Slaves
In a chapter on the history of sex crime in I Have Lived in the Monster, Robert Ressler writes about the rise of serial murder: “Perhaps it is because modern society has thrown up many young men who were loners as children. They turned to fantasy as a result of physical and mental abuse during childhood, and were mentally unable to participate in normal consensual sexual relationships as young adults.” And he adds: “The lethal fusing of sexual and aggressive impulse that characterize serial killers seems to occur in most modern societies . . .” And he cites Ed Kemper, who told a psychiatrist: “I have fantasies about mass murder—whole groups of select women. . . . Taking life away from them . . . and having possession of everything that used to be theirs—all that would be mine. Everything.”
Unlike DeBardeleben, Kemper is not the kind of aggressive sadist who enjoys inflicting pain and humiliation on living victims. His dream is about sex slaves, with whom he can do whatever he likes because they are dead. With a slightly different temperament, such as that of William Heirens, he might have released his tensions in underwear fetishism.
Ressler then discusses a serial killer who followed this route. Jerry Brudos, an electrician of Salem, Oregon, had been stealing shoes and panties for most of his life when, on January 26, 1968, he received a visit from Linda Slawson, a twenty-two-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman. He invited her into his garage, knocked her unconscious with a piece of wood, and then strangled her. He was not interested in rape, but in dressing and undressing her as if she were a doll, using a box of stolen panties and bras. That night he threw her in the Long Tom River, south of Corvallis, Oregon. He kept only one thing—her foot for trying shoes on—in his garage freezer.
The following November, Brudos succeeded in luring another victim into his garage, twenty-three-year-old student Jan Whitney. He strangled her from behind, and then once again “played dolls.” This time he also raped her, then suspended her by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling—the archetypal “sex slave” position. He kept her there for several days, using her as a plaything, and even removed her breast and tried to turn it into a paperweight with a resin hardener. He left her there while he took his family for a Thanksgiving trip, and was dismayed on his return to find that a corner of his garage had been demolished by a car that had run out of control. Fortunately for him, the police who were called to the accident had failed to look inside.
Once more he disposed of the body in the river.
But he was growing bored with passive slaves. On March 19, 1969, he abducted a nineteen-year-old student, Karen Sprinker, from a parking lot by pointing a gun at her and promising not to hurt her. After raping her on his garage floor, he made her pose for photographs in her white cotton bra and panties, and then in more glamorous underwear from his box. Finally he tied a rope around her neck, pulled her clear of the ground, and watched her suffocate. He then violated the corpse, cut off her breasts, and disposed of the body in the river.
With his next—and final victim—Brudos used the same abduction technique. Linda Salee, a twenty-two-year-old office worker, was climbing into her car, loaded with parcels, when Brudos showed her a police badge and told her he was arresting her for shoplifting. He took her back to his garage and tied her up, then left her while he went and ate dinner. He then went back to the garage and strangled her with a leather strap; he was in the act of raping her as she died. Later, he once more disposed of the body in the river.
The finding of bodies in the river triggered the search for the killer. Detective Jim Stovall decided to start at the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, eighty miles south of Portland, where Karen Sprinker had been a student, and spent two days questioning every female student. The only promising leads were several mentions of a stranger who made a habit of telephoning the residence hall, asking girls their first names, then talking at length about himself, claiming to be psychic and to be a Vietnam veteran. He usually asked for a date, but seemed unoffended when he was refused. It was when one of the girls mentioned that she had agreed to meet the “Vietnam veteran” that Stovall’s attention suddenly increased.
The man had seemed intrigued when she mentioned that she was taking a psychology course, and told her that he had been a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital, where he had learned about some interesting new techniques. When he suggested meeting her at the dorm for a coffee, the girl agreed.
The man’s appearance had been a disappointment. Overweight and freckled, he looked to be in his thirties. He had a round, unprepossessing face and narrow eyes that gave him an oddly cunning look, like a schoolboy who is planning to steal the cookies. But he seemed pleasant enough, and they sat in the lounge and chatted at some length. Nevertheless, she had the feeling that he was a bit “odd.” This suddenly came into focus when he placed a hand on her shoulder and remarked: “Be sad.”
“Why?”
“Think of those two girls whose bodies were found in the river . . .”
When he left, he asked her to go for a drive, and when she declined, made the curious comment: “How do you know I wouldn’t take you to the river and strangle you?” Stovall began to feel excited when the girl told them that the “Vietnam veteran” had mentioned that he might call again.
“If he does, would you agree to let him come here? Then call us immediately?”
The girl was reluctant, but agreed when the police told her that they would be there before the man arrived. She merely had to make some excuse to delay him for an hour.
A week later, on Sunday, May 25, 1969, the Corvallis Police Department received the call they had been hoping for. The girl told them that the “Vietnam veteran” had telephoned a few minutes ago, asking if he could come over. She told him she wanted to wash her hair, and asked him to make it in about an hour.
When the overweight, freckle-faced man in a T-shirt walked into the lounge of Callaghan Hall, two plainclothes policemen walked up to him and produced their badges. The man seemed unalarmed; he gave his name as Jerry Brudos, and said that he lived in Salem; the only sign of embarrassment was when he admitted that he had a wife and two children. He was now in Corvallis, he explained, because he was working nearby—as an electrician. Because Brudos had committed no offence for which he might be arrested, or even taken in for questioning, the police let him go.
A preliminary check showed that he was what he claimed to be—an electrician working in Corvallis. But when Stovall looked into his record, he realized that he had a leading suspect. Jerome Henry Brudos, thirty, had a record of violence towards women, and had spent nine months on the psychiatric ward of the Oregon State Hospital. Moreover, at the time of the disappearance of Linda Slawson, Brudos had lived in Portland, in the area where she was trying to peddle encyclopedias.
The first thing to do was to check him out. Stovall called on Brudos at his home in Center Street, Salem, and talked to him in his garage. Stovall’s colleague, Detective Jerry Frazier, also went along, and noted the lengths of rope lying around the room, and the hook in the ceiling. He also noticed that one of the ropes was knotted, and the knot was identical to one that had been used to bind the corpses in the river.
This, Stovall decided, had to be their man. Everything fit. He worked as an electrician and car repairman. He had been working at Lebanon, Oregon, close to the place where Jan Whitney’s car had been found. And he had been living close to the place from which Karen Sprinker had disappeared in Salem.
There was another piece of evidence that pointed to Brudos. On April 22, an overweight, freckled man holding a gun grabbed a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl as she hurried to school along the railroad tracks; she had screamed and succeeded in running away. She immediately picked out the photograph of Jerry Brudos from a batch shown to her by the detectives.
Except for this identification, there was no definite evidence against Brudos for the murders. Stovall was therefore reluctant to move against him. But five days after Brudos had been questioned in Corvallis, Stovall realized that he could no longer take the risk of leaving him at large. As he was on his way to arrest Brudos for the attempted abduction of the schoolgirl on the railway tracks, he received a radio message saying that Brudos and his family had left Corvallis, and were driving towards Portland. Shortly after this, a police patrol car stopped Brudos’s station wagon. At first it looked as if Brudos was not inside; but he proved to be lying in the back, hidden under a blanket.
Back at the Salem police station, Brudos was asked to change into overalls. When he removed his clothes, he was found to be wearing women’s panties.
When Stovall first questioned Brudos, he failed to secure any admissions. It was the same for the next three days, Stovall did not ask outright if Brudos had murdered the girls; he confined himself to general questions, hoping to pick up more clues. But at the fifth interview, Brudos suddenly began to talk about his interest in female shoes and underwear. Then he described how he had followed a girl in attractive shoes, broken into her home through a window, and made off with the shoes. Soon after this, he described how he had stolen the black bra—found on Karen Sprinker’s body—from a clothesline. Now, at last, he had virtually admitted the killing. Then, little by little, the rest came out—the curious history of a psychopath who suffered from the curious sexual abnormality for which the psychologist Alfred Binet coined the word fetishism.
In Jerry Brudos’s case, it first showed itself at the age of five, when he found a pair of women’s patent leather shoes on a rubbish dump, and put them on at home. His mother was furious and ordered him to return them immediately; instead he hid them and wore them in secret. When his mother found them, he was beaten and the shoes were burned.
When he was sixteen—in 1955—he stole the underwear of a girl who lived next door. Then he approached the girl and told her he was working for the police as an undercover agent, and could help her to recover the stolen articles. She allowed herself to be lured into his bedroom on an evening when his family was away. Suddenly, a masked man jumped on her, threatened her with a knife, and made her remove all her clothes. Then, to her relief, he merely took photographs of her with a flashbulb camera. At the end of the session, the masked man walked out of the bedroom, and a few minutes later, Jerry Brudos rushed in, claiming that the masked intruder had locked him in the barn. The girl knew he was lying, but there was nothing she could do about it.
In April 1956, Brudos invited a seventeen-year-old girl for a ride in his car. On a deserted highway, he dragged her from the car, beat her up, and ordered her to strip. A passing couple heard her screams, and rescued her.
A psychiatrist determined that he was sane and had no violent tendencies. Back in his home, police found a large box of women’s underwear and shoes. They sent him to the Oregon State Hospital for observation, and he was released after nine months.
A period in the army followed, but he was discharged because of his bizarre delusions—he was convinced that a beautiful Korean girl sneaked into his bed every night to seduce him.
Back in Salem, he attacked a young girl one night and stole her shoes. He did it again in Portland. Then, just as it looked as if nothing could stop him from turning into a rapist, he met a gentle seventeen-year-old named Darcie (a pseudonym) who was anxious to get away from home, and who got herself pregnant by him. Once married, she was sometimes a little puzzled by his odd demands—making her dress up in silk underwear and high-heeled shoes and pose for photographs—but assumed that most men were like this.
While his wife was in the hospital having a baby, Brudos followed a girl who was wearing pretty shoes. When he broke into her room that night, she woke up, and he choked her unconscious. Then, unable to resist, he raped her. He left her apartment carrying her shoes.
He was now a time bomb, waiting for another opportunity to explode. It happened when an encyclopedia saleswoman knocked on his door one winter evening . . .
Because he pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, Jerry Brudos was sentenced without a trial to life imprisonment.
* * * * *
The desire for a living toy was carried to an absurd extreme when Cameron Hooker, a bespectacled, mild-looking timber worker, kidnapped a hitchhiker and kept her in a box for seven years. No case better illustrates Hazelwood’s comment that sex crime is not about sex, but about power.
On May 19, 1977, twenty-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking from Eugene, Oregon, to Westwood in Northern California when she was offered a lift by a young couple with a baby. When they suggested turning off the main road to look at some ice caves, she raised no objection. In a lonely place the man placed a knife to her throat, handcuffed her, and then confined her head into a peculiar boxlike contraption that left her in total darkness. Hours later, he took her into the cellar of a house, stripped her, suspended her from the ceiling with leather straps, and whipped her. Then the couple had sex under her feet. After that, the head-box was clamped on again and she was placed in a larger wooden box, about three feet high, for the night.
The next day she was chained by her ankles to a rack, and given food. When she showed no appetite, he hung her from the beam again and whipped her until she was unconscious. Later the man made her use a bedpan, which he himself emptied. Again she was locked up in the box.
This went on for weeks. When she became dirty and unkempt, he made her climb into the bath. He raised her knees and held her head under water until she began to choke. He did this over and over again, taking snapshots of the naked, choking girl in between. After that, her female jailer tried to comb her hair, then gave up and snipped off the knots and tangles with scissors.
Cameron Hooker had been born in 1953. He was a shy, skinny boy who had no close friends. When he left school he went to work as a laborer in a local lumber mill. His only reading was pornography, particularly the kind that dealt with flagellation and bondage. His daydream was to flog nude women who were tied with leather straps. When he was nineteen, he met a plain, shy fifteen-year-old named Janice. She was delighted and grateful to be asked out by this quiet, polite youth who drove his own car and treated her with respect. So far she had fallen in love with boys who had ignored her or treated her badly. Cameron was marvelously different. When he explained that he wanted to take her into the woods and hang her up from a tree, she was frightened but compliant. It hurt her wrists, but he was so affectionate when he took her down that she felt it was worth it. In 1975 they married, and she continued to submit to strange demands, which included tying her up, making her wear a rubber gas mask, and choking her until she became unconscious. Finally, he told her of his dream of kidnapping a young woman and using her as his “slave.” Eventually, she agreed. She wanted a baby, and longed to live a normal life; perhaps if Cameron had a “slave,” he would stop wanting to whip and choke her. That is how it came about that Colleen Stan was kidnapped, and taken to their basement in Oak Street, Red Bluff, where she was to spend the next seven years.
After a month or so, Janice felt she could no longer stand it. The idea of holding someone captive sickened her. What was worse was that the captive was an attractive young woman. Even though her husband had agreed that there would be no sex between him and his “slave,” it was obvious that he was deriving from Colleen the same sexual satisfaction that he derived from tying her up. Janice decided to weaken the ties with her husband. She went to stay with a sister, and found herself a job in Silicon Valley. She returned every weekend, but this brought about the situation she had been trying to avoid. Left alone with his “slave” for the whole week, Cameron gave way to temptation. He forced Colleen to perform oral sex on him, reasoning that he was not going back on his bargain so long as there was no vaginal intercourse. He also burned her with a heat lamp, administered electric shocks, and choked her until she blacked out. Six months after the kidnapping, he started giving her small tasks, such as shelling walnuts or crocheting. The Hookers sold the results of her labors in the local flea market.
Early in 1980, after nearly three years of captivity, Colleen was allowed an amazing excursion. She was permitted to dress up in some of Janice’s clothes, make up her face, and accompany Janice to a dance. There they met two men and went home with them. Janice vanished into the bedroom with one of them, while Colleen stayed talking to the other. Cameron apparently suspected nothing, and his wife’s liaison continued for the next two months, until it fizzled out. After that, Janice, still unsuspected, had another short affair.
In January 1981, Hooker discovered an article in an underground newspaper about a company of white slavers who forced girls to sign a slavery contract, and decided that Colleen should do the same. On January 25, Colleen was made to sign a long document declaring that she handed herself over, body and soul, to her Master, Michael Powers (alias Cameron Hooker), but her true owner was a company affiliated with the Mafia. She was to agree never to wear panties, and always to sit with her legs open. She was told that her new name was Kay Powers.
Now she was allowed upstairs to help with household chores, but if Cameron came in and shouted “Attention!” she had to strip off her clothes and stand on tiptoe with her hands above her head. Soon after this, Janice herself suggested to her husband that he should have sex with his slave. Perhaps she was hoping that he would cite his original agreement and refuse; in fact, he promptly brought Colleen up from the basement, spread-eagled her naked on the bed, with a gag in her mouth and her wrists and ankles tied to the corners, and then raped her. Janice, meanwhile, rushed off to vomit.
The Hookers decided to move to a more secluded place. He bought a trailer on some land beyond the city limits, and underneath a large waterbed, constructed a kind of rabbit hutch, which was to be Colleen’s home. Colleen was moved in—blindfolded and handcuffed—one afternoon, and immediately confined in her new quarters.
Life became a little freer. She was let out for an hour or so every day to perform her ablutions and help with the chores. She made no attempt to escape—Hooker had told her all kinds of horror stories about what happened to “Company” slaves who tried to run away: having their fingers chopped off one by one was the least of them. To remind her that she was his slave he periodically hung her from the ceiling and flogged her with a whip. He also burned her breasts with lighted matches.
There were compensations. In the autumn, Hooker went up into the mountains to cut wood on the land of the company that employed him; he took his slave with him. He made her work; he also made her swim in a pond and run along a dirt road. When she was “disobedient,” he tied her down on a kind of mediaeval rack and “stretched” her. This excited him so much that he stripped naked and made her perform oral sex. On another occasion he raped her on the “rack.” Janice was not told of these sexual episodes. Soon after this, the slave was made to drink most of a bottle of wine, then perform oral sex on Janice; it made her sick.
Colleen was also allowed more freedom—she was allowed to go out and jog on her own. Incredibly, she still made no attempt to escape—Hooker had brainwashed her into seeing herself as a well-behaved and loyal slave. As a reward for obedience, she was allowed to write to her sister—without, of course, including a return address—and even, on one occasion, to telephone her family, with Hooker standing beside her monitoring everything she said. She told them she was living with a couple who were “looking after her.” When they wanted to know more, her Master made her hang up. Soon after that he took her on a visit to his own family, on their ranch outside town. This passed off so well that he decided to take the ultimate risk, and allow her to go and see her own parents, who lived in Riverside, California. In March 1981, he drove her to Sacramento, and ordered her to wait in the car while he went into an office block that belonged to the sinister Company who owned her. When he came back, he told her that they had granted permission to visit her family. The visit to Riverside was brief, but went off perfectly. Hooker was introduced as her fiancé Mike, who was on his way to a computer seminar. Colleen Stan spent the night in her father’s home, and then visited her mother—who lived elsewhere—without divulging where she had been for four years, or why she had failed to keep in touch. The following day, her Master rang her and announced that he would be arriving in ten minutes to take her home. Colleen was upset that Hooker had broken his promise to allow her to spend a full weekend with her family, and sulked all the way back to Red Bluff. When they got back, the Master decided that enough was enough. The slave’s period of liberty came to an end, and she was put back into the box.
This period lasted another three years, from 1981 until 1984. The relationship between Hooker and his wife was becoming increasingly tense—she disliked being tied up and whipped. At one point she left him for a few days and went to stay with her brother. When she came back, she and Cameron had a long, honest talk; she confessed her two affairs—her husband seemed indifferent—while he admitted that he had been having sex with Colleen. (This deeply upset Janice.) Then, in an attempt to repair their marriage, they began reading the Bible together. Colleen had already found refuge in the religion of her childhood, and now she joined in the prayer sessions. Cameron, meanwhile, worked on a kind of underground bunker that would be a dungeon for the slave. It was completed in November 1983, and Colleen was installed inside. When the winter rains came, however, the dungeon began to fill with water, and they had to take her out again and let her back indoors.
Janice and Colleen, whose relationship in the past had often been stormy—Janice was inclined to boss Colleen around—had now become close friends as well as fellow Bible students. Cameron still flogged his slave—on “Company orders”—but was also treating her better, giving her more food, and allowing her to babysit his two daughters. And in May 1984, seven years after her abduction, he sent her out to find a job. She was hired at a local motel as a maid, and proved to be such a hard worker that she soon received a promotion.
Colleen believed implicitly that she was the slave of “the Company”; she often mentioned it to Janice, and Janice felt increasingly guilty and uncomfortable at having to support her husband’s lies. Her new religious faith made it difficult. It became harder still when she and Colleen—with Cameron’s permission—began to go to the local church together. Cameron tried to turn the Bible to his own advantage, quoting the passage from Genesis in which Abraham went to bed with his wife’s maid, Hagar, and suggesting that Janice should take the same liberal attitude towards Colleen. As usual, he finally got his way; he even persuaded Janice to share the bed, and entertain him with lesbian acts with Colleen. Janice was so upset by the new situation that she asked Cameron to strangle her—something he did frequently, but only to the point of unconsciousness. He agreed, but either lost courage, or was suddenly struck by the thought of the inconvenience of disposing of the body; at all events, Janice woke up to find herself still alive.
On August 9, 1984, Janice made her decision. She went to speak to Colleen at work, and told her the truth: that there was no “Company,” that she was not a slave, that Cameron was merely a pervert. Colleen was stunned. Her first reaction was to quit her job. Then she and Janice called on the pastor of their church, and gave him a confused outline of the story. He advised them to leave Cameron. But it was too late in the day for Colleen to take a bus to her family in Riverside. Instead, they picked Cameron up from work as usual, and went back to the mobile home. That night Janice pleaded that she felt ill, and she and Colleen slept on the floor together. As soon as Cameron had gone to work at 5 a.m., they began packing, and fled to the home of Janice’s parents. Then Colleen went home, told her parents the whole story but—after a phone conversation with a tearful Cameron, agreed not to go to the police.
In a sense, the story was now over. Cameron Hooker was not arrested immediately; it took some time for Janice to make up her mind to turn him in. And when she eventually did so, what she had to tell the police was not simply the story of Colleen Stan’s seven-year ordeal. She had been keeping a more sinister secret. In January 1976, more than a year before Colleen had been abducted, they had offered a lift to a young woman in the nearby town of Chico. She told them her name was Marliz Spannhake, and that she was eighteen years old. When the time came to drop her off at her apartment, Hooker had grabbed her and driven off to a lonely spot, where the young woman had been tied up, and her head clamped in the “head-box.” Back at home, Hooker stripped off her clothes and hung her from the ceiling. Then, perhaps to stop her screams, he cut her vocal cords with a knife. He tortured her by shooting her in the abdomen with a pellet gun, and finally strangled her. In the early hours of the morning, they drove into the mountains, and Hooker buried Marliz Spannhake in a shallow grave.
The police were able to verify that a young woman named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake had indeed vanished one evening in January 1976; but although Janice accompanied them up into the mountains, they were unable to locate the grave. That meant that there was not enough evidence to charge Cameron Hooker with murder. Two detectives flew down to Riverside to interview Colleen Stan, and as they listened to the story of her seven years in a box, they soon realized that they had enough evidence to guarantee Cameron Hooker at least several years in jail. Hooker was arrested on November 18, 1984.
The trial, which began on September 24, 1985, caused a nationwide sensation; the “Sex Slave” case seemed specially designed to sell newspapers. The jurors learned that Hooker was to be tried on sixteen counts, including kidnapping, rape, sodomy, forced oral copulation, and penetration with a foreign object. The prosecutor, Christine McGuire, had hoped to be able to introduce the Spannhake murder as corroborative evidence of Hooker’s propensity to torture, but had finally agreed to drop it if Hooker would plead guilty to kidnapping. On October 28, 1985, the jury retired; on October 31—Halloween—they filed in to deliver their verdict. Cameron Hooker had been found guilty on ten counts, including kidnapping, rape, and torture. On November 22, Judge Clarence B. Knight delivered the sentence. After describing Cameron Hooker as “the most dangerous psychopath that I have ever dealt with,” he sentenced him to several terms of imprisonment amounting to 104 years.
One question remains unanswered—the question that Christine McGuire raises on the last page of her book about the case, Perfect Victim: how did Cameron Hooker develop his peculiar taste for torturing women? She has an interesting comment from someone on the case who wished to remain anonymous:
People like to believe in an Einstein or a Beethoven—geniuses—but they hate to believe in their opposites. A genius is a mutant, something unnatural. But just as some people are born with extra intelligence, others are born without much intelligence or without fingers or limbs or consciences. The human body is phenomenally complex, with trillions of cells, and trillions of things can go wrong. Cameron Hooker is a fluke, an accident of internal wiring. His instincts are simply the opposite of yours and mine.
But is it as simple as that? Surely this element of conquest is present in all male sexuality? If it were absent, the male would find the female totally undesirable. In “normal” relationships, protectiveness and affection outweigh the desire for conquest, but it does not replace it.
In a fantasist such as Cameron Hooker—and, like Brudos, he had been a shy and introspective child—the dominance fantasy had been cultivated until it had grown out of all proportion, producing a grotesque, lopsided monster.
The world learned of the existence of another such monster—perhaps the worst serial killer since Pee Wee Gaskins—in early June 1985, after a group of detectives from the San Francisco Missing Persons Department drove out to a remote cabin near Wilseyville, Calaveras Country, together with Claralyn (“Cricket”) Balasz, the ex-wife of its deceased owner, Leonard Lake. In the master bedroom the bed had electric cords attached to its posts. Hooks in the ceiling and walls suggested that it was some kind of torture chamber, while a box full of chains and shackles could have only one use: to immobilize someone on the bed. A wardrobe proved to contain numerous women’s undergarments and some filmy nightgowns. In a dresser drawer was an assortment of women’s lingerie, some of it soiled with dark red stains. The mattress was stained dark brown.
Next to the cabin there was a concrete building that ran back into the hillside. When Balasz refused to give them access, the police obtained a search warrant.
At first sight the interior looked harmless enough—a workshop with power tools. But closer inspection revealed that some of these were encrusted with a dark substance that looked like dried blood. The shelves of the tool rack at the rear proved to cover a secret door that led into a small room with a bed and reading lamp. A wooden plaque was inscribed with “The Warrior’s Code,” and above it, in red ink, the words “Operation Miranda.” The wall contained twenty-one “candid” photographs of girls in various stages of undress. (Further investigation would reveal that these had been taken by Lake, whose lifelong hobby was photography, and that all the girls were still alive.)
Again, a bookcase proved to be a false front that led into the next room, which was little more than a deep closet, and which contained a narrow bed. A one-way mirror on the wall meant that someone in the next room could survey it. Under the bed they found a book that proved to be the diary of Leonard Lake. It was this that provided the evidence that Leonard Lake and his close associate, Charles Ng, were serial killers.
This story had begun two days earlier, on Sunday, June 2, when a shop assistant at the South City lumberyard in San Francisco noticed that a young man was leaving without paying for a $75 vise. The assistant hurried outside to speak to Police Officer Daniel Wright, and by the time the young man—who looked Asian—was putting the vise in the trunk of a car, the officer was right behind him. When he realized he was being followed, the man fled. Wright gave chase, but the skinny youth was too fast for him, and vanished across a main road.
When Wright returned to the car—a Honda Prelude—a bearded, bald-headed man was standing by it. “It was a mistake,” he explained, “He thought I’d paid already. But I have paid now.” He held out a sales receipt.
That should have ended the incident—except for the fact that the young Asian had fled, ruling out the possibility that it was merely an honest mistake. Wright wondered if anything else in the car might be stolen. “What’s in there?” he asked, pointing at a green holdall.
“I don’t know. It belongs to him.”
Wright found that it contained a .22 revolver, with a silencer on the barrel. Americans have a right to own handguns, but not with silencers—such attachments being unlikely to have an innocent purpose.
The bearded man explained that he hardly knew the youth who had run away—he had just been about to hire him to do some work.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come down to headquarters to explain this.”
At the police station, the man handed over a driver’s license to establish his identity; it indicated that he was Robin Scott Stapley. But when asked various simple questions, such as his birthdate, he was unable to answer. Clearly, the license was someone else’s, and he had failed to memorize the details.
“We’ll have to do a computer check on the car. But you’ll probably have to post bond before you can be released.”
“Stapley” asked if he could have some paper and a pencil, and a glass of water. When the policeman returned with these items, he scribbled a few words on the sheet of paper, tossed two capsules into his mouth, and swallowed it down with water. Moments later, he slumped forward on the tabletop.
Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor hold their son, Lonnie Bond Jr. All three are believed to have been murdered by Charles Ng and his accomplice Leonard Lake. One of California’s longest and costliest homicide cases started in 1998, more than thirteen years after Charles Ng’s arrest for shoplifting led to his prosecution for serial murder. (Associated Press/Detroit Free Press)
Assuming it was a heart attack, the police called an ambulance. The hospital rang them later to say that the man had been brain-dead on arrival, but had been placed on a life-support system.
The medic added that he was fairly certain the man had not suffered a heart attack; it was more likely that he had swallowed some form of poison. In fact, the poison was soon identified as cyanide. The note “Stapley” had scribbled had been an apology to his wife for what he was about to do. Four days later, removed from the life-support system, the man died without recovering consciousness.
By this time, the police had determined that he was not Robin Stapley. The real Robin Stapley had been reported missing in February. But soon after, there had been a curious incident involving his camper, which had been in collision with a pickup truck. The young Chinese man who had been driving the camper had accepted responsibility and asked the other driver not to report it. But since it was a company vehicle, the driver was obliged to report the accident.
The Honda the two had been driving proved to be registered in the name of Paul Cosner. And Cosner had also been reported missing. He had told his girlfriend that he had sold the car to a “weird-looking man” who would pay cash, and driven off to deliver it; no one had seen him since. The Honda was handed over to the forensic experts for examination; they discovered two bullet holes in the front seat, two spent slugs, and some human bloodstains.
If the bearded man was not Robin Stapley, who was he? Some papers found in the Honda bore the name Charles Gunnar, with an address near Wilseyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles northeast of San Francisco. Inspector Tom Eisenmann was assigned the task of heading to Wilseyville to check on Gunnar. There he spoke to Sheriff Claude Ballard, and learned that Ballard already had his suspicions about Gunnar, and about the slightly built Chinese youth, Charles Ng (pronounced “Ing”), with whom he lived. They had been advertising various items for sale, such as television sets, videos, and articles of furniture, and Ballard suspected that they were stolen. Nonetheless, checks on serial numbers had come to nothing. What was more ominous was that Gunnar had offered for sale furniture belonging to a young couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, who had lived next door, explaining that they had moved to Los Angeles with their baby and had given him the furniture to pay a debt. No one had heard from them since. And at a nearby campsite at Schaad Lake, another couple had simply vanished, leaving behind their tent and a coffee pot on the stove.
By now, a check on the dead man’s fingerprints had revealed that he had a criminal record—for burglary and grand larceny in Mendocino County—and had jumped bail there. His real name was Leonard Lake.
Eisenmann’s investigation into Lake’s background convinced the detective that this man seemed to be associated with numerous disappearances. His younger brother, Donald, had been reported missing in July 1983 after setting out to visit Lake in a “survivalist commune” in Humboldt County. Charles Gunnar, whose identity Lake had borrowed, had been best man at Lake’s wedding, but had also vanished in 1985. Together with Stapley and Cosner and the Bond couple and their baby, that made seven unexplained disappearances.
Police also found some expensive video equipment. This led Eisenmann’s assistant, Sergeant Irene Brunn, to speculate whether it might be connected with a case she had investigated in San Francisco. Harvey and Deborah Dubs had vanished from their apartment, together with their sixteen-month-old baby son, Sean, and neighbors had seen a young Chinese man removing the contents of their apartment—including an expensive video recorder. She had recorded the serial numbers in her notebook. Her check confirmed her suspicion: this was the missing equipment.
Deputies came in to report that they had been scouring the hillside at the back of the house, and had found burnt bones that looked ominously human. Ballard noted a trench that seemed to have been intended for a telephone cable; he ordered the deputies to dig it up.
A filing cabinet in the cabin proved to be full of videotapes. Eisenmann read the inscription on one of these—“M. Ladies, Kathy/Brenda”—and slipped it into the recorder. A moment later, they were looking at a recording of a frightened young woman handcuffed to a chair, with a young Asian man—obviously Charles Ng—holding a knife beside her. A large, balding man with a beard enters the frame and proceeds to remove the young woman’s handcuffs, then unshackles her ankles, and orders her to undress. Her reluctance is obvious, particularly when she comes to her panties. The bearded man tells her: “You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.” After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Asian man. A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend, Mike, is dead.
After “Kathy” the video showed “Brenda”—identified by Sheriff Ballard as the missing Brenda O’Connor from next door—handcuffed to a chair, while Ng cuts off her clothes. She asks after her baby, and Lake tells her that it has been placed with a family in Fresno. She asks: “Why do you guys do this?” and he tells her: “We don’t like you. Do you want me to put it in writing?” “Don’t cut my bra off.” “Nothing is yours now.” “Give my baby back to me. I’ll do anything you want.” “You’re going to do anything we want anyway.”
Another tape showed a woman Sergeant Brunn recognized as Deborah Dubs.
Lake’s accomplice, Charles Ng, was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance from the South City parking lot. Police had discovered that he had fled back to his apartment, been driven out to San Francisco International Airport by Cricket Balasz, and there bought himself a ticket to Chicago under the name “Mike Kimoto.” Four days later, a San Francisco gun dealer notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago. The man had been repairing Ng’s automatic pistol, and Ng wanted to know if he could send him the gun by mail, addressing it to him at the Chateau Hotel under the name Mike Kimoto. When the gun dealer explained that it was illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng cursed and threatened him with violence if he went to the police. By the time Chicago police arrived at the Chateau Hotel, the fugitive had fled. From there on, the trail went dead.
Meanwhile, the team excavating the trench had discovered enormous quantities of bones, chopped up and partly burnt. Tracker dogs were brought in to sniff for other bodies. They soon located a grave that proved to contain the remains of a man, a woman, and a baby. These could be either the Dubs family or the Lonnie Bond family—they were too decomposed for immediate recognition. A bulldozer removed the top layer of earth to make digging easier.
The discovery of the cabinet of videos was followed by one that was in some ways even more disturbing: Lake’s detailed diaries covering the same two-year period. The first one, for 1984, began: “Leonard Lake, a name not seen or used much these days in my second year as a fugitive. Mostly dull day-to-day routine—still with death in my pocket and fantasy my goal.”
The diaries made it clear that his career of murder had started before he moved into the ranch on Blue Mountain Road. He had been a member of many communes, and in one at a place called Mother Lode, in Humboldt County, he had murdered his younger brother, Donald. A crude map of Northern California, with crosses labeled “buried treasure,” suggested the possibility that these were the sites of more murders; but the map was too inaccurate to guide searchers to the actual locations.
Who was Leonard Lake? Investigation of his background revealed that he had been born in 1946 in San Francisco, and that he had a highly disturbed childhood. His father was unstable and workshy, and he and Lake’s mother fought all the time. Lennie was only six when his parents, loaded with debt, decided they could not keep him, and he was sent to live with his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian. Both his father and mother came from a family of alcoholics. The alcoholic grandfather was a violent individual who subjected the child to a kind of military discipline. Lake’s brother, Donald, his mother’s favorite, was an epileptic who had suffered a serious head injury; he practiced sadistic cruelty to animals and tried to rape both his sisters. Lake protected the sisters “in return for sexual favors.”
From an early age Lake had displayed the sexual obsession that seems to characterize serial killers. He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins, and later became a maker of pornographic movies starring his wife, Cricket. She was “into” S&M and kinky sex with chains and handcuffs.
Lake had compensated for the emotional aridity of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy, both sexual and heroic. But the greatest single influence on his fantasy life was a novel, The Collector by John Fowles, in which a mentally disturbed lepidopterist chloroforms and kidnaps Miranda, a pretty art student, and keeps her captive in a farmhouse—Fowles admitted that it was based on his own “Bluebeard” fantasies of imprisoning one of his students. This novel became the basis of Lake’s adolescent fantasies, and explains the “M” on the videotapes, and “Operation Miranda” on the plaque—it stood for his Miranda project—kidnapping and enslaving young women.
Lake had been in the marines for seven years, and had even served in Vietnam; but he had finally showed signs of being deeply mentally disturbed and was discharged on his second tour of duty. According to his sister, this, as much as any other problem, was the foundation of his insecurity and sense of betrayal. But his hatred of women, she said, was due to his mother’s early rejection, and the fact that this first wife had divorced him.
Yet he was skillful in hiding his abnormality, teaching grade school, working as a volunteer firefighter, and donating time to a company that provided free insulation in old people’s homes. He seemed as exemplary a citizen as John Wayne Gacy of Chicago. But his outlook was deeply pessimistic, convinced that World War III would break out at any moment. Like other “survivalists,” he often dressed in combat fatigues, and talked of living off the land. Once out of the marines, his behavior became increasingly disturbed and psychotic.
It was while living in an isolated village called Miranda in the hills of Northern California—obviously chosen for its name—that Lake thought out Operation Miranda. It was to stockpile food, clothing, and weapons against the coming nuclear holocaust, and also to kidnap women who would be kept imprisoned and used as sex slaves. “The perfect woman,” he explained in his diary, “is totally controlled. . . . A woman who does exactly what she is told to and nothing else. There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations—only pleasure and contentment.”
Lake’s accomplice, Charles Ng, was born in Hong Kong on December 24, 1961, the son of a wealthy businessman, who believed that children had to be brought up strictly, and often beat Charles. After being expelled from several schools for stealing and arson, he was sent to a school in Yorkshire, England, where an uncle taught. He was soon expelled for thieving. At eighteen, he traveled to the United States on a student visa, and spent a semester in Notre Dame College in Belmont, California, before boredom set in. After being convicted of a hit-and-run accident in which he was ordered to pay damages, he joined the marines, claiming to be a U.S. citizen. But when he and three accomplices stole military equipment in Hawaii, he escaped to California, where he met Lake through an ad in a survivalist magazine.
He and Lake formed a close friendship, in which Lake, sixteen years Ng’s senior, became a kind of father figure, and for a while Ng moved in with Lake and Cricket. Then the military authorities caught up with him, and he was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth.
Lake by then was involved as an accomplice, and decided to go into hiding, sewing cyanide capsules into the lapel of his jacket, which he swore to use rather than go to prison. And it was when Ng emerged from prison that the two once more went into partnership, moved out to the property in Wilseyville—purchased by Balasz’s parents—and set about turning “Operation Miranda” into a reality.
Lake’s journal left no doubt about his method of collecting his sex slaves. He made a habit of luring people to the house, often inviting them—as he did the Bond family—to dinner. The husband and the baby were then murdered, probably almost immediately. The woman was stripped of her clothes, shackled, and sexually abused until her tormentors grew bored with her. Then she was killed and buried or burned.
One other thing emerged clearly from these journals, and was noted by psychiatrist Joel Norris, who published a study of Lake in his book The Menace of the Serial Killer: when Lake killed himself, he was in a state of depression and moral bankruptcy. “His dreams of success had eluded him, he admitted to himself that his boasts about heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and the increasing number of victims he was burying in the trench behind his bunker only added to his unhappiness. By the time he was arrested in San Francisco, Lake had reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realized that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it.”
In mid-June 1985, two weeks after the digging began, the police had unearthed nine bodies and forty pounds of human bones, some burnt, some even boiled. The driving licenses of Robin Stapley and of Ng’s friend Mike Carroll (the boyfriend of another victim, Kathy Allen), and papers relating to Paul Cosner’s car, confirmed that they had been among the victims.
When the “survival bunker” itself was finally dismantled and taken away on trucks, it seemed clear that the site had yielded up most of its evidence. This suggested that Lake had murdered and buried twenty-five people there. The identity of many of the victims remained unknown. The only person who might be able to shed some light on it was the missing Charles Ng.
On Saturday, July 6, 1985, nearly five weeks after Ng’s flight, a security guard in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, saw a young Chinese man pushing food under his jacket. When he challenged him, the youth drew a pistol; as they grappled, he fired, wounding the guard in the hand. He ran away at top speed, but was intercepted by other guards. The youth obviously had some training in Japanese martial arts, but was eventually overpowered and handcuffed. Identification documents revealed that he was Charles Ng.
FBI agents hurried to Calgary, and were allowed a long interview. Ng admitted that he knew about the murders, but put the blame entirely on Lake. And before the agents could see him again, Ng’s lawyers—appointed by the court—advised him against another interview. After a psychiatric examination, Ng was tried on a charge of armed robbery and sentenced to four and a half years. But efforts by California Attorney General John Van de Kamp to make sure that he was extradited after his sentence, met with frustration. California, unlike Canada, still had the death penalty, and the extradition treaty stipulates that a man cannot be extradited if he might face the death penalty. In November 1989, after serving three and a half years of his sentence, Ng was ordered back to California to face the murder charges against him, yet the possibility of the death sentence would impede his extradition for another six years. Ng was eventually returned to California on September 26, 1991.
What followed was the most drawn-out and costly American legal proceeding in U.S. history, the bill soon passing $14 million. His lawyers were able to further delay his trial for another eight years, until October 1998. It was finally moved to Santa Ana, in Orange County, on the grounds that most people in San Andreas, Calaveras County, believed Ng guilty.
The accused had now ceased to be slimly built and become rotund. But he still continued to insist that he should not be on trial at all, since it was Lake who was entirely responsible for the murders. The problem about that defense was that he could be seen on videotape cutting off the clothes of one of the victims, and joining with Lake in making fun of her distress. Worse still, part of the evidence against him was a cartoon he had drawn showing himself dropping a baby by its leg into a kind of wok over a fire. An accompanying cartoon shows him holding the baby upside down and breaking its neck with a karate chop.
Four months later, on February 24, 1999, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on eleven of the twelve counts of murder in the first degree. Judge John J. Ryan sentenced Charles Ng to death.
Ng’s complaints of unfair treatment are perhaps not entirely without foundation. In practically all known cases in which two people participate in murder, there is a leader and a follower. In this case there can be no doubt that Ng was the completely besotted follower. Yet it is also certain that the murders could never have taken place without his presence from the beginning. As noted earlier, psychiatrists use the phrase folie à deux, a mental disorder shared by two in association, such as Leopold and Loeb, Fernandez and Beck, Bianchi and Buono. In most such cases, the presence of the follower is the catalyst that sparks the leader to kill. The two then murder as a matter of joint purpose. But the follower adds some essential psychological element to the partnership.
In the case of Lake and Ng, the joint purpose was sealed by their sense of having been treated badly in childhood; both saw themselves as victims of the adult world represented by their parents. That is how Lake came to hate happy families. And this is why, in his case, the normal inhibition against harming children was suspended. We only have to look at the photograph of the families he destroyed—of Brenda O’Connor, Deborah Dubs, Kathy Allen—to understand how a man who felt he had been denied a normal family life must have envied and hated them.
Then why was it Ng who provided emotional fuel that energized the folie á deux, rather than Cricket Balasz? To that the answer is undoubtedly that she was more dominant than Lake, a leader, not a follower. Photographs of Lake reveal a man who is undermined by lack of self-esteem. It was Ng who provided Lake with the unqualified admiration that he needed. The envy and hatred that triggered twenty-five murders might have remained isolated in the vacuum of Lake’s enormous self-pity if he had not met someone else who shared his feelings. When two paranoid and self-pitying individuals share the same vision of the world, the world suddenly becomes a much more dangerous place.
