Serial killers often cause curiosity on the part of ordinary people. To explain such an interest is rather difficult. Mostly people are attracted by strong emotions, and the fear of painful death makes them show feelings.
Maniacs do not cause sympathy and understanding on the part of society, but nevertheless people like Leonard Lake attract attention. It is always interesting to find out what leads to a person starting to mock and kill his own kind. Is the maniac pledged from birth, or acquired throughout life?
Childhood and pornography
Leonard Lake was born on October 29, 1945 in San Francisco. Parents divorced when the boy was six years old. Together with his brothers, he moved to live with his grandparents.
Leonard grew up as an intelligent child, but since childhood he has developed a passion for pornography. There is evidence that he was interested in his sisters, examined them in photographs. He also liked to dissolve animal carcasses in chemicals. This experience later came in handy for him to get rid of corpses.
His grandmother knew all this, but did nothing.
Military service
At nineteen, Leonard Lake joined the Marine Corps. His service coincided with the war in Vietnam. In the army, he was listed as a radar operator. Service lasted from 1965 to 1971. The end of his military career was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder.
The young man was demobilized and a course of psychotherapy was prescribed. After that, he began to live in San Jose. In the same city, Leonard entered State University, where he studied for only one semester.
Not much is known about his later life. In the early seventies of the twentieth century, he joined the hippies, in the eighties he was arrested several times. For the first time he went to prison for car theft, and the second time - for violating the rules for the use of firearms. After that, he settled on a ranch in Vilsiville. This is where the killings took place.
Failed marriages
Leonard Lake for some time tried to establish his personal life. In 1975, he got married. But the marriage did not last long. The woman broke up with Leonard after she learned that he was filming amateur pornographic videos. He not only created such films, but also played a major role in them. The video used elements of sadomasochism and bondage.
He met his second darling in 1977, when he worked on a Renaissance fair. Her name was Klaralin Balash. The wedding took place in 1981. Soon the woman left because she was tired of her husband's ideas. He demanded that she take part in his pornographic creations, play the main roles.
Meet Charles Ng
Having moved to the ranch of his ex-wife, Leonard began to lead a secretive life. Very soon he met Charles Ng and made friends with him. The men began to live together on the ranch. They abducted people, tortured them, raped the fair sex and killed. They filmed all this on camera.
Most of their victims were selected by a couple of friends from their circle of friends. For example, their younger brother Lake, as well as his army friend Charles Gunnar, were tortured and killed by them.
Arrest
Perhaps Leonard Lake (the American serial killer) would have committed many more murders, if not for chance. In the summer of 1985, people noticed two people who were stealing in a store. The police who arrived could not catch the criminal, but Lake was with him. He did not have time to leave the place of theft.
Police inspected his car and identified a revolver with an illegally integrated silencer. The maniac introduced himself to law enforcement agencies as Robin Stapley, but they did not believe him. The driver's license indicated that Stapley was twenty-six years old, while in front of them was a forty-year-old man.
Suicide
When Lake was taken to the San Francisco Police Department, he asked for a glass of water. He hid a cyanide capsule under his shirt. Leonard Lake, whose biography is stained with blood, swallowed the poison.
He lost consciousness, was sent to a hospital. There he fell into a coma. His life was maintained for four days using an artificial respiration apparatus. Then he died.
Until the death, the police already knew the real name of the offender. They searched the ranch, and what they saw there terrified them.
Mountains of corpses
Police were able to find out that Leonard was a member of the survival movement. A bunker and a cache of weapons were found at the ranch.
In his diary, he wrote that a nuclear war was coming. It is necessary to prepare for it in order to survive and restore the human race. To do this, he needed a collection of slaves. In addition to the diary, the police found videos that showed men mocking women and raping some of them.
From the photo of the victims of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, it was impossible to identify. They not only buried bodies on the ranch, but also burned some of them. In total, twelve corpses and about twenty kilograms of bones were found. It is estimated that there were more than twenty-five victims.
An incomplete list of victims of Leonard Lake and his partner:
- Dubs family (consisted of a man named Harvey, his wife Deborah, their son Sean);
- the Bond family (Lonnie's man, his wife Brenda, their son);
- Robin Staple - disappeared in the summer of 1985;
- Paul Cosner - disappeared in the fall of 1984, Lake drove his car when he was arrested by the police;
- Kathleen Allen is an eighteen-year-old girl who met with cellmate Leonard;
- Donald - Lake's brother, disappeared in 1983.
Studies have shown that women from two murdered families were sexually abused. They were bullied after they killed husbands and sons.
Where did the Miranda Plan come from?
In his diary, Leonard called the plan for the revival of mankind after a nuclear war “Operation Miranda.” He became a kind of follower of the character of the novel by John Fowles "Collector".
The main character was called Frederick Flegg. He was a lone butterfly collector. His love for a young girl grew into an obsession, and he abducted her. Flegg hoped that in captivity Miranda would get to know him better and also fall in love.
The girl tried to escape to the last. She imitated tender feelings for a maniac, bearing a plan of escape and murder. As a result, she fell ill and died. The hero decided to find for himself a new pretty brunette.
The film based on the novel was released in 1965, when Leonard was twenty years old. Twenty years later, he began to embody what he saw in real life. So, in his soundproofed bunker young girls and not only began to appear.
The image of a killer in a movie
The Lake case remains one of the sensational crimes not only in the United States, but also in the world. The creators of the famous series Law and Order in 2001 shot one of the episodes based on the real events of 1985. The series is called the "Season of the Hunt." She became the eighteenth episode of the second season.
According to the plot of the criminal, the name was Deryl Kern. His partner is Marvin. The actor does not seem to be what Leonard Lake actually looked like. The photo shows that the prototype of the criminal did not have army dressing and wore a mustache. In the film, he did not commit suicide, but fled to Canada, but was returned to the United States for trial.