WARNING!: Description below may be disturbing to some readers.

This memorial located at the Peoples Cemetery in San Andreas, California is dedicated to the victims of the Wilseyville Mass Murder, one of the most horrific crimes in the state that took place in the mid-1980s in nearby Wilseyville.  More info below:

During the mid-1980s, serial killers Leonard Lake & his accomplice, British Hong Kong-born Charles Ng, raped, tortured and murdered an estimated eleven to twenty-five victims at a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, located 150 miles east of San Francisco.  Lake met fellow former Marine Charles Ng, originally from Hong Kong, in 1980 or 1981. Sources claim the two met through a survivalist magazine advertisement Lake placed. Lake was managing the Philo Motel in Philo, California at the time. Ng had escaped from a military prison following a conviction for weapons theft and stayed at the motel for a time and then moved into a house along with Lake and Balazs. Several witnesses testified that Ng was very subservient and allowed Lake to order him around and speak to him in a condescending, disparaging manner. Ng stated that he looked up to Lake "like a brotherly, fatherly figure". In April 1982, police raided the house and arrested Ng and Lake on weapons charges. Ng was returned to Fort Leavenworth to complete his sentence. Lake jumped bail and began life as a fugitive, using various aliases and wearing disguises in an attempt to hide his true identity. In July 1984, Ng was dishonorably discharged after serving time for theft and desertion, and rejoined Lake and Balazs. Ng first stayed in an apartment rented by Lake's sister before moving into an apartment on Lenox Ave in San Francisco in the fall of 1984. Lake was living Wilseyville in a cabin owned by Balazs' parents by this time. Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon". He had already murdered his brother Donald Lake, and his friend Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and identities.

Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture, and murder. Lake and Ng targeted women but were not hesitant to abduct entire families. After killing the men and children to get them out of the way, Lake would hold the women captive in a custom-built room in the bunker at the ranch, tie them up and torture and rape them, and eventually kill them. Lake allegedly did not allow Ng to enter the rear portion of the bunker, telling him "that is my domain". Lake also lured men to the compound with promises of work but would instead rob and murder them, after which Lake stole their identities. After killing the victims by shooting them, they would either bury them in shallow graves on or near the property, or burn them and scatter the bones. Police found over forty pounds of burned, crushed bone fragments scattered around the Wilseyville property. Charles Ng was convicted of murdering eleven people, but because of the massive amount of burned, shattered bone fragments found at the cabin, they are thought to have killed as many as twenty five people. Lake is known to have committed several murders without the assistance of Ng, and wrote in his journal that Ng was initially "very hesitant to get involved with my plan". Known victims include Lake's brother, his best friend, his neighbors, multiple people met through newspaper advertisements, tenants of a boarding house where Lake had rented a room, two men who had advertised gay sex (one of whom survived), and two workmates of Ng.

Their crimes would only just be discovered on June 2, 1985 when Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in South San Francisco and fled the scene on foot, throwing the vise into the trunk of a brown Honda. Lake attempted to pay for the vise, but by then police had arrived.  Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's license, which carried the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier. Lake was arrested after a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of his vehicle, a 1980 Honda Prelude, and was later positively identified via a fingerprint search. At the station, Lake was placed in an interrogation room where he was given a pen, paper, and a glass of water. A short time later, a detective entered the room to conduct an interview and found Lake violently convulsing on the floor. The notepad contained a brief suicide note. At the hospital, it was determined that he swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothes. Lake never regained consciousness and died four days later on June 6.

The license plate on Lake's vehicle was registered to Lonnie Bond, but the VIN on the Honda itself was registered to Paul Cosner, who had disappeared from San Francisco in November 1984. A utility bill found in the Honda led detectives under the command of San Francisco Police Homicide Lieutenant Gerald McCarthy to the property in Wilseyville, where they found Stapley's and Bond's trucks, and the dungeon. In a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed over forty pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments corresponding to a minimum of eleven bodies. A phone line trench 100 feet long and 10 feet deep was found to be filled with trash, personal effects of victims, and two intact skeletons. Another intact body was found buried under a chicken coop. Two bodies found about a mile from the cabin were later identified as Bond and Stapley. They had been gagged and executed by gunshots to the head.

Prodding the ground near the cabin, police noticed loose dirt, leading them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One contained an assortment of ID papers and personal possessions, suggesting that the total victim count could be as high as twenty-five. In the other were Lake's handwritten journals for the years 1983 and 1984, and two videotapes . One videotape contained a 20 minute long manifesto recorded on October 23, 1983, in which Lake discusses his plan to build a "cell" and enslave women. The other tape, labeled 'M Ladies', documented the torture of Kathleen Allen and Brenda O'Connor. In one scene, Lake is heard telling O'Connor that her family is not liked by the neighborhood to which O'Connor replies "So we'll leave" and Lake coldly answers "Oh, you've already left. We've closed you down". Ng later tells O'Connor "You can cry and sob like the rest of them, but it won't do any good. We are pretty... cold-hearted, so to speak". In another scene, Allen is seen tied to a bed as Lake tells her "I'm having a little war within myself, between what I want to do and what we might call the decent thing to do. And for the moment the decent thing to do is winning. So rest". Both Allen and O'Connor were subsequently murdered.

Lake's ex wife, Claralyn Balazs, cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution. Court records stated that Balazs turned over weapons and other material to authorities during the investigation. She was called as a key witness in Ng's trial in 1999. Yet in a surprise move, Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, dismissed Balazs without asking any questions. Kelley later declined to explain his actions. Balazs was on the witness stand for a few minutes as Kelley read sections of her immunity agreement. Balazs had been expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned and rented to her and Lake. It was later revealed that Balazs had removed boxes of papers and videotapes from the Wilseyville cabin in the time between Lake's arrest and the initial police search. Many videotapes referenced in Lake's journal were never recovered by investigators.

Ng, who had never legally obtained U.S. citizenship, was captured in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on July 6, 1985. A store security guard suspected Ng of shoplifting and in the ensuing confrontation, Ng shot the security guard. Though wounded, the security guard was able to disarm and detain Ng until the police arrived. Ng served four and a half years in a Canadian prison, and tried to fight extradition to the United States on the grounds that he would be subject to capital punishment. In 1991 he was extradited to California, where he was indicted on twelve counts of first-degree murder. Despite the video evidence, and the detailed information in Lake's diaries, Ng maintained that he was merely an observer and that Lake planned and committed all of the kidnaps, rapes, and murders unassisted.

In February 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven of the twelve homicides — six men, three women, and two male infants. Jurors deadlocked on the twelfth charge, the murder of Paul Cosner, but Ng was sentenced to death. The presiding judge noted, "Mr. Ng was not under any duress, nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake." As of January 2022, Ng was still incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison. The last execution in California was in 2006. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California.

While most of the victims have been identified, there are a few to this day who remain unknown.  As for this memorial, the inscription reads:

In Wilseyville we found you, our lost ones.

Though taken in darkness, you will forever live in light.

Rest in Peace

Victims of the 1984-85 Wilseyville Mass Murder

From:

https://www.crimelibrary.org/notorious_murders/classics/haunted_places/5.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Lake