Terror in East Lansing: The Tale of MSU Serial Killer Donald Miller (6 page)

When the couple failed to return to the Honda
by that afternoon, the friend and fellow member of Miller's
fraternity reported them missing. Tracing the license number of the
car Miller and Sowers disappeared in, the police discovered that
the car—a silver 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass—was registered to Charlene
A. Williams or Charles Williams, her father. This was the second
big break.

In the meantime, Miller's mother worried that
her usually dependable son and future daughter-in-law were missing.
A friend of Sowers had phoned Miller's mother early Sunday morning
looking for Miller. "I don't want you to worry," the friend had
said, "but something really strange is going on. Nobody has seen
Mary Beth or Craig since last night."

When Miller failed to show up for his 10:00
A.M. shift at a paint store in Carmichael, his mother telephoned
police.

* * *

After learning from the Department of Motor
Vehicles that the Oldsmobile Cutlass belonged to Charlene A.
Williams or Charles Williams, Detective Lee Taylor and Detective
Larry Burchett drove to the home of Charles and Mercedes Williams
on Berrendo Drive in Arden Park.

The parents told the detectives that the
Cutlass was their daughter Charlene's, and that she had left home
about 6:30 P.M. Saturday to go to a movie theater with her
boyfriend, Stephen Robert Feil. During the conversation, Charlene
drove up in her silver Cutlass. This was the third big break,
although it did not seem like it at the time.

Charlene, twenty-four, was blonde, pretty,
petite, and seven months pregnant. She coolly denied any knowledge
of the disappearance of Sowers or Miller. She allowed the
detectives to search the Cutlass. They found no indication of foul
play or otherwise incriminating evidence that a crime had been
committed.

Charlene complained of being sick because of
her pregnancy and suffering from a hangover. She gave few details
about her boyfriend, Stephen Feil.

The detectives, unaware that Miller's body
was soon to be discovered and having no other reason to detain the
ill Charlene further, promised to return later that day to
photograph her. She, in turn, hoped to have recovered somewhat and
be more cooperative.

* * *

It was not until the following day that
Charles and Mercedes Williams admitted to the detectives that their
daughter was married to Stephen Feil and that this was actually an
alias used by Gerald Gallego, thirty-four, who was wanted on incest
and other sex charges.

Suddenly some frightening pieces of a bizarre
puzzle began to fall into place. Not only had the Gallegos become
the chief suspects in the murder of Craig Miller and disappearance
of Mary Beth Sowers, but neighboring Yolo County authorities were
also investigating the connection of a Stephen Feil to the
kidnapping-murder of Virginia Mochel, a local bartender.

Unfortunately, by now the Gallegos, sensing
trouble, had fled to parts unknown. On November 5, 1980, El Dorado
County filed charges of kidnapping and murder against Gerald and
Charlene Gallego. The following day, a federal fugitive warrant of
unlawful flight to avoid prosecution was issued against the
Gallegos to allow the FBI to join in a nationwide search for the
fugitive couple on the run.

That search came to an uncomplicated end
twelve days later. On Monday, November 17, 1980, Gerald and
Charlene Gallego were captured by FBI agents in Omaha, Nebraska
while they were attempting to pick up money that had been wired to
them by Charlene's parents at a Western Union office in downtown
Omaha.

The arrest came without incident and brought
to an end what was later discovered to be a twenty-six month reign
of sex-motivated brutality and cold-blooded murder.

Yet this was only the beginning of a bizarre
tale of sexual fantasies, domination, and sheer terror that was to
unravel and take three and a half more years to bring to a
conclusion.

* * *

Read the entire gripping book, The Sex Slave
Murders, available in eBook, print, and audio.

# # #

The following are bonus excerpts from the
bestselling true crime short

THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS
3

The Horrific Tale of Serial Killers Leonard
Lake & Charles Ng

By R. Barri Flowers

Leonard Lake and Charles Ng left their dark
mark on society as two of America's worst and most sadistic serial
killers. Between 1984 and 1985, the unlikely homicidal pair
perpetrated most of their crimes at a secluded cabin and adjacent
custom-made dungeon of horrors in an unincorporated area in
Calaveras County, California, where they brought their abducted
victims, sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered them, often
videotaping their heinous crimes.
¹
On one videotape
confiscated by police, killer Ng is shown eerily warning one female
victim, "You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won't
do any good. We are pretty cold-hearted, so to speak."
²
In all, the two slayers are thought to have killed between twelve
and twenty-five people.

The killers would undoubtedly have claimed
the lives of more victims, had they not been stopped in their
tracks by Ng's penchant for shoplifting and Lake's misguided
attempt to cover for him. In the process, authorities would
discover the true horrors brought about by the two men, one of whom
would commit suicide to avoid owning up to his 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 partner in sexual criminality and homicide, Charles Ng. The
two former U.S. Marines found other common ground with their
antisocial and sadistic personalities and grew close. Not long
after, Lake invited Ng to move to the ranch, which he readily
accepted, as a prelude to the two men living their lives as
sexually-motivated serial killers.

* * *

NOTES

1. R. Barri Flowers and H. Loraine Flowers,
Murders in the United States: Crimes, Killers and Victims of the
Twentieth Century
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), p. 174.

2. Charlotte Greig,
Evil Serial Killers:
In the Minds of Monsters
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005),
p. 9.

3. "Leonard Lake and Charles Ng,"
Criminal
Minds
,
http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Lake_and_Charles_Ng.

4. Cited in
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, "Leonard Lake,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Lake.

* * *

Read the entire riveting story, The Sex Slave
Murders 3, available in eBook and audio.

# # #

The following are bonus excerpts from the
bestselling true crime short

THE AMITYVILLE
MASSACRE

The DeFeo Family's Nightmare

By R. Barri Flowers

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning on
November 13, 1974, shots rang out in the upscale home at 112 Ocean
Avenue in Amityville, New York, a village within the town of
Babylon. The house belonged to forty-three-year-old Ronald DeFeo,
Sr. and his forty-two-year-old wife, Louise, who lived there with
their five children, ranging in age from nine to twenty-three. The
DeFeos and four of their children—Dawn, eighteen years old;
Allison, age thirteen; Marc, age twelve; and John, nine years
old—were all shot to death.
¹
The
surviving member of the family, Ronald "Butch" DeFeo, Jr.,
twenty-three, was suspected of being the shooter. The police
investigated the horrible crime, before it went to court, with
solid evidence pointing toward the killer. The case of the
Amityville massacre has left many wondering how it happened, and if
it could happen again. The chilling scenario, motive, mental state
of the accused, the trial, and
the shocking
supernatural implications of the mass murder of the DeFeo family in
Amityville are recounted
in this true crime short.

* * *

On September 26, 1951, Ronald "Butch" DeFeo,
Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York at
Adelphi
Hospital to parents Ronald DeFeo, Sr. and Louise DeFeo
. He
was the first of four children for the couple. DeFeo, Sr. made a
good living for the family as a car salesman for a Buick dealership
owned by his father-in-law in Brooklyn. Apart from providing the
comforts of a home, where the family had lived since 1965, Ronald
DeFeo was described as a "domineering authority figure," who
"engaged in hot-tempered fights with his wife and
children."
²

Ronald DeFeo, Jr. was often most victimized
by the parental abuse, which was compounded by the overweight, glum
youth being frequently taunted by classmates. When he grew older,
DeFeo got bigger and stronger and fought back when his father
victimized him. According to one authority, "
Shouting matches often degenerated into boxing matches, as
father and son came to blows with little
provocation."
³
Others also became the target of Butch DeFeo's
belligerent behavior.

Against his wishes, DeFeo's worried parents
forced him to get psychiatric care. Once the therapy ended with no
sign of his violent episodes going away, Ronald and Louise DeFeo
tried to use money and gifts to calm their troubled son. This
included a speedboat that cost $14,000.

Unfortunately, things continued to go
downhill for Butch DeFeo, as by the time he reached
seventeen
years of age, he was using heroin and LSD and
engaging in petty theft. He got kicked out of school because of
violent conduct.

These issues notwithstanding, the DeFeos
sought to pacify their oldest child any way they could. When he was
eighteen, Butch was given a job at the family Buick dealership,
along with a new car and an allowance weekly with no strings
attached. DeFeo took advantage of this generosity by delving
further into substance abuse with alcohol and drugs.