It started with a stolen fifteen-dollar vise. By the time police finished pulling on that thread, they'd uncovered one of the most disturbing crime scenes in California history.
A Shoplifting Arrest That Led Somewhere Else
On June 2, 1985, a man named Charles Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in San Francisco. While store employees held him for police, another man walked in, introduced himself as Ng's friend, and offered to pay for the item. That man was Leonard Lake.
By the time police arrived, they had Ng in custody on a minor theft charge. What they didn't know yet was that the man standing in front of them, trying to smooth things over, was responsible for one of the worst killing sprees in the state's history.
Two Men, a Remote Cabin
Leonard Lake was born in San Francisco in 1945. His childhood, by the account that emerged after his death, was marked by severe abuse and neglect that went unaddressed by the adults responsible for him — circumstances that, whatever their role in shaping him, in no way explain or excuse what came later. He served in the Marine Corps as an electronics technician during the Vietnam War and was diagnosed with schizophrenia during his service, leading to his discharge. Afterward, he drifted through California's hippie communities, two marriages, amateur pornography production, and a prison stint for car theft, eventually settling into a remote cabin in Calaveras County, in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Lake met Charles Ng — fifteen years younger, a former Marine himself, born in Hong Kong — through a classified ad in a magazine catering to survivalist and war-gaming enthusiasts. The two men found in each other a shared, sadistic compatibility.
What Happened at the Cabin
Between 1983 and 1985, Lake and Ng are believed to have abducted, tortured, and murdered somewhere between 11 and 25 people at Lake's property near Wilseyville. We're not going to detail the specific methods of torture here, beyond saying that investigators who later reviewed videotapes recovered from the cabin described what was on them as some of the most disturbing evidence they'd ever encountered, including footage documenting the abuse of two female victims before their deaths.
Their known victims included neighbors Lonnie Bond and his girlfriend Brenda O'Connor, along with their infant son; a family of three — Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their young son; and a wider circle of people who'd come looking for missing friends or family, along with acquaintances, coworkers, and others who crossed paths with the two men. Court records indicate a consistent, horrifying pattern: men and children were killed quickly, while women were kept alive longer, subjected to prolonged abuse before they died or were killed.
The Arrest
Everything began to unravel because of that hardware store theft. While Ng was in custody, police noticed Lake's behavior was off and asked for identification. The driver's license he produced belonged to a man named Robin Stapley, who had been reported missing the week before. A search of the vehicle Lake had arrived in turned up an illegally modified firearm registered to another missing man, Paul Cosner.
That was enough to hold Lake. While in custody, he swallowed cyanide capsules he'd hidden in his clothing. He died in a hospital days later, never standing trial for anything.
A search of Lake's cabin turned up multiple stolen vehicles and more than 40 kilograms of burned human bone fragments. Investigators also recovered identification documents and credit cards belonging to numerous missing people, helping establish just how many victims may have been involved — estimates that, even decades later, remain genuinely uncertain.
A Trial Delayed for Years
Ng fled to Canada after Lake's death and was eventually arrested there after shooting a security guard during an unrelated shoplifting attempt. What followed was a years-long legal battle over his extradition, complicated further once he reached the United States by Ng's own relentless legal maneuvering — firing attorneys, representing himself at points, and filing an extensive series of complaints and lawsuits that delayed his trial for years. By the time his case finally went before a jury in 1998, more than a decade had passed since his arrest, and the legal process alone had cost the state millions of dollars.
In February 1999, a jury convicted Ng of eleven counts of first-degree murder, based on the videotape evidence, Lake's own handwritten journals, and testimony from Lake's widow, Claralyn Balazs, who cooperated with prosecutors. Ng's defense argued he had acted under Lake's control and influence; the court rejected that argument, finding he had acted on his own will. He was sentenced to death.
A Case Still Being Pieced Together
Remarkably, this case hasn't fully closed even now. In 2025 — four decades after the killings — investigative genetic genealogy techniques, applied by forensic genealogy organizations working with a dedicated Calaveras Cold Case Task Force, identified two more of Lake and Ng's victims: Brenda O'Connor and a man named Reggie Frisby, both previously unidentified remains from the original investigation.
That same renewed effort led investigators to a hand-drawn "treasure map" among the recovered evidence, which directed them to two buried containers. One held envelopes containing names and identification documents belonging to victims, suggesting the true death toll may indeed be as high as the higher end of the original 25-victim estimate. The other contained Lake's own handwritten journals from 1983 and 1984, along with the videotapes documenting the torture investigators had referenced at trial decades earlier.
Where Ng Is Now
For years, Ng was held on death row at San Quentin State Prison. That changed as part of a broader transformation of the California prison system: in 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom announced San Quentin would be converted from a maximum-security facility into a rehabilitation-focused center, and the state's death row population — including Ng — was transferred to other facilities across California. As of 2024, Ng has been held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. He remains formally under a sentence of death, even though California has not carried out an execution since 2006 and continues to operate under a gubernatorial moratorium on capital punishment.
The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld Ng's death sentence in 2022, rejecting his appeal. Whether that sentence will ever actually be carried out remains, like much else in this case, an open question.