The Torture Dungeon Of Leonard Lake And Charles Ng
MurderpediaLeonard Lake as a child.
American serial killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng went undetected for two whole years before they were caught. Before a minor slip-up led to their arrest, some 25 people were brutally tortured and killed in a remote cabin in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.
According to Die for Me: The Legendary True Story of the Charles Ng/Leonard Lake Torture Murders, Lake did two tours in Vietnam before he was medically discharged from the Marine Corpse in 1971. He suffered a mental breakdown during the war and was diagnosed with “impending schizophrenia.”
Back in the U.S. and left to his own devices, that trauma led him down a dark path — though he displayed troubling signs as early as childhood. He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins and began mutilating animals.
After his discharge, Lake seemed to positively acclimate to the hippie lifestyle booming in California. He worked as a store clerk and a general fix-it man, and by 1975 he married a girl he met in San Jose. They divorced the following year.
Though he remarried, he still lusted for blood. He was convinced a nuclear holocaust would eradicate life on Earth, and took to his wife’s cabin in the woods to establish a survivalist bunker.
He invited his little brother Donald and friend Charles Gunnar — best man at his second wedding — and murdered them. He then began to pose as Gunnar in public.
When he posted an ad to find another victim, he found an accomplice, instead. Charles Ng was younger, but grew up eerily similar to Lake — and enjoyed similar passions.
The two lived in the cabin together and set out on a torture and killing spree that shocked the nation. Between 1983 and 1985, they kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered between 8 and 25 people in their “survivalist” bunker. The remains of 12 people were found on the property, as was a 40-pound collection of charred human bone.
Lake and Ng kept their female victims as sex slaves in a six-and-a-half by three-and-a-half-foot cinderblock bunker, with nothing but a bucket and toilet paper. It was lined with a one-way mirror. After raping them, they’d kill them, chop them up, and dissolve their body parts in acid.
MurderpediaA view of Leonard Lake’s bunker from above where he kept his victims and prepared for a nuclear holocaust.
According to Historic Mysteries, many of them were put in leg-irons before these sexual assaults, with some so brutal they didn’t survive. Others were forced to watch their own partners get raped before witnessing their murder.
In June 1985, their reign of terror ended, when Ng tried to steal a tool from a hardware store.
Lake arrived at the scene to assuage authorities by paying for the item, but police began to question the two and quickly found they had stumbled upon a dangerous pair of individuals. They found a gun in Lake’s stolen car, which warranted an arrest.
Lake had prepared for this type of scenario by sewing cyanide pills into the lining of his clothing. He chewed a few up while in custody and died before he could be tried or even imprisoned. With that, his part in this brutal horror story came to an end.
Police captured Ng a month later, and in 1999 he was found guilty of 11 counts of murder. He was sentenced to death, but remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison, as California hasn’t executed an inmate since 2006.
