What if the serial killing was just one small part of Leonard Lakes's expansive criminal empire? Yes, some of his victims were women who were subjected to sadistic torture and captivity, but Lake also killed the best man from his own wedding, male drifters with no possessions to steal, even his own brother. These guys weren't part of Operation Miranda. So, what was the motive there? Well, according to Lake's diary, Operation Miranda wasn't the only operation Lake was running. It turns out that for the last years of his life, Lake made sure he had multiple criminal plots going at all times, and he referred to all of them as operations. A typical journal entry from the time reads, "Met Charlie, performed Operation Met resistance for the first time, unsuccessful at obtaining credit cards or bank codes, drove to country for completion." Every documentary on the case shows the infamous video of Brenda O'Conor being told she might never see her family again. But what no one ever mentions is that her husband, Lonnie Bond, was a professional methamphetamine cook who had moved his family into the cabin next door to Lake's compound to collaborate in a drug manufacturing conspiracy with Leonard Lake himself. And those videos that were supposed to believe were just Lake and Ng's private home movies. Lakes ex-wife told the cops that he had been selling and trading tapes with an adult video broker who quote had the largest collection of adult videotapes in the world. Most accounts mention in passing Lake's affinity for firearms and his survivalist beliefs, but local media reported at the time that Lake was running some kind of militia, holding military drills in the woods by his cabin while illegally trafficking in guns and networking with like-minded survivalists through ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Lake was also known to openly associate with self-described pagans and witches, and one of Lake's acquaintances even reported that he had tried to recruit her into a San Francisco cult, which he said practiced human sacrifice. Even though Charles Ng was the only person who would end up facing prosecution for the crime spree, early news reports suggested the police were actually looking for a third suspect besides Lake and Ng. They even had a name, Wayne Greener. And police said they expected to press charges against Lake's ex-wife, Claire Balaz, as well as both of them appeared to have known about the murders well before the police did. And there's no indication Lake held any kind of job for at least the last few years of his life. Yet, he appeared to be living comfortably, even paying for new construction on his compound, including his infamous torture chamber. Police investigations turned up extensive evidence of Lake's deep relationships with the California criminal underworld, dealing in everything from guns to drugs, adult videos, and possibly even snuff films, along with his involvement in militia groups and cults, and convincing evidence of multiple accompllices besides Charles Inc. And yet, despite being the longest, most expensive murder trial in California history up to that point, none of this information ever came up in the case against Ng and has been studiously ignored in the mainstream narrative of the case ever since. So, the question becomes, if Operation Miranda wasn't Leonard Link's primary motivation, then what was? What were the contours of his criminal operation, his militia training, and his cult involvement? And how many of his murders were actually a result of these other hidden factors? If Lake didn't have a job during his final years as a fugitive, where was all his money coming from? And if Charles Ng wasn't Lakes's only accomplice, then who got away with it and why?
Leonard Lake read survivalist and mercenary magazines like Soldier of Fortune, holding military drills with fellow survivalists and people he met through classified ads he placed in the magazine. Now, Soldier of Fortune at this time operated in something of a legal gray area. It was marketed to veterans and survivalists and contained military news, geopolitical analysis, and wartime adventure stories. But the heart of the magazine was a large classified section that advertised products and services of questionable legality. Military contractors and foreign governments used Soldier of Fortune classifies to hire mercenaries for sketchy international missions or bodyguard work. People placed ads looking to illegally buy and sell firearms and all kinds of exotic weapons. Merchants advertised their military surplus and survivalist gear. And most famously, a number of people offered their services as hitmen, leading to several famous murder for hire cases in the 1980s involving hitmen solicited through Soldier of Fortune. Other similar magazines and newsletters were even implicated in coup attempts like the so-called Bayou of Pigs incident, where a group of white supremacists recruited mercenaries to overthrow the government of the tiny island nation of Dominica. The full extent of Lake's involvement with the wider mercenary and survivalist scenes isn't known for sure, but news reports at the time suggested that Lake had written articles for Survivalist magazines, and there's evidence that he may have met Charles Ng through a classified ad in Soldier of Fortune.
This paramilitary aspect of Lake's background has remained almost entirely unexplored in the official narrative of the case, but reports of militia activity followed Lake everywhere he went. In Mendescino County, neighbors described seeing Lake carrying out quote warlike exercises in the woods, bounding from tree to tree. Lake bragged about establishing a survivalist camp in the mountains and quote conducted war games at night with friends in the back country of Menescino. It was definitely automatic weapons fire. AP quoted one man as saying, "Sometimes there would be a lot together, like several people were involved, sometimes less. It would keep up sometimes for hours and make it difficult to sleep. It sounded like living near an army base." Another resident quoted by the news service said, "Sometimes the shooting would be muffled like they were firing inside a mineshaft. We used to hear it every weekend and even during the week." None of the members of Lakes's militia have ever been identified with the exceptions of Charles Ng and two of Lakes's victims, Lonnie Bond and Scott Stapely. But it seems likely that at least part of Lake's involvement with Soldier of Fortune and the militia movement revolved around the income he made from trafficking and firearms. Lake was known locally for his massive stockpile of weapons, including automatic rifles, submachine guns, handguns, large amounts of ammunition, explosives, including dynamite, grenades, and plastic explosives, chemical weapons, including lethal gases, ammunition belts, knives, everything except a tank, as one acquaintance put it. The mainstream narrative tends to attribute Lake's vast weapon stockpile to his survivalist plans. But Lake made little to no legitimate income, sometimes for years at a time, despite seemingly living comfortably, buying property, and even paying for new construction on land he purchased. This is, of course, speculation, but Lake had to be making money somewhere, and circumstantially illegal gun sales seems like one of the most plausible candidates. On the communes where Lake was living, he also gained a reputation for cultivating marijuana. At times, growing multi-acre fields of the crop.
After Lake's death, police found albums full of Lakes's amateur photos of young women and girls in various states of undress and distributed some of the pictures to the media in hopes of identifying the women. Two teenagers quickly came forward saying that they'd been students at Hillrest Juvenile Hall when Balaz working as a teachers aid at the school approached them offering money for a supposed modeling opportunity. They were driven to Lakes's property and made to pose in swimsuits, gowns, and sportsware, later being told the photos were to be used in advertisements. This practice of soliciting women to participate in lewd photo shoots under false pretenses was another constant in Lakes's behavior during this period. One couple, Alan and Lorice Springer, responded to an ad for female models posted on a Main Street bulletin board. Springer drove his wife to Lake's cabin where Lake paid her $10 an hour for modeling sessions where she posed with a variety of military weapons. Lake, using an alias, told them he was using the photos in firearm advertisements he'd placed in survivalist magazines. But the couple grew suspicious when he couldn't name any magazines where the photos had appeared. The Springer stopped the sessions when a friend of theirs answered an ad for a maid and discovered it had been placed by Lake using yet another alias. When Lake was managing the hotel in Pho, he hired women for photoshoots claiming he wanted to put them in advertisements featuring his hotel's hot tub. While living in the Bay Area, he had placed ads in the underground newspaper, The Berkeley Barb, seeking BDSM models. And during his time on the ranch commune, Lake solicited dozens of women between the ages of 16 and 23 to pose for a unicorn calendar he was supposedly planning, which of course never materialized. Many of the women who were positively identified would later say that Lake had tried to entice them into nude modeling. Most claimed they had rejected the offer. The fact that Lake was seemingly constantly engaged in soliciting paid photooots over the course of several years once again implicates his strangely deep pockets for someone with no visible means of income. How could Lake possibly afford to pay $10 an hour in the early8s? That's nearly $35 an hour in 2025 money to dozens of women all over Northern California. Well, there are indications that it may actually have been a profit-making venture. After Lake's death, when Balaz was interviewed by police investigators, she told them that Lake was engaged in correspondence with a man named Hal, who quote had the largest collection of adult videotapes in the world or something, and they swapped them back and forth and traded them. Could Lake have been producing these amateur LWD photos for sale on the black market? The implications of this arrangement get a lot more disturbing when considered in light of Lake's infamous home movies, but we'll return to this later.
It was soon after Balaz lost her job that Charles Ng would enter the picture in late 1981. Ng had grown up relatively privileged in Hong Kong before being sent by his wealthy father to complete his studies at a prestigious boarding school in England. Upon graduating high school, Ng moved to the United States for college, but dropped out after one semester. To avoid prosecution and deportation after a hit-and-run accident in San Leandro, California, Ng enlisted in the Marine Corps, reaching the rank of Lance Corporal. While stationed at Kanye Marine Corps Station in Hawaii, Ng participated in the burglary of an armory on the base that netted over $11,000 in grenade launchers, machine guns, pistols, and night vision scopes. One of the four men involved in the plot turned informant, and the weapons were seized, leaving Ng facing multiple felony charges in a court marshal. Rather than wait around for his trial, Ng escaped from a barracks window in the middle of the night and made his way to Pho, California, where he deranged to stay with the newly married couple of Lake and Balaz. Like many elements of this case, the actual circumstances under which Charles Ng came to know Leonard Lake are a lot more ambiguous than the official narrative suggests. Most reports claim that the two became acquainted by mail. By this time, Lake was regularly placing advertisements in various survivalist and mercenary magazines, including Soldier of Fortune, and it suggested that Ng saw one of Lakes's ads and began corresponding with him. Ng himself would later claim that he was put in touch with Lake by a fellow Marine survivalist. However, news reports from the period quote a former friend of Lakes, saying that in the late 1970s, Lake bragged of being in close contact with people in the military who were stealing weapons to be stored at Lakes's hideout until the cities collapsed when they would need the weapons to protect themselves. Ng would later tell Marine interrogators that he'd stolen the weapons on a lark just to prove that he could do it. But if Lake's friend's testimony is accurate, then it's entirely possible that Charles Ng may have been one of these military members Lake was in contact with, and the burglary plot was actually Lake Lakes's idea, his first criminal conspiracy with his future crime partner, Charles Ng. But there's another data point which further complicates this picture. According to the official story, Clarin Balaz first met Leonard Lake at the Renaissance Pleasure Fair in Marin County, California in early 1981, and then met Charles A through Leonard Lake when he came to live with them as a fugitive from the Marines. Later that same year, however, two years earlier, on June 29, 1979, police in San Leandro, California had arrested Charles Ng on a charge of fleeing the scene of a car accident. Ng was released on $2,000 bail, and according to court records, that bail was posted by Clarin Balaz of South San Francisco. It's at least plausible that Lake and Ng could have known each other in 1979 or earlier since they appear to have met through correspondence. But how could Clarin Balaz possibly have known Charles Ng well enough to be posting his bail in 1979, a full two years before she met Leonard Lake in 1981? This fact alone means the official narrative of Ng's relationship with Lake and Balaz can't possibly be true. And yet somehow this point was never raised by Ng's defense at trial. This 1979 car crash was the precipitating event that had caused Ng to join the Marines so he could avoid deportation. Ng's lawyers in his murder case could have easily pointed out that the prosecution's timeline made no sense since it relied on Charles Ng meeting Clarin Balaz for the first time in 1981. So why didn't they why not point out such an obvious inconsistency? Was there some larger secret that Ng's defense team needed to avoid exposing? There are other hints that this relationship may have started earlier than is commonly believed. It was later determined that Lake and Ng had started engaging in violent crime together no later than December of 1981. A prostitute came forward claiming that Lake, using the alias Tom Meyers, had solicited her through an escort service and brought her to a motel in Milbury, California. She would perform services for Lake after which he photographed her and took her out to dinner. But upon arriving back at the motel room, a man she later identified as Charles Ng burst out of the bathroom holding a knife and sa her while stabbing the mattress around her head. Crucially, the woman recalled Lake and Ng taunting her, claiming that they engaged in this activity regularly and had already killed other prostitutes. Quote, "Lake supposedly told her that this is something they do frequently and that they usually kill the girls they've been with," said Milbury Police Captain Michael Parker. But Lake said he liked her and that he wasn't going to kill her. But Parker said that Lake had removed the woman's driver's license from her purse during the attack and that Lake told her that in case she told anyone what had happened, he knew where she lived. The official story is that Ng met Lake in person for the first time no earlier than October of 1981. Is it really plausible that just 2 months later, these two psychopaths would come to trust each other so much that they'd be willing to commit potential life sentence felonies together? The first victim, whose death is attributed to both Lake and Ng as a team, disappeared in 1984. Could their killing spree really have begun a full 3 years earlier than the official story suggests? By April of 1982, Lake Ng and Balaz had left Pho, moving down the road to a rural property called Indian Creek Ranch. Later that same month, 10 FBI agents would raid the ranch in helicopters, having apparently tracked Ng to the location. Ng was arrested and shipped back to Hawaii to face charges in the 1981 armory burglary. But in the process of serving the warrant, FBI agents discovered Lakes's massive storehouse of weapons and ammunition. It took two days for investigators to catalog all the guns, gold coins, explosives, and other possessions found in the house. By the end, Lake faced a 17-count indictment on grand theft, burglary, receiving stolen property, and weapons charges. Lake had just gotten off probation for a 1980 case in which he was caught stealing materials from an agency that supplied weather proofing for the houses of elderly people. And fearing the prospect of substantial prison time, he decided to jump bail. Lake's decision to become a fugitive marked the most dramatic turning point in the case, and his crimes would rapidly escalate in both frequency and severity while on the run. According to maps and diaries discovered after Lake's death, he immediately fled to a ranch in Hanold County, where he would expand his marijuana farming operation to cover a 30 acre plot of farmland, likely an early indication of his intention to disappear into the underground black markets of California. Lake had already lost much of his weapons stockpile in the raid, and he couldn't work a regular job while on the lamb. Bas had already lost her job months earlier, meaning any income Lake had would be coming from illegal activities from here on out. By the time he got to Humboldt County in 1982, Lake had already started using the alias Charles Gunner. The real Charles Gunner was Lake's self-described best friend, who had been the best man at Lake's first wedding and occasionally visited Lake at the various communes where he'd been living. However, at some point in 1983, Gunnar allowed the fugitive Lake to hide out at his home in Morgan Hill, California. And just a few months later, Lake told Gunner's ex-wife that Gunner had gone off somewhere to meditate and never came back. Charles Gunner was last seen in the spring of that year, making him only the second person chronologically whose disappearance is attributed to Leonard Lake. The first being Lake's own brother, Donald Lake, who disappeared in 1982. Lake would assume Gunner's identity and begin looking for more men whose identities he could steal. In the meantime, Ng faced his court marshal for the weapons theft, and his interviews from the case give more hints as to the timeline of his criminal career. Ng bragged to lawyers on the case that he'd killed a man in California, bombed another person's house, and tried to assassinate a Marine Corps staff sergeant by launching a grenade at him, which misfired. Ng told one lawyer that he had blown up two cars and that he quote likes to plan and conduct military type operations involving violent attacks on other people and their property. Ng told the military court that he had escaped because he was afraid that members of an organized crime syndicate, which he claimed was behind the plot to steal the weapons, might try to kill him. Could this have been a reference to his criminal partnership with Leonard Lake? Did Ng believe that he and Leonard Lake were coordinating with a wider gun trafficking syndicate or the mafia? Or perhaps Ng was telling the truth? He would later be suspected of involvement in a 1981 murder at a car rental shop on the Canyoi military base. Jacqueline Ryder was working as a clerk in the Rainbow Renar office on July 15, 1981 when a man entered the business posing as a customer and shot Ryder, killing her. Jacqueline Ryder was the 26-year-old daughter of a Hawaiian organized crime figure named Roy Ryder, who had earlier testified as a prosecution witness in a number of gang related trials on the island. Nothing was stolen in the attack, and Ng was considered a suspect after boasting to investigators about having killed civilians and his supposed connections to the Hawaiian underworld. One of the attorneys on Ng's weapons theft case also later told police that Ng bragged about having killed a woman in Belmont, California in 1979, though no open cases have been definitively connected to this claim. Either way, it seems clear that Charles Ng was intimately familiar with psychopathic violence long before he ever teamed up with Leonard Lake. During his Marine Corps trial, Ng would bizarrely claim to be a reincarnated ninja warrior from feudal Japan. According to Earl Pardington, a lawyer who represented one of Ng's codefendants. Quote, Ng seemed to live in a fantasy world where he thought he was a ninja. At the trial, Ng testified that quote, he believed in the philosophy of ninja or ninjutsu and said he planned to become a soldier of fortune in Africa or elsewhere in the world. One of the fundamentals of ninjutsu is using other people to your advantage without them knowing it. He imagined himself to be some sort of great genius in the art form of ninjutsu and that his talent wasn't being used, said Pardington, who said that books on survivalism and ninjutsu were found in Ng's room at the time. Despite claiming to have masterminded the whole operation, Ng was allowed to plea to reduce charges in exchange for testifying against his codefendants. Under the terms of the deal, Ng served 18 months in Fort Levvenworth Military Prison before being parrolled and dishonorably discharged in 1984. Upon his release, Ng moved back to California. ultimately reuniting with Lake in the summer of 84. Although Lake and Balaz were legally divorced when Lake went on the lamb, they stayed in close contact and soon after the disappearance of Charles Gunner, Lake moved into the infamous Wilyville cabin owned by Baza's parents. The typical narrative says that Lake's operation Miranda was his plan to build the bunker/tor torture chamber on the grounds of the Wilyville cabin. But according to Lakes's diary, discovered after his death, Wilyville wasn't the first time he had tried to implement Operation Miranda. Quote, 1983 was the year of Miranda. I started and abandoned in Hanold County and restarted here in Wilyville. Lake also used his diary to keep detailed plans for and records of his criminal activities. And just like Ng, he referred to his plans as operations, constantly placing classified ads to lure new victims and tracking potential criminal opportunities. A typical entry from October 31, 1984 reads, "Nothing day spent day making calls and checking on potential operations. New Beta Honda Prelude with owner who could pass for me. The owner referred to here was Paul Cosner, whose identity Lake would soon steal along with his car after murdering him. At least seven of Lakes's victims were people he had lured to the Wilyville property with promises of lodging and payment in exchange for working on construction projects, only to execute them when they had outlived their usefulness. On at least one occasion, Lake handed out flyers in the Hayashberry neighborhood of San Francisco, offering cash for help with construction of his bunker. Another common lure Lake used to find victims was drugs. Using the alias Alan Dre, Lake enticed three people from a rooming house in Hate Ashbury, Maurice Rock, Randy Jacobson, and Cheryl Okaro with offers of money to help harvest a marijuana crop from a farm in Hanold County. It isn't known for sure whether or not the crop in question actually existed, but both Lake and Balaz had been unemployed for months by this point, so it's at least plausible that Lake had continued cultivating marijuana after his time on the commune. After leaving San Francisco with Lake, Rock, Jacobson, and Okaro were never seen again. Notably, in his correspondence with Hal, the man with the world's largest collection of adult movies, Lake had used the pseudonym Cheryl Okaro, and even sent him at least one video with Clarin Balaz posing as Cheryl, an early indication that Balaz may have known more about the murders than she led on. When Lake went on the run, he limited his choice of hideouts to towns that already had well-established links with the criminal underworld. After Lake was caught, journalists descended on Wilyville and the surrounding areas to ask locals how Lake could have gone unnoticed in such a small town. Quote, "A local marijuana grower who lives about 2 mi from the ranch where Lake stayed, said the murder suspect could have remained anonymous there for years. There are other pot farmers up here who are rarely seen and whose crops have never been found," said the man. "The rule around here is that you don't go wandering around the hills unless you belong there because we don't like it. But if you live up here, nobody ever takes notice. There's no reason to." The editor of a local paper, K. Aerola, said, quote, "A lot of people, particularly those who want to manufacture drugs, feel they can come up here and hide. They feel the area is rather unsophisticated and that they can get away with it." Wilyville and its surrounding area was somewhat famous at the time for methamphetamine manufacturing, with several local meth labs being busted up in the years preceding Leonard Lake settling there. And apparently, Lake moved to Wilyville fully intending to get in on the meth business. After Lake's death, police found commercial-sized containers of chemicals stored under Lakes's house. Sulfuric acid, nitric acid, ether, chloroform, kerosene, and aluminum powder, along with beers and other glassware consistent with the methamphetamine laboratory. On the glasswware, police found fingerprints from two men, Leonard Lake and Lonnie Bond. Bond was a mechanic from San Diego, who, according to police, was also a meth cook on the side. Bond had rented the cabin next door to Lakes, intending to set up a meth manufacturing operation with him and their mutual friend, Scott Stapley. Bond and Stapely also considered themselves survivalists and had previously participated in some of Lakes's militia activities. Bond brought his girlfriend, Brenda Okconor, to the cabin with him along with their one-year-old son, Lonnie Jr. Okconor grew to hate Leonard Lake immediately. Lake was listed in Okconor's address book as that creep on the mountain, and she tried to get away from the cabin as frequently as possible, saying she didn't want her baby Lonnie Jr. being exposed to the fumes from meth cooking. Bond frequently took out of town jobs painting buildings. And whenever he left Wilyville, Okconor would end up placing frightened calls to friends, asking them to pick her up from the cabin. After her disappearance, Okconor's friends reported that she had frequently complained to them about Lakes's disturbing behavior. He had repeatedly invited Okconor and Bond to his house to watch quote explicit videos, eventually asking them to actually film such a video with Lake participating. One friend, Triny Ferrero, even told police that Lake had quote wanted to take pictures of Okconor doing things with the baby and Lonnie on extremely disturbing detail considering Lakes's relationship with Hal, the video collector, and the black market for adult videos. During the investigation, it was reported that Okconor had confided in some of those same friends that she had seen Lake burying a woman's body. In fact, there are indications that Lake was relatively open about the murders he was committing among his friends and acquaintances. According to Scott Stapley's ex-girlfriend, Tory Dolan, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng had shown up at Stapley's residence in East San Diego driving Stapley's pickup truck and informed Dolan that Scott Stapley, Lonnie Bond, and Brenda O'Conor had been killed at the meth lab by unknown intruders. Lake told Dolan, quote, "You know, Stapely and Bond and Brenda are dead. We arrived at their cabin and two of them were in the yard and had been shot and the girl was on the porch. It was really bloody and messy, and we had to clean the mess up." Dolan said that she had found the story too outlandish to believe and assumed that Stapley just wanted to break up with her and instead of telling her directly, had concocted the whole story with Lake and Ng. She only reconsidered when Lake's other crimes came to light. Investigators even told the news media that they suspected that other people besides Lake and Ng may have participated in the murders. Quote, "Previously, only Lake Lakes's friend, Charles Ng, 24, was thought to have been involved in the killings, but we think there's a good possibility that others may be involved." Calaver's County Sheriff Sergeant Ron McFall said, "One of the primary suspects investigated by police was a man named Wayne Greener. When real estate agent Sandy Maynard had originally rented the cabin to Lonnie Bond, she said that there was a second man with him with long stringy hair, calling himself Wayne Greener, who said that he intended to move into the cabin with Bond, but never did, even though he seemed to spend a lot of time there. Investigators found a storage shed connected to Lake and Bond's meth operation, which had been rented under Greener's name and had glassware with Bond's fingerprints inside. Media reports quoted FBI and local Calaveris County police sources saying that Bond and Staples meth operation had been bankrolled by a man named Chuck who went by the alias Wayne Greener and was described as a major San Diego drug dealer. Most damningly, police heard from a friend of Bond that Greener had told him, "I know he's dead," referring to Bond. "We don't know if Greener was involved in the killings," a police source said, but he knows about them. After weeks of searching, police would ultimately identify Wayne Greener as an alias for a man who was wanted in San Diego for drugrelated crimes, whose real name was James Allen Miller. Investigators tracked Miller to the Merced County Jail, where he was being held on a $100,000 bail on drugdeing charges, which were later dismissed. Miller agreed to a lie detector test, and apparently the results were persuasive enough for police to give up on the possibility of charging him as a co-conspirator. There are no indications in the public record of what Miller actually told police about Leonard Lake or Charles Ng. But the fact that he was being openly floated as a suspect early in the investigation suggests that police at least initially believed that the murders may have been drugrelated. According to a source who spoke to the media about Bond and Lakes's method loaned Lonnie Bond a lot of money. Apparently that somebody was Miller. Could this have been Lakes's real motive for the murders of Bond, Stapely, and Okconor? just kill them and keep James Miller's seed money for himself. There's one likely accomplice, however, who is even more clearly implicated in Lake and Ng's criminal enterprises and who escaped prosecution despite evidence of indirect and even direct involvement in theft, fraud, and possibly even murder. Clarin Cricut Balaz. Officially, Balaz divorced Lake when he went on the run after the FBI raid. In reality, Balaz was intimately involved in Lake's life right up to the time of his death. Bas nominally lived with her parents in South San Francisco after the divorce. But the Wilyville cabin where Lake lived while on the lamb was owned by her parents and she spent considerable time there and in San Francisco with Lake. In one case, Lake and Ng had murdered a San Francisco typographer named Harvey Dubs along with his wife Deborah and infant son after responding to a classified ads had placed trying to sell some video equipment. Shortly after Deborah's father reported the family missing, Lake Ng and Bolaz were seen using Deborah's credit card to pay for food at a Benihana restaurant just outside San Francisco. Handwriting experts consulted by police later determined that Deborah Dubs' forged signature on the receipt was inconsistent with the handwriting of both Lake and Ng, but did show characteristics similar to Balaz's writing. Baz ultimately admitted to using bank cards and credit cards that Lake had given her, but claimed she didn't know who the cards belong to. She told investigators, quote, "I think I remember Leonard telling me when I used the card at Wells Fargo not to fingerprint it and to hold it by the edges when I put it on, and that he was always concerned the machine might keep it someday." Bas also seemed to be intimately involved with Lakes's perverse film projects. Duplicates of the photos linked to the juvenile hall girls were found in Balaza's San Francisco residence, and she was heavily featured in some of Lakes's home movies. Although the segments that included Balaz were recorded on different tapes than the ones featuring scenes of torture and essay, according to police. Disturbingly, Balaz admitted to police that she had helped Lake film a video to send to Hal, the adult film collector, in which she introduced herself using the name Cheryl Okaro, which was actually the name of a missing San Francisco woman who was not only one of Lakes's victims, but who had also previously dated Lake. It isn't known for sure when this video was filmed, however, so Bolaz may have actually started impersonating Okaro when she was still alive. Lake told Balaz that he intended to remodel the cabin to better suit his fetishes, equipping it with hooks and eyes or some kind of cable. And he had talked about having it set up so he could have a woman inside that house so that she could move around, but that she couldn't get out. And he recently put those dead bolts on the door to lock someone in. He even told her about Operation Miranda. quote, "When he spoke of Miranda to me, in my opinion, it was more like, would you like to be in bed with that woman? Could I photograph you in bed with that woman?" And that was how my mind dealt with it because I didn't like the idea of him kidnapping anybody and imprisoning them and whatever. And I had fought with him about that. To be clear, this is from an interview with police and Bolaz admitting that she argued with Lake over his plans to kidnap women and hold them prisoner in the Wilyville cabin. And then there were all the times that Lake and Ng literally just told her about people they'd killed. In a police interview, Bas admitted that Lake had told her about the robbery and murder of Don Gilletti. Gilletti was a local San Francisco radio personality who had placed a classified ad soliciting men to his apartment. Just 2 weeks after his release from military prison in Kansas, Charles Ng had shown up at Gillette's apartment and shot Gillette and his roommate, leaving Gillette dead and the roommate injured. According to Balaz, quote, "Charlie was to go into the apartment and rob these two men and call Leonard, and Leonard was supposed to come." Supposedly, Charlie went into the apartment and ran into one of the men and got nervous with his gun he was holding and he shot one of the gay men. Shortly thereafter, the roommate of the man came in and Charlie shot him also and he panicked and left the apartment. Bas also told police that Ng had confessed to killing a cab driver in Hawaii and told her a story about stabbing a bed next to a woman's head to frighten her, possibly a reference to the prostitute kidnapping incident discussed earlier in this video. and Balaz may have actually been directly implicated in one of the lesserk known disappearances attributed to Leonard Lake. William Lee Parker grew up in the same neighborhood as Balaz and had known her since childhood. He had repeatedly visited the Wilyville cabin with both his good friend Balaz and her boyfriend/husband Leonard Lake before disappearing sometime around Father's Day of 1983. Parker's sister-in-law Janet Parker told local media, "William has known Clare Lin Balas for years and so have I. and he used to go up to that cabin to work with Lake from time to time. Parker's family initially believed that he had just left the area to start a new life, but once news broke of Lake's other murders, they grew suspicious. No direct physical evidence was ever found to prove that Parker was killed by Leonard Lake. But police admitted that despite their searches, it was entirely possible that more bodies remained undiscovered in Lakes's various hiding spots across rural Calaveris and Hanold counties. If William Parker was indeed a murder victim of Lakes, he would have been one of the earliest since by the time Parker disappeared in 1983, the only missing people known to be connected to Lake were his brother Donald and his best friend Charles Gunner. It is notable, however, that William Parker shared important characteristics with other victims. Just like Donald Lake and Charles Gunner, Parker had a close personal relationship with Lake and Balaz. And just like many future victims, Parker had been helping Lake with work on the Wilyville cabin. Balas may also have been implicated in the case of Michael Carroll and Kathleen Allen. Michael Carol had met Charles Ng in the military prison at Fort Levvenworth, Kansas. After his release, Carol had been living out of a motel room with his girlfriend Kathleen Allen in Milpas, California when he decided to reconnect with Charles Ng. In early April of 1985, Carol told witnesses that he was heading to San Francisco with two friends with the intention of quote rolling some gays. Those two friends turned out to be Lake and Ng. And shortly after he left town, Carol's family received a letter with his signature saying that he had found a new place to live and that two men would soon be coming by the family's house to pick up his things. Lake and Ng then showed up to the house when the family was away and cleared out Carol's possessions. Soon afterwards, Charles Ng sold Carol's car to a man at a San Jose bus station. Within days of his disappearance, Michael Carol's girlfriend, Kathleen Allen, received an anonymous phone call saying that Carol had been shot and might be dead. A man later identified as Leonard Lake showed up at the Safeway where Kathleen Allen worked, saying that he knew where Carol was and offering to drive Alan there. Alan agreed and was last seen entering Lake's car outside her work. The day after she left, Alan called the Safeway where she worked to say she was taking some time off. A few weeks later, a typewritten letter arrived at the Safeway signed by Alan resigning her position and saying that she had decided to move north. Then the day after the date on the letter, a woman identifying herself as Kathleen Allen called the Safeway and after informing them that she wouldn't be returning to work, requested that her final paycheck be mailed to her in the care of a P.O. box in Wilsyville. Now, it is of course possible that Lake andNg had just forced Alan to make both of the phone calls to Safeway. She had been forced to participate in the filming of one of Lake and Ng's vile home movies and withdraw $2,000 from her bank account, suggesting that she was kept alive for at least a few days. But news reports about the calls explicitly identified Kathleen Allen as the speaker on the first call. Whereas for the second call, they referred only to a woman who identified herself as Allen. Perhaps police or the media had some compelling reason to believe that the second call had been made by an impostor. And given Bolaz's apparent history of forging Deborah Dubs's signature and pretending to be Cheryl Elaro, it certainly seems plausible that Bolaz may have been behind the woman's voice on the phone call. And what would be the point of having a check with Kathleen Allen's name on it sent to a PO box controlled by Lake? How could he even cash a check made out to a missing woman? Well, it turns out that Lake had registered at least six P.O. boxes under different names, including the names of some of his victims all over California. And one of his sources of income was using these PO boxes for various types of fraud. Investigators said they had identified a pattern whereby Lake would open post office boxes under his victim's names, and then attempt to seize outstanding debts owed to the victims, like paychecks. Lake's brother, Donald, had been hit by a train as a child and was considered mentally disabled as an adult, requiring full-time care from his mother, which qualified Donald for disability benefits. Donald was never reported missing after his disappearance, and Lake began cashing his disability checks after routing them through a PO box he controlled. At least one of the boxes was under the name of Cheryl Okaro, the same name Lake used to communicate with Hal the video collector. The day before one of her police interviews, Clarin Bas received a package containing parts for a 22 caliber Ruger pistol that Lake had ordered under her name. This may suggest another possible money-making angle for the PO boxes, ordering guns for resale on the black market using victim's names for the transactions. In her interview with police, Balaz quote admitted she knew Lake had post office boxes throughout the state in the names of people police now suspect were victims. But Balaz told investigators she thought Lake made up the names. So, we have Balaz admitting that she used bank cards and credit cards she received from Leonard Lake, who told her not to leave fingerprints on the cards. We have her trying to recruit underage girls for Lake's photo shoots and keeping duplicates of the prints for herself. We have her saying that she argued with Lake about Operation Miranda and his stated desire to kidnap women and hold them prisoner in a house her parents owned during a period when Lake was installing restraints to restrict a prisoner's movement inside the cabin. On the most basic level, she must have noticed that Lake's brother went missing, then his best friend, then her own childhood friend, and then several of Lakes's neighbors and crime partners, friends and acquaintances. At a time when both Lake and Ng were telling her stories about having murdered people, we have her appearing in Lake's Sick Home movies while using the name of Lake's missing ex-girlfriend as an alias. And we have her admitting that she knew Lake was opening P.O. boxes all over California under aliases, which just so happened to be identical to the names of some of the people Lake had murdered, including that missing ex-girlfriend. Either Clarin Balaz was the dumbest, most oblivious person in human history, or she was way more involved in Leonard Lakes's crime spree than the official narrative suggests. During the investigation, Balaz's attorney reported that she had been receiving anonymous death threats at her home in San Francisco. And police told her that they believed that, quote, "Somebody may be after her." Of course, these could have just been local residents angry that Bas was walking free despite her apparent complicity in her ex-husband's killing spree. But it also may have been some of Lakes's criminal associates trying to make sure Balaz kept her mouth shut. The police departments investigating the case seemed to disagree about whether or not Balage should be considered a suspect. San Francisco cops told the media that Balaz was being cooperative and that they had no evidence connecting her to Lakes's crimes. While Calaveris County police said they expected to be filing charges against her once the investigation was complete. For her part, Balaz told reporters that she was anxious to speak publicly to answer media questions and clear her name. But ultimately, her lawyers announced that she would be refusing any further comment unless she and her entire family were given full state and federal immunity. Incredibly, Balaz was even allowed to go on vacation to Bermuda during the investigation. At the very least, Baz was clearly guilty of aiding a fugitive, enticing minors on behalf of Lake, and fraudulently using multiple credit and bank cards. But to be fair, there are some factors that tend to go in her favor. For instance, in 1982, Lake participated in the burglary of Balaz's parents' house, stealing silverware, jewelry, a coin collection, and about $30,000 in cash, which Bas only found out about later when she discovered some of the missing property in Lake's house at Indian Creek Ranch. Incredibly, Balaz's parents quickly reconciled with Lake, and the proceeds from the burglary became the seed money they used to purchase the Wilyville cabin. This incident, assuming the witnesses involved, told the truth, proves that Balaz wasn't kept in the loop on every single one of Lakes's criminal endeavors. So, it's at least plausible that he could have been hiding his more monstrous crimes from her. And when police were initially serving search warrants on the Wilyville cabin, Bal snuck onto the property first and later admitted removing some items and quote, "le cleaning up the place before police got there." But when investigators later scoured the property for evidence, incriminating tapes showing Lake and Ng torturing some of their victims were still there. Ironically, Baza's efforts to hide evidence may have been exonerating because the fact that she didn't remove the torture tapes suggests that she may very well not even have been aware of their existence. On the other hand, perhaps she just couldn't find the torture tapes, which Lake surely would have taken pains to hide. Police seemed satisfied that Balas had ultimately turned over all of the tapes she had removed from the cabin, which she claimed were just her and Lakes's intimate home movies that she was embarrassed the police would find, but obviously at this point, we'll likely never know for sure. There was one other nagging question that kept coming up during the research for this video. Lake recruited many of his victims through classified ads, like the Dubs family, or by inviting them to the cabin to do work for him, like Maurice Rock and Randy Jacobson. Lake allegedly met Charles Ng through a classified ad. And by all accounts, he spent a lot of time at the Wilyville property, helping Lake with various construction projects and criminal schemes. So, why didn't Lake just kill Charles Ng? He was constantly putting Lake in compromising positions, like when he got in a car accident driving a camper van that belonged to one of Lakes's victims, or when he bungled the Gillette robbery, and he would end up being directly responsible for the petty theft at a hardware store that precipitated Lakes's death. Lonnie Bond and Scott Stapely were also survivalist friends of Lakes and had even been involved in his criminal activities and Lake murdered them anyway. So, what was it about Charles Ng specifically that made Lake turn him into an accomplice rather than a victim? Obviously, we can't know for sure, but there is one possibility that sticks out. During her police interviews, Clarin Balaz admitted that she had once attended a swinger party in Oakland with Ng where the two quote cuddled up together but went no further. According to her, she didn't specify when this incident allegedly occurred, but we know from police records that Balaz knew Charles Ng well enough to bail him out of jail in June of 1979, some 2 years before she met Lake, according to the official story. What if Balaz had actually dated Ng before she ever met Lake? Balaz was engaged to another man within months of Lake's death, making it highly unlikely that the swinger's party could have occurred after her divorce from Lake. So the only time period when this event could plausibly have taken place is before Balaz entered into a relationship with Lake. The official story says that Ng had only known Lake in person for 5 months when the FBI raid occurred and then within 2 weeks of his release from prison 2 years later he had already committed the armed robbery murder of Gillette with Lake. A timeline which seems unlikely since it would require that both men were willing to engage in life sentence eligible criminal conspiracies with someone who was essentially a pen pal. But if Lake had really been coordinating military armory robberies with Ng in the late '7s, as the story from Lake's friend suggests, then it's entirely possible that Lake actually knew Charles Ng first and then met Clarin Balaz through him. What if Lake had only refrained from murdering Charles because Balaz was still fond of him as her ex-boyfriend and Lake agreed he was off limits? But obviously, this is just speculation. Leonard Lake certainly deserves the contempt and revulsion that he provokes as one of America's most depraved serial murderers. But the reduction of Lakes's entire criminal career into just another power and control motivated serial killer has so far served to obscure all these other important aspects of Lakes's crimes. There's been endless speculation about other serial killers alleged connections to cults and fringe religions. But with Lake, we know for certain that he spent years living on communes devoted to black magic and the mother goddess. And we even have eyewitness testimony saying that he was inviting people to attend meetings of a secret human sacrifice cult that he was involved in. And yet this element of the case has been almost entirely ignored to this day. Lake spent years asking every young woman he met to take lewd pictures and videos, paying many of them to do so while apparently in active communication with an adult video broker who owned the largest collection of such films on Earth. How did Lake even meet Hal the video collector? And what if those torture tapes he created were actually snuff films that he intended to sell on the black market? One of the tape segments that was released to the media features Lake in a recliner explaining Operation Miranda directly into the camera. If the videos were solely for Lake's own private use, would he really make a tape explaining his own fetishes to himself? Lakes's requests to create child essay material with Brenda Okconor may have been attempts to fulfill his sick fantasies, but they could just as easily have been a depraved money-making scheme. yet another homemade product he could sell to Hal or any of the other black market buyers he was presumably in contact with. And how do we know there aren't more tapes out there in the private collections of people like Hal to this day? Lakes's drug dealing activities have similarly remained almost entirely ignored in the mainstream narrative of the case, but Lake wasn't engaged in low-level street dealing. Humboldt County farmland is capable of producing anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand pounds of marijuana per acre. So Lakes's 30acre pot growing operation could have been bringing in tens of thousands of dollars per year easily. And that's in 1980s money. The police found quote commercialsiz containers of raw materials for methamphetamine production under the Wilyville cabin. And media reports on the case quote a local street price for meth of around $1,000 per ounce. Meaning Lakes's meth cooking operation was looking at five or potentially six figure dollar value yields. And the fact that Lake was dealing directly with highlevel drug dealers like James Miller, aka Wayne Greener, suggests that he had significant underworld connections in the narcotics business, which have also remained almost entirely absent from the mainstream narrative of the case. Similarly, most treatments of the Leonard Lake story have studiously ignored Lakes's deep ties to the survivalist and mercenary subcultures at a time when both were near the peaks of their popularity. The right-wing militia movement of this period birthed prominent terrorist groups like the order and would eventually culminate in incidents like the Ruby Ridge standoff, the Waco siege, and the Oklahoma City bombing. The fact that Lake was getting his articles published in survivalist and mercenary magazines suggests that he had reached a level of prominence in the subculture that has never truly been reckoned with. And if he was regularly holding war games with survivalists from all over that region of California and planning to open a permanent training camp on his property, then clearly Lake was plugged into some wider networks of people with similar interests whose identities remain unknown to this day. We know that Charles Ng and two of Lakes's victims, Lonnie Bond and Scott Stapely, had attended his war games in the forest. But who else was there? And what roles did they play? The media was also eager to write off Lake Lakes's weapons caches as the stockpile of a lone maniac. But the record of the case suggests that Lake was actually running a fairly substantial gun trafficking scheme, both buying and selling firearms through the ads he placed in Soldier of Fortune and other survivalist magazines. But who was Lake selling these weapons to, especially the chemical weapons and explosives? And was Charles Ng the only enlisted man who Lake had enticed into stealing military weapons for him? Clarin Balaz eventually signed an agreement granting her immunity from prosecution in 19 murders in exchange for her testimony against Charles Ng. His trial, which wouldn't begin for some 13 years after Lake's death, would ultimately become the most expensive criminal prosecution in California history up to that point, ending with his conviction on 11 counts of murder. Ng was sentenced to death and moved to California's death row, where he remains to this day. Clarin Balaz has kept a low profile ever since the trial, living under her new married name and ignoring all media inquiries. Charles Ng has similarly avoided engaging with the media, choosing to forego the attention that many other serial killers revel in. For their part, the journalists, documentarians, writers, and YouTubers who have covered the case have been content to leave all these other areas of Leonard Lakes's past almost completely unexplored, choosing instead to focus on the toddry horror movie aspects of the case. Maybe Leonard Lake really was just like any other 1980s American serial killer, murdering people for fun or to rob them or for no reason at all. But if some of the deaths attributed to Lake were actually the result of drugrelated disputes, gun trafficking deals gone bad, producing snuff films for the black market, or occult human sacrifice rituals, then it seems like Lake may have actually been running his own mini mafia totally separate from Operation Miranda. And if that's the case, then the entire narrative needs to be rewritten. How many more people like Clarin Balaz, James Miller, and Hal the video collector are still out there keeping Leonard Lakes's secrets to this day? And ironically, the man who was so obsessed with survival would end up dying at his own hand, taking most of those secrets with him. Heat. Heat.
Accult element - On one of these communes in Pho, California, known as the ranch, Lake encountered a couple named Otter and Morning Glory Gazelle, who had invented a process for surgically fusing the two horn buds of a weak old cow, analopee, sheep, or goat to form a single horn, giving the animal an appearance superficially similar to a unicorn. Lake would begin touring one of their creations, a goat named Sir Lancelot at local events like Renaissance fairs all over Northern California. Lake's regular attendance at these Renaissance fairs also gives us some insight into the kinds of fringe cultures he was immersed in. The San Francisco Bay area and its famous Renaissance fairs of this period acted like a petri dish for the spread of various new age and occult religious movements like Wikah and neopaganism which were rapidly growing in the fertile ground of the hippie counterculture of 1970s California. At least some of the communes where Lake was living followed similar occult and neopagan beliefs. He told one woman that Otter and Morning Glory Gazelle, the unicorn makers, were the quote high priest and priestess of the black magic cult that lived on the ranch. A US Army soldier Lake met through Soldier of Fortune reported that Lake told him he was an Odinist involved in a Viking cult. There is at least one anecdotal account online from a woman who claimed that she encountered Leonard Lake exhibiting the unicorn goat at one of these fairs when she was 15 years old and he behaved inappropriately towards her. Now, obviously, this is just an anecdote from an anonymous message board poster, but given Lake's documented behavior at this time, it seems entirely plausible that he would have been engaging in his typical deviant pestering of young women at these events. In fact, it was at the August 1981 Renaissance Pleasure Fair in Marin County, California, that Lake would meet Clarin Cricut Balaz, the woman who would soon become his wife. After Leonard Lake's death, Clarin Bolaz would tell police about his occult beliefs, saying, quote, "Leonard has always been involved with witches and paganism. I also knew that Leonard and his people up there on Greenfield Ranch in Mendescino County worshiped the goddess and that it was against his religion to cut a tree down cuz a tree meant more to him, in my opinion, than a human life." There were media reports during the investigation indicating that workers at the hotel Lake managed in Phoenic boiling a goat's head on a stove top in the hotel kitchen. Could Lake have been trying to create a Baffomet skull for use in some bizarre religious right? One of Lakes's former neighbors, a woman named Geneva Southern, even reported that Lake had invited her to attend a meeting of a San Francisco cult that practiced human sacrifice. "He scared the hell out of me," Southern said. He said the group was very small and very confidential, and they believed in live sacrifices, and if somebody deserved to die, they should be dead. Southern said she told him she disagreed with such a philosophy, but Lake continued to try to entice her. The woman quickly left Lake's house and said she didn't see him until 2 weeks before his death near her home. When Lake asked me if I'd like to come up to his house so we could talk, he said he liked talking to someone intelligent. I started getting nervous and told him no. Apparently Lake's neighbors were not particularly surprised to hear these reports. In an interview with a regional newspaper, local woman Peggy Smith said, quote, "There's a long history of cults in this area, and it's time something was done about it." A survey of therapists in Mendescino County, where Lake lived, found that 32 children and nine adults were being treated for psychological trauma resulting from ritual abuse. Three of the victims told therapists that they had witnessed ritual murders. Others told of being drugged, physically tortured, said, photographed, and forced to drink blood and urine. No cases have gone to court. Filmmaker Dave McCully, who served as moderator at three public forums on ritual crime, said he has quote talked to dozens of people here who, in one way or another, have been victims of ritual crime. And the evidence suggests that Balaz may have agreed with Lakes's weird religious beliefs, or at the very least willingly played along. Media reports indicated that Balaz was known to have attended a local witches ball focused on a cult and supernatural themes with Lake during this period. and transcripts of her police interviews show Balaz sympathizing with and rationalizing his strange religious views. When she met Lake, Balaz was working as a teachers aid at elementary and high schools, including a high school for juvenile delinquents, on the grounds of a juvenile prison facility. But a few months after their relationship started, she was fired from these jobs. Lake had unsuccessfully petitioned school administrators to allow him to use the school's chemistry lab when the school was closed. An interesting request given Lake's involvement in meth manufacturing. And Balaz was warned by her boss at the elementary school to stop trying to solicit local teenagers for photo shoots with Lake, a warning she seems to have ignored.
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