The Wilseyville Horror: Leonard Lake, Charles Ng

In the summer of 1985, investigators searching a remote property in California's Calaveras County made a discovery that would take forty years to fully comprehend. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng had built, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a killing ground organised around a written ideology - a project Lake called Operation Miranda, after the captive in Fowles' novel, a name that revealed everything about what the enterprise was designed to do. They killed at least eleven confirmed victims, and likely as many as twenty-five. Then Lake swallowed cyanide, and Ng fled to Canada, and the reckoning took decades to arrive.

The Wilseyville Horror traces the full arc of one of America's most disturbing criminal cases - from the childhoods that shaped two very different but fatally compatible men, through the years of killing and concealment, to the landmark extradition battle, the most expensive murder trial in California history, and the forensic breakthroughs of 2025 that finally gave names back to victims Lake had tried to erase with fire and bone-crushing and forged letters. It is not, finally, the story of what two men did. It is the story of the people they did it to - and the long, patient, ultimately unstoppable work of making sure those people were not forgotten.