THE CHAMBER
PAGE 6 OF 8
| Ng and his accomplices stole three grenade launchers, two M-16 assault rifles, seven pistols and a night-vision scope. |
The Killers
While Ng's motivations and mental state remain something of a mystery, Lake revealed his innermost feelings through rambling monologues on the videotapes and passages in his diary. In one peculiar section of the tape, Lake appears alone sitting in an easy chair, describing aloud his fantasy of kidnapping a woman and turning her into his slave. He laments the fact that he is growing old and fat, and is no longer attractive to women. No matter, he says, after the impending nuclear holocaust he will build a series of bunkers and imprison a woman in each one, and together with his unwilling harem he will repopulate the planet.
He seemed to have had as little regard for his own life as anyone else's. On the tapes, he tells his victims that if anything goes wrong he will simply kill himself, because he isn't afraid of dying. Even his dog, a German shepard called Voden, was fair game.
"Shot the dog," Lake notes in one diary entry. "A stupid thing to do... vengeance rarely makes sense."
eonard Lake was born in San Francisco on Oct. 29, 1945. According to news
accounts, his parents fought frequently and passed him off to various
relatives, finally sending him to live with his grandparents at the age of 6.
Friends of Lake's said he often complained about his emotionally bankrupt
childhood, and that he felt he had been abandoned by his parents.
He joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1964 and was trained as a radar specialist.
He completed two tours of duty during the Vietnam War, but never saw
combat. During his first tour in Da Nang, he was hospitalized for exhibiting
"incipient psychotic reactions," but was treated and sent back to Southeast
Asia. He served seven years in the Marines.
In 1971, he was treated for further psychological problems at a Veterans
Administration hospital in Oakland. He attended college at San Jose State
University in the early 1970s and moved to a commune in Philo, a settlement
in Northern California's Mendocino County, in 1976. Here he grew marijuana
and lived on a large hilltop ranch that he nicknamed "Alibi Run."
Friends believe it was at this time of his life that Lake began to form his
paranoid fantasies. One man who was acquainted with Lake said the deluded
veteran turned his Philo ranch into a survivalist enclosure stocked with
weapons and food to withstand a siege.
Some time in the late 1970s, Lake met Claralyn Balasz while working at the
Renaissance Pleasure Fair in Marin County, an arts and entertainment fair
themed on Renaissance Europe. Lake worked weekends at the fair by
charging visitors to pose for photos with his goat, which he had surgically
altered by attaching a horn to the center of its forehead. Lake named the
animal Sir Lancelot and passed it off as a unicorn.
Lake and Balasz were married in 1981. The best man at their wedding was
Charles Gunnar, an old friend of Lake's who disappeared from his Morgan Hill
home in April 1982. Lake frequently used Gunnar's name as an alias while
living in Wilseyville, and his body was discovered buried near the cabin in
September 1992.
Balasz was briefly considered a suspect in the early days of the investigation of the Wilseyville killings. After divorcing Lake in 1982, she went to live with her parents in San Bruno. Police obtained a search warrant for her parents' house after discovering she had allegedly helped Ng escape from police by giving him a ride to his San Francisco apartment soon after Lake was taken into custody. She refused to cooperate with police unless they guaranteed her immunity from prosecution; the guarantee was never given, and Balasz was never charged.
It was in 1981, after Lake had sold his Philo ranch and was working a brief stint as a hotel manager, that his fateful first meeting with Ng took place. Ng was looking for a place to hide out after escaping from a Marine Corps jail, where he was being held on charges of weapons theft. He apparently met Lake through a classified ad in a survivalist magazine. The two men struck up a friendship and Ng moved in with Lake and Balasz in their mobile home in Mendocino County. PAGE 7
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