During the mid-1980s, Lake and his accomplice, Hong Kong-born Charles Ng, raped, tortured and murdered an estimated eleven to twenty-five victims at a remote cabin near Wilseyville, California, 150 miles east of San Francisco.

[4]: 91 Lake was reportedly a bright child, but developed an obsession with pornography after habitually photographing his sisters nude, which his grandmother apparently encouraged.

[5]: 134  Lake allegedly killed mice by dissolving them in chemicals, in the same manner he would later dispose of his human victims' corpses, and became fascinated with the idea of holding women captive after reading the John Fowles novel The Collector in his teens.

In 1975, he met and eventually married Claralyn Balazs — nicknamed "Cricket" — who became involved in Lake's fantasies and appeared in many of his pornographic films.

[4]: 93  Lake's growing fear of impending nuclear holocaust prompted him to begin construction of a "bunker" on the settlement grounds until the owner of the property became aware of the project and ordered it halted.

Sources claim the two met through an advertisement Lake, by that time managing a Philo motel, had placed in a survivalist magazine.

[4]: 93  Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's license, which carried the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier.

Lake was arrested after a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of his vehicle, a 1980 Honda Prelude, and was later positively identified via a fingerprint search.

A short time later, a detective entered the room to conduct an interview and found Lake violently convulsing on the floor.

In a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed over forty pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments corresponding to a minimum of eleven bodies.

On one of the tapes, labeled "M-Ladies", Ng is seen telling victim Brenda O'Connor, as he cuts her shirt off with a knife, "You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won't do any good.

In another part of the tape, Katherine Allen is seen seated in a chair, with Lake warning her, "If you don't go along with us, we'll probably take you into the bed, tie you down, rape you, shoot you, and bury you."

Balazs had been expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned and rented to her and Lake.

Ng served four and a half years in a Canadian prison, and tried to fight extradition to the United States on the grounds that he would be subject to capital punishment.