Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Murders

In 1985, two men were caught shoplifting in San Francisco. Charles Ng escaped, but Leonard Lake aroused suspicion—he was carrying someone else’s driver’s license. Four days after police took him into custody, Lake killed himself by swallowing a cyanide pill he had hidden in his clothes. Ng, meanwhile, had fled to Canada. Police traced the car Lake was driving to a man who had disappeared a year earlier. They then followed a trail of evidence to a remote property in the Sierra Nevada foothills. What they found there shocked even seasoned veterans of the force. Inspired by John Fowles’s novel The Collector, Lake and Ng had turned a hidden concrete bunker into a grisly den, where the two had indulged in an orgy of sex crimes, torture, and murder that claimed at least sixteen victims. Police found forty pounds of bones from men, women, and children buried in a nearby plot—and videotapes the killers had made of their unspeakable acts. In Die for Me, true crime master Don Lasseter recounts the events surrounding their sensational crimes and capture, bringing readers face-to-face with pure evil.