Charles Ng

Charles Chi-tat Ng (Chinese: 吳志達; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born 24 December 1960) is a convicted Hong Kong-American serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento.[3] After his 1985 arrest and imprisonment in Canada on robbery and weapons charges, followed by a lengthy dispute between Canada and the US,[4] Ng was extradited to California, tried, and convicted of 11 murders.[1] He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

For the racing driver, see Charles Ng (racing driver).
This is a Chinese name; the family name is Ng.
Charles Ng
August 2018 Mugshot
Born
Charles Chi-tat Ng

(1960-12-24) 24 December 1960
British Hong Kong
NationalityBritish Dependent Territories citizen (1983–1997)
British National (Overseas) (1997–present)
CitizenshipBritish
Conviction(s)
Criminal penaltyDeath by lethal injection (1999)
Details
Victims11 convictions, 25 total suspected[1]
Span of crimes
1984–1985
State(s)Calaveras County, California
Date apprehended
July 6, 1985[2]
Imprisoned atSan Quentin State Prison
Charles Ng
Traditional Chinese吳志達
Simplified Chinese吴志达

Early life

Ng was born in British Hong Kong,[5] the son of a wealthy Hongkonger executive and his wife. As a child, Ng was harshly disciplined and abused by his father.[6] As a teenager, he was described as a troubled loner and was expelled from several schools. After his arrest for shoplifting at age 15, he went, at his father's insistence, to Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in North Yorkshire, England.[4] Not long after arriving, Ng was expelled for stealing from other students and returned to Hong Kong.

Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978, and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.[7] He dropped out after one semester.[8]:91 At that time, he met Leonard Lake. Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

U.S. Marine Corps

Ng became a Marine in 1979 with the help, he claimed, of a recruiting sergeant and false documents attesting to his birth in Bloomington, Indiana.[8]:91 After less than a year of service, he was arrested by military police for theft of automatic weapons from MCAS Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. Facing court-martial, he escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California, where he reunited with Lake.[7]

In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home they shared in Ukiah, seizing a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives. Lake was released on $6,000 bond. He jumped bail and drifted around the state, using a series of pseudonyms.[7] Ng was returned to the Marines' custody and pleaded guilty to the theft and desertion charges. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was paroled and discharged in 1984 after serving 18 months in the military stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks Fort Leavenworth.[9]

Murders

After his release, Ng immediately contacted Lake, who was renting a remote cabin near Wilseyville in Calaveras County and invited Ng to join him.[8]:92 Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon". He probably had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and Gunnar's identity. Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture and murder.[8]:92[10]

Their victims included their neighbour Lonnie Bond; their neighbor’s girlfriend, Brenda O'Connor; Lonnie Jr., the Bonds’ infant son; Harvey Dubs; Deborah Dubs; and their young son Sean. According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately but kept the women alive, raping and torturing them, before murdering them or allowing them to die from their injuries.[8]:92[10] Other known victims included relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O'Connor, two gay men and some workmates of Ng.

The duo's rampage might have gone on longer were it not for Ng's kleptomania. On 2 June 1985, Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a South San Francisco hardware store and fled the scene. Lake later drove to the store and attempted to pay for the vise, but by then the police had arrived.[8]:93

Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's licence, which carried the name of Robin Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier. After a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of Lake's vehicle, he was arrested and positively identified via a fingerprint search. In custody, while awaiting arraignment, Lake swallowed a cyanide pill he had sewn into his clothes and died four days later in the hospital.[8]:93

The license plate on Lake's vehicle was registered to him, but the vehicle itself was registered to Paul Cosner, who had disappeared in November 1984. Lake's auto registration led detectives to the property in Wilseyville, where they found Stapley's truck and Bond's car, and behind the cabin, the dungeon. In a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed roughly 40 pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments corresponding to a minimum of 11 bodies.[8]:94

They also found a hand-drawn "treasure map," leading them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One contained envelopes with names and victims' IDs, suggesting that the total number of victims might have been as high as 25. In the other bucket were Lake's handwritten journals for the years 1983 and 1984, and two videotapes documenting the torture of two of their victims. In one of the tapes, Ng is seen telling victim Brenda O'Connor, "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." In the other, Deborah Dubs is shown being assaulted so severely that she "could not have survived."[8]:94

Ng, meanwhile, had fled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his sister lived.[11] He lived, undetected, in a lean-to in Fish Creek Provincial Park until his penchant for theft did him in yet again. On 6 July 1985, he was arrested by the Calgary Police Service after shooting security guard Sean Doyle in the hand while resisting arrest for stealing a can of salmon from a Calgary department store.[2][12] He was charged and subsequently convicted of shoplifting, assault with a weapon, and possession of a concealed firearm, and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.[2] After serving his sentence, he remained incarcerated pending an extradition request from California authorities.[13]

Ng fought a protracted legal battle against extradition on the grounds that Canada, which does not have the death penalty, would be violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by permitting him to stand trial in California for capital murder. A habeas corpus petition and an appeal to the Alberta Court of Appeal were both denied. In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada also ruled against him, and he was extradited to California later that year.[8]:94[14]

Murder trial

In Calaveras County, Ng was indicted on twelve counts of first degree murder. After a change of venue to Orange County, he initiated a protracted series of pretrial motions. He sued the state over his temporary detainment at Folsom Prison, where he was caught hiding maps, fake IDs, and other escape paraphernalia, and filed challenges against four of the judges assigned to his case. He lodged a long series of complaints regarding the strength of his eyeglasses, the temperature of his food, and his right to practice origami in his jail cell.[15]

Ng went through a total of 10 attorneys, some of whom ended up defending him a second time. He also filed a malpractice suit against several of the attorneys, citing incompetent representation.[15] After claiming that he had lost trust and confidence in all of his lawyers, he was allowed to represent himself, which delayed the trial another year while he researched applicable laws.[14] His trial finally began six years after his extradition in October 1998.

Leonard Lake's wife, Claralyn Balazs, cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution.[16] Court records stated that Balazs turned over weapons and other material to authorities during the investigation. Balazs was called as a key witness in Ng's trial in 1999. Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, in a surprise move, dismissed Balazs without asking any questions. Kelley later declined to explain his actions. Balazs was on the witness stand for a few minutes as Kelley read sections of her immunity agreement. Balazs was expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned.[16]

Despite the video evidence and information in Lake's voluminous diaries, Ng maintained that he was merely an observer, and that Lake planned and committed all of the kidnappings, rapes, and murders unassisted.[7] He further maintained that he was dependent upon Lake for direction, that the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father was a mitigating factor, and that his good behaviour behind bars showed that he should be imprisoned for life rather than executed.[10]

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian testified that Ng had dependent personality disorder, but admitted under cross-examination that he had not viewed the tapes that showed Ng participating in the crimes. Clinical psychologist Abraham Nievod agreed with the diagnosis of dependent personality disorder, and opined that Ng's behavior in the tapes indicated that he was attempting to "mirror" and please Lake. Four prison guards, two sheriff's deputies, a prison library employee, and a prison counselor all testified that Ng was a model prisoner. Four former Marines who had known Ng while he was serving in the Marine Corps testified that he was quiet and well-behaved. Ng's parents both testified about his troubled childhood, and expressed remorse for their son's actions.[17]

Ng insisted on taking the stand in his own defence, which allowed prosecutors to introduce additional evidence that helped define Ng's role in all aspects of the crimes. One significant item was a photo of Ng in his prison cell, with cartoons he had sketched of his victims hanging on the wall behind him.[15]

In February 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven of the twelve homicides: six men, three women, and two male infants; jurors deadlocked on the twelfth charge. Ng was sentenced to death, and the presiding judge rejected a motion to reduce the jury's verdict to life imprisonment. "Mr. Ng was not under any duress," he said, "nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake."[10] Ng's prosecution cost the State of California approximately $20 million, at the time the most expensive trial in the state's history.[4][18]

As of July 2019, Ng remains on death row[19] at San Quentin State Prison.[20] No executions have taken place in California since 2006.

See also

References
  1. Welborn, Larry (2011-02-25). "O.C. death row: 11 murders, maybe more". The Register. Archived from the original on 2011-03-01. Retrieved 2011-02-28.
  2. "Ngs trail went from California to Calgary and back again". The Lethbridge Herald. Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada: Heritage Archives. 1998-11-12. p. A9. Retrieved 2011-02-28.
  3. "Charles Ng Biography". biography.com. A&E Television Networks. Archived from the original on 30 November 2016. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  4. "Reference Re Ng Extradition". umontreal.ca. 1991-09-26. Archived from the original on 2010-01-17. Retrieved 2011-02-27.
  5. "Charles Chi-tat Ng – Extradited From Canada to Face Death Penalty in California". Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. 2005-04-25. Archived from the original on 2011-07-25. Retrieved 2011-02-28.
  6. YI, DANIEL (21 April 1999). "Ng's Father Blames Self, Begs Jurors to Spare Son". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 6 January 2017. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  7. "As Jury Meets to Decide His Fate, Ng Expects Death – latimes". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2015-05-20.
  8. Greig, Charlotte (2005). Evil Serial Killers: In the Minds of Monsters. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 978-0-7607-7566-0. Archived from the original on 2019-12-15. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  9. United States vs Charles Ng.
  10. World: "America's serial killer sentenced to die" Archived 2018-06-18 at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, 30 June 1999, access date 15 August 2013
  11. Calgary man who helped capture Charles Ng hits the road to find redemption, healing and a killer Archived 2018-07-04 at the Wayback Machine. Calgary Herald (March 5, 2016). Retrieved May 30, 2017.
  12. Hickey, E.W. (2003). Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime. SAGE Publications. p. 277. ISBN 978-0-7619-2437-1. Archived from the original on 2015-05-25. Retrieved 2015-05-20.
  13. Bishop, Katherine (1991-02-13). "Murder Suspect's Bid to Stay in Canada Tests Pact". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2015-05-25. Retrieved 2015-05-20.
  14. "Charles Ng Has a Date With a Needle". San Francisco Chronicle. 1999-07-06. Archived from the original on 2015-09-07. Retrieved 2015-05-20.
  15. Serial Killer Charles Ng – A Master of Legal Manipulation Archived 2017-03-24 at the Wayback Machine. ThoughtCo.com (March 1, 2016). Retrieved March 23, 2017.
  16. Yi, Daniel (January 8, 1999). "Defense Seeks to Put Ng on Witness Stand". Los Angeles Times.
  17. Lasseter, Don (2000). Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Murders. pp. 393–403. ISBN 978-0-7860-1107-0.
  18. "Leonard Lake and Charles Ng". Frances Farmer's Revenge. Archived from the original on March 8, 2011. Retrieved 2011-02-25.
  19. CDCR Division of Adult Operations. "Death Row Tracking System – Condemned Inmate List" (PDF). California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-06-30. Retrieved 2019-06-30.
  20. CDCR (2018-08-12). "CDCR Inmate Locator". California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Retrieved 2018-08-12.

Further reading
  • Owens, Gregg (2001). No Kill, No Thrill: The Shocking True Story of Charles Ng – One of North America's Most Horrific Serial Killers. Red Deer Press. ISBN 978-0-88995-209-6.
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