Charles Ng

Charles Ng was born as Ng Chi-tat in British Hong Kong, the youngest of three children and only son of a wealthy Hongkonger executive and his wife. As a child, Ng was harshly disciplined and abused by his father. 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. He dropped out after one semester. 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 joined the Marines in October 1979 with the help, he claimed, of a recruiting sergeant and false documents attesting to his birthplace as Bloomington, Indiana. After less than a year of service, he was arrested by military police for stealing automatic weapons from the Kaneohe Bay base armory. Facing court-martial, Ng escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California, where he met Leonard Lake. In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home Ng and Lake shared in Ukiah, seizing a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives. Lake was released on bond, but he jumped bail and hid at a remote cabin owned by his wife, Claralyn Balazs, in Wilseyville, a community in Calaveras County located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Ng was captured and returned to Marine custody and pleaded guilty to the charges of theft and desertion. Under the terms of this plea deal, he was paroled and dishonorably discharged in 1984 after serving eighteen months in the military stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. == Murders ==

After his release from Leavenworth, Ng rejoined Lake, who was still living at the Wilseyville cabin. By then, Lake and Balazs had divorced but remained on good terms. Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon." Before Ng's arrival, Lake is believed to have already murdered his brother Donald, whom he lured to the cabin and shot in his sleep in 1983, and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar. Gunnar's body was unearthed from the Wilseyville property in 1992. They also found a hand-drawn "treasure map", leading them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One contained envelopes with names and victims' identifications, 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. On one of the tapes, labeled "M-Ladies", Charles Ng is seen telling victim Brenda O'Connor, as he cuts her shirt off with a knife, "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 another part of the tape, Kathy Allen is seen seated in a chair, with Leonard Lake warning her, "If you don't go along with us, we'll probably take you into the bed, tie you down, rape you, shoot you, and bury you." In the other, Deborah Dubs is shown being assaulted so severely that she "could not have survived". He was charged, and, in December 1985, convicted of shoplifting, assault with a weapon, and possession of a concealed firearm, and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Ng fought a protracted legal battle against extradition on the grounds that Canada, which did not have the death penalty for most offenses, 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. On September 26, 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled by a vote of 4 to 3 against him. According to former Alberta prosecutor Scott Newark, Canada deported Ng to California 18 minutes after the ruling. == 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. By September 1998, Fitzgerald would himself be succeeded by Judge John J. Ryan, who would serve as the presiding judge of the trial. Ng's trial began with primary jury selection on September 14, 1998. Opening arguments began on October 26. The trial would last four months, ending on February 24, 1999. Balazs cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution. Court records stated that Balazs turned over weapons and other material to authorities during the investigation. Balazs was called a key witness in Ng's trial, but Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, in a surprise move, dismissed Balazs without asking any questions. Balazs was expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned. Kelley later declined to explain his actions. The prosecution rested its case on November 17, 1998. The defense began its case on November 30. 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. 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 correctional officers, 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 serving in the Marine Corps testified that he was quiet and well-behaved. Ng's parents testified about his troubled childhood and expressed remorse for their son's actions. At one point during the trial, Ng somehow managed to obtain the phone number of one of the nine female jurors. He contacted the juror at home in an unsuccessful attempt to cause a mistrial, after which the phone number was found in his cell. Thereafter, he was kept in a metal cage within a room during recesses. The defense initially concluded its case on January 25, 1999. The following day, Judge Ryan granted Ng's request to reopen the defense portion of the trial to allow him to testify about the murders. Ng took the stand for the first time that day, blaming the murders on Leonard Lake, who he said was responsible for all of them. On February 2, prosecutors declined to ask further questions of Ng, and re-summarized the closing arguments they had given jurors the week before. On February 3, the defense made its closing arguments. On February 8, the jury began its deliberations. After three weeks of deliberations, the jury returned its verdict on February 24, 1999, convicting Ng Jurors found him not guilty on the twelfth charge, the murder of Paul Cosner, even though Lake and Ng had driven Cosner's car for seven months since he went missing in November 1984, and Cosner's California driver's license had been found at the Wilseyville property. Ng was sentenced to death, and Judge John J. Ryan rejected a motion to reduce the sentence to life imprisonment, saying, "Mr. Ng was not under any duress, nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake." far exceeding that of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994–1995, which cost $9 million. On July 28, 2022, the California Supreme Court upheld Ng's death sentence and conviction. As of 2022, Ng still has other possible federal appeals in spite of a moratorium on the death penalty by Governor Gavin Newsom. As of 2025, Ng remains on death row at California Medical Facility. No executions have taken place in California since 2006. == See also ==