In the stifling summer of 1984, the city of San Francisco was quietly gripped by an escalating sense of terror. Across the bustling Bay Area, neighbors, family members, and close friends were suddenly vanishing without a single trace. For months, local police departments were completely perplexed by the sheer volume of unconnected missing persons cases. It wasn’t until a seemingly unrelated, minor property crime occurred that investigators inadvertently pulled the thread on what would become a massive, horrifying tapestry of violence. The investigation that followed would take a deeply dark journey into the minds of two elusive killers, uncovering a sprawling killing field high up in the remote California mountains.
It would eventually culminate in the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the history of California—a marathon legal battle spanning thirteen grueling years, generating a case file that weighed over two tons, and ultimately resting heavily on the shoulders of Peter Smith, the dedicated District Attorney of Calaveras County. For Smith, seeking justice meant ensuring the system operated fairly, no matter how grotesque the crimes or how long the road to a conviction might be.
The nightmare formally unraveled on June 2, 1985. A South San Francisco police dispatch operator received a routine call reporting a theft in progress at a local business, South City Lumber. Officer Daniel Wright, a relatively green patrolman with only one year of experience on the streets, responded to the call. Knowing that any routine call could easily go awry, Wright approached the scene with standard officer safety in mind. Upon arriving, a witness informed him that an Asian male had just stolen a heavy, seventy-five-dollar table vice. When confronted by store employees, the thief desperately tossed the stolen merchandise into the trunk of a brown Honda parked nearby and sprinted away on foot.
While examining the abandoned Honda, Officer Wright spotted a suspicious-looking case resting inside the vehicle. Opening it, he made a startling discovery: a .22 caliber Ruger pistol equipped with a cylinder-shaped object roughly six to nine inches long. Through his police training, Wright immediately recognized it as an illegally modified silencer. As Wright was taking a closer look at the terrifying weapon, a visibly agitated man burst out of the lumber store, loudly proclaiming that he had just paid for the vice his “friend” had taken.
By this time, Wright’s supervisor, Sergeant Paul Ziemer, had arrived on the scene. The presence of the silenced weapon in the trunk made both officers deeply suspicious of the nervous man. The Honda was promptly impounded, and the man was handcuffed, placed into the back of Sergeant Ziemer’s patrol vehicle, and transported down to the station to give a formal statement regarding the illegal firearm. During the short ride, the man revealed that the runaway shoplifter’s name was Charles Ng. A quick background check run over the police radio revealed that Ng was a former Marine born in Hong Kong, who had previously been convicted in a military court for stealing automatic weapons from a base in Hawaii—and had even managed to escape from a military prison.
Back at the South San Francisco police station, the detained man was placed in a secure holding room. He confidently told officers his name was Leonard Lake, admitted he was a fugitive from justice, and offered to make a full written statement. His only request was for a piece of paper and a pencil. The on-call detective, Detective Hopper, stepped out of the room briefly. When he returned moments later, he was met with a terrifying sight: Lake was on the floor, convulsing wildly. Detective Hopper later described the violent, uncontrollable seizures as looking “like a fish flapping out of water.” Paramedics were rushed to the scene, but by the time Lake reached the emergency hospital, there was absolutely zero brain activity. A subsequent autopsy revealed a grim truth: Lake had intentionally swallowed a hidden gel capsule filled with deadly cyanide. The medical examiner noted that it would have taken roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes for the gel cap to dissolve in his stomach—the exact amount of time between his arrest at the lumber yard and his arrival at the holding cell.
Instead of writing a confession, Lake had utilized his final moments to pen a cryptic suicide note addressed to a woman named Lynn. It read: “Dear Lin, I love you, I forgive you. Freedom is better than all else. I’m sorry Mom, Patty, and all. I’m sorry for all the trouble. Love, Leonard.”
Police were utterly perplexed. Why had a seemingly standard suspect in a weapons and shoplifting case chosen to take his own life in such a dramatic and irreversible manner? Whatever dark secrets Leonard Lake held, he had intended to take them directly to the grave. With Lake dead, investigators realized the answers might lie with his missing companion, Charles Ng. They immediately issued a warrant for Ng’s arrest, but the investigation was about to take a far more sinister turn.
When investigators ran the serial number on the engine block of the brown Honda Lake had been driving, they discovered the vehicle actually belonged to a local Bay Area man named Paul Cosner. There was just one massive problem: Paul Cosner had been missing for seven months.
San Francisco Police Detective Irene Brun was already deeply immersed in investigating Cosner’s baffling disappearance. Months earlier, Cosner’s highly distraught sister had reported him missing. He had a dinner date scheduled with his girlfriend, who lived in his apartment building, but he never showed up. His girlfriend recalled that Cosner had been planning to show his car to a prospective buyer who had answered a newspaper advertisement. Cosner was far from the only strange disappearance weighing on Detective Brun’s desk. She was also investigating the deeply unsettling vanishing of an entire family.
On July 25, 1984, police had responded to a frantic call for help regarding Harvey Dubs, his wife Deborah, and their sixteen-month-old infant son, Sean. Officers had been forced to climb through a window to gain access to the Dubs’ San Francisco apartment, where they found distinct signs of a violent struggle. The apartment was in disarray, the baby’s room was completely out of order, and Deborah’s daily medication had been left behind. Uncharacteristically, their beloved pet cats were locked inside the house and left completely unattended. To Detective Brun, it was abundantly clear that the family had not left voluntarily. Adding a chilling parallel to the Cosner case, Harvey Dubs had recently placed a newspaper advertisement offering to rent out his expensive video equipment. That equipment was now missing from the home.
In a city where detectives handle hundreds of missing person reports a month, most typically involve teenage runaways who return a few days later. But the Dubs family and Paul Cosner vanished into thin air. Connecting these cold cases was an uphill battle until the discovery of Cosner’s stolen Honda cracked the investigation wide open. Detective Brun and her partner thoroughly searched the impounded vehicle for any hidden clues. What they found painted a terrifying picture. They uncovered a driver’s license belonging to another missing man named Scott Stapley, a stun gun, several unspent bullets scattered on the floorboards, and a recent electric bill addressed to an unknown woman named Claralyn Balaz. Most disturbingly, they found a single bullet hole pierced through the roof of the car. The trajectory indicated the fatal shot had been fired from the back seat. When crime scene investigators sprayed luminol around the interior, the chemical brilliantly illuminated a massive, high-velocity blood spatter on the roof right next to the front passenger seat. Detective Brun now knew, with absolute certainty, she would never find Paul Cosner alive.
With Leonard Lake dead and Charles Ng on the run, a full-scale homicide investigation was launched. Detectives drove an hour outside of San Francisco to speak with Lake’s mother. There, they found the woman whose name was printed on the electric bill found in Cosner’s blood-stained car: Claralyn Balaz, who turned out to be Leonard Lake’s ex-wife. She explained that the address on the electric bill was for an isolated, rustic family cabin located in Calaveras County, a sprawling, wild terrain spanning over 1,100 square miles in Northern California.
Eager to search the property, detectives were stonewalled by Balaz, who claimed she was too busy to take them there until the following day. Suspicious, the detectives called the severely understaffed Calaveras County Sheriff’s Department to keep a passing eye on the property overnight. The following morning, when detectives met Balaz outside the local Wilseyville post office, she nervously admitted she and Lake’s mother had secretly driven up to the cabin the night before to “tidy up.” Fearing crucial evidence had been destroyed, the detectives immediately escorted her to the property.
Outside the cabin stood a strange, cinderblock bunker. Balaz claimed she did not have the key and vehemently refused permission to search it. Lacking a warrant for the locked structure, Detective Brun focused on the main house. Inside, the horrors began to reveal themselves. She noticed a bed with holes deliberately drilled into the wooden posts and the floor, a setup seemingly designed to tie someone down. Then, while scanning a nearby bookcase, she recognized a highly specific piece of video equipment. Remembering the meticulous inventory records kept by Harvey Dubs, she called her office, verified the long serial number, and matched it perfectly to the Dubs family’s stolen property. When she confronted Balaz with this massive revelation, the ex-wife grew incredibly nervous and demanded the police leave her property immediately.
Armed with undeniable probable cause, the investigators returned later that afternoon with a signed search warrant. Lieutenant Ron McFall of the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office led the breach into the property. Their first target was the mysterious cinderblock tool shed, which Balaz had casually referred to as a “fallout shelter.” Lake was known as a hardcore survivalist, but this bunker was not built to protect against a nuclear holocaust. As the heavy doors swung open, detectives were met with a wall displaying twenty-one photographs of young women, ranging from eighteen to twenty-three years old, captured in various stages of undress. The haunting images looked like trophies.
Nearby, they found a disturbing handwritten journal belonging to Leonard Lake. In it, he obsessed over a fictional novel titled The Collector, which tells the story of a man who kidnaps his ultimate prize, a young girl named Miranda. Lake’s journal chillingly read: “Has it really been near 20 years I’ve carried this fantasy… my lovely little prisoner of the future.” The diary extensively detailed operations under the sinister heading of “The Miranda Project.”
Just one hundred yards from the bunker, investigators noticed the earth was deeply scarred by a series of seven distinct burn sites. Sifting through the ash, they made a gut-wrenching discovery: the piles contained human bone fragments. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to incinerate and conceal an unspeakable horror.
As the property was declared a massive crime scene, a specialized task force descended upon the acreage. Vehicles belonging to other missing people were found parked on the land, including a truck belonging to Lake’s next-door neighbor, Lonnie Bond. Bond lived just fifty yards away with his wife, Brenda O’Connor, and their infant son. Inside their home, the nauseating smell of decayed food thickened the air. The family had completely vanished, leaving their belongings behind.
Cadaver dogs were brought in to scour the dense woods. Soon, they unearthed two intact bodies tightly wrapped in sleeping bags. The remains were bound, gagged, and shot to death. Dental records confirmed they were the bodies of neighbors Lonnie Bond and his missing friend, Scott Stapley. Nearby, the dogs found a trench loosely filled with debris and personal belongings, yielding hundreds of pieces of evidence. As volunteers from the California Conservation Corps painstakingly raked the soil with their bare hands, they recovered over forty pounds of crushed, burned human bone fragments. Investigators grimly theorized that as many as twenty-five missing people from Northern California had met their end at the hands of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.
Inside the fallout shelter, an even more terrifying secret was uncovered. Investigators noticed a false door hidden brilliantly behind a set of shelving units. Pushing it open, they found a cramped, three-by-six-foot inner chamber acting as a makeshift dungeon. It contained a crude wooden cot, a small ventilation hole, and a two-way mirror facing outward. Tacked to the wall was a typed list of rules for a human slave, including: “I must always be ready to service my master and must never speak unless spoken to. I must always be obedient and never look my master in the eye.” The heavy door’s interior hinges were severely bent outward, clear evidence of a captive desperately fighting to escape.
The ultimate, damning proof of what occurred in that room was found buried under some blue soil next to the cabin’s driveway. Inside a five-gallon plastic bucket, investigators dug up several videotapes. When they played them on the television inside the cabin, the seasoned detectives were sickened. The tape, labeled “M-Ladies,” showed two women suffering extreme psychological and verbal torture at the hands of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who demanded absolute sexual submission under the horrific threat of violence. The Asian male, clearly identifiable as Ng, was captured on film holding a knife and aggressively cutting the clothing off the terrified women.
With this irrefutable visual evidence, a massive, worldwide FBI manhunt for Charles Ng was initiated. The fugitive utilized a deep network of underground contacts, successfully fleeing to Chicago under the alias “Mike Kimoto,” and eventually crossing the border into Canada. The trail grew frustratingly cold as Ng vanished into the Canadian wilderness, eventually living inside a makeshift children’s play fort in a park.
However, Ng’s sheer arrogance and penchant for petty crime would once again be his undoing. On July 6, 1985, a security guard at a department store in Calgary confronted a young Asian man casually slipping stolen merchandise into his knapsack. A violent struggle ensued, and Ng shot the guard in the hand before being violently wrestled to the ground and subdued by brave store patrons. Charles Ng was officially in custody.
San Francisco homicide inspector Ed Erdolatz immediately flew to the maximum-security prison in Calgary to interrogate the captured killer. Ng offered only one-word answers and flat denials, placing all the blame entirely on the deceased Leonard Lake. Back in Calaveras County, the District Attorney indicted Ng on twelve counts of first-degree murder, setting the stage for the death penalty. But a complicated international extradition treaty between the United States and Canada severely delayed the process, explicitly forbidding the extradition of criminals facing capital punishment unless specific exceptions were met. To purposely stall the system, Ng waived his right to a jury trial for his Canadian shoplifting and assault charges, taking a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
During his time behind bars in Canada, Ng studied the American legal system extensively. He also made the fatal mistake of bragging about his gruesome crimes to his cellmate, a career criminal named Maurice La Berge. To pass the time, Ng drew grotesque, detailed cartoons depicting the murders—including a chilling sketch of killing a baby—and recounted the darkest details of the Calaveras cabin. Seeking favor with his parole board, La Berge handed the cartoons over to authorities and testified against Ng in an extradition hearing.
After a painstaking legal battle that reached the Canadian Supreme Court, Ng was finally placed on an airplane and returned to California in September of 1991. The nightmare of the trial was only just beginning. Determined to wreak absolute havoc on the judicial system, Ng weaponized his newly acquired legal knowledge. He repeatedly filed frivolous motions demanding better food, complained about his commute, and successfully fired his court-appointed attorneys. Because the intense pre-trial publicity made finding an impartial jury in the small town of Calaveras County impossible, the judge granted a motion to move the trial four hundred miles south to Orange County. A fully loaded thirty-six-foot truck delivered the mountain of evidence to his new defense team, who requested and received an additional two and a half years to prepare.
Tragedy struck the prosecution right before the trial was set to begin: their star witness, Maurice La Berge, was unexpectedly killed in a car accident. Despite this devastating setback, on October 26, 1998—thirteen years after the investigation began—the trial of Charles Ng finally commenced. Two thousand potential jurors had been screened for the monumental case. In the courtroom, Ng was so combative and prone to shouting obscenities that the judge ordered him to wear an electronic stun belt, controlled by a bailiff’s remote, to ensure his compliance.
Prosecutor Charlene Honaka delivered a masterful and emotional opening statement, directly describing the Calaveras property as a “killing field” and a “mass graveyard.” Because there was so little physical evidence directly tying Ng to the murders, the prosecution relied heavily on the devastating “M-Ladies” videotape. The footage was the centerpiece of their case, deeply emotional and highly incriminating, showcasing the sheer terror in the victims’ eyes as Ng and Lake tormented them. The defense, led by attorney William Kelly, attempted to aggressively shift all blame onto Leonard Lake and his ex-wife Claralyn Balaz.
But investigators had uncovered yet another chilling piece of evidence. While analyzing the confiscated videotapes, Sergeant Larry Copland accidentally played one of the tapes in reverse. Suddenly, a hidden, single-frame still image flashed onto the screen. It perfectly depicted two bodies haphazardly tossed into a wheelbarrow, tightly wrapped in sleeping bags. The medical examiner testified that the bodies were in full rigor mortis, proving they had been photographed mere hours after death. The sleeping bags perfectly matched the ones used to bury neighbors Lonnie Bond and Scott Stapley.
In a shocking and highly calculated move, against the desperate advice of his own defense attorneys, Charles Ng demanded to take the witness stand to testify on his own behalf. It was a spectacular miscalculation. On the stand, Ng flatly denied everything, claiming his violent threats on the videotapes were merely spoken in the “heat of the moment.” But Prosecutor Honaka was relentlessly prepared. Using transcripts from the extradition hearings, she systematically tore apart his lies. She proved that Ng had told his deceased cellmate La Berge about the distinct sound of handcuffs clicking on the victims—a detail impossible to know unless Ng was personally involved. She also highlighted a moment on the tape where Ng coldly warns Lake that a gun is resting on the table, proving Ng was actively directing the flow of the torture session.
Following a grueling three weeks of intense jury deliberations, the courtroom finally held its breath on February 24, 1999. The jury returned their verdict. While they were deadlocked on the tragic death of infant Sean Dubs due to a lack of physical evidence, they found Charles Ng universally guilty of eleven counts of first-degree murder.
He was swiftly sentenced to death. At a staggering final cost of over twenty million dollars, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the history of California finally came to a close. For District Attorney Peter Smith and the countless investigators who dedicated their lives to the case, justice had finally prevailed. The victims of the Wilseyville boneyard would never be forgotten, and the monster responsible was permanently exiled to the darkest corner of California’s death row.
