Charles Ng

What the record shows

Charles Chitat Ng is a former U.S. Marine who was convicted in Orange County, California, on February 24, 1999, of 11 counts of first-degree murder for killings committed with Leonard Lake between July 1984 and April 1985. The victims were abducted in the San Francisco Bay Area and Calaveras County, and the case centred on Lake's property in Wilseyville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. A jury returned a death verdict on April 30, 1999, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on July 28, 2022. Lake died by suicide in police custody in June 1985. Ng remains under sentence of death in California, which has not carried out an execution since 2006.

Ng was born in British Hong Kong on December 24, 1960, according to the Wikipedia article. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where, the article says, he was implicated in the theft of weapons from the Kaneohe Bay armory in Hawaii and served about 18 months at Fort Leavenworth. The California Supreme Court opinion records that a man he met in Hawaii gave him Lake's address in the summer of 1981, and that in 1982 Ng lived with Lake and Lake's wife, Claralyn, in Philo, Mendocino County.

According to the court's summary of the trial evidence, 12 people went missing between July 1984 and April 1985. Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their 16-month-old son Sean disappeared from their San Francisco apartment on July 25, 1984; Paul Cosner vanished in November 1984 after leaving to deliver a car he was selling; Clifford Peranteau, who worked with Ng at a San Francisco moving company, disappeared in January 1985, and Jeffrey Gerald in February. In April 1985 Kathleen Allen and her boyfriend Michael Carroll disappeared, followed later that month by Lonnie Bond Sr., his fiancee Brenda O'Connor, their infant son Lonnie Bond Jr., and their friend Robin Scott Stapley, all connected to a house in Wilseyville.

The disappearances were linked only after June 2, 1985, when a reserve officer saw Ng leave South City Lumber in South San Francisco with an unpaid vise. Ng walked away; Lake was found with a pistol and silencer registered to Stapley, identified himself as Stapley, and was arrested. At the station he swallowed cyanide and died days later. The car proved to be Cosner's, and a utility bill inside led investigators to Wilseyville, where they found property from the Dubs home. A five-week search uncovered a bunker with a concealed cell and thousands of burned bone and tooth fragments that forensic anthropologists attributed to at least four adults, one child and one infant. On July 8, 1985, the bodies of Bond and Stapley were found buried nearby. Investigators also recovered buried videotapes; UPI reported in 1992 that one played at a closed preliminary hearing showed Ng and Lake threatening two handcuffed women.

Ng fled to Canada. On July 6, 1985, security guards at a Hudson's Bay Co. store in Calgary stopped him on suspicion of shoplifting; UPI reported that he fired a .22-caliber pistol and wounded a guard in the hand before being subdued. Investigators then told UPI of 25 missing people with some link to the pair. The Wikipedia article says he was convicted in Canada in December 1985 and sentenced to four and a half years. He fought extradition on the ground that he faced the death penalty; according to the Wikipedia article the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against him by four votes to three on September 26, 1991, and he was handed over the same day. He was arraigned in Calaveras County on September 27, 1991.

Pretrial proceedings took seven years. The case was moved to Orange County, and the Supreme Court opinion notes that Ng filed 37 motions to replace his lawyers and for a period represented himself. Trial began in September 1998. Ng testified and blamed Lake for the killings. The jury convicted him of the 11 murders and found the multiple-murder special circumstance true; on the Cosner count the jury failed to reach a verdict, according to the Supreme Court opinion, although the Wikipedia article describes it as an acquittal. The Wikipedia article puts the cost of the prosecution at about 20 million dollars.

In its 2022 opinion the California Supreme Court rejected Ng's claims, including challenges to the handling of his self-representation, and affirmed the convictions and death sentence. Identification work has continued: in January 2025 Intermountain Forensics, working with the Calaveras Cold Case Task Force, announced that remains recovered in June 1985 had been identified as Reginald Frisby, born in 1956, who had never been reported missing. The total number of victims is unknown; a Calaveras County sheriff's lieutenant told CBS News in 2022 that he did not think anybody would ever know.