Terror in East Lansing: The Tale of MSU Serial Killer Donald Miller by R. Barri Flowers Read Free Book Online Page A

brutalities, while
the other would flee to Canada in order to escape the ultimate
American justice. It would take years before the case went to trial
and a verdict rendered for the surviving serial killer.
    But the anguish felt by victims' loved ones
and the greater community to the senseless, barbaric crimes is
still being felt to this day.
    * * *
    Leonard Lake was born in San Francisco,
California on October 29, 1945. He was only six years of age when
his parents separated. Lake's maternal grandparents took him and
his siblings in. Early in life, Lake developed a predilection for
pornography after photographing his sisters and other pubescent
girls in the nude. He was also involved in an incestuous
relationship with a sister, and made sex slaves out of other
teenage girls locally. Lake's aberrant behavior included a fondness
for killing mice, using chemicals to dissolve them.
    In 1965, nineteen-year-old Lake signed up
with the U.S. Marines, where he served in Vietnam for two tours of
duty as a radar operator. Medical records indicate that during the
first tour, he exhibited "incipient psychotic reactions," and was
hospitalized and treated before returning to duty. 3
    After continuing to serve in Da Nang, Lake's
second tour ended early after a mental breakdown, and he was sent
back to the El Toro Marine Base in Orange County, California.
Diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, he received
psychiatric treatment at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, before
being medically discharged in 1971, having earned several medals,
including a Vietnam Campaign Medal and a Vietnam Service Medal.
    Lake went through psychotherapy at the
Veteran's Administration Hospital in Oakland. He relocated to San
Jose, California, where he enrolled at San Jose State University,
lasting just one semester before dropping out and joining a hippie
commune.
    In 1975, Lake got married. The marriage did
not last, however, once his wife learned that he made and
participated in amateur porn movies, typically including
sadomasochism and bondage.
    In 1977, at a Marin County, California
renaissance fair, Lake met and fell for twenty-five-year-old
Claralyn Balazs, a teacher's assistant. At the time, he had a stall
at the fair where visitors were charged to pose for photographs
beside a goat Lake had masqueraded as a unicorn. Balazs, nicknamed
Cricket, became the object of Lake's sexual fantasies and the
featured actress in his homemade pornography.
    In 1980, Lake received probation for one year
after being charged with theft. He and Balazs got married in 1981
and took up residence in a Northern California hippie commune in
Philo, located in Mendocino County not far from Ukiah.
    It was during the years that Lake lived on
the "back-to-the-land hippie settlement," spanning some 5,600
acres, that a "survivalist paranoia" took shape. 4 The
notion that a nuclear war worldwide was imminent captured his
imagination, and he became obsessed with guns as a consequence,
building a bunker and stockpiling it with weapons to defend against
such an attack.
    In April 1982, Lake was arrested on the ranch
for firearms violations by federal authorities. Jumping bail, he
started using the pseudonym Charles Gunnar, the stolen identity of
a man he had murdered. Gunnar, thirty-six, and an ex-postal worker,
had been Lake's best man at his wedding.
    Lake and his wife fled to a remote cabin
belonging to Balazs in Wilseyville, an unincorporated area in the
Sierra Nevada foothills in Calaveras County, California. Nearby,
Lake built a bunker where he amassed illegal weapons and video
equipment that he stole. The bunker also had a hidden room that
would become a place of sexual slavery, torture, and murder.
    Lake's marriage to Cricket proved to be
short-lived as the sexual perversions and criminality, combined
with his delusional behavior, became more than she could
handle.
    It has been reported that in 1981, after
placing an advertisement in a survivalist magazine, Lake met his
future