In the mid-1980s, California serial killer Leonard Lake lurked in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills. A Vietnam veteran, survivalist, and fugitive from justice, Lake built a torture chamber underneath his cabin. Here he imprisoned, raped, and tortured at least three women, sometimes videotaping the brutalities. Together with his accomplice, Charles Ng, he financed this life by murder and theft. During a nine month period in 1984 and 1985, the pair filled the earth around the cabin with the corpses of eleven victims and the bones of an estimated additional fourteen. Among the dead were entire families and a man who was best man at Lake's own wedding.
Abandoned by his mother as a child, Lake lived a life of violence and fantasy. He joined the Marines, fought in Vietnam, and later managed a motel. By the 1980s, he had become a survivalist, expecting the imminent destruction of the world by nuclear war. He often shared his doomsday ideas with his friend, Ng, a Hong Kong immigrant and ex-Marine, and the two began stockpiling weapons. In 1982, the FBI arrested them in connection with the theft of weapons from a military base. Ng was court-martialed and served two years in prison. Vowing to avoid imprisonment, Lake fled bail and went into hiding.
Freed from prison, Ng rejoined Lake in 1984. Grown even more extreme, the survivalist had begun building a system of cement bunkers around his cabin. Fantasizing wildly in his diary, he saw himself imprisoning women in the bunkers and personally repopulating a war-ravaged world. He shared a part of his vision with Ng, explaining that it had been inspired by John Fowles' best-selling 1963 novel, The Collector. The novel concerned a psychotic butterfly collector who one day captured a young college student named Miranda, whom he kept locked up and observed until her death. Lake proposed something similar.
For nine months, the men carried out the plan. They lured one woman from a supermarket with a story about her boyfriend being hurt. Another happened to be a next door neighbor, whom they captured. In the underground bunker, the women met horrible ends, as attested by the videotapes that Lake and Ng made depicting their victims' anguished pleading. Behind a false wall in the bunker was their torture chamber, as well as a rack of power tools encrusted with blood. Carved onto a wooden plaque were the words, "Operation Miranda."
The spree ended in 1985 with Lake's arrest for shoplifting and possession of a stolen car and a missing man's identification. In police custody, the survivalist cheated justice: he swallowed cyanide capsules that were sewn under the lapel of his shirt and died. Ultimately convicted following a lengthy extradition battle and the costliest trial in California history, Ng was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of six men, three women, and two infants. Police believed more than double that number died, but the heaps of human bones unearthed at the cabin defied identification.
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