. Each video depicted at least three different women.

48.December 31, 1983: To celebrate New Year’s Eve,1983, Lake drove to San Francisco to meet a female friend of Cricket’s and her boyfriend. He later wrote, “Went hot tubbing with them. Later took them to dinner.” And he discussed a new idea, I’m assuming with Cricket, called, ‘Operation Scott.’” - he wanted to kill a new guy to keep that disability money coming in.

49.February 1984: By February of 1984, the bunker is almost built.

With completion in sight, Lake’s thoughts turned to his plan to enslave a female victim. which he records in his journal.

He philosophized: “While I enjoy company, I don’t want an independent guest or girlfriend around for too long or too often. I enjoy quiet, not having to entertain or clean up after others. People around seem to get in the way, get into things, attempt to change things. When Miranda arrives, she’ll be on a strictly helpmate basis. She’ll be around when I need help, do what she’s told, and to go [to] her room when I’m finished with her.”

On a weekend trip to the Bay area, Lake picks up a tabloid newspaper, scans the personals, and makes a telephone call to a gay man named Phil wishing to find a partner who enjoys oral sex.

He later wrote in his journal, “Went over to his house to case the place. Nothing of immediate grab-able value, so I let him give me head. Surprisingly very good. Slow and deep as I like it. Still very strange having a man do it. No reciprocation of course. With a little work, I might be able to pass for him. Considering a Fishlike operation.”

Uh oh. Not looking good for Phil. He’s sucking Lake’s dick while Lake is considering killing him and taking his identity.

Lake ends up inviting Phil out to his place on March 16th and the day before, he cancels his trip.

I wonder if this Phil guy learned about Lake and realized that if he hadn’t of canceled, he would’ve for SURE been murdered.

Not a lot happens the next several months. He shoots a neighbor’s dog for barking too much and then smooths things over by giving the neighbor some homemade porn. Seriously.

And he convinces the younger sister of the kid working for him on building the bunker to let him take some pictures of her breasts.

Just shooting a pet and taking some kiddie porn. Slow couple of months for Lake.

50.June 29, 1984: On June 29, 1984, Lake’s buddy, Charlie Ng, walks out of the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks, twenty- six months after he had been arrested at Philo.

51.July 9th, 1984: On Monday, July 9th, after hooking up with a lady he’d corresponded with while in prison and NOT killing her, and visiting a guy he’d been locked up with, Cricket picks up Charlie at the San Francisco airport.

Right before Ng arrived, Lake had rented an apartment in San Francisco in the same building where he’d lived a year earlier, on 19th Avenue, near Golden Gate Park. A huge apartment building called “the Pink Palace,” that would be converted to senior housing shortly after Lake rented this room and he and Ng started killing various tenants.

Ng helped with the moving-in chores at the new apartment, while the two men conversed about old times and Ng’s prison experiences and undoubtably discussed all the nasty shit they wanted to do.

At this point, Lake takes a two month break for his journal, later writing that he’d do so “to allow a period of time to pass that was best left unrecorded.”

Creepy. We’ll never know exactly how much horrible shit he and Ng did in the summer of ’84.

Following Ng’s arrival in San Francisco, there would be a sudden spike in home invasions, burglaries, and unsolved murders in the area that was probably not coincidental.

Ng also quickly was able to get a driver’s license and social security guard under the name of Mike Kimoto. No one knows how this fucker was always able to get fake identification information so quickly.

A woman saw a man who looked exactly like Charles Ng leaving the apart of a man who was murdered on July 25th dragging what she assumed later to be a body. Two other men had been killed near Lake and Ng’s apartment a few days before. Investigators would later believe that these murders and robberies and many other crimes were fueling bunker construction plans.

Lake, going by the name of Alan Drey now, started asking a lot of Pink Palace residents to come to the mountains with him. If they were women, he’d ask them to come for a photo shoot. If they were a dude, he’d ask them to come check out some weed he was growing he’d be happy to sell them so they could deal it.

37 year old Pink Palace resident Maurice Rock went with Lake to pick marijuana to sell that summer and was never seen again.

Pink Palace woman Shreyl Okoro was approached by Lake to take some nude photos that summer, and she also is never seen again.

A local man named Randy Jacobsen who lived nearby who owned a broken-down van that Alan Drey aka Lake wanted to buy also goes missing.

His girl friend, Maysha McClennan later recalled that “Alan” came to Randy’s house to talk to him about buying it. She had to hurry off to school and left the two of them.

And it was the last time she or anyone else would ever see Randy and his van was gone after that.

A few days later she received a letter in the mail from “Randy” suspiciously saying that he’d decided to head off to San Jose with some guy named Steve he’d just met to help with some big pot operation she’d never heard about. The letter wasn’t in Randy’s handwriting and didn’t mention when, if ever, he’d come back to San Francisco.

After he’d been gone for a full week, she checked his bank account, saw that a disability check of his had been recently cashed, and she figured he was okay.

He wasn’t. He was dead. And now Lake was cashing his checks. Next to trying to take nude photos of every woman he met, trying to kill and cash the disability checks of everyone he knew who was receiving disability checks was Lake’s favorite thing to do.

52.September 1984: Shortly after arriving back in San Francisco, Ng rented a place a half mile from Lake’s apartment on Lenox Way that he most likely payed for with money he’d taken from people he’d also sometimes killed.

On September 28th, to keep from arousing too much suspicion, Charles Ng got a straight job, too, at Dennis Moving Company located on California Street. Took it under his real name.

This month, Lake also began to record entries in his journal again.

He wrote,

“I have learned that my programming [in my] youth . . . that which is called morality, either was not given or was given poorly. To all purposes save a very few, I have no morality . . . accept it as fact. In terms of life or death, neither seems to move me….”

So he’s figured out he’s a complete sociopath who isn’t bothered by killing his brother, close friend, or strangers. He also writes:

“The past two months saw Miranda come to fruit. That taught me more. The perfect woman is one who is totally controlled, a woman who does exactly what she is told and nothing else.

There are no sexual problems with a totally submissive woman. There are no frustrations. There [is] only pleasure and contentment. I have observed, I believe, one woman who found this not only acceptable but even desirable. I doubt this will be the norm and in this case the woman’s low mentality probably affected the discovery. A whore, druggy, and fool. Still, I enjoyed using her and (seemingly) she enjoyed the use. I do hope I do better next time, however.... Pink Palace helped with money and [sex].”

Not sure who this woman he is referring to is. Numerous Ng and Lake murder victims would never be identified.

53.October 1984: Ng gets busted for shoplifting in Daly City in October of 1984. Dude has been stealing shit since he was a kid and isn’t about to stop now.

Lake writes in his journal about being annoyed with having to bail him out.

54.October 31st, 1984: On Halloween, Lake writes about finding a new person to kill and make some money off of. He writes about seeing the ad of a San Francisco Man named Paul Cosner who wanted to sell his car. Lake writes about the man looking enough like him to be able to use his ID.

A few days later Lake would meet up with Paul to talk about buying that car, and guess what?

No one would ever see Paul again.

55.November 9, 1984: On the evening of November 9th, Lake made the last entries in the journal that had covered a little more than two years.

He typed, “And so life goes on up here. On alternate days it has rained and I’ve done nothing.” He mentioned the possible arrival of another woman he’d met. “She may come up this weekend. If she does come, I expect to screw her. Why else would a woman over 40 travel 100 miles to visit a man she doesn’t know if she doesn’t want to be screwed? Been playing with the vid equipment. Walking the dog. General stuff. As ever, reading a lot. Tonight, I retyped all my written journal notes. End here.”

There would be no more record of Leonard Lake’s daily life. But some videotapes would be made that would confirm his completion of Operation Miranda.

56.Mid November, 1984: The week of November 9th, Lake and Ng made a stop at the post office in Pioneer, a few miles above Wilseyville, and rented two post office boxes. Lake used the name and identification documents of Randy Jacobson, while Ng claimed to be Michael Kimoto. These addresses would be used to correspond with future victims.

57. January 18, 1985: On January 18th, 1985, Charle Ng’s moving company co-worker Cliff Peranteau would disappear forever.

Two letters would show up supposedly from Cliff at the company a few weeks later. The both were postmarked in Wilseyville.

One, made out to Cliff and Ng’s boss, said: “Dennis, Sorry to leave on such short notice, but a new job, place to live and a honey came all at once. Please send my check for the last three days I worked and my W-2 to my new address below. Thanks, Cliff.”

Fucking crazy how many people disappeared around these two dudes. And investigators don’t yet have a clue they’re killing people.

58. Feb 1, 1985: On February 1st, Lake and Ng get some new neighbors in Wilseyville.

A young San Diego couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, with their baby, moved into a cabin near Wilseyville.

They quickly meet the neighbor who lived down the slope from them, a man who introduced himself as Charles Gunnar who said he was a professional photographer. The photos. He never stops.

Lonnie and Brenda’s friends, Scott Stapley and Tori Doolin drove up to the cabin in mid-February to help them settle in.

When Stapley and his girlfriend returned to San Diego, he showed the pictures to his coworker, Terijo Kohler, who had been a close friend for nearly six years.

Also in February, a local San Francisco musician in a band called Crash n Burn, Jeff Gerald, starts working with Charles Ng at Dennis Moving Company.

He’d worked there before and Dennis let him have seniority over Ng and Charlie doesn’t care for this. He complains to Dennis, Dennis doesn’t do anything about it, and, on February 24th, Jeff meets Charlie to “help someone move” and he disappears and is never seen again.

59.February 25th: On February 25th, Leonard Lake visits a doctor about twenty miles from Wilseyville.

One of his fingers on his left hand has been shot.

Prior to showing up unannounced at the doctor’s office, Lake had called his sister Janet at home at close to eleven o’clock Saturday night and told her he’d been shot in his hand.

Since she had experience as a nurse, he wanted advice on how to treat it. Janet gave him instructions on cleaning and bandaging the wound.

And then he showed up at her door early the following morning, after a three-hour drive and asked her to give him treatment.

He told her he’d picked up a man who wanted to buy some weed and the dude had tried to “burn” him, and a struggle ensued in which the guy’s gun discharged, sending a bullet into a finger of Lake’s left hand.

And Janet still doesn’t ask where the fuck Donny is. Poor Donny! Did anyone even ever file a missing persons report?

It’s though the guy who shot Lake was probably Jeff Gerald, the second Charles Ng coworker to go missing in a month’s time. 60.April 1985: In April of 1985, Lake and Ng find the first known Operation Miranda victim, eighteen-year-old Kathleen Elizabeth Allen.

Kathleen was doing good before she ran into Lake and Ng.

She was young and smart and hard working and kind and beautiful. She was excited for her future.

She had a full-time job at Safeway in nearby Milpitas [mill pete us], where she’d worked for most of a year.

Her boyfriend, Michael Sean Carroll, twenty-three, worked at a pizza restaurant.

The two had recently rented a motel room together to stay in until they could find a more permanent residence.

And then on Friday, April 12th, Mike didn’t come home.

By Sunday, April 14, Kathi was worried sick.

She struggled through her work duties at Safeway, trying not to think about where Scott could be. And then she got a disturbing phone call - a call that sent her fears about Mike skyrocketing through the roof.

Someone called her, undoubtably Lake or Ng, saying that Mike had experienced some serious problems in San Francisco and had sought refuge near Lake Tahoe, about 140 miles away.

The person on the phone asked Kathi to head to Tahoe and meet him.

They said they would send someone to pick her up at the supermarket. A coworker at Safeway would later say that Kathi told them that “Mike had been shot and might be dead.”

That same Sunday evening, Kathi called a friend, James Baio, and told him that a strange man had arrived to pick her up and take her to Mike, and that the guy talked about wanting to take pictures of her.

Clearly - this is Lake.

James asked Kathi to call when she arrived at her destination, and Kathi promised she would.

He’d never hear from her again.

A few hours later, Kathi Allen found herself in terrifying circumstances, unable to telephone anyone in the outside world. A video camera recorded segments of her nightmarish predicament.

As the tiny red light on the camcorder blinked, Kathi sat in a well- worn brown fabric recliner chair, her legs crossed. She wore a white jersey with red short sleeves, dark pants, and black shoes.

Handcuffs bound her wrists together behind her back.

She sat perfectly still with a numb expression on her face, saying nothing.

From behind the camera, the voice of Leonard Lake filled the room. “Mike owes us,” he said. “He can’t pay. Now we’re going to give you a choice, Kathi, and this is probably the last choice that we’re going to give you. You can go along with us, you can cooperate, you can do everything we tell you to do willingly, and in approximately thirty days, if you want a date to write on your calendar—the fifteenth of May—we will either drug you, blindfold you or in some way or other make sure you don’t know where you are and where you’re going, and take you back to the city and let you go. And what you say at that time… I don’t care. My name you don’t know. His name is Charlie, but screw it.”

At this point, Charles Ng emerged from shadows in the dimly lit room, dressed in dark colors. Lake, wearing a tan knit sweater, entered camera range, knelt to adjust the bonds on her ankles, and moved back out of sight.

He said, “If you don’t cooperate with us, if you don’t agree this evening, right now, to cooperate with us, we’ll probably put a round through your head and take you out and bury you in the same area we buried Mike.”

A few minutes later, Lake tells Kathi: “While you’re here, we’ll keep you busy. You’ll wash for us, you’ll clean for us, cook for us, you’ll fuck for us. That’s your choice in a nutshell.

And a few minutes later, he adds: “In the last twenty-four hours we’ve been tired, nervous, a little high-strung, perhaps. We expect you to do something about that. Believe me, we both need it. If you go along with us, cooperate with us, we’ll be as nice as we can to you within the limits of keeping you prisoner. If you don’t go along with us, we’ll probably take you into the bed, tie you down, rape you, shoot you, and bury you. Sorry, lady, time’s up. Make your choice.”

And then Lake instructs Kathi to take off all her clothes, and tells her that Charlie is going to go shower with her, and that when she was cleaned up, they’d both have their way with her.

Back at her Safeway, Kathi’s store manager received an unexpected call from her on Monday. Kathi asked for an extended leave of four weeks, explaining that she had a prospective job lined up in the Lake Tahoe area. The manager granted her request. He would subsequently receive a typed letter, under which appeared to be her signature, announcing that both she and her boyfriend, Mike Carroll, had found permanent jobs and would be staying in their new location. It also contained a request for the manager to clean out her locker and forward the contents, along with her W-2 form, to a post office box in - I bet you can guess it - Wilseyville, California.

Two more tapes of Kathi would later be found. In the second tape, she gives Ng a massage. In the third tape, Lake takes some nude photos of her. After that, no one knows what happened to Kathi because Charlie never confessed and Lake never made it to court.

Lake called a friend the week after Kathi’s abduction and had him pick up Mike Carroll’s car, saying it was abandoned, and had him sell it.

61.Early April 1985: Meanwhile, in early April of 1985, Lake’s new neighbors are have grown increasingly frustrated with the man they know as as Charles Gunnar.

When Lonnie Bond conducts some out-of-town business, Lake stops by his house and ask his wife Brenda to take some nude pics.

Classic Lake! You just got Laked, Brenda!

Curtis Everett, Lonnie’s pal and business associate, stays overnight at the cabin and Bond tells him he’s trying to “stay clear” of Gunnar, because Gunnar is a survivalist who has weapons and deals weed.

Bond tells Everett that he’d been in Gunnar’s house, and had seen all sorts of guns, grenades, and even a fucking grenade launcher.

Bond had also noticed, shelves in Gunnar’s house jammed with videotapes, and he’d heard he “was into making smut movies.” And Gunnar, Everett later said, had the “hots” for Brenda and continually bothered her about modeling for him.

She’d been so unnerved by the insistent and constant proposals that she grew afraid to stay home alone.

62.April 17, 1985: In Mid-April Bond and Everett met in a valley town to work on a commercial enterprise, while Brenda and Lonnie Jr. stayed with acquaintances in San Diego.

And Bond told Everett that he’d had enough of Gunnar’s shit.

He told them that as soon as their business was done in the valley, he was going to “take care of the problems in Wilseyville,” with a gun. Everett would later say that he interpreted the comment to mean that Bond planned to “have it out with Gunnar and pay him back for messing with his woman.”

And he would have it out with Lake and he and a friend he had come with him to deal with Lake, Scott Stapley, would lose.

By Wednesday morning, April 17th, he and his baby, Lonnie, Jr and his friend Scott would be dead and his wife would either be dead or was about to die, being held captive, a new playmate for Lake and Ng’s Miranda project.

Lake and Ng, after the murders, drove to San Diego and showed up at Scott’s girlfriend Tori Doolin’s home.

Lake told her he wanted all of Scott’s belongings to take back with him to make it look like Scott had moved out so that nobody came looking for him.

Lake said he’d tried to cover up the deaths of Scott, Lonnie, Brenda, and Lonnie, Jr;, at Wilseyville, because it looked like there were illegal guns and drugs in the cabin, and he didn’t want the police snooping around. He said it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Completely overwhelmed by shock, Tori gave him all of Scott’s stuff.

Dude was a smooth talking psychopath.

In Michigan the families of Brenda O’Connor and Lonnie Bond couldn’t believe it when phone calls and letters from their loved ones suddenly ceased without explanation.

Several other families had recently felt the same horror when their kin had vanished: Donald Lake, Charles Gunnar, Maurice Rock, Sheryl Okoro, Randy Jacobson, Harvey Dubs, Deborah Dubs, Sean Dubs, Paul Cosner, Clifford Peranteau, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Kathleen Allen, Lonnie Bond, Brenda O’Connor, and Lonnie Bond Jr.

Two babies, four women, ten men, and god knows how many others. All missing. All having been in contact with Leonard Lake or Charles Ng or both right before the vanished.

A woman had seen Charles Ng leaving the San Francisco residence of the dubs family - baby Sean was only 16 months old - in July of 1984, shortly before they vanished along with a lot of Harvey Dubs video equipment - he’d recently opened up a business called “Video Dubs,” to either record weddings, graduations, etc or rent out expensive video equipment for others to record these events.

It’s believed Ng and Lake killed them as well to take their equipment to use for the Miranda Project.

63.Early May, 1985: By early May of 1985, there had been so many victims that Lake could transfer money from one victim to another for his personal use. Using Randy Jacobson’s identification, he cashed a check to him that appeared to have been written by Kathleen Allen, from her credit union account, weeks after both were dead.

64.June 2, 1985: On Sunday, June 2nd, 1985, Lake and Ng’s long run of murder and mayhem would FINALLY come to an end.

They wanted some more materials to torture people with, so Ng and Lake drove to a South San Francisco lumberyard-supply store at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Spruce Street.

It wasn’t a particularly chilly day, but Ng wore a heavy parka, perfect for concealing shoplifted items.

Leaving a Honda in the store’s front parking lot, Lake and Ng strolled inside. Ng stopped to examine a display of table vises, while Lake wandered off to another section of the store.

Reserve South San Francisco Police Department officer John Kallas happened to enter the store a few minutes later, and watched a short, muscular Asian man walking toward him carrying a large vise.

Fully expecting him to turn left toward the sales counter, Kallas was surprised when he instead marched quickly out the front door.

Instantly, Kallas approached the salesclerk and asked if he’d sold the man a vise. When the clerk said he hadn’t, Kallas said, “Well, if no one sold a vise, then you just got ripped off.”

Accompanied by another clerk, Kallas sprinted outside to the parking lot to find Ng.

He spotted him standing at the passenger door of a copper- colored Honda Prelude, about seventy-five feet from the entrance.

When Kallas spotted him, Ng moved away and walked diagonally toward the intersection of Spruce and Airport.

The clerk shouted at him to stop and Ng picked up his pace and vanished from sight.

Kallas, meanwhile, returned to the Honda, looking for the vise, and saw a box of wrenches on the backseat.

Kallas called in the crime and Officer Daniel Wright came to the store.

Since the Honda’s trunk lid remained open, Wright looked inside and found the vise, which was still marked with a $75 price tag.

He later recalled, “There was a South City Lumber and Supply bag directly next to it, and I looked through that for any type of receipt, but found none.”

Kallas wondered aloud if any more stolen property might be in the car, so Wright scanned through the trunk’s contents. He later reported, “I found a backpack, lifted it, and it was heavy.

Inside was a gun case containing a semiautomatic Sturm Ruger . 22 caliber handgun and a silencer.

Examining the weapon closer, Kallas noted a serial number and found that the weapon had been recently purchased by R. Scott Stapley in San Diego.

Wright had just completed logging this information when a bearded man exited the store, approached him, and said that everything was all right. He said he’d taken care of the bill for the vise that his friend had accidentally carried out, so there was no reason to pursue the matter.

When Officer Wright asked him who he was, Lake said, “My name is Stapley.” And then he reached for his billfold and withdrew a driver’s license for Robin Scott Stapley.

Wright once again used his radio to check for any warrants on Stapley.

Picking up the silencer, Wright told “Stapley” that it was an illegal possession and placed him under arrest, handcuffed him, and radioed a request for another officer to transport him to the station.

While Lake was taken in, Write found a stun gun and nine slide photographs of Lonnie Bond, Brenda O’Conner, and Lonnie Bond Jr.

Lake had taken pictures of all of these people before killing them! Made them into slide photos so he could, I’m guessing, watch them whenever he wanted to and relive his kills. Photo albums of nude women he’d slept with or at least talked into taking some pictures, and pictures of people he’d murdered. His collections. He really was The Collector. Like Bob Berdella in Kansas City, a much darker one than the character in the book or the movie.

I wonder how many people he showed nude photos of murder victims too? I’m sure he got off on shit like that.

Officer Wright called in for another check, this time on the vehicle. He learned it belonged to a missing person - Paul Cosner of San Francisco.

At the police station, the bearded man calling himself Scott Stapley faced some serious questions.

In an interrogation room, an officer spoke to Stapley, and told him how they knew his Honda belonged to a man named Paul Cosner, who had been missing for nine months. That someone had attached license plates registered to a Buick owned by Lonnie Bond, another missing person.

They had him. The fucking had him.

Lake slumped in his chair, defeated. His eyes welled up with tears.

He asked for a piece of paper and a pen, saying he needed to write a note to his wife before giving his confession. His interrogator removed his handcuffs so Lake could do so.

While Lake scrawled a message, he asked for a glass of water and was given one.

He admitted that his real name was Leonard Thomas Lake, and told the police he was wanted on outstanding charges in Mendocino County.

He also identified his companion as Charles Ng, adding that Ng had served time in Leavenworth.

Then he wrote his note, which said:

“Dear Lyn - aka Cricket,

I love you. I forgive you. Freedom is better than all else. Tell Janet I’m sorry. Mom, Patty, and all. I’m sorry for all the trouble. Love, Leonard.”

Lake then folded the paper and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.

And before the handcuffs could be snapped back on his wrists, he reached under his collar, pulled out one of those cyanide pills he would never shut the fuck up about, and gulped it down with a quick swallow of water.

Moments later, he collapsed on the floor, and fell into convulsions.

He did it. He said for years he’d take cyanide to avoid prison time and he wasn’t joking.

Right before he lost consciousness, he was able to talk one of his interrogators into taking a quick couple of nudey pics.

Of course that’s not true. Would love it if it was.

Lake was rushed to a nearby hospital and put on life-support systems. He’s never regain consciousness.

Detectives quickly contacted Lynn “Cricket” Balazs who lead them to the cabin and bunker that investigators immediately got a search warrant for.

Investigators soon stepped inside Lake’s combination toolshed / workshop, and found an array of construction tools, as expected, along with shovels, picks, a wheelbarrow, and other ordinary implements.

They also found a wall covered in photos of scantily clad young women, not all of whom seemed happy to be having their picture taken.

Detectives knew they’d faced the task of identifying a variety of murder victims.

By pacing the perimeter outside, the investigators realized there was considerably more space inside than what was being used by the workshop.

They reentered the building and saw piano hinges on a plywood wall, and realized there was a hidden door behind some shelves.

The hinges were bent as if someone on the other side had pushed or pounded on the concealed door.

When the officers opened it, they found that it led through a narrow passageway to a rectangular chamber.

They would label this chamber, “the living area.”

The room contained a bed, a table with a lamp, a desk, a dresser, shelves for food storage, some clothing, and various other supplies. Also - and how psychotic is this - a copy of The Collector, by John Fowles, rested on the bookshelf.

It was the only book on the shelf. If captives wanted to read, this is what they got to read. MAN he was committed to that dark fantasy.

At one end of the chamber, a plywood partition divided the space, making yet a third tiny room no more that 3½ feet wide by 6½ feet long.

It contained a narrow platform, about two feet wide, on which lay a foam-rubber pad that might be used for a bed.

A five-gallon plastic bucket with a roll of toilet paper sat in one dark corner.

The cell had been completely soundproofed.

A mirror had been inserted into the wooden wall between the living area and the tiny cell, providing a one-way view into the cramped cubicle so someone outside the cell could watch whoever was inside.

A single, typed sheet of paper was posted on one wall.

All the words were written in upper case later: It said, “RULES: a) 1) I MUST ALWAYS BE READY TO SERVICE MY MASTER. I MUST BE CLEAN, BRUSHED, AND MADE-UP WITH MY CELL NEAT. b) 2) I MUST NEVER SPEAK UNLESS SPOKEN TO. UNLESS IN BED, I MUST NEVER LOOK MY MASTER IN THE EYE, BUT MUST KEEP MY EYES DOWNCAST. c) 3) I MUST NEVER SHOW MY DISRESPECT, EITHER VERBALLY OR SILENT. I MUST NEVER CROSS MY ARMS OR LEGS IN FRONT OF MY BODY, OR CLENCH MY FISTS, AND UNLESS EATING, MUST ALWAYS KEEP MY LIPS PARTED.

4) I MUST BE OBEDIENT COMPLETELY AND IN ALL THINGS. I MUST OBEY IMMEDIATELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION OR COMMENT. d) 5) I MUST ALWAYS BE QUIET WHEN LOCKED IN MY CELL. e) 6) I MUST REMEMBER AND OBEY ANY ADDITIONAL RULES TOLD TO ME. I MUST UNDERSTAND THAT ANY DISOBEDIENCE, ANY PAIN, TROUBLE, OR ANNOYANCE CAUSED BY ME TO MY MASTER WILL BE GROUNDS FOR PUNISHMENT.

Investigators sound found photos, so many photos. And they found videotapes of two women - Kathi Allen and Brenda O’Connor.

In the opening shots of Brenda’s tape, she sits in the same brown chair Kathi Allen had before her. At one point, she says to the man she still thinks is named Charles Gunnar, “Charles, what are you going to do to us? Why are you doing this?”

’Cause we hate you,” Lake answers.

A minute or so later, Lake says, “Your baby is going to take— to be taken away. There’s a family in Fresno that doesn’t have a baby.” Brenda pleads, “You’re not taking my baby away from me.”

And Lake says, “They’ve got one now.”

Charlie Ng adds, “It’s better than the baby is dead, right?”

Lake and Ng then taunt Brenda about her baby, make her undress, and tell her that Charles is gonna shower with her and that Lake is then going to rape her.

Brenda has no idea that as this tape is made, her baby and husband are already dead.

As the land around the bunker begins to be searched, six different plots of ground containing blackened soil that signals the sites of hot fires where remains may been burned.

One of the police canines makes the first discovery that sets off alarms of multiple murders.

The curious dog walked a short distance away during a break in the search and returned carrying a bone between its teeth.

Close examination revealed remnants of flesh still clinging to the bone and then a pathologist declared the grisly find to be human.

Not long after this and not far from the bunker and its secret chamber, a sheriff’s deputy spotted a four-foot by eight-foot section of plywood on the ground, partially obscured by a scattering of the iron-rich red dirt common to the region.

By sifting the dirt removed from under the plywood, the searchers turned up bone fragments, a section of a human spine, and bits of human teeth.

Dr. Boyd Stephens, chief medical examiner for the city and county of San Francisco, joined the task force and would report that “hundreds” of bone fragments found had been subjected to cremation.

The reason for six burn sites on the grounds becomes clear - bodies were definitely burned. Eventually “thousands” of bone pieces are gathered from the property.

On the third day of the search at Wilseyville, investigators receive expected news from San Francisco that Leonard Thomas Lake had died from cyanide poisoning.

Lake’s death would be the first tally on a long list.

The next two entries came from a grisly discovery by men excavating a telephone line trench.

The first body, probably an African-American man, would never be identified.

The other victim, also African American, was Maurice Rock, a tenant who’d vanished from the pink palace.

Remains of another occupant of the pink palace, Rock’s friend Sheryl Okoro, are found.

Also, among the photographs discovered in the bunker, was a picture of Okoro standing on the deck that projected from the back of the Balazs house, her wrists locked in handcuffs.

Several sealed packages contained hundreds of dollars in coins of all denominations were dug up on the property.

Two Tupperware containers disgorged rolls of silver dollars along with valuable gold pieces, foreign coins, and jewelry.

One of the plastic paint tubs held Leonard Lake’s journal for 1983 and 1984.

Several more sealed drums contained drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, bank cards, checkbooks, and other identification documents.

Randy Jacobson’s remains were found, a man who’d vanished from the pink palace in June of 1984.

The medical examiner found that his body “was totally encased in lime,” and that he had ingested cyanide, Leonard Lake’s poison of choice.

Two more videotapes were found.

When an investigator popped one of them, labeled “Taboo,” into a VCR, it at first appeared to be nothing more than a taped movie. But when he rewound it, a split-second flash of something obviously unrelated to the movie appeared in the first few seconds of the tape.

Two stiff bodies partially wrapped in plastic and in sleeping bags, seemingly in full rigor mortis, appeared to be resting in a blue wheelbarrow. Copland had seen a blue wheelbarrow near the bunker.

What else had been on this tape before a movie was taped over it? A snuff film? Did they not find snuff films because he sold them on the black market? Maybe. I’d be surprised if he didn’t make those.

No more bodies turned up. Experts would estimate that, after finding some forty-five pounds of bone fragments, at least twenty-five people’s remains had been buried around the bunker.

Now what about Charlie Ng? Let’s back up a bit and find out where he went after he walked away from the lumberyard…

65. June 2nd, 1985: Back on June 2nd, 1985, after he simply walked away to avoid arrest, he contacted Cricket from a payphone.

She picked him up and they drove to the lumberyard.

When they saw Leonard talking to the cops, Cricket got scared and drove off. She eventually dropped Ng off at a bus station, where he called his aunt and told her he wanted to take a vacation. She gave him $400.

Then he called the owner of Dennis Moving and said that a pal in Hawaii had committed suicide. Said he needed time off for the funeral.

He packed a suitcase and then his aunt drove him to San Francisco International airport. En route, he mailed a package of guns to Chicago.

Ng bought a ticket to Chicago, flew there, and stayed at a friend’s house for a few days - a former Marine he’d spent time with in Leavenworth - where he received the package he’d mailed to himself.

Ng then spent four more nights at the Chateau Hotel in Chicago under the name of Mike Kimoto, before getting a ride to Detroit, where Ng crossed the border into Canada.

From there, he made his way west to Calgary, where one of his sisters lived.

66.July 1st, 1985: By the first week of July 1985, Charles Ng had been targeted in an international manhunt by the FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Ng made it to Calgary where it is NOT believed he stayed with his sister. Maybe he was too worried agents were monitoring her house.

Instead, he hid in the woods.

He fashioned a primitive lean-to campsite in Fish Creek Park, situated in a small wooded valley that runs through the southern part of Calgary. A short walk from a bus stop.

Some kids found him sleeping in the woods, the Police were called, and Ng was gone by the time they made it to the Park.

67. July 6th, 1985: Then, on Saturday, July 6th, ol’ sticky fingers got caught again.

Sean Patrick Doyle, a forty-six-year-old high-school teacher and part-time security guard, nudged his partner, George Forster, forty-eight, inside a downtown Hudson Bay Company department store.

Doyle spotted a short Asian man, wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes, acting suspiciously in the store.

He say Ng put a “tin of salmon” into a shopping bag along with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi-Cola, canned soup, sugar, and other items. And then he slipped several of the items into a blue knapsack, walked past the cash register and headed toward the exit.

And Doyle and Forster followed him.

A few steps outside the store, Doyle and Forster grabbed Ng and a struggle broke out.

Ng had a .22 caliber handgun inside his jacket and it fired twice during the struggle to subdue Ng.

Forster reported, “As soon as I saw he had a gun, I put a choke hold on him. Sean grabbed for his hand . . . gave him a sort of a shoulder block, and the three of us went to the floor.”

Doyle ended up getting shot in the hand but he and Forster were able to hold on to martial arts master Ng until the Calgary police arrived and took him into custody.

Ng was booked on charges of attempted murder, robbery, and possession of a firearm. He was taken to the city jail and strip- searched.

In his holding cell, Ng, who had literally shit his pants on the ride to the jail, tried to hang himself with his soiled underwear.

I’m sure that was fun for officers to untie his shit stained underwear and take him to the shower to get clean. For a time Ng was left naked in a cell ... “depressed, suicidal, and fearful.”

The kidnapper had became the prisoner. I’m sure he didn’t like it.

When Ng’s campsite at Fish Creek Park was searched, a 35mm Ricoh camera, serial number 50225954 was found. A trace would soon reveal that the camera had been picked up by missing man and murder victim Robin Scott Stapley from a San Diego repair shop the previous April.

Ng’s real identity was soon discovered and American investigators flew to Calgary, and talked to Ng who lied his ass off and blamed everything on Lake.

Ng made a horrifying assertion about captive Brenda’s baby, Lonnie Bond Jr. Lake, saying Lake had strangled the child by “putting the baby’s head between his thighs and twisting the upper body.” Ng said this execution method was his idea, saying he told Lake, “If you want to kill the baby, make sure [he] doesn’t suffer.”

Detectives questioned Ng about all the crimes they were uncovering in Wilseyville and also crimes unrelated to Lake, such as a young woman who had been shot to death in Hawaii at a car rental agency on the military base. Ng became a suspect in that case and also in a rape case in December of 1981.

68.December 18, 1985: On December 18, 1985, Ng was found not guilty of attempted murder in Canada.

He was found guilty of assault and robbery and sentenced to 4½ years behind bars.

69.October 1988: Then, nearly three years later, in October 1988, Ng faced the opening stages of court hearings to determine the issue of his extradition to the United States, where murder charges had been filed against him. He’d spend the previous two years studying for his defense, hoping to avoid being sent across the border.

During a trial to decide his extradition fate, US investigators tracked down one of the men Ng spent time with in Leavenworth - Ed Popovich. A man he’d talked with often after he’d been released from Leavenworth.

Popovich said he and Ng talked about all kinds of stuff, like about using lime to dispose of bodies. Bodies in Wilseyville WERE encased in lime.

He said, “We also once discussed the best way to burn bodies.”

Ng had told him that he and Lake had killed several people. One time, after he said he shot a guy several times, he said they’d burned his body and that there were just teeth and bones left.

Ng said that he and Lake had tortured this guy and other men before killing them.

He also supposedly told Popovich that he and Lake had killed some women, and that one time they even killed the woman’s baby.

He told Popovich he’d targeted a coworker to kill.

And Ng had supposedly said that Lake preferred not to do a lot of the killings so he he did them.

Ng said all kinds of things that checked out with what investigators found in Wilseyville - that they burned some bodies and buried others around the bunker.”

Ng told Ed that he’d tortured and sexually abused various women at the bunker. Popovich stated that Ng had admitted using a knife on one of the female victims, and quoted Ng as saying, “I cut the bitch up, chopped her up.”

Regarding another victim, “He said he had used a concrete reinforcing rod. I believe that he meant he had beaten her with it. He said he used pliers on one, on her nipples.”

Popovich believed Ng had videotaped torturing the women but that footage was never found.

Popovich said to investigators, “Ng told me he had anal intercourse with some of the women, as well as sexual intercourse and oral copulation. He said he always ‘wasted’ them afterward. He said Lake participated with him in this. They were together, and had videotaped some of these activities and would send me a tape.”

He said the last call he received from Ng was in mid-April 1985, when Ng invited him to come out and join in on the fun.

Ed said he told him he couldn’t afford to come out, and that Ng offered to send him some money, but he never did. And then he never heard from Ng again.

70.September 26, 1991: On September 26th, 1991, seven Canadian Supreme Court justices announced that, by a slim 4 to 3 margin they had ruled that Charles Ng could be extradited to California and face a trial that might result in a verdict of death.

A few hours later, Charles Ng entered a cell within the cold, foreboding walls of Folsom Prison, a few miles east of California’s capital, Sacramento.

For Charles Ng, the years of studying legal procedures while locked up in Canada had armed him with an arsenal of knowledge he would use to wage an all-out war on the California justice system. A jail guard claimed he’d overheard Ng say, “If you want to delay the system, all you have to do is fire your lawyers.” It was a tactic he would use generously.

It would take six more long years of legal wrangling, changing judges, changing defense attorneys, motions, complaints, venue arguments, and other delays before Charles Ng faced a jury that would decide his fate.

The case would eventually cost California taxpayers an estimated $20 million.

What a waste of so much money.

Once the trial finally was underway, it quickly became clear that Cricket was involved in Operation Miranda. She signed a plea deal where charges would not be brought against her in exchange for testifying.

After being given immunity, Cricket told the police that she and Lake had conversed on the subject of cutting up Gunnar with a chain saw. She also engaged in forgeries of government checks payable to the children of Charles Gunnar after his murder, and sold stolen items with Lake, posing as Gunnar, at flea markets.”

She also helped the police find one of the bodies. She told police to look under the chicken coop where victim Randy Jacobson was found.

One of Ng’d defense attorneys would note, “Cricket was deeply involved in sado-masochistic sexual practices, as was Leonard Lake. Her participation in the Miranda Project is clear.”

Jurors were told Cricket helped recruit potential female victims to be photographed. And that many of those photo sessions lead to murders.

On one of the videotapes, Leonard and Cricket sat together and looked at a photo album of young women, talking about some of them disappearing, joking about the Miranda project.

Ng’s trial lasted from October 26th, 1998 to February 8th, 1999.

And the jury announced that they’d deadlocked on one count of murder, but found Ng guilty of eleven other counts. 71. June 30, 1999: And then, on Wednesday, June 30, 1999, Ng was finally sentenced.

While Ng sat slump-shouldered, a blank expression on his face, Judge Jack Ryan cleared his throat, and said in a resounding, strong voice, “Charles Chitat Ng, it is the judgment and sentence of this court . . . for eleven counts of murder for which the jury found you guilty, and the finding of ‘true’ in the special circumstance of multiple murder, and the jury’s verdict of death, it is the order of the court that you be punished by death within the walls of San Quentin Prison at a time to be set by this court . . . in the manner prescribed by law.”

And he has sat on death row ever since. And he will likely never be executed. California has not executed a prisoner since 2006.

72. July 16th, 2014: On July 16, 2014, federal judge Cormac J. Carney of the United States District Court ruled that California's death penalty system is unconstitutional because it is arbitrary and plagued with delay.

And that takes us out of this big as Timesuck Timeline.

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE OUTRO

IV. Additional Thoughts

A. Recap: What a tale, right?

My God. Two sociopaths came together to unleash so much hell upon the Earth.

Too bad those Canadian police didn’t let Ng kill himself with his shit- stained underwear in Calgary.

Letting him die would’ve saved well over twenty million dollars. I’d like to think I’d look the other way in a situation like that.

“Whoops! I can’t believe he killed himself in the five minutes we weren’t watching. What a shame!”

The case of Charles Ng is pointed to by a lot of pro-death penalty advocates. I pointed at it in my standup special, Don’t Wake the Bear, a few years ago.

I called him Robert Ng the day of the recording instead of Charles Ng and I will regret that mistake until the day I die. So embarrassing.

I won’t go on and on about the death penalty today. I’ve talked about it so many times before.

Nothing to really wrap up here - just a darkly interesting tale. Lake and Ng were two seriously fucked up dudes very committed to such a dark goal.

They just didn’t care about anything other than their own desires.

They devoted their lives to inflicting pain and suffering. To feeling sexually satisfied, no matter what the cost to others that entailed.

Ng is still in prison. Still in San Quentin. The oldest prison in California. Just over twenty miles north of the Golden Gate bridge. So close to where he caused so much pain.

He’s 59 years old and healthy and despite technically being on death row, he’ll never be executed.

Hopefully another inmate carries out that death sentence. I hope it hurts. If anyone deserves a terrible death, it’s Leonard Lake’s old murder buddy.

Time now for Top Five Takeaways!

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

V. Top Five Takeaways 1. Number One: Number one! Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were both US Marines who both were discharged. Ng was kicked out and imprisoned for stealing weapons and fleeing capture and Lake was let go for mentally breaking down during a second tour of Vietnam. Both would use their military training to conduct a variety of fucked up “ops”, like Operation Miranda.

2. Number Two: Number two! Ng was convicted of 11 murders but he and Lake are thought to have killed more than 25 people total. And at least two women were imprisoned and then killed in Operation Miranda.

3. Number Three: Number three! Holy shit Leonard Lake liked to take a nude pic. My GOD did he love it. He was more committed to putting together photo albums full of nude pics than anyone I have ever heard of. If he could’ve just been hired by Hustler or something, maybe all or some of this could’ve been avoided buy probably not.

4. Number Four: Number four! Charles Ng was arrested in Calgary in 1985, extradited to the US in 1991, and finally convicted of murder in 1999. His $20 million dollar trial was the most expensive trial in the history of California at the time.

5. Number Five: Number five - new info! Bob Berdella and Leonard Lake weren’t the only serial killers inspired by The Collector. Christopher Bernard Wilder aka the Beauty Queen Killer, was an Australian man from Sydney who abducted and raped at least twelve women, and killed at least eight of them, during a during a six-week cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984.

He’d lure women, mostly models, to his truck under the pretense of modeling photos. And then he’d abduct them, rape them, and sometimes kill them.

A copy of the novel The Collector was found among his possessions after his death.

What is it about that book? It’s author, John Fowles, stated in an interview that his own sick fantasies inspired him to write the book. As a boy, he frequently imagined imprisoning some woman and exerting power over her.

If he knew how powerful this book would be, I wonder if he would’ve kept that fantasy to himself?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wilder http://journalisticreview.com/analysis-of-the-collector-by-john- fowles/

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

VI.Final Announcements

A. Episode has been sucked!: Charles Ng and Leonard Lake have been sucked.

What a crazy, crazy tale.

Is anyone else doing something similar, somewhere in the world, right now? Are any of the survivalists living near me in Northern Idaho harboring their own Operation Miranda-like plans? Scary to think about what might be found someday on remote properties around here.

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team (including episode researcher):

Big thanks to the Timesuck Team!

Thank you to the All Seeing Eyes of the Cult for helping the Countess of the Cult Liz Hernandez run the Cult of the Curious Facebook Group. Thank you Liz for being on top of the Bojangles emails and taking good care of listeners.

Check out the Timesuck Discord channel and the Facebook group if you want more virtual social interaction right now. Links in the episode description. Discord link also in the Timesuck app. C.Facebook Group/Messageboard:

Thanks to Queen of the Suck Lynze Cummins for doing a bit of everything, Reverend Doctor Paisley - been working hard on some stuff will unveil later this year, the Bit Elixir app design crew doing beta test after beta test of an upcoming app-based trivia game, Logan and Kate at Spicy Club running BadMagicMerch.com and the socials! And the Script Keeper Zaq Flannary.

D.Gifts thank you:

Also thank you to the many Timesuckers who send gifts to the Suck Dungeon every week. We are very luck to have such awesome fans.

E.Next Episode Preview:

Next week - true crime continues with the Space Lizard voted in topic of Alexander Solonik - The Superkiller.

Alexander was a Russian gangster who escaped impenetrable prisons and murdered rival gang leaders.

He was a mysterious contract killer who may or may not have been in the special forces in the Soviet military. He may have assassinated high level NATO officials during the Cold War.

He escaped incarceration numerous times, and, if you believe all the legends, was a real life Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal character - a killing machine who did shit like take on a dozen men in a Russian prison brawl and win.

He touched untouchable Russian gang leaders and seemed unstoppable. And then he vanished.

And if you want to know more you’ll have to listen next week!

F. Segue to Timesucker Updates: Now let’s check out this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO VII.Timesucker Updates

A. First Update comes in from super sucker Steve Walker who has some good news to share. I like good news. Steve writes:

So pleased to finally have something to say to the monster-cock master of suck. As a self proclaimed student of history and a super nerd, gotta say that the historically focused sucks are my favorites, binged the Lincoln assassination, JFK, LBJ, and I have the other presidents in my saved episodes.

I’ve been jumping around after listening to the most recent. I believe I can officially say that the suck is my favorite podcast, I love the accuracy of information with the tomfoolery and your absolute batshit sense of humor - I mean that as a compliment.

My young fiancé and I just learned that we are PREGNANT! with our first child. Currently 5 1/2 weeks but we figure by the time you read this (if you choose) on the suck that we will have told our family by then. I am so excited to announce it to the world!

At the very least the world of the suck. But with that comes a question, as a parent of two, do you have any advice for us? Oh lord master of suckdom. thanks for so many hours of fun and feeding my quest for knowledge and so many yet to have been heard. much love to you, the family, and all my fellow suckers.

Sincerely, New Daddy Steve.

Congrats, Steve! Such great news. Hail Nimrod!

My main advice? Be present, be patient, listen, and let your kid know you love them. I’ve had times when I’ve been able to take my kids on nice vacations, and I’ve had times when I’ve worried about the cost of taking them out to dinner. I used to worry about money with my kids - what I could give them. But the most important thing is free - your time. Build memories with them that they can look back on. Memories when you were patient with them, when you listened to them and took an interest in what they were doing, and you can’t tell them that you love them too much. Be firm with them - discipline them when they need it - give them boundaries and don’t let them get away with being a tiny, terrible person. But also tell them how proud of them you are when they do something great. Positive reinforcement is probably more important than punishment. Good luck and enjoy every moment you can.

B. Now some nice words from Sweet Sack Billy Mitchell. Billy writes:

Please excuse my poor punctuation and shitty sentence structure and all that other 8th grade English class bullshit.

also I don’t feel bad about this long ass email like a lot of other suckers.

I hope I’ve managed to successfully send you an email as I am the least tech savvy millennial in history. I’ve listened to you every Monday for about a year and a half and have finally decided to write in (if this makes it to you). The reason I’m writing you is to keep your Chikatililo shame cock half hard by telling you that your podcast is different in a lot of ways. You not only manage to keep all of us suckers engaged but you bring something new to every single suck.

I thought to myself today why do I listen to your podcast so religiously. All I could come up with is the fact that somehow you manage not only tell an interesting story that id never otherwise hear like Chikatilos shame cock or Crowleys butt fucking in the desert escapades but you put an interesting spin on all of it. Your perspective and humor somehow comes together in a soup sandwich kind of way that makes your subjects that much more interesting. If you didn’t fuck up pronunciation of words or throw in a cuss word here and there your podcast would give off that uptight pinky up while you drink type of vibe.

You got it dude keep rockin it you’re good people don’t change anything you’re doin. But I would have never heard of you or Albert fish if it weren’t for my old coworker Jordan he’s got an interesting way of looking at things kinda like you and hes responsible for making me a sucker and I couldn’t be more thankful for him and you taking the edge of my Monday’s. he worked with me for an alcohol distributor in Reno NV (ne-va-duh not ne-vah-duh for the suckers not from around here) but if you could do me a favor and give him a shout and tell him John is still a c-word it would be greatly appreciated. Keep rockin it you mush mouth mf. Pray more suckers suffer Cummins law.

-billy

Thank you Billy! You put some wind in my sail with that message. I appreciate it thoroughly. In a bit of mental funk recently. Feeling way better today. I’m so glad you like these stories the way I tell them and thank you Jordan! Fuck that cunt, John, and Hail Nimrod!

C. Now a serious update from Rightfully concerned Sucker Nick. I’ll leave his last name out. Nick writes:

Dear Dan Cum, Suck Lord Actual, Grand Master Suck Dragon. First off, thank you for everything you do. The Timesuck team and you have become an integral part of my daily routine. Coffee, nicotine, Dan Cum, mmmmm that's a delicious trio.

I am writing this because I am genuinely seeking your opinion on a serious matter. My daughter, who is 3, has accused a family member - an older kid - of touching her inappropriately and making sure to include the fact that it hurt her physically.

She has given very descriptive details on when and where and who. When I heard this from her I broke down like a baby. Not just for my daughter, but for the other child involved because I personally believe that it is not something that just randomly pops into a kids head, it is something learned. When I brought this to my family, knowing it would cause strife amongst my family and extended family, my daughter, my wife, and I were immediately dismissed and pretty much told it didn't happen my daughter is lying.

My daughter maintains that it happened in a closet similar to the one she has in her room. When she is brought into that closet to get her night time diaper off to put big girl underwear on she freaks out. She will scream and say things like "no please don't touch my holes" "don't touch my pee pee".

Personally this is all the info I need to believe her. I am aware of false memories and how leading questions can create a false narrative, so my wife and I were very careful about it. The accused is not in the same developmental stage as my daughter, so the curiosity theory is thrown out. All I want is for my family to take this seriously and they are not. My wife and I have avoided bringing this up to my daughter anymore because it is traumatizing for her and we want her to forget ASAP.

I truly do not know where to go from here. I am reaching out to you because I respect you as a man and as a father. I am not looking for this to be read aloud during a podcast. I just want the advice of another father. Thank you and the Timesuck team for everything you do. The Cult of the Curious is truly a wonderful community and I am so thankful to have this outlet for advice and support. Hail Lucifina, Praise BoJangles, MMM! P.s. Sorry this was long and thank you again Master of the Suck.

- Nick.

Well first Nick, thank you for writing and all the kind words - and you sound like a fantastic father.

This is tough.

I thought a lot about your situation, and here’s what I think. I think you do some googling in your area for a counselor that specializes in sexual abuse and you make an appoint for your wife and yourself to accompany your daughter. A good therapist will also be well aware of false memory syndrome. If, after some counseling sessions, you are still convinced another child in the family touched your daughter inappropriately, then you go back to that child’s parents and demand to talk about it. And if they won’t talk, I think you say that you will then talk to the police and get social services involved. If the threat of doing that doesn’t start a conversation, you follow through and do that.

If your family is furious with you after that, that’s on them.

Also, I would ask the therapists advice about all of this. This is their area of expertise, not mine. And I would do this very soon. Best of luck and I hope this gets resolved as soon as possible.

The worst thing you could do, is nothing at all from this point forward.

D. Next up, Devil Boy, proud papa and kick ass sucker has a shoutout. Devil Boy writes:

Greetings suckos, this is space lizard Devilboy. I've been a space lizard/cult member for a while now and love the podcasts. This is my first time contacting you because I haven't had anything important to say till now. My son Keefer is the one who introduced you and the suck to me our family and countless others.

He has been listening since the beginning and has to be one of the first few space lizards. His art is on your wall (the piece with the space lizard and bojangles coming out of your head), he has been to a bunch of your shows in our area (O.C. California) and even got to see you near New Hampshire last year.

He did a demon voice challenge for you, and is the guy who did the shining twins pose with you at Rec room HB and the prom pose at that location the year before.

By now you probably have a good idea of who he is so on to my point. this superfan is one of the greatest people there is, I know I'm biased but it's TRUE. His birthday is coming up on May 7th and it would be pretty fuckin sweet if you could give him a shout. He's been bugging me to call/write into the show so here it is. Keefdawg, I love you big lil buddy Happy burfday!! Thank you Dan and crew for kicking out quality content that has become a constant source of entertainment and discussion for our family. Keep doing that thing you do, and we'll keep listening. Hail Nimrod!! and keep on fucking!

Thanks Devil Boy and happy belated birthday, Keef dawg! Your dad got this message in early by the way, so the late is all me. Love you man. Hope you’re doing well and hope to see you again. Still have your art on the Suck Dungeon wall! Hail Nimrod.

E. And last up, some humor. A Cummins Law and shoutout update from Magnificent Meat sack Ryan Schanck. Ryan writes:

Dear Master Sucker, aka Quarantine King, aka COVID Commander, I'm writing in to share my own Cummins Law story. I have a 6 month old son that has been in the hospital since March 9th. My wife and I have been trading places at the hospital every Sunday and Thursday for the last month so one of us can stay home with our 4-year-old. The 6-month-old just had open heart surgery this week and while sitting at his bedside I was listening to the Covid19 suck with my headphones on. One of his monitors started to alarm so I got up to check on it. When I stood up quickly the headphone jack came unplugged and right after, clear as day you said: "No one likes scabby balls" while doing your Manscape commercial.

I couldn't see the nurses jaws drop as they were wearing masks but I did see some wide eyes and heard some muffled laughs. I quickly leapt back to my laptop to pause the episode to prevent any additional ball talk. Luckily nurses see and hear far worse so I'm sure they thought it was funny.

Sorry for the long email but I just wanted to also thank you for all the hard work you and your team do to provide us with free content.

Thanks to you and the Crime in Sports/Small Town Murder and Broaum boys for keeping my mind distracted while all this has been going on.

Being separated from my wife and sons 3 or 4 days per week, every week for the last month has been hard especially since I have been furloughed from my job and practicing social distancing. All these nurses and doctors are true heroes and we are grateful not only for their hard work but their great sense of humor as well. Be well good sir and keep on sucking!

Thank you, Ryan! Appreciate you sharing this. Hope things pick up for you soon!

Love the Small Town Murder shout out for James and Jimmie - so good. And love the Boraum boys as well. Great podcasts.

And yes - lot of hero doctors and nurses working right now during a scary time for the medical community. Thanks for doing what you all do!

And that’s all for this week.

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

VIII.Goodbye!

A. Goodbye!: Have a great week everyone. Fuck Covid-19, don’t let it drive you crazy enough to build a bunker slash fuck dungeon, and keep on sucking.

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Die For Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Murders Book by Don Lasseter