The California Killing Fields, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng

The California Killing Fields is the documentary of one of the most frightening serial murders in history.  In the early 80s two former marines, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng met and developed a friendship; one that came to cause the very gruesome and horrifying end for more than two dozen people.  The murders were discovered after Lake, while using a fake identity, was arrested for weapons possession. While being questioned by the police, Lake asked for a glass of water and a pen and paper.  On the paper he wrote an apology and suicide note to his wife, and then took a capsule which he had taped to the underside of his collar.  Lake died and was never charged for any crimes committed.  After the police discovered the true identity of Lake, and that identity and vehicle he was using were owned by missing persons, they searched his property and uncovered the gruesome crimes of Lake and Ng.

On Lakes property police found a bunker which had been some kind of holding cell for Lake and Ng’s victims.  They also found pictures of several missing women, and videos of some of the women being tortured and raped. Some of the women had gone missing with their small children and their husbands, none were ever found alive.  Lakes property was an incinerator and burial ground for many innocent victims.

Over a number of years, Lake and Ng had abducted their victims, killing the men and children immediately, and holding the women as sex slaves for some time.  At the home of Lake, police found videos of Lake and Ng torturing and raping the women as they begged for their children.  They also found several decomposing bodies buried on the property, and bone fragments of up to 25 different human bodies which had been burned, crushed and piled or buried. 

After finally identifying Lakes accomplice Ng, Ng managed to flee  custody and the US into Canada, where he was later arrested and jailed for shooting a police officer.  After years of appeal with the Canadian authorities, Ng was extradited to the U.S. to face trial and sentencing for the gruesome acts that he and Lake committed.  Ng chose to represent himself in his cases and managed for years to find loopholes in prolonging the trial and gaining more appeals.  His efforts eventually failed and he was sentenced to death row for the heinous crimes he and his accomplice Leonard Lake committed in the California Killing Fields.  

The crimes these men committed make me ill. Being a woman and knowing another human is capable of doing such awful things is hard to swallow, but being a mother and thinking of what those poor women must have felt being abducted and then having strange men keeping their babies from them, while raping and torturing them, not knowing what has happened to their child is a horrific feeling! The thought of a small child, or any child, being murdered in front of his mother brings tears to my eyes and tugs at my heart.