Content note: this piece contains references to sexual violence and the murder of children, quoted material from a convicted killer’s diary, and short direct quotes from a videotape recorded during a victim’s captivity. If you need to skip that last part, it is the section titled “The M-Ladies Tape.”
What Was Not Found
Look. I have been sitting with this case for years and I could not write it. Not one word. That empty draft on this site with just the title on it — that was me, trying and failing, every time. Because Leonard Lake and Charles Ng did what they did, and then Leonard Lake killed himself, and Charles Ng went silent, and forty years later most of it is still missing. Missing tapes. Missing bodies. Missing names. And when you sit with a case where everything is missing, the missing lives in your chest, and it is very hard to know where to put your first sentence.
So I am going to start with what is missing, because that is the shape of the thing.
The videotapes — the ones Leonard Lake made of himself and Charles Ng inside a cinderblock bunker in the California mountains, doing what they did to women who could not leave — are mostly gone. Burned, buried, we do not know. Two survived, and those two were enough to put Charles Ng on death row and to sit in an evidence locker for forty years as training material for law enforcement, which tells you what was on them. But two survived. Two. Everything else Leonard Lake filmed in that bunker, and he filmed a lot, has vanished. Which means every horror we can name is a floor. Not a ceiling. The ceiling is somewhere much higher up, and I do not think we are ever going to see it.
The bodies are also mostly gone. Investigators pulled five identifiable sets of remains out of the ground at Wilseyville. They also collected forty-five pounds of charred bone and ash from a burn site behind the cabin. I want to hold you at that number for a second. Forty-five pounds is not five people. Forty-five pounds is a count that nobody has ever finished, whoever they were. The official estimate of Lake and Ng’s total victims runs from eleven to twenty-five. That is not a scientific hedge. That is an admission that this case was too big for its own investigation.
And then there is the silence. Leonard Lake — the man who wrote the manifesto, built the bunker, filmed his own crimes — never said one word to police. He swallowed cyanide before they could ask him anything. He died four days later on a hospital bed, in a coma, without a name, without a location, without an apology. Which is what a coward does. I will not soften that word. Cowards die on their own terms so they don’t have to face the terms of the people they hurt, and that is what Leonard Lake did, and I am not going to be polite about it in his own story.
Charles Ng, the accomplice they actually caught, has given the American court system fourteen years of trial time and almost nothing else. Another wall. Another silence. Behind it, an unknown number of dead women, men, and children we may never account for.
This is the story of the ones we do know. And it starts, absurdly, with a shoplifted vise.
A Vise, a Fake ID, and a Dead Man’s Name
June 2, 1985. South San Francisco. A lumberyard on Sunset Avenue. A young Asian man in his mid-twenties palms a seventy-five-dollar bench vise off a display and walks it out to the trunk of a Honda parked at the curb. A clerk sees the whole thing. The clerk calls the police. By the time officers arrive, the young man — Charles Ng, twenty-five years old, US Marine Corps veteran of the dishonorable-discharge variety — is already gone on foot.
But there is a second man waiting in the Honda. He does not run. He is older. Balding. Bearded. He is calm. He hands the officer a driver’s license. The name on the license is Robin Scott Stapley. The photo does not match. Stapley is listed as twenty-six years old on his ID. The man holding it is clearly pushing forty.
Officers search the car. In the car they find a .22 caliber revolver, illegally fitted with a silencer.
Now I need you to sit with the mismatch for a minute, because the mismatch is the whole case in miniature. The bearded man in the car — Leonard Lake, ex-Marine, Vietnam veteran, thirty-eight years old — is carrying the driver’s license of a man he had murdered seven weeks earlier. He is not just using an alias. He is wearing the identity of one of his own victims. And what ends everything is not detective work, not a witness, not the FBI, not a tip line, not a task force. What ends everything is a shoplifted vise and a photo that does not match the face of the man holding it.
Sometimes God writes the ending, and it is the small thing you would never have thought to write yourself.
At the station, Lake asks the officers for a glass of water. He uses the water to swallow two cyanide capsules he has sewn into the lapel of his shirt. He collapses. He is rushed to the hospital. He goes into a coma. Four days later, on June 6, 1985, he dies without ever speaking a word to law enforcement.
Everything police would come to know about what happened at Wilseyville, they had to learn from the ground, from the bunker, from the buried videotapes, and from Lake’s own hundred-page diary — a diary he was too proud not to write down and not clever enough to destroy. Because Leonard Lake did not just kill people. He documented himself killing them. And then he killed himself so he would never have to answer for any of it. That is not the choice of a man who thought he was misunderstood. That is the choice of a coward. And I will keep saying it because the case does not deserve softening.
The Advertisement That Started It
You need to understand something about how these two men found each other. It was not chance. It was not fate. It was not one of those true-crime stories where two damaged people cross paths at a bus stop and their damage lines up. It was an ad in a magazine.
In 1981, Leonard Lake placed a personal advertisement in a survivalist magazine. He was in his mid-thirties. He was looking, in his words, for someone with similar interests. And what we call “similar interests” today usually means a hobby. In Lake’s case it meant a very specific combination of Cold War paranoia, weapons obsession, and — as he was already writing down in his own hand — a plan to kidnap women and lock them inside a bunker.
Charles Ng answered the ad.
Hold onto that. Because it changes the shape of everything. Leonard Lake advertised for a partner in what he was about to do. Charles Ng — twenty years old, fifteen years younger than Lake, son of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, stationed with the Marines in Hawaii — read that advertisement, in a magazine, in an America he had recently moved to, and said yes. There is no romance in this story. There is no tragic accident. There is a want ad, and a young man who answered it, and this is where our women died.
Now, by the time these two actually built a life together, both of them had already been shaped by the American military into what they were going to become. That part matters, so let me walk you through it.
Ng was already, by twenty, a career petty criminal. He had been arrested for shoplifting in England as a teenager. His father had shipped him out of Hong Kong to try to straighten him out. The Marines were not straightening him out. In November 1981, he was caught stealing automatic weapons from a Marine armory. He escaped military confinement. He spent five months on the run. He was recaptured in April 1982, court-martialed for conspiracy to commit larceny and unlawful entry, sentenced to three years, and shipped to Leavenworth federal prison. By 1984 he was out, dishonorably discharged. And he went straight from the prison to the cabin in California where Leonard Lake was waiting for him.
Lake’s story is older and messier, and it matters because a lot of what he became was set in motion by a war. He enlisted in the Marines in 1964, right out of Balboa High School in San Francisco. He served two tours in Vietnam — 1965 and 1968 — as a radar electronics technician, largely avoiding direct combat. In Da Nang, during his second tour, he had a delusional breakdown. Military psychiatrists diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder: emotional detachment, social withdrawal, recurrent fantasies of violence and control. He was treated. He did not improve. In 1971 he was medically discharged from Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. And from that moment on, he spent the next decade drifting through survivalist communities in Humboldt County, a brief marriage to a teacher’s aide named Claralyn “Cricket” Balazs, and one long, increasingly specific fantasy that he could not stop writing down.
I am not going to tell you Vietnam made Leonard Lake a serial killer. Plenty of men came home from Da Nang and did not build a bunker to keep women in. Plenty of men. But I am going to say, plainly, that the American military identified this man as psychiatrically unwell in 1968, sent him home with a discharge that let him get on with a civilian life, and did not follow up. And then he did what he did. And nobody in the chain of care that failed him will ever have to answer for how many women got hurt because of that failure. Which is another silence in a case built of them.
Operation Miranda
Lake called his plan Operation Miranda. He named it after Miranda Grey, the woman in John Fowles’s 1963 novel The Collector.
If you have not read the book, I will summarize it and then never bring it up again. A lonely young man collects butterflies. He decides, one day, to collect a woman. He kidnaps her. He keeps her in a cellar. He does not sexually assault her — he does something worse, if you can imagine. He simply owns her. Because he cannot bear the world in which she does not belong to him. She dies in the cellar. He starts planning the next one. Fowles wrote this novel as a moral horror about male entitlement, about the specific violence of a man who cannot let a woman exist outside his reach. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng read it as an instruction manual. Inside the Wilseyville torture chamber, there was a sign nailed to the wall. The sign said The Miranda.
Here is what Lake wrote about his own project in his 1983 diary, the year he began serious construction. I have read this passage four times and I still cannot get past the numbering. I want you to read it once, in full, because the way this case is usually told does not quote it in full:
1983 was the year of Miranda. Started (and abandoned) in Humboldt County and restarted here. M is a serious underground construction meant to:
1) Provide a physical setting for my sexual fantasies.
2) Provide physical security for myself and my possessions.
3) Provide limited protection from nuclear fallout.
Look at that list. Look at the order he wrote it in.
The way this case is usually framed, Leonard Lake was a Cold War survivalist who happened to want a collection of female slaves for the post-nuclear rebuilding of the human race — as if the nuclear-war part was the primary architecture and the women were an appendix. His own words, in his own numbered list, in his own diary, put the sexual fantasy at position one. Nuclear fallout is at position three. He knew what he was building. He knew what the bunker was for. The apocalypse story was cover. And I am going to say that plainly, because we owe the women who died in that bunker the small mercy of not letting a dead man’s fake justification survive him.
He wrote other things. On women:
God meant woman for cooking, cleaning house and sex. And when they are not in use, they should be locked up.
He put God’s name on that sentence. I want you to see him do it.
On himself:
I am a dangerous person. Society would be worried if they knew that I existed and what I was up to.
And on Saturday, February 25, 1984 — a random Saturday, the kind of entry a normal person would write about the weather — he wrote:
Mostly dull day-to-day routine still with death in my pocket and fantasy my major goal.
Death in his pocket. That is a man who knew exactly what he was carrying. Not a delusion. Not a break with reality. A pocket. A fact. A tool he kept with him at all times. When he swallowed cyanide in that police station fifteen months later, it was not a snap decision. He had been rehearsing the exit for years, and he had told his own diary the rehearsal was going well.
The last diary entry we have is from November 2, 1984. It refers to the murder of a man named Paul Cosner:
Friday, November 2, 1984. Met Charlie, performed op. Met resistance for the first time … unsuccessful in obtaining credit cards or bank codes. Drove to country for completion canceled Charlie’s running debt to me.
Read those euphemisms slowly. Please. “Performed op.” “Drove to country for completion.” “Canceled Charlie’s running debt to me.” A murder reduced to the language of a small business owner closing out receivables at the end of a quarter. This is not the vocabulary of a man losing his grip on reality. This is the vocabulary of a man who has organized his whole reality around the killing so completely that he can barely bring himself to name the thing he is doing. He is bookkeeping. He is bookkeeping over a body.
The Cabin, and the Woman Who Kept It
The cabin was in Wilseyville, an unincorporated community in Calaveras County, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Rural. Sparse. The kind of place where the nearest neighbor is a long drive away and a scream does not travel to anyone who can help you. It was, in other words, perfect for what Lake had in mind.
And the cabin did not belong to Leonard Lake. It belonged to Claralyn “Cricket” Balazs. His ex-wife. They had married in 1981, separated a year later. She had kept the property in the divorce. He rented it from her.
On the property, Lake and Ng built a cinder-block bunker. They installed an incinerator. They ran power for the video equipment. The torture chamber inside had rings bolted into the walls and the sign that said The Miranda. Investigators walked into it in June 1985 after Lake’s arrest, and they did not describe finding a hidden facility. They described a workshop. The equipment was neatly arranged. The tapes were labeled in Lake’s own handwriting.
Now. About Cricket.
Cricket Balazs was a teacher’s aide. She married Leonard Lake when she was young. She stayed married to him for one year. She left him. She held on to a piece of land in the mountains. When her ex-husband asked to rent it, she said yes. That is what is on the record. That is what anyone can prove.
When police arrived, Cricket’s lawyers requested blanket immunity in exchange for her cooperation. She was granted blanket immunity. She was called as a witness at Charles Ng’s trial. She took the stand. And the prosecution never asked her a single question. They had already given her the deal. By the time she got to the witness box, the attorneys had concluded she was too unreliable a witness to actually use. So she stood there. And then she went home. She was never charged with anything.
I have thought a lot about Cricket, because I am a woman writing about a case where a woman’s land became the place other women died. And I want to be honest with you about what I do not know. I do not know what Cricket knew about her ex-husband. I do not know what she saw when she visited that property, if she visited. I do not know at what point she started to suspect, if she started to suspect. I do not know how long it takes a woman who has escaped a marriage to a dangerous man to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. I do not know any of these things. Neither did the prosecution, which is precisely why they gave the deal they gave and asked the questions they did not ask.
What I do know is that she is treated as a footnote in this case, and I think that is a mistake. Not because I want to condemn her without evidence — I do not, I will not — but because a case with this many silences inside it can afford to sit with one more instead of moving past it politely. Cricket is another silence. Another thing this case will not answer for us. If she knew anything, I hope the weight of it found her the way this world did not. And if she did not know, I hope she got to rest.
The Names
When true crime turns victims into a body count, it does the exact thing the killer wanted done. So I am going to say the names, slowly, and I am going to tell you a little about who they were, because that is the least you and I can do for them in the middle of the night forty years later.
Harvey and Deborah Dubs, and their sixteen-month-old son Sean, disappeared from their San Francisco home in July 1984. All three of them. A whole family, taken. Sean was old enough to walk. He was not old enough for anything else.
Paul Cosner — the man Lake reduced to “canceled Charlie’s running debt” in his diary — was killed in November 1984 after being lured into a used-car transaction. He was thirty-nine. He thought he was selling a car.
Then Lake and Ng began killing people they knew. This is the part where the story stops sounding like a slasher film and starts sounding like something worse.
Clifford Peranteau, a coworker at the San Francisco moving company where Ng was employed, disappeared in January 1985. He was shot while pleading for his life. Read that again. He was shot while pleading for his life. He knew what was happening. He asked them not to. They did anyway.
Jeffrey Gerald, another mover, disappeared in February 1985 — killed, according to court testimony, so that Ng could inherit his seniority at the moving company. His promotion. That was the motive. Read that sentence again and tell me it sounds real. Jeffrey Gerald died so that Charles Ng could move up a rung at a labor-hire job.
Michael Carroll — Ng’s own friend — disappeared in April 1985. Then Ng went and got Michael’s girlfriend, Kathleen Allen, and brought her up to Wilseyville, and I want you to hold onto that fact for a second. He killed his friend. And then he went and picked up his friend’s girlfriend and took her to the cabin where his friend’s body already was. Kathleen was in her twenties. She was killed after an escape attempt. She tried. She almost got out. She did not get out.
The final cluster is the one that has haunted me longest, and I want to walk you through it slowly.
In April 1985, Leonard Lake turned on his own neighbors. There was a family living close by — Lonnie Bond, Sr., his partner Brenda O’Connor, and their infant son Lonnie Bond, Jr. Brenda was a young mother. Lonnie Jr. was a baby. Their friend Robin Scott Stapley was visiting them at the time. Lake and Ng came for all of them.
Lonnie Bond, Sr. was shot in the head while handcuffed. Robin Stapley was shot three times. Robin was killed specifically because he physically resembled what Lake wanted a fake identity to look like — his driver’s license would be in Lake’s pocket seven weeks later at the arrest. He was killed for his ID. That is the whole reason. A young man died so a dangerous stranger could carry his name for two months. And the man who killed him was arrested carrying it, which if there is any small justice in this world, is at least a poetry of ending. His ID caught the man who took it.
The infant was taken from Brenda. Kathleen was already at the cabin. Brenda was brought there. And what happens next is on tape.
That is eleven confirmed murder convictions. Nine adults. Two children. Every one of them a person before they were a case number, a body before they were a body count. And the official estimate of the true total — the number of people who died on that land whose remains have not been identified or whose deaths were not proven in court — goes up to twenty-five. Which means as many as fourteen more people. Unnamed. Their families still wondering. Their mothers still not knowing, forty years on.
The M-Ladies Tape
The tape they call the M-Ladies tape — the M is for Miranda — recorded the torture of Kathleen Allen and Brenda O’Connor. Investigators found it buried on the Wilseyville property, labeled in Lake’s own handwriting.
I want to be honest with you about the choice I made writing this next part. Every true crime outlet that has covered this case has quoted from this tape. I decided I did not want to add another transcription. Then I sat with the case for a while longer and I changed my mind. I changed my mind because what Kathleen and Brenda said on that tape is the closest thing we have to their own voices. Lake destroyed most of what he filmed. The two women on this tape are the ones whose words survived by accident. If we cannot bear to read their words, we do not really want to know them, and we do not deserve their story.
If you cannot bear to read them, skip this section. I will not think less of you. But nothing that follows is speculation. Every quoted line was recorded on video by Lake and Ng themselves and played in open court.
Lake reads what amounts to a script to his captives. He explains the terms. He is calm. He is clear:
By cooperating with us, that means you will stay here as a prisoner, you will work for us, you will wash for us, you will fuck for us. Or you can say no, in which case we’ll tie you to the bed, we’ll rape you, and then we’ll take you outside and shoot you. Your choice.
— Leonard Lake, M-Ladies tape
Read that again. He is offering it as a menu. He has thought about it enough to structure the sentences in parallel. He built the bunker for exactly this moment, and now the moment is here and he is reading his own script back to a young woman he is about to enslave. This is not rage. This is administration. He is not out of control. He is very, very in control, and that is the horror of him. Rage would be easier. Rage would be a thing you could imagine breaking. This is not breaking. This is a filing cabinet.
Later on the same tape, Lake tells Brenda that the neighborhood does not like her family — an invented complaint from imaginary neighbors, delivered as if it were a mild HOA grievance. Brenda answers reasonably. She is still, in her own mind, in a world where reasonable answers work:
Brenda O’Connor: So we’ll leave.
Leonard Lake: Oh, you’ve already left. We’ve closed you down.
“We’ve closed you down.” That is a phrase from the world of small business. Same register as “canceled Charlie’s running debt.” This man’s inner grammar for killing people is the grammar of shutting down a shop, and it never breaks. He is not out of his mind. He is inside it. He has furnished it. This is what the furniture looks like.
Ng is also there. Ng also speaks. His line, to Brenda:
You can cry and sob like the rest of them, but it won’t do any good.
— Charles Ng, M-Ladies tape
“The rest of them.” There were others. Ng is telling Brenda, on camera, that he has done this enough times to be bored of the sound women make when they beg for their lives. He is not confessing. He is complaining about repetition. And in that one line — that one line — he tells us the count of surviving tapes is nowhere close to the count of women who cried and sobbed in that bunker. Everything you can name is a floor. Not a ceiling. I told you.
And then, later on the tape, there is the moment I cannot stop thinking about. It is not one of the threats. It is a small piece of casual information Lake delivers to Brenda about her infant son. He tells her the baby has been given to a barren family — placed with people who could not have children of their own. He says this to comfort her. Or to appear to comfort her. Or to inflict a particular kind of psychological injury dressed up as comfort. The baby had not been placed with anyone. The baby had been murdered. Brenda O’Connor died believing her son might be alive somewhere, in someone else’s arms.
I want to sit with what that costs. I want you to sit with it too, because as a woman, as a daughter, as someone who has held babies in her arms — this is where the case broke me the hardest, and I want to tell you why.
Brenda was a young mother. She had just been taken from her home. Her partner was already dead. Her friend was already dead. Her infant son had been physically removed from her body. And this man — who has already told her he will rape her, who has already told her he will shoot her, who has already told her he has done this to other women — hands her the one lie that would let her die still holding a piece of hope. That her baby was safe. That her baby was in a family. That her baby was going to grow up. That was the last mercy Leonard Lake ever gave anyone, and it was a lie, and he knew it was a lie when he gave it. He gave a dying mother a lie about her baby, dressed up as comfort, because he wanted to. That is what I want you to hold when you close this tab. Not the killer. Her. Brenda O’Connor. A mother who died believing the wrong thing about her son because it was the only mercy left in the room.
The tape is used, today, to train law enforcement interrogators. It is one of the standard reference documents in the field for what a fully organized, fully self-aware predator sounds like on camera. Which means, in a small awful way, the M-Ladies tape is doing more good in death than Leonard Lake ever did alive. That is not a redemption. That is just what happens to a piece of evidence over time. It survives. It teaches. Brenda and Kathleen are, in the smallest possible way, still saving other women. I do not know how to sit with that either.
Canada, and Six Years of “No”
Ng flew to Canada immediately after Lake’s arrest. He landed in Calgary. He should have vanished. He didn’t. On July 6, 1985 — barely a month after Lake collapsed in that South San Francisco police station — Charles Ng walked into a Hudson’s Bay Company department store in downtown Calgary and tried to shoplift groceries. A security guard stopped him. Ng resisted. Ng pulled a handgun. Ng shot the security guard in the hand.
Read that back. The man who had participated in the torture and murder of at least eleven people over eight months in California went down for shooting a mall security guard over shoplifted groceries. In the middle of what was, at the time, one of the largest manhunts in California history, Charles Ng could not stop stealing. There is something almost banal about it, and the banality is part of the story. These men were not masterminds. They were petty. They were petty at scale.
Ng was convicted in Canada. He served three years there. Then the extradition fight began.
Canada does not have the death penalty. Canada does not extradite a person to a country that will impose the death penalty unless the requesting country provides assurances that death will not be sought. California would not provide those assurances. Ng’s Canadian lawyers used this refusal to run the clock — six years — through the Canadian court system. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
On September 26, 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that extraditing Charles Ng to the United States without death-penalty assurances did not violate Canada’s constitutional protection of human rights. He was on a plane back to California the same day.
Six years. Six years to move one man across one border. Because Canada, unlike the United States, believes it is barbaric to execute people. And the United States, unlike Canada, does not. I will let you sit with which country you would rather stand trial in if you were innocent.
Fourteen Years for a Verdict
Ng arrived back in California in September 1991. His trial began in 1995. The venue had to be moved from Calaveras County, where the killings actually happened, all the way south to Orange County — more than four hundred miles — because pretrial publicity had made an impartial jury in the local area impossible.
The trial cost approximately fourteen million dollars. It is among the most expensive criminal proceedings in California history. On February 24, 1999 — more than thirteen years after the crimes and eight years after Ng’s return to the United States — the jury returned eleven first-degree murder convictions. On April 30, 1999, the same jury returned a death sentence.
Ng was moved to death row at San Quentin. His appeals began.
On July 28, 2022 — twenty-three years after his conviction, thirty-seven years after his arrest — the California Supreme Court issued a unanimous 181-page opinion affirming both his convictions and his death sentence. Case number S080276. He remains on death row today, alive, because California’s governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions for the duration of his time in office. Ng also still has federal appeals available to him.
Do the math with me for a second. Charles Ng was arrested in the summer of 1985. It is now 2026. He has been in custody, on this case, for forty-one years. He was twenty-five when they took him. He is sixty-five now. The case has cost more than the annual budget of a small California city. And it is still not over.
This is a country that argues about the death penalty as if it were a philosophical question. Look at the Charles Ng case and tell me the death penalty is even a functional matter, let alone a moral one. It has resolved nothing. It has delivered nothing. It has kept a man alive on the state’s dime for forty years while the families of the eleven people he was convicted of killing have grown old, and some of them have died, waiting for a resolution the state cannot give them. If you wanted to design a system that punished the survivors instead of the guilty, you would design this one.
Reggie Frisby, Forty Years Later
I told you at the start of this piece that I wanted to come back to what was not found. Here is the piece of it that came back.
On January 15, 2025 — almost exactly forty years after investigators first walked onto the Wilseyville property — the Calaveras County Sheriff’s cold case team announced that a set of remains from that site had finally been identified. His name was Reginald “Reggie” Frisby. He was born in 1956. He had been a resident of San Francisco. He had never been reported missing. He had never appeared on any list of possible Lake and Ng victims. He had simply been in the ground since 1985, waiting for a technology that did not exist yet to find him.
The identification was made using Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy, a method that did not exist in 1985. Standard DNA analysis had failed to match him against anyone in the CODIS database. His remains were sent to a specialized lab called Intermountain Forensics. The lab extracted a usable genetic profile and matched it against public genealogy databases — the same kind of family-tree services people use to find their great-great-grandparents. Reggie Frisby was identified by a distant relative who had spit into a tube out of curiosity.
Forty years after Leonard Lake killed himself with cyanide rather than answer for what he had done, a man named Reggie Frisby got his name back. Say that with me, out loud. One of them came home.
He is not the last. The Calaveras cold case team is still working the file. There are other sets of remains on that property that still have no name. There are, almost certainly, other victims we still have no physical remains for at all. Somewhere in a database of family-tree kits sold in a drugstore in a place none of us have been, other names are waiting.
Leonard Lake wanted to be forgotten by history. He wrote in his diary that society would be alarmed if it knew what he was up to. He killed himself so society would never know the full extent of it. He almost got what he wanted.
But every time a lab like Intermountain Forensics pulls a usable genetic profile out of a fragment of forty-year-old bone, and matches it to a person, and gives a family the answer they had stopped hoping for — every time that happens, Leonard Lake loses another inch of the silence he tried to buy with his cowardice. Reggie Frisby is one inch. There will be more. There has to be.
What was not found is being found. Slowly. Decades late. Not by the people who should have found it in 1985. By strangers. By science. By a distant cousin who wanted to know if she was part Irish.
The bodies are coming home. The names are coming home. Charles Ng is still alive on death row, and Leonard Lake is still, thank God, dead. Their silence is losing. Slowly, and forty years late, but it is losing.
Say the names out loud. In your kitchen. In your car. Before you go to sleep tonight. When you tell someone about this case, do not lead with the killers’ names. Lead with theirs.
Harvey Dubs. Deborah Dubs. Sean Dubs. Paul Cosner. Clifford Peranteau. Jeffrey Gerald. Michael Carroll. Kathleen Allen. Lonnie Bond, Sr. Lonnie Bond, Jr. Robin Scott Stapley. Brenda O’Connor. Reggie Frisby.
And say them again next year, when the count goes up. Because it will go up.
Sources
- People v. Ng, S080276 (Cal. Sup. Ct., July 28, 2022) — unanimous opinion affirming conviction and death sentence.
- Chitat Ng v. Canada, UN Human Rights Committee, Communication No. 469/1991 (1994).
- UPI Archives, June 18, 1985 — on Claralyn Balazs.
- San Francisco Chronicle, July 28 2022 — on the Supreme Court affirmation.
- CBS News, 2022 — on the affirmed death sentence.
- CBC News — Canadian angle on the case and the extradition history.
- Oxygen, Manifesto of a Serial Killer — direct diary excerpts.
- Oxygen — on Claralyn Balazs and the immunity deal.
- myMotherLode, January 2025 — on the identification of Reginald Frisby.
- Don Lasseter, Die For Me: The Terrifying Story of Charles Ng/Leonard Lake Torture Murders (Kensington, 2000).