On the hazy morning of June 2, 1985, Southern San Francisco police received a routine call about a shoplifting incident. An Oriental man had strolled out of a store with a $75 vice, placed it in the trunk of a tan 1980 Honda Prelude, and disappeared before he could be detained. Arriving police encountered a Chinese puzzle of sorts.

When police questioned an overweight, bearded white man still inside the Prelude, he produced a driver's license bearing the name Robin Stapley. But he did not resemble the DMV photograph. Concealed inside the trunk, probers found the vice reportedly stolen. In addition, they found a .22-caliber revolver equipped with a silencer. More puzzling, an inquiry of the license plate revealed it was registered to a man named Lonnie Bond. Yet the plate was supposed to be attached to a Buick, not a Prelude. The suspect was immediately taken into custody for questioning. At police headquarters, he flately denied all charges of impropriety.

While the suspect was being questioned, police ran a check of the Vehicle Identification Number on the Prelude. A DMV print-out said the car belonged to Paul Cosner, a resident of San Francisco. A computer spat out that Cosner had been unaccountably missing for nine months. At the jailhouse, the suspect asked for a glass of water. He removed a cyanide capsule from a secret niche in his belt buckle and swallowed it. Rushed to the emergency room of the Kaiser Permante Hospital, he lingered for several hours and succumbed on June 6. The dead man was not a natural object of sympathy. Good riddance, some said, he had saved California tax payers millions of dollars in legal fees.

Meanwhile, the dead man's Oriental accomplice -- the man who had actually stolen the vice -- had escaped unscathed. Before it was over, and in the wake of civic uproar, he would manipulate a dotard legal system beyond anyone's wildest imagination.

A computer check showed that 26-year-old Robin Stapley was founder of San Diego's Guardian Angeles chapter. His family reported him missing several weeks earlier. Family members were summoned to identify the body. No, they said, this was not Robin. This man was an imposter. A fingerprint check revealed the overweight, bearded corpse was Leonard Lake, a San Francisco native born on July 20, 1946. A dossier collected on Lake unfolded the bestial side of a man too pathetic to be called human.

At a young age his mother allegedly encouraged him to take nude photographs of his sister and other adolescent girls. Gradually, Leonard developed an overwhelming obsession with pornography. His unbalanced personality, a report said, included sex with his sister. His weird sexual escapades included making neighborhood girls his love slaves.

In 1966 Leonard joined the Marine Corps and served noncombatant duty in Da Nang, Vietnam as a radar operator. He was given a medical discharge in 1971, after two years of psychiatric treatment at Camp Pendleton. A civilian again, his criminality worsened.

Following his discharge, Lake moved to San Jose. He got married and ultimately earned a reputation among his neighbors as a survivalist and weirdo sex-freak who openingly talked about bondage with anyone who would listen. When his wife discovered that he was filming bondage scenes that included handcuffs, leather straps and shackles, with women other than herself, she divorced him.

In 1980 a sympathetic judge gave him one year's probation on a grand theft charge of stealing weatherizing material from a construction site. In 1981 he married again and moved his wife to a communal ranch in the rugged foothills of Ukiah, California. The ranch was a good place for whoredom, flimflammery and wife swapping. Here, Lake was as much at home as a hound in Baskerville.

Aside from pornography, collecting automatic weapons was Lake's favorite pastime and he didn't care where the weapons came from. Neighbors learned that the second Mrs. Lake had been fired from her job as a teacher's aid at the Anderson Valley High School in Boonville. She allegedly taught kids how to make explosives. She told a General Sessions Court that she thought the knowledge would come in handy in case the kids wanted to blow up tree stumps for land-clearing in the farmland. A judge believed her. In 1982 federal agents swooped down on the ranch and arrested Lake for firearms violations. Freed on $6,000 bail, he assumed the name of Charley Gunner. He and his wife retreated to a remote ranch in Wilseyville, Calaveras County, deep in the Sierra Nevada. The cabin had been purchased by her parents as a future retirement home. Lake had other plans. He transformed it into a house of horrors.

Police say, Lake erected a fortified bunker adjacent his cabin where he hoarded illegal weapons and pilfered video equipment. Foolishly, he recorded his dastardly deeds in a ledger that could be used as evidence against him in a court of law. His diary was crammed with sexual fantasies involving sex slaves he planned to keep in his bunker after a nuclear holocaust. He wrote: "God meant woman for cooking, cleaning house and sex. And when they are not in use, they should be locked up." On another page he scribbled: "If you love something, let it go. If it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it." No one knows how many people Lake killed during his lifetime, but it is thought that his first victim was his brother, Donald. They got along like Dracula and sunlight.

Their mother reported Donald missing after he failed to return from a visit with Leonard in San Bruno, in July 1983. Donald, she told authorities, went to Humboldt County to find work as a carpenter and she never heard from him again. She remembered that Leonard once told her, "The world would be better off without Don."

After Lake's hara-kiri, San Francisco police investigated the Honda Prelude he was driving at the time his arrest. It was registered to 39-year-old Paul Cosner, a San Francisco car salesman. Further investigation revealed that on November 5, 1984, Cosner took an obese man answering Lake's description on a test drive to sell him a Prelude and never came back.

Video equipment found in Lake's cinderblock-torture-chamber was traced to Harvey Dubs. Dubs, a San Francisco resident, vanished on July 25, 1984, along with his wife and son. Stacks of video tapes revealed "home movies" of hog-tied women, orgies of lust, and young girls, their faces contorted in hideous grimace as they are forced to partake in oral sex and torture. One of the sex tapes showed terrified 33-year-old Debbie Dubs being sexually abused so badly she couldn't have survived.

On the same tape, Lake and his Oriental accomplice were seen sexually abusing pretty Brenda O'Connor. Brenda, her husband Lonnie, and their son had been unlucky enough to be Lake's closest neighbor. Brenda didn't trust Lake, who called himself "Gunnar." She told people thereabouts that she had seen him bury a body in the woods. Instead of notifying the police, Lonnie invited a friend named Robin Stapley to stay with them for added protection. None of the four had been seen since May of 1985.

In captivity, Brenda was seen on tape tied to a chair, pleading for her life as her husband, son, friend Stapley, and others watched in horror. The Asian untied her and she was forced to strip naked before being put in leg-irons and sexually abused by both Lake and the Oriental.

Charles Ng

On tape, Lake was heard to say, "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!" Police estimated that 21 "missing" women; daughters, wives, girlfriends, were shown as victims of malicious attacks in the tapes or captured on still photos. Veteran homicide sleuths who thought they had seen everything winced at the screams of luckless victims being raped and sodomized. Cries of children in the background particularly distressed casehardened detectives.

Female captives were seen withering on the floor, humiliated in front of other male and female captives. Still photographs showed naked young girls raging in age from 12 to early twenties forced to engage in kinky sex trysts.

Six women identified in the tapes were eventually found alive. Fifteen more remain missing to this day. Abducted children and male captives were obviously buried or cremated in an incinerator found adjacent Lake's Wilseyville bunker.

Investigators continued to uncover one horror after another as more skeletons were sorted out of acattered fragments.

Beautiful Kathleen Allen was a San Jose high-school student working part-time in a supermarket when she met Lake and his Asian partner through an ex-con named Mike Carroll. Carroll, police discovered, derived sadistic pleasure from watching people die. He and the Asian were cellmates at Leavenworth. Since Carroll's parole, he and the Asian were involved in several shady deals together. Allen left her job after receiving a phone call that her sweetheart had been shot and was dying. Police traced her final paycheck to Lake's address in Wilseyville. On one of the videotapes Lake promises to kill the terrified, naked girl and bury her like "Mike" if she doesn't cooperate in a sex orgy. "It's like horror film," Sheriff Ballard told journalists who gathered at a press conference. "Vicious, Vicious, vicious."

On June 8, hordes of police started digging outward from Lake's bunker, working with meticulous care, to preserve evidence. With the help of sheriff's canine dogs they uprooted some fifty pounds of human skeletons and fragmented bones, teeth and partial remains of missing men, women and children. They found jewelry, rotted clothing and several driver's license, including that of Stapley and Mike Carroll. A rotted corpse was eventually identified as Randy Jacobson. Randy was a 34-year-old unemployed drifter who vanished in October 1984 after Lake answered an ad he had placed in a newspaper to sell his van. Donald Giuletti, 38, a favorite San Francisco disc jockey answered an ad in a sex tabloid offering free oral sex by an Asian male. He was found shot three times in the study of his home. Giuletti's roommate identified the man who visited Giuletti that night as Charles Ng.

Terry Parker, who filled-in as an elected coroner when he wasn't operating the area's only two mortuaries, was a member of the body-search team. He had a story to tell that would peel masonry off buildings.

"When we started digging, we didn't have a clue what we were getting into, but more and more evidence kept turning-up, a bone here, a shoe there, an entire body in a ditch. It got to the point where you were thinking: 'Am I walking on someone's remains now? There could be more under every rock. How much longer could this go on?"

Authorities refused to speculate about a link between the crimes, but that was little comfort to the 500 residents of Wilseyville. According to California Highway Patrol officer Bill Claudino: "People started locking their doors and listening for noises and wondering who lives next door." Police speculated on solutions as the victim toll mounted and detectives uncovered body parts of some 26 people. In an unprecedented move, the district attorney's office released fifteen of 21 photographs to the news media in hopes that relatives or friends would come foreword to identify the bodies.

Since Lake was beyond human punishment, having taken his own worthless life with a hidden tablet, police concentrated on his Asian partner, determined that someone would pay for these atrocious crimes. If anyone deserved the description "Mad Dog" it was Charles Chitat Ng (pronounced "Ing"), Lakes 24-year-old sidekick from Hong Kong. The son of well-to-do Chinese parents, he spent his entire life launching a one-man reign of trouble. In Hong Kong, Ng was kicked out of public school, so his wealthy parents sent him to a private school in England. In no time, he was expelled for stealing from his classmates. Frustrated, his parents sent him to California to live with an uncle and to continue his education. In California, he got in more trouble. Rather than face court ignominy involving a hit-and-run accident, he joined the Marine Corps, listing his birthplace as Bloomington, Indiana. That's where his world really began unraveling.

Ng rejected every effort of his commanding officers to make him a good Marine. He saw himself as a "ninja warrior." While stationed in Kanehoe on Oahu, Hawaii, Ng, now a lance corporal, talked incessantly about his ability to kill anyone who was foolish enough to face him in hand-to-hand combat. His fellow Marines referred to him as "Bruce Lee" and avoided him like the plague. While stationed in Hawaii in October 1979, Ng, along with two accomplices, broke into a Marine arsenal and swiped $11,000 worth of deadly weapons. They took three automatic machine guns, seven revolvers, a night-sighting scope, and three grenade launchers.

The reaction by the Marines and Washington was equally predictable. He was arrested. During psychiatric analysis, he whimsically boasted he had "assassinated" a person in California, although he would not elaborate. He was proud of the fact that he laced salt shakers in the mess hall with cyanide while he was stationed in Kaneohe. Luckily, there were no reported deaths concerning the incident. Ng told the same psycharitist that he fired a grenade launcher at a staff sergeant in a futile attempt to kill him. "Damn the luck - the grenade was a dud," he smirked. From the psycharitist's point of view, most of Ng's stories came from an overworked imagination and bizarre braggadocio. Feeling certain he would be convicted for the armaments theft, Ng fled captivity. He was listed as a deserter when he answered Lake's ad in a survivalist magazine, in 1981. The two hit it off like Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Neighbors loathed to see them strutting around with T-shirts bearing the slogan: "Mercenaries do it for money."

The Marine deserter was eventually traced to Chicago after a San Francisco gun dealer told police he had received a call from Ng, asking him to mail him an automatic pistol he had left at his gunshop for repair. Ng, a user of more nom de plumes than Lon Chaney, now called himself "Mike Kimoto." The gun dealer explained there was a federal law against shipping firearms across state lines. Ng threatened to kill him if he reported their conversation to authorities.

Having received the report that Ng was somewhere in the Chicago area, Chicago police organized an aggressive search for the fugitive. The FBI pulled out all the stops. American authorities apprised the Paris-based international police agency that a federal warrant had been issued for Ng. The alert warned police agencies across the nation that Ng was a demolition expert and master of booby traps. There was no guarantee he could be taken alive.

At this point, State Attorney General John Van de Kamp, assumed overall charge of the case. His first act was to informed Canadian authorities that Ng might be worming his way toward Toronto. There, he could mix in the with vast majority of Chinese population to escape detection. Additionally, the state attorney urged the public to help identify 15 bodies that had been uprooted on the ranch grounds. Clifford Parenteau, barely 24, had been identified on the videotapes by relatives. It was presumed he had been slain. He vanished like a puff of smoke after winning $400 in a Superbowl pool. A bartender at the Rockin'Robin saloon said the last time he saw either Ng or Parenteau, they went off together to celebrate Parenteau's good fortune. Parenteau had erred terribly.

25-year-old Jeff Gerald, a drummer with a traveling band, vanished like a poltergeist after helping Ng move some furniture. For openers, Parenteau and Gerald, along with 10 others were named in the indictment against Ng.

Van de Kamp said more victims probably never would be properly identified because many had been chopped into small pieces and fed to chickens or buried. Having suffered excruciating pain, others were cremated and their bones crushed into malt. It was the slaughter of the innocents all over again. Additionally, Van de Kamp said, Ng's practical involvement in the serial murders were documented in Lake's ledger and on videotapes. "Unless we can locate Ng and get him to talk, the chances are slim that we'll never know everything that went on out there," he acknowledged. "It has become a case so overwhelming, so enormous and so gruesome that our computer system hasn't been able to keep up with it."

Randy Jacobson waved good-bye to his girlfriend in October 1984 and drove off into oblivion. He was regarded as a 34-year-old long-haired flower child left over from the 1960s hippie period. The thing that attracted Lake to Randy was his beautiful, well-stacked girlfriend, whom he unsuccessfully tried to seduce. Randy's blue-eyed beauty told investigators that Lake offered her a job as caretaker of a marijuana plantation on the lip of Humboldt County in northern California, but she turned the job down. The last time she saw Randy, the distraught woman told police, was the day he left to sell Lake his 1981 Ford van. When Lake was arrested on June 2, 1985, he had in his possession a bank card belonging to Jacobson. Jacobson's corpse was found under a chicken coop on the ranch along with several other victims, discarded like so much garbage. His Flower-Child friends held a memorial service for him in a San Francisco soup kitchen for the homeless.

There were references in Lake's journal to the Pink Palace, a rooming house in the slum district of Haight-Ashbury where Jacobson lived. Investigators discovered that two other victims of Lake and Ng were lured from the pink-colored rooming house. Cheryl Okoro was 26, with an hourglass figure. 38-year-old Maurice Wock was black, the hippie-type with braided hair and gold emblems and chains dangling from his neck. After "indescribable things" had been done to them, they were ground into chicken feed. A relative of Mrs. Okoro said she warned Cheryl not to accept Lake's offer to show her his farm. She described Cheryl as a partygoer who lived in the fast lane. She said Cheryl survived by marrying illegal aliens who paid her handsomely then divorced her. Police were confident that Cheryl became Lake's new score shortly after she entered the gates of Lake's farmhouse.

An excellent guitarist, Wock was the life of the party whenever he and his dope-addict friends got together. Once he crossed paths with Lake and Ng his strumming days were over. Like Okoro, pieces of Wock's flesh were fed to the chickens. Their bones were uncovered in the nearby woods adjacent Lake's fortified bunker.

With hundreds of posters plastered throughout Canada it didn't take long until Canadian authorities informed the FBI that a man bearing Ng's description had been spotted in a bus station restroom in Chatham, Ontario. A witness said he saw Ng shaving off his sideburns and eyebrows. The witness picked out Ng in a photo lineup at Ontario police headquarters.

Leonard Lake

This information equated a Chicago man's call to the FBI alleging that he had driven a hitchhiker answering Ng's description from Chicago to a motel in Chatham, Ontario, where they parted company. The shaken informant vowed never to pick up another hitchhiker after reading in the newspapers that his Oriental passenger was the subject of a worldwide manhunt.

Canadian police missed nabbing Ng in Sedbury by a hairsbreadth. They focused their attention to the Vancouver area of British Columbia. Authorities were worried that he might try to reach the Pacific coast. From there, it was a hop and a skip to Hong Kong where he could blend in with the Asian community.

Ng's weakness for shoplifting finally caught up with him. On July 6, 1985 Hudson's Bay department store security guards John Dolyle and George Forster spotted him slipping a bottle of soda water under his coat. When they attempted to arrest him, Ng pulled a .38-caliber Cobra. There was a scuffle and a wild shot took off the finger of Doyal. Calgary, Alberta police arrived and subdued the shoplifter. A California driver's license identified the kleptomaniac as Charles Chitat Ng. The thirty-four day manhunt for one of the most brutal and imaginative killers in the annals of crime was over. Down to his last ten dollars, Ng's hide-out was a clapboard lean-to in a 200,000-acre wastelands boarding the southernmost tip of Calgary. His wordily possessions: a pen knife, ten dollars, and a .38-caliber Cobra.

American authorities were elated that the brutish killer was in custody. He was immediately housed at the Calgary Remand Centre and place under 24-hour suicide watch. It was public knowledge that Lake and Ng had made a pact to commit hara-kiri rather than face incarceration. Top officers from the San Francisco Police Department, Calaveras County Sheriff's department, and the California State Department of Justice flew to Calgary to interview Ng. Confronted with the evidence, he typically blamed everything on his dead partner Leonard Lake. He had a phenomenal memory for details dealing with the deaths of Cosner, Gerard, Parenteau and the Dubs family. His story was enough to gag a maggot.

Getting the scoundrel back to the United States from Canada was no piece of cake. According to a 1976 treaty between the two nations, Canada, like Mexico, which also opposes the death penalty, is not obliged to hand over suspected killers to the United States if the charges call for execution. Ng's attorney fought strenuously against extradition proceedings because some of the charges Ng faced included multiple murder, a special circumstance that marked him for death at San Quentin. The Canadians found Ng guilty of aggravated assault, robbery, and illegal use of a firearm for the department store incident. He was sentenced to four and one-half years in prison. California would have to wait.

Haggling between the United States and Canada took six years before the Canadian Supreme Court finally allowed Ng to be extradited in September 1991, for capital murder. After running through loophole after agendum loophole, he was brought to trial.

Because of pretrial publicity in Calaveras County, the trial was moved to Orange County, which was already bankrupt, and would have to worry later how they would pay for the litigation's hidden costs. Certainly, no amount of money could pay for the pain and suffering Ng's legal shenanigans cost the families of the victims he was accused of torturing and sexually abusing.

Ng's trial, known throughout as "the lemon-law case of California's judiciary system," began on Monday, October 26, 1998 on the 11th floor of the Orange County Courthouse. Deputy Attorney General Sharlene Honnaka and Calaveras County District Attorney Peter Smith prosecuted the case. Bill Kelley, an assistant Orange County public defender, represented Ng. The presiding judge was Robert Fitzgerald. 12 jurors and six alternates listened intently as Honnaka outlined the state's case against Ng. "Leonard Lake and Charles Ng planned and committed the murders charged in this case," she said. Through videotapes she retraced for jurors the nightmarish ordeal Kathleen Allen suffered. Jurors winced at the sight of Allen, her hands tied tightly behind her back, listening in obvious terror to Ng telling her that he would put a round through her head if she didn't submit to their perversions.

In another segment, Ng rips off a red-and-white baseball shirt Brenda O'Connor is wearing, takes a folding knife, and cuts off her brassiere. He warns her: "You can cry and stuff like all the rest of them, but it won't do you no good. We're pretty cold-hearted," In another video clip, Lake, snuggled in a recliner chair, quietly describes his plan to enslave youthful girls.

"What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner," he says. "I want to be able to use a woman any way I want. And when I'm bored, I want to be able to simply put her away." Kelley, in his opening statement, told jurors that Lake alone killed the 12 victims Ng was being charged with murdering. He said, Ng may have witnessed the crimes but he did not help Lake dispose of them. "I'm not saying Charles Ng is an angel," Kelley said, "He's certainly not that. That's apparent. But he's charged with murder here, remember -- ending people's lives, not cutting off their clothes." Considering the case had taken 13 years to come to trial, the opening statements were anticlimactic. The state took 50 minutes to present the evidence against the myopic and sullen defendant, while the defense took five minutes longer. By early afternoon, the first in a long line of witnesses took the stand, and the prosecution began to reassemble for jurors the sick sexual fantasies of Charles Ng.

Using every conceivable stalling tactic imaginable, by 1991, Ng had fired two different defense teams, sued the state over his temporary detainment at Folsom State Penitentiary, and waged a costly court battle over whether he should be allowed to do origami in his holding cell, a case he lost. At Folsom, he was caught hiding escape paraphernalia. Ng filed challenges against four of the judges assigned to his case, resulting in the removal of three of them. During the course of his trial, Ng went through 10 attorneys, including some who ended up defending him a second time. After saying he lost trust and confidence in Kelley, Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald allowed Ng to represent himself. His decision delayed the trial another year while he brushed up on the law.

Ng petitioned to get Kelley back. When Fitzgerald refused to reinstate Kelley, Ng filed a complaint with the appeals court. Subsequently, Judge John Ryan replaced Fitzgerald. Kelley was reinstated as Ng's lawyer.

On March 20, 1998, Ng changed his mind again and asked Judge Ryan to replace Kelley with Michael Burt, who already represented him on a charge of killing a cab driver in 1985. The deal fell through when Burt refused to state if he would be available by September 1.

On April 20, Ng decided he wanted to represent himself again. Judge Ryan refused. Ng filed a malpractice suit against two of his former lawyers and lodged enough motions to fill Fort Knox with legal tokens. His success in starving off his trial, caused one reporter to note: "After Ng, California's legal system should be placed on trial."

"This is just one of those situations where you have a defendant intent on using every mechanism for delay," Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff told a talk show audience. "In a case like this, the system has to return the same kind of focus to stop it from continuing." In August, 1998, Judge Ryan finally ended Ng's legal charade, He berated Ng and accused him of "playing games within games within games." In a dramatic outburst Ng cursed the judge and the legal system. One of Ng's defense attorneys said this was evidence of Ng's mental illness. The prosecutor said Ng was again further trying to manipulate the legal system.

After an exhausting trial, the jury deliberated 15 hours over a three day period before finding Ng guilty of murdering all but one of 12 victims.

In the penalty phase, Kelley struggled to convince jurors that Ng's life was worth saving. He depicted the defendant as a classic "dependent personality" who was easily led by Lake, the utmost powerful force in his life.

Mom and Daddy Ng flew in from Hong Kong to testify in his behalf. His father testified that he mistakenly enforced severe punishment on his son believing it would make him a better citizen. Both parents tearfully pleaded for his life.

It was what the newspapers called a shocker. It gave the tabloids one more juicy fact to chew on, the defense attorneys one more thing to worry about. And it reconfirmed Charles Ng's position at center stage, his status as a killer without remorse, who loved the limelight. Against the advice of his lawyers, he addressed the jurors.

"When our client decided against our wishes to take the witness stand we felt tactically that wasn't a particularly wise choice on his part," said Kelley. "I believe that sealed his fate." On Monday, May 3, 1999, a jury's decision that Charles Ng should be executed for his role in the murders of 11 people 14 years ago, marked a long-awaited but satisfying act of justice in a marathon case that went into record books as the longest and costliest murder case in California's history. Theirs would be the high honor and the phenomenal pleasure of convicting America's most cold-hearted killer in the most signicant murder prosecution ever.

The real injustice, a police spokesman said, is the justice system that allowed years-long extradition discrepancies, complex security measures, fired and rehired attorneys, accidentally destroyed evidence and an immeasurable flow of legal haggles and delays over such earthly issues as the strength of Ng's eyeglasses, the temperature of his food and his right to practice origami -- the Japanese art of paper-folding, in his jail cell.

The laborious case cost all that and more, to the tune of $20 million. Before Ng is executed, that amount is sure to rise through appeals and the cost of keeping him on death row for many years to come. As one prosecuting attorney noted: "The justice system in America has gone haywire."