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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry. What's up my little cult babes?

We're almost to October, almost to spooky season.

What else can I tell you? Drink check. Drink check. Everybody always wants to know what I'm drinking. So let me tell you, I'm drinking water with lemon and honey because it helps my voice.

When I do this and then I'm also drinking a chai latte, a dirty chai, which I've been talking about online a lot recently. Here's the ice.

Ice ASMR check. Anyways, I'm obsessed with chai. So that's new, that's what's happening. Everybody loves it. Everyone's like, whoa, what's next?

Today's story, I'm actually having a really hard time because even now up until the point of recording, I'm like, is this going to be a two-parter or one really long episode?

So I guess we'll see. You'll know by the title where we decided to go with this. I want to do two parts only because in a normal episode I have a few pages of notes.

Well, this time I have like three times the pages of notes because there is so much that happened in this story and there's so many interesting parts to the investigation that were available because like that's the best, right?

Some stories, they're made to just be shorter. I mean, I always get kind of just to the point with everything anyways, but also like a lot of the older stories that I cover from like the 1800s to the 1920s, like there's not as much information available.

In this case, there was so much media coverage that it pretty much gives all the details and all of them after hearing them. I'm like, okay, well, I want to make sure I include this. I want to make sure this is part of the episode too. So that's why it's so long or a two-parter. We'll see.

The story starts on June 2nd of 1985.

Here's receive a call from a hardware store in San Francisco where a worker tells them that they had witnessed a man steal a $75 table vice.

Minutes later, an officer arrives and the clerk tells him like, listen, he threw the vice into the trunk of a brown Honda that is still in our parking lot and then took off on foot.

The officer begins to inspect the cart in question and inside of the trunk he found more than just the vice.

He pulls out this zipped up like black case and inside is a 22 caliber gun with what appeared to be a silencer attached to it.

As he inspected the gun, he could tell that it was obviously illegally modified and before he knows it a different man than the vice snatcher runs out of the store and approaches the vehicle, explaining to the officer that he had paid for the vice for his friend.

As he's explaining this, another supervising officer pulls up and who knows. Maybe they would have been like, okay, dude, whatever you paid for your friend, whatever, get the hell out of here.

But the original officer was kind of caught up with the whole gun situation. They decided they were going to impound the car and take the man down to the station to give a statement on the illegal weapon.

As they drove the man Leonard Lake down to the station, he tells them that his friend that was shoplifting's name was Charles Ng.

The officer calls in the information and the department quickly discovers that this was not Charles nor Leonard's first run-in with the law.

As soon as they get to the station, they begin questioning Leonard who basically tells them like, listen, I have a lot to say there's more to this story and I want to make a statement.

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