Black-bearded and balding, ex-Marine Leonard Lake and his baby-faced Chinese-American sidekick, Charles Ng, appear in a homemade videotape
”disciplining” a woman handcuffed to a straight-backed chair.
”I am the Captain,” Lake says to the trembling woman.
Ng enters the frame brandishing a knife and slashes her clothes. The woman begs the men not to harm her baby, an infant apparently just out of camera range.
There is more on that videotape, found as California authorities tried to unravel what seems to be a blood-drenched odyssey by two gun-loving survivalists who may have killed 25 men, women and children while acting out a fantasy of nuclear war, sexual bondage and the hunting of humans as game animals.
Police will not further describe that particular videotape other than to say the woman was abused sexually but not killed–or at least she was not killed while the camera was running.
But authorities identified the woman as one of four persons, including a baby, missing in Calaveras County since April. And when Calaveras County Sheriff Claude Ballard emerged from Lake`s two-acre ”ranchette” after seeing the tape, he was visibly shaken.
That tape is just one fragment in a growing stack of evidence that has turned Lake, 39, a pot-bellied ex-marine, into a national enigma.
Lake last week sealed away some secrets forever. While being interviewed in a South San Francisco police lock-up, he slipped a cyanide pill into his mouth and fell into a fatal coma.
Lake was arrested by Patrolman David Wright after being summoned to a hardware store where Ng had become involved in a fracas with the owner over shoplifting a $75 vise.
When Wright arrived, Lake told him that Ng had gone and that Lake would pay the owner $75 for the vise. Lake gave the policeman the false name of Charles Gunnar and showed him Gunnar`s driver`s license.
Wright became suspicious, however, and ran a radio check of the car Lake was driving. It was a Honda owned by a missing person, Paul Cosner, 39. An affluent San Francisco auto salesman and real estate owner, Cosner disappeared last November after leaving his home to show the car to a potential customer. Further checks disclosed that Charles Gunnar, considered Lake`s ”best friend,” had been reported missing by his wife last April.
As his story started to unravel in the police station, Lake asked officer Wright for a pencil and paper. He then jotted something on the paper and asked for a glass of water.
He used the water to gulp down his suicide pill, blurted out his real name, said he was a federal fugitive and slumped to the floor. The words he had written turned out to be a suicide note to his family: ”I love you. Please forgive me.”
Ng, meanwhile, has disappeared, and is the subject of a nationwide federal manhunt.
San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein has issued a $25,000 reward for Ng, who is being sought on a state warrant on charges of kidnaping, false imprisonment and burglary as well as on a federal warrant accusing him of leaving California to avoid burglary charges.
”We have no idea as to his whereabouts, although we`re checking several leads,” said John Holford, a spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco.
When police made their first check of the Lake ranchette last Wednesday, one officer noticed ants swarming over a 100-foot-long garbage pit and, with a stick, unearthed a human bone.
Then the grisly story began to emerge. A search was made of a 16-foot-square cinderblock shed Lake had built 15 feet from the house.
The building had two rooms. The first was equipped with a bed and various bondage equipment–ropes, chains, leather thongs. Behind the bedroom was a secret compartment with a one-way window through which Lake and Ng operated a videocamera.
That started police along a trail of bizarre discoveries as officers from San Francisco and Calaveras County combed Lake`s makeshift graveyard, viewed his videotapes and read his diaries.
San Francisco Police Chief Cornelius Murphy said the tapes depict Lake`s plans for ”survival in bunkers, nuclear explosions, that kind of thing.” In one, for example, Lake expounded his ”philosophy” of survival after the nuclear war he believed was on the horizon.
Standing like a TV newsman in front of his cabin, he said he would need
”sex slaves” to continue the human race. He spoke of the type of guns to use and outlined the sexual acts he contemplated with his slaves.
A series of tapes labeled ”Operation Miranda” dealt further with his sexual fantasies and included tapes of the two men sexually abusing a number of female captives.
A second series of tapes and diaries outlined a complex check-kiting scheme that Lake and Ng called ”Operation Fish,” officers familiar with the evidence said.
Lake had kept comprehensive diaries for more than two years. Those diaries and an unpublished novel found in the shed led police to speculate that the men planned to take male prisoners into the Sierra foothills near Lake Tahoe and force them to play the role of quarry in a human big-game hunt. One well-informed officer compared the hunt to the 1924 short story by R.C. Connell, ”The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a jaded millionaire turned men loose on his African game preserve and then hunted them with an elephant gun.
Police found two Calaveras County residents who had helped Lake build the shed last summer.
One, a boy of 16, recalled that Lake paid him to put up the cinder blocks and that several times Lake tried to get the youth to join him in watching homemade pornographic videotapes.
A woman who helped Lake weatherproof the shed said that she saw several shelves filled with videotapes. She also recalled that the shed was used to store large numbers of army-issue automatic weapons and camouflage clothing.
Lake served with the Marine Corps in Da Nang, Vietnam, in the late 1960s, but Marine spokesmen said he saw no combat.
Ng, who at 24 was 15 years Lake`s junior, apparently met Lake through a war-gaming newsletter that Lake was publishing. The men became fast friends.
In 1982, while Lake and Ng were living on the ranch near Ukiah, a task force of federal treasury and FBI agents using helicopters raided their quarters and arrested both men for possessing illegal weapons.
The weapons included a number of automatic rifles, grenade-launchers and handguns that Ng had stolen from a Marine armory while stationed in Hawaii.
Lake posted a $3,000 bond and went into hiding.
Ng, who was AWOL from the Marines, was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he remained until June 29. Some time after that, Ng apparently reunited with Lake, who had remained a fugitive until he was arrested by patrolman Wright last week and the horrors of Calaveras County began to unravel.
After Lake`s suicide, numerous persons who had known him came forward to express their astonishment. Some acquaintances recalled Lake as a well-liked volunteer fireman in Mendicino County, Cal.
Others remembered him as frequently attending Bible classes in the Calaveras County town of Wilseyville, where he once baked a chocolate cake for the congregation.
For several years Lake worked as a volunteer for North Coast Opportunities, a charity that provides insulation for the homes of
impoverished senior citizens.
But when he wasn`t baking cakes or insulating the homes of San Francisco`s elderly, Lake was editing a newsletter called ”War Games Magazine” and engaging in private ”maneuvers” on a ranch north of Ukiah, Cal.
