Heinous – An Asian True Crime Podcast · Mediacorp

The Torture Bunker | Leonard Lake and Charles Ng |1983 | 1/2

·22 min·9 clips

On June 2, 1985, police respond to a lumber store report of a stolen vice clamp. The scene looks small at first. A brown Honda Prelude sits in the lot. A middle-aged man says there has been a misunderstanding. The officers search the trunk. The vice clamp is there, just as reported. Beside it sits a pistol fitted with an illegal silencer. Loose ammunition is scattered nearby. A stun gun and unspent bullets make the situation feel less like petty theft and more like the start of something dangerous. The man gives a driver’s license in the name of Robin Stapley. The officers can see that the face in front of them does not match the identity on the card. That mismatch becomes the first sign that the arrest is tied to a larger deception. The story then pulls back to Leonard Thomas Lake. His childhood is shown as unstable and deeply troubling. After his parents divorced, he was sent to live with his grandmother. Early signs of fixation appeared there. He became absorbed in pornography. He photographed his sisters nude. He also began experimenting with killing small animals. Mice became subjects for chemical jars and slow dissolution. What looked like a private oddity at the time is later treated as a warning. The same method would eventually be used on human beings. As a teenager, Lake read The Collector, and the book shaped his fantasies. In 1964 he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served two tours in Vietnam as a radar technician. His military career ended after a breakdown in Da Nang and a discharge on medical grounds in 1971. Back in California, he drifted through university life and counterculture circles. He entered a short marriage in 1969, and it ended when his wife discovered he was filming bondage- and sadomasochism-centered pornography. By the mid-1970s, Lake had left the city and moved north to Greenfield Ranch in Mendocino County. The commune gave him space. Cabins, livestock, and isolation created a place where he could hide in plain sight. There he met Clara Lynn Cricket Ballas, and the story moves toward the partnership that would define the case. Lake was the planner. Charles supplied the physical force. Together they moved into stolen identities, secrecy, and a hidden bunker in Willsieville. The narrative keeps tightening around the question of what investigators would eventually uncover there. The answer is held back until the next episode. Before the cut, the episode points to journals, sketches, and videotapes that preserved what no one was meant to see. The final accounting is devastating. At least 11 victims are confirmed. The number may be as high as 25. The episode closes on that threshold, with Lake and Charles at the center of one of the darkest crimes in American history.

As heard by us

A bleak, carefully built descent from routine police work into one of true crime's darkest cases.

This episode turns on the first hard shift in the Leonard Lake case, when a routine shoplifting stop opens onto something much darker. The narration keeps tightening the net: a silenced pistol, a stun gun, ammunition, a false identity, then the slow move into Lake's background…

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want a true-crime case that begins as a petty theft call and darkens into something far worse.

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