Read Online World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds by Charlotte Greig - Free Book Online Page B

Leonard Lake. Lake was born in San Francisco on 20 July 1946. His parents by all accounts had a dreadful relationship and, when Lake was six, his mother left, leaving him with his grandmother. As a child, Lake collected mice and enjoyed killing them by dissolving them in chemicals (a technique he would later use to help dispose of his human victims). In his teens, he sexually abused his sisters.
    At eighteen, Lake joined the US Marines and made the rank of sergeant. He served two tours in Vietnam as a radar operator. Following a spell in Da Nang, he suffered a delusional breakdown and was sent home before being discharged in 1971. He was already married by this time, but his wife left him because he was violent and sexually perverted.
    Lake became part of the hippie lifestyle centred around San Francisco. He also became increasingly obsessed with the idea of an impending nuclear holocaust, and for eight years lived in a hippie commune near Ukiah, in northern California. There he met a woman named Claralyn Balazs, or ‘Cricket’, as he nicknamed her. A twenty-five-year-old teacher’s aide when he met her, Balazs became deeply involved in Lake’s fantasies. She starred in the pornographic videos he began to make, the latest manifestation of his sexual obsession. His other obsession was with guns – part of his survivalist paranoia – and through a magazine advert he placed in 1981, he met Charles Ng.
    Arsonist
    Born in Hong Kong, Ng, or ‘Charlie’ as Lake called him, was a disruptive child, obsessed with martial arts and setting fires. His parents sent him to an English private school in an effort to straighten him out, but he was expelled for stealing. Next, he went to California where he attended college for a single semester before dropping out. Soon after that he was involved in a hit-and-run car crash and to avoid the consequences he signed up for the US Marines, fraudulently claiming to be a US national. It was at this time that he met Lake. They came up with a plan to sell guns that Ng would steal from a marine arsenal. However, Ng was caught stealing the guns and was sentenced to three years in prison.
    When he was released in 1985, he immediately contacted Lake, who invited him to his new place, a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California, that he was renting from Balazs. He had custom-built a dungeon next to the cabin ready for his friend Charlie to come up and have fun. It is thought that by then Lake had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, in order to steal their money and, in Gunnar’s case, his identity.
    Over the next year Lake and Ng indulged themselves in an orgy of killing, rape and torture. Their victims included their rural neighbours, Lonnie Bond, his girlfriend Brenda O’Connor plus their baby son Lonnie Jr, and another young family, Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their young son Sean. In both cases the men and babies were killed quickly, while the women were kept alive for Ng and Lake’s perverse sport. They would rape and torture the women – Lake filming the whole awful business – before putting them to death. Other victims included workmates of Ng’s; relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O’Connor; and two gay men.
    The career of evil might have gone on a lot longer if it had not been for Ng’s addiction to stealing. On 2 June 1985, Ng was spotted shoplifting a vice from a San Francisco hardware store, probably for use as a torture implement. Ng ran away from the scene. Lake then appeared and tried to pay for the vice. By then, however, the police had arrived. Officer Daniel Wright discovered that Lake’s car’s number plates were registered to another vehicle, and that Lake’s ID, in the name of Scott Stapley, was suspicious. When Wright found a gun with a silencer in the trunk of the car, he arrested Lake. Once in custody, Lake asked for a pen, paper and a glass of water. He then wrote a note to Balazs, and quickly swallowed