by Colin Wilson
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.
He and Lake formed a close friendship, in which Lake, 16 years Ng’s senior, became a kind of father figure, and for a while Ng moved in with Lake and his wife Cricket. Then the military authorities caught up with him, and he was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth.
Lake by then was involved as an accomplice, and decided to go into hiding, and sewed cyanide capsules into the lapel of his jacket, swearing to use it rather than go to prison. And it was when Ng emerged from prison that the two once more went into partnership, moved out to the property in Wilseyville—purchased by Balasz’s parents—and set about turning ‘Operation Miranda’ into a reality.
Lake’s journal left no doubt about his method of collecting his sex slaves. He made a habit of luring people to the house, often inviting them—as he did the Bond family—to dinner. The husband and the baby were then murdered, probably almost immediately. The woman was stripped of her clothes, shackled, and sexually abused until her tormentors grew bored with her. Then she was killed and buried or burned.
One other thing emerged clearly from these journals, and was noted by the psychiatrist Joel Norris, who published a study of Lake in his book The Menace of the Serial Killer: when Lake killed himself, he was in a state of depression and moral bankruptcy. ‘His dreams of success had eluded him, he admitted to himself that his boasts about heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and the increasing number of victims he was burying in the trench behind his bunker only added to his unhappiness. By the time he was arrested in San Francisco, Lake had reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realised that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it.’
In mid-June 1985, two weeks after the digging began, the police had unearthed nine bodies and 40 pounds of human bones, some burnt, some even boiled. The driving licences of Robin Stapley and of Ng’s friend Mike Carroll (the boyfriend of another victim, Kathy Allen), and papers relating to Paul Cosner’s car, confirmed that they had been among the victims.
When the ‘survival bunker’ itself was finally dismantled and taken away on trucks, it seemed clear that the site had yielded up most of its evidence. This suggested that Lake had murdered and buried 25 people there. The identity of many of the victims remained unknown. The only person who might be able to shed some light on it was the missing Charles Ng.
On Saturday 6 July, 1985, nearly five weeks after Ng’s flight, a security guard in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, saw a young Chinese man pushing food under his jacket; when he challenged him, the youth drew a pistol; as they grappled, he fired, wounding the guard in the hand. He ran away at top speed, but was intercepted by other guards. The youth obviously had some training in Japanese martial arts, but was eventually overpowered and handcuffed. Identification documents revealed that he was Charles Ng.
FBI agents hurried to Calgary, and were allowed a long interview. Ng admitted that he knew about the murders, but put the blame entirely on Lake. And before the agents could see him again, Ng’s lawyers—appointed by the court—advised him against another interview. After a psychiatric examination, Ng was tried on a charge of armed robbery and sentenced to four and a half years. But efforts by the California Attorney General John Van de Kamp to make sure that he was extradited after his sentence, met with frustration. California, unlike Canada, still had the death penalty, and the extradition treaty stipulates that a man cannot be extradited if he might face the death penalty. In November 1989, after serving three and a half years of his sentence, Ng was ordered back to California to face the murder charges against him, yet the possibility of the death sentence would impede his extradition for another six years. It eventually happened on 26 September 1991. In due course, Ng was returned to California.
What followed was the most drawn-out and costly legal proceeding in US history, the bill soon passing $14 million.
His lawyers were able to further delay his trial for another eight years, until October 1998. It was finally moved to Santa Ana, in Orange County, on the grounds that most people in San Andreas, Calaveras County, believed Ng guilty.
The accused had now ceased to be slim
ly built and become rotund. But he still continued to insist that he should not be on trial at all, since it was Lake who was entirely responsible for the murders. The problem about that defence was that he could be seen on videotape cutting off the clothes of one of the victims, and joining with Lake in making fun of her distress. Worse still, part of the evidence against him was a cartoon he had drawn showing himself dropping a baby by its leg into a kind of wok over a fire. An accompanying carton shows him holding the baby upside down and breaking its neck with a karate chop.
Four months later, on 24 February 1999, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on 11 of the 12 counts of murder in the first degree. Judge John J. Ryan sentenced Charles Ng to death.
Ng’s complaints of unfair treatment are perhaps not entirely without foundation. In practically all known cases in which two people participate in murder, there is a leader and a follower. In this case there can be no doubt that Ng was the completely besotted follower. Yet it is also certain that the murders could never have taken place without his presence from the beginning. As noted earlier, psychiatrists use the phrase folie a deux, a mental disorder shared by two in association, such as Leopold and Loeb, Fernandez and Beck, Bianchi and Buono. In most such cases, the presence of the follower is the catalyst that sparks the leader to kill. The two then become involved in murder as a matter of joint purpose. But the follower adds some essential psychological element to the partnership.
In the case of Lake and Ng, the joint purpose was sealed by their sense of having been treated badly in childhood; both saw themselves as victims of the adult world represented by their parents. That is how Lake came to hate happy families. And this is why, in his case, the normal inhibition against harming children was suspended. We only have to look at the photograph of the families he destroyed—of Brenda O’Connor, Deborah Dubs, Kathy Allen—to understand how a man who felt he had been denied a normal family life must have envied and hated them.
Then why was it Ng who provided emotional fuel that energised the folie a deux, rather than Cricket Balasz? To that the answer is undoubtedly that she was more dominant than Lake, a leader, not a follower. Photographs of Lake reveal a man who is undermined by lack of self-esteem. It was Ng who provided Lake with the unqualified admiration that he needed.
The envy and hatred that triggered 25 murders might have remained isolated in the vacuum of Lake’s enormous self-pity if he had not met someone else who shared his feelings. When two paranoid and self-pitying individuals share the same vision of the world, the world suddenly becomes a more dangerous place.
Chapter Fourteen
The 1990s
In 1946, the British novelist George Orwell wrote an essay in which he lamented the decline of the British murder since pre-war days. The ‘classic’ cases, he said, such as Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen, the Brides in the Bath, have a gruesome or dramatic quality that touches the imagination of novelists and film producers. With these Orwell contrasts the ‘Cleft Chin Murder’ of 1944, in which an American GI named Karl Hulten teamed up with a strip-tease dancer, Betty Jones, and set out on what was intended to be a rampage of crime that would bring 1920s Chicago to London. They shot and robbed a hired car driver and dumped his body in a ditch, then drove around all weekend in his car until they were caught. Both were sentenced to death, although she was reprieved. Orwell complains that, as the most talked-about murder of recent years, it is oddly commonplace and unmemorable.
He would probably have had something similar to say about the rise of the serial killer—Manson, Corona, Mullin, Kemper, Frazier, Corll, Gacy—for all these certainly lack the quality of the classic American murder case from Professor Webster to Lizzie Borden. And this is simply because killers who are demented by drugs or suffering from clinical psychosis are bound to be less interesting than killers who are basically normal but are driven to kill by some negative or twisted emotion we can understand.
This complaint will certainly be echoed by any future criminologist who attempts to tell the story of serial murder in retrospect. The interest of the tale lies mainly in the advances that have been made in forensic and psychological detection—in short, in the manhunt. Corll, Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, clearly belong to the story, but only because their cases have been landmarks in the history of mass murder. As to the dozens of killers known by acronyms such as the Night Stalker, the Green River Killer, the Skid Row Slasher, the Trashbag Killer, the Sunset Slayer, the Trailside Killer, the Freeway Killer—they will probably be relegated to a few paragraphs describing the number of their crimes and how they were caught. There is something oddly anonymous about such murderers.
In the case of the Night Stalker, this sense of anonymity persisted even after he had been caught. Yet the crimes themselves were hideous enough. He would break into a house, creep into the bedroom and shoot the husband in the head, before raping and beating the wife. On one occasion when a woman refused to tell him where to find the valuables, he put out her eyes with a knife and took them away with him. He also occasionally raped or sodomised children.
The intruder had already been described by the roommate of a woman he killed in her condominium in Los Angeles on 17 March 1985; Maria Hernandez said he was a long-faced young man with black curly hair, bulging eyes and rotten teeth.
In that spring and summer there were more than twenty attacks, most of them involving both rape and murder. By the end of March the press had picked up the pattern and splashed stories connecting the series of crimes. After several abortive nicknames, such as the ‘Walk-In Killer’ or the ‘Valley Invader’, the Herald Examiner came up with the ‘Night Stalker’, a name sensational enough to stick.
By August things were obviously getting difficult for the Night Stalker. The next murder that fit the pattern occurred in San Francisco, the shooting of 66-year-old Peter Pan and his wife on 17 August showing perhaps that public awareness in Los Angeles had made it too taxing a location. This shift also gave police a chance to search San Francisco hotels for records of a man of the Night Stalker’s description. Sure enough, while checking the downmarket Tenderloin district police learned that a thin Hispanic with bad teeth had been staying at a cheap local hotel periodically over the past year. On the last occasion he had checked out the night of the San Francisco attack. The manager commented that his room ‘smelled like a skunk’ each time he vacated it and it took three days for the smell to clear.
The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to bring about his identification. A young couple in Mission Viejo were attacked in their home. The Night Stalker shot 29-year-old Bill Carns through the head while he slept, and then raped his partner on the bed next to the body. He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for money and jewellery. Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head. After making her repeat that she loved Satan, he left. But a 13-year-old boy, James Romero, was repairing his motorcycle when he noticed an orange Toyota driving slowly past, and the driver peering around as if looking for a place to rob. And when he saw the car a second time half an hour later, he made a note of its license plate number. When he heard about the rape, he alerted the police. LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in the Los Angeles Chinatown district while the owner was eating in a restaurant. The Night Stalker abandoned it soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in the Los Angeles Rampart district. It was taken away for forensic testing, and a single fingerprint was successfully raised from behind the rear-view mirror.
Manually searching police fingerprint files for a match can take days. The LAPD, however, had recently installed a fingerprint database computer system, designed by the FBI, and it was through this that they checked the print. The system works by storing information about the relative distance between different features of a print, and comparing them with a digitised image of the suspect’s fingerprint. The search provided a positive match and a photograph. The Night Stalker was Ricardo Leyva Ramirez, a petty thief
and burglar.
The identification was described by the forensic division as ‘a near miracle’. The computer system had only just been installed, and this was one of its first trials. Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after 1 January 1960. Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.
The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news. At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo. On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph on the front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.
In the bus station he went into the men’s room to finish off the cocaine, and then into a liquor store to buy Pepsi and sugared donuts. Waiting for his change, he saw his own face looking up at him from a newspaper, and as someone said, ‘It’s him,’ he ran from the shop. Stimulated by the cocaine, he raced two miles, and into the Hispanic district. In a parking lot he tried to drag a woman from her car, but was chased by passers-by. Seeing a red Mustang in a yard he jumped into it, but the owner, who was underneath it, emerged and grabbed him by the collar. Ramirez reversed into the garage wall and the car stalled. Once again he began running. He tried to pull another woman from her car, but failed and fled, now pursued by a crowd. Racing ahead, he stopped to stick out his tongue at his pursuers. Minutes later, he was caught, and dragged down by a crowd. At that moment, a young policeman arrived, and Ramirez shouted, ‘Save me before they kill me.’
In his hometown of El Paso, on the Texas-Mexico border, acquaintances said Ramirez had become a Satanist in negative reaction to Bible-study classes, and that he had spent his teens as a loner, smoking marihuana and listening to heavy metal music.
In spite of his own desire to plead guilty, his lawyers entered a plea of not guilty. The defence strategy was to play for delays, and the case came to trial only after three and a half years, in October 1988. Ramirez was finally sentenced to death in November 1999, telling the court, ‘You maggots make me sick.’