Serial Killer Investigations (36 page)

Again, a bookcase proved to be a false front that led into the next room, which was little more than a deep closet, and which contained a narrow bed. A one-way mirror on the wall meant that someone in the next room could survey it . Under the bed they found a book that proved to be the diary of Leonard Lake. It was this that provided the evidence that Leonard Lake and his close associate, Charles Ng, were serial killers.

This story had begun two days earlier, on Sunday 2 June, when a shop assistant at the South City lumberyard in San Francisco noticed that a young man was leaving without paying for a $75 vice. The assistant hurried outside to speak to Police Officer Daniel Wright, and by the time the young man—who looked Asian—was putting the vise in the trunk of a car, the officer was right behind him. When he realised he was being followed, the man fled. Wright gave chase, but the skinny youth was too fast for him, and vanished across a main road.

When Wright returned to the car—a Honda Prelude—a bearded, baldheaded man was standing by it. ‘It was a mistake,’ he explained, ‘He thought I’d paid already. But I have paid now.’ He held out a sales receipt.

That should have ended the incident—except for the fact that the young Asian had fled, ruling out the possibility that it was merely an honest mistake. Wright wondered if anything else in the car might be stolen. ‘What’s in there?’ he asked, pointing at a green holdall.

‘I don’t know. It belongs to him.’

Wright found that it contained a .22 revolver, with a silencer on the barrel. Americans have a right to own handguns, but not with silencers—such attachments being unlikely to have an innocent purpose.

The bearded man explained that he hardly knew the youth who had run away—he had just been about to hire him to do some work.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come down to headquarters to explain this.’

At the police station, the man handed over a driver’s licence to establish his identity; it indicated that he was Robin Scott Stapley. But when asked various simple questions, such as his birth date, he was unable to answer. Clearly, the licence was someone else’s, and he had omitted to memorise the details.

‘We’ll have to do a computer check on the car. But you’ll probably have to post bond before you can be released.’

‘Stapley’ asked if he could have some paper and a pencil, and a glass of water. When the policeman returned with these items, he scribbled a few words on the sheet of paper, tossed two capsules into his mouth, and swallowed it down with water. Moments later, he slumped forward on the tabletop.

Assuming it was a heart attack, the police called an ambulance. The hospital rang them later to say that the man had been brain-dead on arrival, but had been placed on a life-support system.

The medic added that he was fairly certain the man had not suffered a heart attack; it was more likely that he had swallowed some form of poison. In fact, the poison was soon identified as cyanide. The note ‘Stapley’ had scribbled had been an apology to his wife for what he was about to do. Four days later, removed from the life-support system, the man died without recovering consciousness.

By this time, the police had determined that he was not Robin Stapley. The real Robin Stapley had been reported missing in February. But soon after, there had been a curious incident involving his camper, which had been in collision with a pickup truck. The young Chinese man who had been driving the camper had accepted responsibility and asked the other driver not to report it. But since it was a company vehicle, the driver was obliged to report the accident.

The Honda the two had been driving proved to be registered in the name of Paul Cosner. And Cosner had also been reported missing. He had told his girlfriend that he had sold the car to a ‘weird-looking man’ who would pay cash, and driven off to deliver it; no one had seen him since. The Honda was handed over to the forensic experts for examination; they discovered two bullet holes in the front seat, two spent slugs, and some human bloodstains.

If the bearded man was not Robin Stapley, who was he? Some papers found in the Honda bore the name Charles Gunnar, with an address near Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles north-east of San Francisco. Inspector Tom Eisenmann was assigned to go and check on Gunnar. In Wilseyville he spoke to Sheriff Claude Ballard, and learned that Ballard already had his suspicions about Gunnar, and about the slightly built Chinese youth, Charles Ng (pronounced ‘Ing’) with whom he lived. They had been advertising various items for sale, such as television sets, videos, and articles of furniture, and Ballard had suspected that they might be stolen. Nonetheless, checks on serial numbers had come to nothing. What was more ominous was that Gunnar had offered for sale furniture belonging to a young couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, who had lived next door, explaining that they had moved to Los Angeles with their baby and had given him the furniture to pay a debt. No one had heard from them since. And at a nearby campsite at Schaad Lake, another couple had simply vanished, leaving behind their tent and a coffee pot on the stove.

By now, a check on the dead man’s fingerprints had revealed that he had a criminal record—for burglary and grand larceny in Mendocino County—and had jumped bail there. His real name was Leonard Lake.

Eisenmann’s investigation into Lake’s background convinced the detective that this man seemed to be associated with many disappearances. His younger brother Donald had been reported missing in July 1983 after setting out to visit Lake in a ‘survivalist commune’ in Humboldt County. Charles Gunnar, whose identity Lake had borrowed, had been best man at Lake’s wedding, but had also vanished in 1985. Together with Stapley and Cosner and the Bond couple and their baby, that made seven unexplained disappearances.

Police also found some expensive video equipment. This led Eisenmann’s assistant, Sergeant Irene Brunn, to speculate whether it might be connected with a case she had investigated in San Francisco. A couple called Harvey and Deborah Dubs had vanished from their apartment, together with their 16-month-old baby son, and neighbours had seen a young Chinese man removing the contents of their apartment—including an expensive video recorder. She had the serial numbers in her notebook. Her check confirmed her suspicion: this was the missing equipment.

Deputies came in to report that they had been scouring the hillside at the back of the house, and had found burnt bones that looked ominously human. Ballard noted a trench that seemed to have been intended for a telephone cable; he ordered the deputies to dig it up.

A filing cabinet in the cabin proved to be full of videotapes. Eisenmann read the inscription on one of these—‘M. Ladies, Kathy/Brenda’—and slipped it into the recorder. A moment later, they were looking at a recording of a frightened young woman handcuffed to a chair, with a young Asian man—obviously Charles Ng—holding a knife beside her. A large, balding man with a beard enters the frame and proceeds to remove the young woman’s handcuffs, then unshackles her ankles, and orders her to undress. Her reluctance is obvious, particularly when she comes to her panties. The bearded man tells her: ‘You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.’ After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Asian man. A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend Mike is dead.

After ‘Kathy’ the video showed ‘Brenda’—identified by Sheriff Ballard as the missing Brenda O’Connor from next door—handcuffed to a chair, while Ng cuts off her clothes. She asks after her baby, and Lake tells her that it has been placed with a family in Fresno. She asks: ‘Why do you guys do this?’ and he tells her: ‘We don’t like you. Do you want me to put it in writing?’ ‘Don’t cut my bra off.’ ‘Nothing is yours now.’ ‘Give my baby back to me. I’ll do anything you want.’ ‘You’re going to do anything we want anyway.’

Another tape showed a woman Sergeant Brunn recognised as Deborah Dubs, who had vanished from her San Francisco apartment with her husband, Harvey, and baby, Sean.

Lake’s accomplice, Charles Ng, was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance from the South City parking lot. Police had discovered that he had fled back to his apartment, been driven out to San Francisco International Airport by Cricket Balasz, and there bought himself a ticket to Chicago under the name ‘Mike Kimoto’. Four days later, a San Francisco gun dealer notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago. The man had been repairing Ng’s automatic pistol, and Ng wanted to know if he could send him the gun by mail, addressing it to him at the Chateau Hotel under the name Mike Kimoto. When the gun dealer had explained that it would be illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng had cursed and threatened him with violence if he went to the police.

By the time Chicago police arrived at the Chateau Hotel, the fugitive had fled. From there on, the trail went dead.

Meanwhile, the team excavating the trench had discovered enormous quantities of bones, chopped up and partly burnt. Tracker dogs were brought in to sniff for other bodies. They soon located a grave that proved to contain the remains of a man, a woman and a baby. These could be either the Dubs family or the Lonnie Bond family—they were too decomposed for immediate recognition. A bulldozer removed the top layer of earth to make digging easier.

The discovery of the cabinet of videos was followed by one that was in some ways even more disturbing: Lake’s detailed diaries covering the same two-year period. The first one, for 1984, began: ‘Leonard Lake, a name not seen or used much these days in my second year as a fugitive. Mostly dull day-to-day routine—still with death in my pocket and fantasy my goal.’

The diaries made it clear that his career of murder had started before he moved into the ranch on Blue Mountain Road. He had been a member of many communes, and in one at a place called Mother Lode, in Humboldt County, he had murdered his younger brother, Donald. A crude map of Northern California, with crosses labelled ‘buried treasure’, suggested the possibility that these were the sites of more murders; but the map was too inaccurate to guide searchers to the actual locations.

Who was Leonard Lake? Investigation of his background revealed that he had been born in 1946 in San Francisco, and that he had a highly disturbed childhood. His father was unstable and work-shy, and he and Lake’s mother fought all the time. Lennie was only six when his parents, loaded with debt, decided they could not keep him, and he was sent to live with his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian. Both his father and mother came from a family of alcoholics. The alcoholic grandfather was a violent individual who subjected the child to a kind of military discipline. Lake’s brother, Donald, his mother’s favourite, was an epileptic who had suffered a serious head injury; he practised sadistic cruelty to animals and tried to rape both his sisters. Lake protected the sisters ‘in return for sexual favours’.

From an early age Lake had displayed the sexual obsession that seems to characterise serial killers. He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins, and later became a maker of pornographic movies starring his wife, Cricket. She was ‘into’ S&M and kinky sex with chains and handcuffs.

Lake had compensated for the emotional aridity of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy, both sexual and heroic. But the greatest single influence on his fantasy life was a novel,
The Collector
by John Fowles, in which a mentally disturbed lepidopterist chloroforms and kidnaps Miranda, a pretty art student, and keeps her captive in a farmhouse—Fowles admitted that it was based on his own ‘Bluebeard’ fantasies of imprisoning one of his students. This novel became the basis of Lake’s adolescent fantasies, and explains the ‘M’ on the videotapes, and ‘Operation Miranda’ on the plaque—it stood for his Miranda project—kidnapping and enslaving young women.

Lake had been in the marines for seven years, and had even served in Vietnam; but he had finally showed signs of being deeply mentally disturbed and was discharged on his second tour of duty. According to his sister, this, as much as any other problem, was the foundation of his insecurity and sense of betrayal. But his hatred of women, she said, was due to his mother’s early rejection, and the fact that his first wife had divorced him.

Yet he was skilful in hiding his abnormality, teaching grade school, working as a volunteer firefighter, and donating time to a company that provided free insulation in old people’s homes. He seemed as exemplary a citizen as John Wayne Gacy of Chicago. But his outlook was deeply pessimistic, convinced that World War Three would break out at any moment. Like other ‘survivalists’, he often dressed in combat fatigues, and talked of living off the land. Once out of the marines, his behaviour became increasingly disturbed and psychotic.

It was while living in an isolated village called Miranda in the hills of Northern California—obviously chosen for its name—that Lake thought out Operation Miranda. It was to stockpile food, clothing, and weapons against the coming nuclear holocaust, and also to kidnap women who would be kept imprisoned and used as sex slaves. ‘The perfect woman,’ he explained in his diary, ‘is totally controlled... A woman who does exactly what she is told to and nothing else. There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations—only pleasure and contentment.’

Lake’s accomplice, Charles Ng, had been born in Hong Kong on 24 December 1961, the son of a wealthy businessman, who believed that children had to be brought up strictly, and often beat him. After being expelled from several schools for stealing and arson, he was sent to a school in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, where an uncle was a teacher. He was soon expelled for thieving. At the age of 18 he travelled to the US on a student visa, and spent a semester in Notre Dame College in Belmont, California, before becoming bored. After being convicted of a hit-and-run accident in which he was ordered to pay damages, he joined the marines, claiming to be an American citizen. But when he and three accomplices stole military equipment in Hawaii, he escaped to California, where he met Lake through an advertisement in a survivalist magazine.