Reno Gazette-Journal from Reno, Nevada • Page 5

5A Calaveras County killings Wednesday, June 12, 1985 Reno Gazette-Journal Fugitive has long history of run-ins with law By Herb Michelson and Paul Avery McClatchy News Service SAN FRANCISCO Charlie Ng has all the moves. Just ask the police in South San Francisco. Or the police in San Francisco. Or military authorities in Hawaii. Or the police in Daly City.

Or jailers at Santa Rita in Alameda County. Or the California Highway Patrol down in Kern County. With Charles Chitat Ng, 24, it's gone today, gone tomorrow. He is of the fugitive kind and right now after the discovery of at least four bodies in Calaveras County the most sought-after fugitive in the U.S. Another 20 people linked to either Ng or his dead friend Leonard Lake are missing and unaccounted for.

"Without Ng, we'll never clear up this case," said San Francisco Police Chief Cornelius Murphy. Claralyn Balazs Lake, Leonard Lake's ex-wife, is the last person known to have seen Ng. That was on the afternoon of June 2, shortly after Ng fled from a South San Francisco lumber supply store. He had tried to shoplift a $75 vise and was stopped. Leonard Lake interceded as police arrived.

And Ng walked away. Where he walked to was the home of Claralyn Lake, who lives with her parents in South San Francisco. Her parents own the Wilseyville property where the four bodies and bags of bone fragments have been unearthed. October of '79. Claralyn Lake said in an interview Tuesday, "I think he enlisted just to get away from that hit-run charge." Oct.

13, 1981 Ng was a lance corporal stationed at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station on Oahu, Hawaii. He and three other Marines cut through a window at the station armory and stole three grenade launchers, two machine guns, seven pistols and a night-sighting scope. The loot was valued at $11,406. Nov. 11, 1981: Shortly after being questioned about the burglary, Ng disappeared.

The weaponry was found buried on a hilltop nine days later. Ng and two other Marines were charged. The fourth man involved reportedly had led authorities to the cache and to the burglars. Spring 1982: Ng turned up at Indian Creek Ranch in Philo, Mendocino County, where Leonard Lake was living. Lake introduced Ng as an "old service buddy," although their Marine careers did not overlap.

Lake's former mother-in-law, Grace Balazs, said last week that the two men met through a mutual friend. On April 29 an FBI SWAT team arrested Ng at the ranch for the Marine armory weapons theft and Lake for an unrelated weapons theft. Aug. 15, 1982: A military court convicted Ng. He was jailed at Fort Leavenworth, until June 29, 1984.

Oct. 16, 1984: Back in northern California, Ng was charged with petty theft by Daly City police after shoplift ing a $52 set of waterbed sheets from a Mervyn's store. A records check turned up an Alameda County misdemeanor warrant against Ng for violating probation on the 1979 hit-run offense. Ng was jailed at Santa Rita. Oct.

17, 1984: Claralyn Lake said Ng telephoned to ask her to bring him $1,000 for bail. By this time, she was divorced from Leonard, who'd jumped bail on his Philo weapons charge and now was a fugitive. She drove across the San Mateo-Hayward bridge with the $1,000. "He paid me back later," she said Tuesday. She also said, "I was so happy when I heard today that Charlie was arrested in Nevada.

But then when they said it wasn't him, it hit me awful hard. His arrest will solve all the problems. My hope is that he may shed some light on where all these people are. I don't believe that the Leonard Lake I knew is responsible for this." April 23, 1985: Ng was driving a 1979 Chevrolet motor home that collided on a Kern County road with a long haul tractor-trailer rig driven by a Dallas-based trucker. No one was injured and damage was minimal.

A CHP officer filed a report but did not cite either driver. The motor home driven by Ng was registered to John W. O'Brien of San Diego. A records check Tuesday indicated that O'Brien is not listed as a missing person. June 2, 1985: The vise theft in South San Francisco and the disappearance of the 5-6, 140-pound, bespectacled Charles Chitat Ng.

On June 2 Ng asked Lake's ex-wife to drive him to his rented basement room in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco. She did. They apparently talked about bailing out Leonard Lake. But by then he had taken a poison capsule. Leonard Lake died June 6.

Claralyn Lake had helped bail out Ng himself from jail late in 1984 after another shoplifting incident compounded by a five-year-old hit-run accident. It's never been one thing at a time for Charlie Ng. In the past few months he may have maintained two rented apartments at once in San Francisco and across the bay in San Leandro. He lied on a Marine Corps enlistment application about his place of birth. He said it was Bloomington, Ind.

It was Hong Kong. He told the Marines his family was in Belmont, in San Mateo County. They're in Hong Kong. "But he did tell the truth about attending high school in Yorkshire, England," a Marine public information officer said Tuesday. "Apparently his father (Kenneth Ng) had business interests there." There is no information to indicate that Ng had any trouble with the law in his first 18 years.

But from 1979 on, Ng's litany is pocked with these incidents: Autumn, 1979: He was living in San Leandro, Alameda County, where he drove into a pole, drove away, was arrested for hit-run and was ordered to stand trial. He joined the Marines in Knowing Lake, Ng common thread in disappearances At least 10 missing persons from as far away as San Diego have been identified as having known Leonard Lake or Charles Ng, or as having been in contact with the two men shortly before disappearing. Here is a partial list of the missing people police have tentatively connected with the mass murder case in Calaveras County: Donald Lake of San Bruno, who was last known to be in Reno. He is Leonard Lake's brother and has been missing since April 1983, when he was 32 years old. Leonard Lake's ex-wife, Claralyn Balazs, said her former husband saw his younger brother as "a leech." Donald Steven Lake, 33, wrote a letter to his mother in San Bruno, in April 1983, saying he was living in Reno with "guys selling drugs," San Bruno Police Detective Bob Met-calf said Monday.

His mother heard nothing further from him. However, about two days later, someone mailed his wallet to San Bruno from San Francisco. Metcalf said Donald Lake was a laborer, who had been employed in Humboldt County prior to moving to Reno. Reno police said Monday they have no information about Donald Lake and have no reason to believe anyone from Reno might have been killed in the mass murder. Paul Cosner, 40, a San Francisco car broker, who was last seen on Nov.

2, 1984, when he went to show his car to a potential buyer he described as "weird." Lake was arrested with Cosner's car on June 2. Harvey Dubs, 29, his wife, Deborah, 33, and their 16-month-old son Sean were last seen on July 25, 1984. Police said videotape equipment from the Dubs' San Francisco home was found at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County. Jeff Gerald, 25, of San Francisco is a thin, muscular man who worked by day as a mover and spent evenings playing drums for the band "Crash and Burn." He vanished after telling a friend he was going to help Ng move. Charles Gunnar, 36, a former postman and drama coach from Morgan Hill who was best man at Lake's wedding.

Gunnar's ex-wife reported in April that he had been gone for two years. Police said Lake was using Gunnar's name as an alias in Calaveras County. Jeffrey D. Askren, 30, of Sunnyvale vanished in April 1984. His late-model Honda automobile was found a few days later in the West Point area of Calaveras County, near Lake's home.

Police said the car was recovered intact, but camera equipment inside was gone. Kathleen E. Allen, 18, of San Jose appears in a videotape found at Lake's home and her last paycheck was sent to the town near his cabin, according to San Jose police. Michael S. Carroll, 23, of Milpitas, is identified as Miss Allen's boyfriend and is mentioned on one of the videotapes.

His driver's license was also found at the cabin, police said. His foster brother, John Gouveia, said Carroll served time at a federal military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, with Charles Ng. Wire service and staff reports Lake's former neighbors not surprised by murder stories tary, was known as a loner when he lived here in 1981-82. He operated a motel for about six months before moving to a nearby ranch. "He kept to himself, but he wasn't a complete loner," Anderson said.

"He was elected recording secretary of the volunteer fire department. He seemed very intense, not somebody I'd socialize with; I thought he was just another alienated zombie moving through the area." Anderson said survivalists and members of the "lunatic fringe" have been drawn to the area ever since a magazine article published in the 1960s said the Anderson Valley was an ideal haven from a nuclear holocaust. Art Hatcher, who operates the Mobil gas station next to the motel, said he avoided Lake as much as possible. "He'd come over here and talk and he brought his car in for servicing," Hatcher said. "I'd have a feeling the guy was not right, but I was always civil to him when I declined his invitations.

He was a strange character." Hatcher said Lake seemed obsessed with talking about weapons- By Steve GibSOnMcClatchy News Service PHILO, Calif. Residents of the picturesque Anderson Valley didn't appear surprised Tuesday to learn that self-styled survivalist Leonard T. Lake may have murdered two dozen people. "He's just the latest in a series of world-class psychotics who have touched down in the area," said Bruce Anderson, publisher of the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser in Mendocino County. The Manson family lived in the valley during the late 1960s.

Peoples Temple leader, the Rev. Jim Jones, taught school here in the 1960s. Kidnapper and child molester Luis "Tree Frog" Johnson made the valley his home. And "the Moonies ran a brainwashing center here," Anderson said. The Anderson Valley population about 3,000 with an economy based on tourism and timber is about 20 miles long and flanked by steep, tree-studded hills between Highway 101 and the coast.

Lake, a 39-year-old former Marine obsessed with weapons and the mili it has Associated Press TORTURE CHAMBER: Officials stand outside the bunker, right, on property used by Leonard Lake near West Point, Calif. Authorities say it was the scene of torture and sexual abuse. was intense," said Ellen Tinkler, a reading teacher at the elementary school. "I used to pick her up and give her a ride to school every day. She never talked much about him.

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