Search for Bodies Continues : Wilseyville: Calm Amid the Storm

“Where’s my fly swatter?” chortled 84-year-old bar owner Effie Schaad, while hundreds of the insects roamed over the walls, floors, chairs and customers of her establishment.

Behind thick lenses, her eyes searched the shelves in back of the bar, which held, among other things, a rattlesnake rattle, snapshots of a dog with a rat in its mouth and a stuffed alligator with its left front foot missing.

The fly swatter turned up near a stack of newspapers Schaad was saving, all of which contained stories about the biggest thing that has ever happened in this remote section of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Just a mile down the road, law enforcement officials aided by California Conservation Corps volunteers are conducting a grim search of the grounds around a mountain cabin once occupied by suspected mass murderer Leonard T. Lake. So far, they have unearthed six bodies and an estimated 20 pounds of human bones.

Lake and his suspected accomplice, Charles Ng, have been linked to 19 missing people, and authorities fear victims may have been kidnaped, tortured, murdered, burned and dismembered in the cabin and a nearby cinder block bunker. Lake is believed to have lived for about two years in the cabin, which was owned by his ex-wife, Claralyn (Cricket) Balazs.

Lake, 39, died in police custody June 6, an apparent suicide by poison. Ng, 24, is the subject of an international manhunt involving the FBI, Interpol, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Scotland Yard.

Local residents expressed shock and outrage that such a thing could have happened in their secluded mountain retreat.

But what has happened in the days since the first bones were discovered has been almost as unsettling.

In addition to police, FBI agents, state Justice Department officials and the CCC, Calaveras County has been invaded by dozens of newspaper reporters and television crews from around the country.

The investigation is headquartered 30 miles down the road in San Andreas, but reporters and officials regularly make the torturous, 45-minute drive up the hill to Wilseyville.

Now the elbow benders at Schaad’s Resort, as well as the lumberjacks, miners, restaurant owners, troubled Vietnam veterans, bikers and misfits who inhabit these parts, say they would like to return to the solitude and small-town life they came here to enjoy.

Pitched as it is halfway up a long road to nowhere, Wilseyville is an ideal spot for people trying to leave city living behind. Downtown Wilseyville, if one can call it that, consists of a general store, a post office and a gas station--all conveniently located in the same tumbledown wood-frame building.

At the other end of town is a volunteer fire station.

In between are about a dozen cabins, each with its own large plot of land.

Larger Village to North

County officials guess that about 600 people live within what is jokingly called the “Wilseyville metropolitan area,” but that includes the separate and somewhat larger village of West Point about two miles to the north.

Lake’s cabin is clumped with three others about four miles outside the most recognizable part of Wilseyville.

In any case, residents--mostly retirees or unemployed laborers waiting for the long-dormant local timber and mining industries to make a comeback--are, for the most part, well hidden from the main road, California 26, by thick stands of pine and scrub oak. Many want relief from the recent invasion of prying news reporters, law enforcement officials and “flatlanders.”

Complained Schaad: “None of them reporters spend much money, just a lot of my time.”

Despite such sentiments, the dig under way on the cabin property once occupied by Lake remains the main topic of conversation in town, and many local residents patiently describe for reporters their past run-ins with Lake, who they knew as Charles D. Gunnar. (The real Gunnar, a Morgan Hill man who was a friend of Lake, has been missing for two years and is one of the 19 disappearances linked to Lake and Ng.)

One of Schaad’s customers, trapper Jim Calvin, 48, gave Lake a ride once to West Point.

‘Was Definitely Different’

Lake was trying to thumb a ride and had just been passed by a woman in a car when Calvin pulled over to the side of the road.

“He was definitely different,” Calvin recalled. “He said, ‘I guess women don’t like me much,’ and didn’t say another word.”

Nicole Suggett, 13, who lives across the road from Lake’s former property, thinks Lake may have shot her dog, Bandit, who “liked to dig up everything.”

“My mom went out to the mailbox and Bandit was lying by the tree, shot,” she said. ‘My mom called him (Lake) to see if he knew anything about it.”

Lake “said he heard a shot and a dog crying,” she said. “I never liked him, he was always a nerd.”

Laurie Springer, 22, of West Point, answered an advertisement that Lake had tacked to a storefront wall seeking “models” willing to pose for $10 an hour, she said.

It happened about two years ago, she said, the day that Lake moved into the cabin--where authorities believe he later tortured and murdered his victims.

After arranging on the telephone to meet with Lake the next day, Springer drove to the cabin with her husband, Alan. “He (Lake) told me to bring some shorts, a white blouse and lipstick,” Springer recalled.

At the cabin, “He had me sitting on tree stumps and different places in the yard,” she said. “He had me hold one of his guns, a machine gun, across my lap.”

Although investigators have found numerous photos of nude or semi-nude young women in the cabin, Springer said she posed clothed, at one point wearing a camouflage jacket that Lake gave her.

‘Everyone Packs Weapons’

Springer, who earned $20 for the session, never received copies of the photographs, but said she now feels “thankful I never got to know him any better.”

There is no discernible fear of murder in Wilseyville. For one thing, Lake is dead. And although Ng is still at large, residents point out that most homes are well stocked with weapons used for “rattlesnakes, hunting and protection,” as Alan Springer noted.

“It’s part of the life style here,” he said.

“Almost everyone packs weapons,” agreed Mike Gorwood, an unemployed miner who lives in a log cabin a few miles down the road from the Springers. “I was telling my boss the other day, ‘If this country is ever attacked, they’ll have a problem getting through Wilseyville.’ ”

A measure of the community’s lack of fear is the residents’ willingness to joke about it.

One bar patron recalled that on the previous day he had removed his false teeth and laid them on the bar. The woman on the stool next to him cracked, “You better put those back in your mouth or the police will want the head that goes with them.”