Charles Chitat Ng Trial: 1998-99

Police checked the Wilseyville address and found a cabin Balasz's parents had purchased as a retirement home. Balasz did not live there. In the cabin they found Lake's belongings, including a 250-page diary. In it, Lake detailed his plans for surviving a nuclear holocaust: he'd build bunkers and stock them with food and weapons. He'd also capture young, nubile females to be his slaves. With them he'd repopulate the world. The cops also found evidence in the diary that he'd been doing his best to depopulate the world. They found human remains in shallow graves around the property. A few were complete. The first remains identified were those of a homeless man police believe had helped Lake and Ng build a cinderblock shack next to the cabin. Most were fragmentary: charred bits of bone no more than three inches long. Lake and Ng had chopped up bodies and burned them in an incinerator. The police dug up 45 pounds of bone fragments.

Charles Ng, jailed in Canada, unsuccessfully fought extradition to the United States to face trial for murder charges. (AP/Wide World Photos)

They also dug up a videotape showing two shackled young women being stripped and threatened by Lake and Ng. One was begging for her baby. Two of the bodies found were later identified as theirs. Behind a bookcase in the cinder block shack, police found a secret door to a torture chamber. In addition to handcuffs, leg irons, a whip, and other torture devices, the torture chamber contained a score of photos of naked young women.

Checking lists of missing persons, police found that at least 25 of them had known Lake or Ng. But it seemed later that many of the pair's victims were homeless people who had never been reported missing.

"Every time this guy [Lake] met somebody," said Calaveras County deputy Jim Stenquist, "they wound up gone." Ng was gone, too. So was Lake. Lake survived four days, alive, but brain dead. Then the hospital pulled the plug. Lake and Ng were the only two people who could explain the Wilseyville Horror.

"If Mr. Ng isn't caught," said Calaveras County coroner Terry Parker, "this is going to be impossible to solve."