Charles Chitat Ng was convicted in February 1999 of murdering 11 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California in 1984 and 1985. They were six men, three women and two baby boys, as the Associated Press summed it up: a San Francisco couple and their son, two of Ng's co-workers at a moving company, a young couple from Milpitas, and a family who rented the house next door to the property where Ng and Leonard Lake were living, together with their friend from San Diego. Most of what was left of them was found as burned fragments on the property, near the hamlet of Wilseyville in Calaveras County.
The case went from arrest to verdict by way of Canada. Ng fled north after Lake was arrested in South San Francisco on June 2, 1985, and he was caught in Calgary on July 6, 1985. Canada had abolished the death penalty, and California would not promise not to seek it, so the question of whether he could be sent back went to the Supreme Court of Canada, and afterward to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. He was returned on September 26, 1991. Pretrial litigation in California then ran until jury selection began in September 1998, and the California Supreme Court later found that Ng had used it to delay his trial. The trial was held in Santa Ana, in Orange County, and the sentence was death. The state supreme court affirmed it in 2022.
Lake never stood trial. He took cyanide at the police station on the day of his arrest and died four days later. His part is known from the evidence at Ng's trial and from what investigators and prosecutors said.
Ng was born in Hong Kong, the son of a wealthy businessman, according to the Lancashire Post and the Gale reference work Great American Trials. McClatchy News Service reported in 1985 that his father had business interests in England. As a teenager he was sent there. He stayed with relatives in Lancashire, and at 14 he became a boarder at Bentham Grammar School in North Yorkshire, the Lancaster Guardian reported in 2022. Great American Trials says he was expelled from several schools, including a private boarding school in England. McClatchy found no record of trouble with the law in his first 18 years.
The fullest account of his childhood comes from the penalty phase of his trial, as the California Supreme Court summarized it. Relatives testified that he was a quiet, sheltered child who was beaten often and harshly, with a stick or a cane, for poor grades or unfinished homework, and a parent admitted at trial to punishing him severely. A psychiatrist told the jury that the family's high expectations, especially of an only son, shaped that discipline. His lawyers argued, as AP reported in 2022, that the beatings he took from his father as a child were one of the forces that shaped him.
Ng moved to the United States when he was 18, the court record says. In the autumn of 1979, according to McClatchy, he drove into a pole in San Leandro, in Alameda County, drove away, and was arrested for hit-and-run; he was ordered to stand trial. Great American Trials says he joined the Marines after the accident. On his enlistment papers he claimed to have been born in Bloomington, Indiana, and he told the Marines that his family lived in Belmont, in San Mateo County, McClatchy reported. In fact his family was in Hong Kong.
He served at the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe, on Oahu, Hawaii, and rose to lance corporal. On October 13, 1981, McClatchy reported, he and three other Marines stole three grenade launchers, two machine guns, seven pistols and a night-sighting scope, valued at 11,406 dollars. The weapons were later found buried. While he was posted in Hawaii, the court record says, he met a man who in the summer of 1981 gave him Leonard Lake's address.
After his arrest for the larceny, Ng escaped from confinement in a military facility on November 14, 1981, the court record says. (McClatchy gave the date he vanished as November 11.) He made his way to Mendocino County, in northern California. On April 29, 1982, an FBI SWAT team arrested him at Indian Creek Ranch in Philo, where Lake was living. A military court convicted him of conspiracy to commit larceny, larceny of government property worth more than 100 dollars, and unlawful entry with intent to commit larceny. The California Supreme Court gives the date of that conviction as July 15, 1982; McClatchy gave August 15. He was held at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, until June 29, 1984, according to McClatchy. AP described it in 2022 as imprisonment at Leavenworth for weapons theft committed while he was in the Marines.
Men who served with him spoke for him at his trial. Former Marines told the jury, in the court's summary, that he had been quiet and dutiful and had never been in a fight, and that the armory theft was out of character.
Accounts differ on how the two men met. Great American Trials says it was through a survivalist magazine; Lake's former mother-in-law told McClatchy in 1985 that they met through a mutual friend. McClatchy reported that Lake introduced Ng at Philo in the spring of 1982 as an "old service buddy," although the two men's Marine careers had not overlapped. Ng testified that he met Lake when he was 22 or 23.
Lake was a former Marine and a survivalist who talked of building shelters against nuclear war. In his own testimony Ng said he had looked up to Lake and trusted him, and that Lake had accepted him though he had no citizenship, no job, no driver's skills and a criminal record. A former neighbor testified that when the two men lived together in 1982 Lake often belittled him.
After his release from Leavenworth, Ng lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked on moving crews for Dennis Moving Company in San Francisco, the court record says, and McClatchy reported that he kept rented apartments in San Francisco and San Leandro. On October 16, 1984, Daly City police charged him with petty theft for shoplifting 52 dollars' worth of waterbed sheets, and a records check turned up an Alameda County warrant for violating probation in the hit-and-run case. Lake, meanwhile, was living on a property near Wilseyville, about 150 miles east of San Francisco. AP described it as a fenced compound of two and a half acres in the Sierra Nevada.
Harvey Dubs worked at a San Francisco typesetting firm, Petrov Graphic Types World, and was starting a videotaping business from home. Friends remembered him as abrasive but big-hearted, the columnist Debra J. Saunders reported in 1998. His wife, Deborah, known as Debbie, was "a dear, gentle person," a friend wrote, whose life centered on their son, Sean. McClatchy gave Harvey's age as 29, Deborah's as 33 and Sean's as 16 months.
On July 25, 1984, Harvey left work early. He told a co-worker, Lauren Bradbury, that he had advertised video equipment for sale in the newspaper and was meeting someone who had answered. At about a quarter to six that evening Deborah was on the phone with a friend, Karen Tuck, and said she was expecting a visitor about Harvey's equipment; she ended the call when someone came to the door. Tuck's later calls went unanswered. Harvey did not come to work the next day, which Bradbury said was "totally out of character," and a caller calling himself James Bright told her that Harvey had gone to Washington State for a family emergency. Deborah's father reported the family missing that evening. George Tuck found Deborah's key ring in the front door and empty shelving where Harvey had kept his recorders and tapes.
A neighbor, Dorice Murphy, saw an Asian man carry a suitcase down the family's front steps at about the time of Tuck's call and put it in a waiting car. Another neighbor, Barbara Speaker, saw a man closing the front door on July 27 with a bag in each hand. Both women later picked Ng out of photo lineups. Police found a San Francisco map in his apartment with the family's street circled, and a video recorder taken from the apartment, identified by its serial number, was found at Wilseyville.
At trial, Ng admitted that he was the man Speaker saw, but said he had gone to the apartment because Lake asked him to help with a "job," and that Lake was driving. He denied any part in the family's deaths. The jury convicted him of all three murders.
Paul Cosner, a car broker McClatchy gave as 40, lived in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Marilyn Namba. On November 2, 1984, he told her he was going to deliver a car he had sold, a gold Honda Prelude. He was due to meet his sister the next morning. He never came home and never met her, and no one heard from him again; his sister reported him missing. Seven months later the Honda was the car Lake was using when he was arrested.
Cosner's was the only count on which Ng's jury could not agree. A defense witness, a neighbor, testified that she had seen Lake with Cosner shortly before he vanished. The judge dropped the count on the day of the verdicts, AP reported. Ng has never been convicted of Cosner's death.
Clifford Peranteau worked on the same crew as Ng at Dennis Moving Company. His close friend and co-worker Hector Salcedo often spent time with him after work. Around December 1984 or January 1985, the court record says, Ng visited Peranteau's home and offered him work on a marijuana plantation. On a Friday night in January 1985, after celebrating the San Francisco 49ers reaching the Super Bowl, Salcedo dropped Peranteau off at about midnight. He did not come to work the next day, and Salcedo's calls and visits went unanswered. About a week later his motorcycle was gone, and his former girlfriend found most of his belongings gone.
The owner of the moving company, Dennis Goza, received a letter that seemed to be from Peranteau, saying he had a new job, a new home and a new girlfriend. It had been typed on a typewriter later found at Wilseyville, and a police investigator testified that Lake had forged it. In April 1985 Lake sold Peranteau's motorcycle in Wilseyville. A pen and pencil set of Peranteau's was found in Ng's San Francisco apartment, and a striped towel from his apartment turned up in Canada, in the dugout where Ng had been hiding.
Jeffrey Gerald, whom McClatchy gave as 25, also worked on a moving crew with Ng. He lived in San Francisco with a roommate, Terry Kailer, who over six weeks took 12 calls from a man who called himself Charlie or Charlie Ng. On February 24, 1985, Kailer took two calls from the same man. Later that day Gerald told Kailer that it was Ng and that he was meeting him at a bus station for "a side job," helping someone move, and that he would be home for dinner. He told his girlfriend, Sandra Krumbein, that he would earn 100 dollars helping a friend move. Neither of them saw him again. Three days later his room had been disturbed, and his clothes, bedding, guitar, amplifier and pictures were gone. His guitar was found at Wilseyville, and his Social Security card was found buried on the property.
A neighbor testified for the defense that she had seen Lake with a bloody sheet the day after Gerald disappeared, and a doctor treated Lake that day for a gunshot wound to the hand. Ng testified that he was at work on the day the apartment was emptied and denied meeting Gerald at the bus station.
Michael Carroll, 23 by McClatchy's account, lived in Milpitas with his foster brother, John Gouveia. Before Carroll disappeared, a man called asking for him. "Is this Charles Ng?" Gouveia asked, and the caller laughed and said yes. Carroll was last heard from in mid-April 1985.
Kathleen Allen, whom McClatchy gave as 18, was Carroll's girlfriend. She worked at a Safeway supermarket in Milpitas. On April 14, 1985, she told a co-worker that Carroll had been shot and might be dead, and that someone was going to drive her to Lake Tahoe; she told a friend, James Baio, that Carroll had called to say he was in trouble. Telephone records showed a call to the Safeway from the Wilseyville property that afternoon. That evening she left work and got into a gold Honda Prelude, Paul Cosner's car, with a white man at the wheel. She called Baio once more from a Milpitas hotel and was never heard from again. The next morning she asked her manager for four weeks off, saying her boyfriend had a job lead near Lake Tahoe; records showed another call to the store from Wilseyville. A check on her account dated May 2, 1985, was made out to Randy Jacobson, whose body was later found at Wilseyville; a handwriting expert testified that Lake had probably written it and signed her name.
On April 14 Lake asked George Blank to help with a car stranded in Milpitas and said a man named Charles would bring the keys. Two days later Debra Blank met Ng at a bus station and he gave her the keys and a letter giving the car's location. It was Carroll's Mercury Capri, parked at the Milpitas Safeway. A barrel at Wilseyville held belongings of Carroll and Allen, and books bearing Carroll's name were inside the house.
Kathleen Allen's mother died before the trial, Saunders reported in 1998. She was one of several witnesses who did not live to see it.
In January 1985 Lonnie Bond Sr. rented the Carter house, next to the Wilseyville property, sharing its driveway. He lived there with his fiancee, Brenda O'Connor, and their son, Lonnie Bond Jr. The court record calls the boy an infant; The Union Democrat has described him as 2 years old. Lake complained to the property manager about gunfire from the house and about the gate on the shared driveway, and a neighbor testified that Lake called the family "pests."
Robin Scott Stapley, known as Scott, lived in San Diego with his girlfriend, Tori Doolin. He was the youngest son of Lola Stapley, who was 70 in 1998. In February 1985 he and Doolin visited Bond and O'Connor in Wilseyville, and Doolin met Lake there. On the evening of April 19, 1985, Doolin saw Stapley for the last time. He had loaded Bond and O'Connor's belongings from a storage locker into his truck and planned to drive O'Connor and the baby back to the Carter house.
On April 23 Ng was driving Stapley's truck when it was in a collision in Kern County; no one was hurt. The next day Ng and Lake appeared at Doolin's apartment, and Lake told her a story about finding the four dead in the Carter house; he wanted Stapley's belongings taken to Wilseyville so it would look as though Stapley had moved out. O'Connor's mother never heard from her or the baby again. In May Lake told the property manager that the tenants had left town and that Bond had left his car to Lake because he owed him money.
Bond and Stapley were found in July 1985, buried in separate sleeping bags about a quarter mile from the property. Bond had been shot once in the head and Stapley three times. No remains of Brenda O'Connor or Lonnie Bond Jr. were identified at the time; the court noted that the family had no remains to bury. Brenda O'Connor's remains were identified in 2025.
On June 2, 1985, a reserve police officer, John Kallas, noticed a man taking a vise from the South City Lumber Company in South San Francisco. Great American Trials says it was a 75-dollar bench vise that the man stuffed under his jacket and put in the trunk of a car before walking away. Lake stayed and talked to police while Ng left. Officer Daniel Wright found a gun fitted with a silencer in Lake's backpack, traced to Stapley, and Lake was carrying cards in Stapley's name. The car was Paul Cosner's Honda. Lake was arrested for possessing the gun with a silencer, and at the police station he wrote a note and swallowed cyanide. He died on June 6, McClatchy reported. He was never charged with any killing.
In his own testimony, Ng said he panicked when he thought someone had seen him take the vise. He feared, he said, that police would find Cosner's car, a videotape and the buried bodies, and that he would be sent back to Hong Kong. He went back past the store to see what had become of Lake, then bought a one-way ticket to Chicago and from there made his way to Canada. McClatchy called him in June 1985 "the most sought-after fugitive in the U.S.," a bespectacled man of 24 who stood five feet six and weighed 140 pounds.
A utility bill in the Honda led police to the Wilseyville property. Inspector Irene Brunn found a video recorder from the Dubs apartment there on June 4, and officers secured the property and obtained a warrant. The search that followed lasted five weeks and involved four agencies. Investigators recovered thousands of fragments of bone and teeth, many of them burned. Forensic anthropologists concluded that they came from at least four adults, one child and one infant. Great American Trials put the bone fragments at 45 pounds.
They also found a cinderblock bunker. It had three rooms, two of them behind a hidden doorway, and one small room, about seven feet by three, could be opened only from outside. AP reported that investigators also found Lake's diary, which ran to 250 pages. A videotape found buried on the property was later played for the jury, and the court treated it as important evidence.
Ng reached Calgary in June 1985. Toward the end of that month a 14-year-old boy playing in a wildlife park in the city saw an Asian man lying in a lean-to near some bushes; the man told him to leave. The boy had seen Ng's photograph in the news and told his parents. The next day a detective went to the park with the boy and his father. About 30 meters from the lean-to he found a cleared area with a sleeping bag laid over wooden planks, and under the planks a dugout big enough for a person. In it were Scott Stapley's camera and the towel from Clifford Peranteau's apartment.
On July 6, 1985, Ng was arrested for shoplifting. A 2016 profile in the Calgary Journal, a student publication of Mount Royal University, told the story through one of the men who caught him, Sean Doyle, then 46, a high school art teacher who worked part time as a store security officer at the Hudson's Bay Company store downtown. Doyle and a colleague, George Forster, saw a man in the basement food area put a tin of salmon and a two-liter bottle of Pepsi in a bag. When Doyle stopped him, Forster shouted that he had a gun. In the struggle the gun went off, and the bullet struck Doyle's left hand; doctors told him three fingers would be permanently paralyzed. Doyle later told the Calgary Journal that he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and had recovered after forgiving Ng. Great American Trials says a second guard subdued Ng. Officers seized handcuffs and a key, a .22-caliber handgun that had belonged to Lake, and ammunition, the court record says.
AP's 1999 account described the arrest differently, as an arrest on a fugitive warrant while he was camping in a park on the edge of the city. The court record, CBC News and Great American Trials all say he was arrested for shoplifting.
Ng was convicted in Canada after the attempted theft and the shooting, the UN Human Rights Committee records. Great American Trials says the convictions were for robbery and assault and that he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, which Canadian authorities ruled he had to serve before any extradition. Saunders also reported a sentence of four and a half years.
In 1986 Ng was held in Canada in a cell next to Maurice Laberge, a career criminal who became an informant. AP placed them in the Edmonton penitentiary. From March to June or July 1986 the two men exercised together daily. Laberge kept notes of their conversations and sent them to his lawyer, along with cartoons that Ng had drawn and shared with him. Laberge died in a car accident before Ng's trial, and his testimony from the extradition hearing was read to the jury.
According to Laberge, Ng described his part in several of the killings: he called the Dubs killings "just business," said that Lake wanted Cosner's Honda, and said he had killed Jeffrey Gerald to move up in seniority at the moving company. Ng denied making any of these statements. He testified that he and Laberge had collaborated on the cartoons by passing them under a door, AP reported.
The United States asked Canada to extradite Ng in February 1987, to stand trial in California on 19 counts, including kidnapping and 12 murders committed in 1984 and 1985. Canada had abolished the death penalty in 1976, Saunders noted, and its extradition treaty with the United States allowed Canada to refuse surrender unless assurances were given that the death penalty would not be imposed or carried out. No California official would give that assurance, Great American Trials says.
On November 29, 1988, a judge of the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench granted a warrant of committal, ordering Ng held for extradition. The Alberta Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on May 2, 1989, according to the Supreme Court of Canada docket, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on August 31, 1989, the UN Human Rights Committee records. In a letter dated October 26, 1989, the Minister of Justice decided not to seek assurances. Ng's Canadian lawyer, Donald MacLeod, fought on.
The federal cabinet then referred the questions directly to the Supreme Court of Canada, by an Order in Council of June 7, 1990. The State of California and Amnesty International were allowed to intervene. The court heard the reference on February 21, 1991, together with the case of Joseph Kindler, an American who had escaped to Canada after being sentenced to death in Pennsylvania. On September 26, 1991, it answered both questions "No": surrendering Ng without assurances did not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Minister's decision was not open to challenge. The vote was 4 to 3. Justices La Forest and McLachlin wrote for the majority, each joined by Justices L'Heureux-Dube and Gonthier; Justices Sopinka and Cory dissented, each joined by Chief Justice Lamer, as James W. O'Reilly set out in the McGill Law Journal in 1992. The majority described the crimes Ng was charged with as nearly unspeakable. One dissent noted that he also faced charges that did not carry the death penalty, such as attempted murder, kidnapping and burglary, and so would be extradited in any case.
Canada sent him back the same day. He was extradited on September 26, 1991, the UN committee records, and Great American Trials says he was flown to California within minutes of the ruling.
Ng took his case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which issued its views on November 5, 1993 (Communication No. 469/1991). He argued that execution by gas asphyxiation, then the method in California, was cruel and inhuman treatment. The committee agreed that it would not meet the test of "least possible physical and mental suffering," and found that Canada, which could reasonably have foreseen that Ng would face execution by that method if sentenced to death, had violated article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by extraditing him without seeking assurances. A majority found no violation of article 6, the right to life; several members dissented on that point. The committee asked Canada to make whatever representations it still could to avoid the imposition of the death penalty, and to ensure that a similar situation did not arise in the future. By then Ng was already in California.
Ng made his first appearance in Calaveras County on September 27, 1991. Lawyers had been appointed for him while he was still in Canada: the Calaveras County Public Defender in July 1985, Garrick Lew in December 1985 and Michael Burt in January 1987. The court removed Burt and Lew in September 1988, ruling it had no jurisdiction while Ng was in Canada. When Ng returned, Burt and Lew asked to be appointed again, but the court declined, citing Burt's caseload, and appointed Thomas Marovich and James Webster.
That set the pattern for the next seven years. Ng wanted Burt and Lew back, and asked again and again. The court record counts 37 motions under People v. Marsden, the procedure by which a defendant asks to replace appointed counsel. Most sought the reappointment of Burt and Lew. Only one, the 23rd, made on July 29, 1996, was granted. In 1992 Ng filed a malpractice suit against Webster and Marovich; Great American Trials and Saunders give it as a suit for one million dollars. He also sued the state over his prison conditions, Great American Trials says.
At a preliminary hearing in Calaveras County, Ng appeared shackled inside a steel security cage, Saunders reported. His lawyers argued that coverage of the case made a fair trial in Calaveras County impossible. Great American Trials says a poll found that 98 percent of local residents knew of the case and that most thought he was guilty. On April 8, 1994, the case was moved to Orange County, according to Great American Trials, and the parties first appeared there on September 30, 1994, the court record says. By then, Saunders wrote, Ng had gone through five judges, and the state supreme court had ruled on questions about his representation eight times.
The court appointed the Orange County Public Defender in 1994. In 1995 Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, the third judge removed from the case, was taken off it after Ng reversed course about dismissing the public defender William G. Kelley, Saunders reported; an appeals court restored Kelley and removed Fitzgerald. The public defender was relieved in 1996 and reinstated in 1997 after the Court of Appeal stepped in, the court record says. Orange County went bankrupt during these years, and the state eventually agreed to pay the costs, Great American Trials says. Kelley estimated that the defense needed at least two and a half years to prepare, citing 350 boxes of documents.
A trial date of September 6, 1996, came and went. In 1998, with trial set for September 1 before Judge John J. Ryan, Ng moved to represent himself. A motion made on March 31, 1998, was denied on April 20, after a hearing at which the court found him competent but found that he did not sincerely want to represent himself and was trying to obstruct the case. A second motion, on May 8, was denied for the same reason. A third, on May 15, 1998, was granted, with the public defender as standby and advisory counsel.
The arrangement did not last. In August 1998 Ng asked for a six-month continuance and for a new competency hearing, saying he had slept poorly and felt tired and confused. Saunders reported that he cited headaches from new glasses, which affidavits from sheriff's deputies disputed, and that he also wanted the case moved to San Francisco and more time for DNA tests. The court found nothing wrong with his mental ability, granted only a two-week continuance, and revoked his self-representation, finding that he was using it to delay and disrupt the trial. Kelley was again his lawyer. Ryan postponed the start to September 14 so that more than 1,000 prospective jurors could be screened, and the trial was expected to last up to nine months, Saunders reported.
The cost of the case was reported in many ways. Saunders, writing in September 1998, called it the most expensive prosecution in California history, with costs approaching 10 million dollars, and quoted the Calaveras County administrator, Brent Harrington, as putting it at 9.3 million at the latest count. Attorney General Bill Lockyer said after the verdicts that the case had taken "nearly 14 years" of legal proceedings and "more than $11 million in public expenses." Great American Trials gives a final figure of 6.6 million dollars. The Union Democrat has since put the cost of the trial at about 14 million dollars, and the Lancaster Guardian at about 20 million.
Jury selection began on September 14, 1998, in Santa Ana. Opening statements were given on Monday, October 26, according to Great American Trials and the Los Angeles legal newspaper Daily Journal, which noted that the killings had happened about 13 years earlier. The chief prosecutor was Sharlene Honnaka; the defense team was led by William Kelley, with Allyn Jaffrey and Carl C. Holmes, Great American Trials says. Ng was tried on 12 counts of first-degree murder.
The prosecution's witnesses were the people who had last seen the victims: Lauren Bradbury, Karen and George Tuck, Dorice Murphy and Barbara Speaker for the Dubs family; Marilyn Namba and Cosner's sister; Hector Salcedo and Dennis Goza for Peranteau; Terry Kailer and Sandra Krumbein for Gerald; John Gouveia, James Baio and George and Debra Blank for Carroll and Allen; and Tori Doolin for the Bond family and Scott Stapley. The officers from the lumber store and Inspector Brunn described the arrest and the search. Laberge's testimony was read. The jury saw the videotape found on the property.
The defense case was that Lake was the dominant figure and Ng a naive and dependent follower. Witnesses described Lake's controlling and abusive relationships with women, his habit of carrying cyanide and saying he would take it if captured, his talk of a bunker for nuclear war, and evidence that he had killed others who were not part of the charges, including his brother Donald and his best friend, Charles Gunnar, whose name several witnesses said Lake often used. A psychiatrist, Dr. Stuart Grassian, testified that Ng was "a classic dependent personality," Great American Trials reports. Another witness, Great American Trials says, testified that Ng had shot him and killed his roommate during a robbery in which Lake played no part; no charge over that shooting was reported.
After the defense had rested and the prosecution had given its closing argument, the court let the defense reopen its case so that Ng could testify. He described his life in Hong Kong and his move to America, and portrayed Lake as a man he felt compelled to follow and could not confront. He said he had been "young and adventurous," had not used independent judgment, and was sorry. He said he had not known that Lake was building a place to hold women captive. He admitted being the man Barbara Speaker saw at the Dubs apartment, admitted a part in holding Brenda O'Connor captive, and admitted helping Lake bury Bond and Stapley after Lake showed him their bodies. He said he had kept Lake's belongings in his apartment. He denied taking part in the deaths of the Dubs family, Cosner, Peranteau, Gerald and Carroll, denied being present when Bond and Stapley were killed, and said he never planned or agreed to the killing of Kathleen Allen or Brenda O'Connor. He denied everything Laberge said he had told him.
On February 24, 1999, the jury reported that it was deadlocked on Count 4, the death of Paul Cosner, and the judge dropped it. The same day the court clerk, Terri Walsh, read the other 11 verdicts, each in the same words: "We, the jury, in the above entitled case find the defendant, Charles Chitat Ng, guilty of first-degree murder." The jury found the multiple-murder special circumstance true, making him eligible for death. Ng, then 38, looked down at the defense table and showed no reaction, AP reported. Lockyer said the families "have had to wait too long for this day," and that the verdict "helps move the families one step closer to closure." His office was to help the Calaveras County District Attorney, Peter Smith, seek the death penalty.
The penalty phase began on March 8, 1999. The prosecution presented Ng's 1982 military conviction, his escape from military confinement, the Calgary arrest and the hideout in the park. Family members described what the deaths had done to them: the court names Sharon O'Connor, Sandra Bond, Robert McCourt, Jeffrey Nourse, Roger Gerald, Denise Gerald, Diane Allen, Dwight Stapley and Lola Stapley as the victim-impact witnesses.
The defense called relatives, former Marines and experts. Dr. Abraham Nievod diagnosed schizoid, avoidant and dependent personality disorders and said Ng had latched onto Lake as a caregiver. Dr. Grassian testified that Ng had spent about 10 of the previous 12 to 13 years in solitary confinement, which he said had affected his thinking and made him docile and compliant. Dr. Paul Leung testified about family structure in Hong Kong. The Lancashire Post reported that prison guards, sheriff's deputies, a prison library employee and a prison counselor testified that he was a model prisoner.
On April 30, 1999, the jury returned a verdict of death. On June 30, 1999, Ng was sentenced to death in Santa Ana for the murders of six men, three women and two babies; the CDCR records June 30, 1999, as both his sentencing date and the date he was received on death row. The presiding judge rejected a motion to reduce the verdict to life imprisonment, the Lancashire Post reported.
Several people who had waited for the trial did not live to see it. By 1998 Kathleen Allen's mother, Deborah Dubs's father and the sheriff who led the investigation, Claude Ballard, had all died, Saunders wrote. Lola Stapley told her that year, "We hope we live long enough to see the trial," and said that if Ng was convicted and sentenced to death, "we fully don't expect to live that long," given the appeals to come. A friend of the Dubs family wrote of them, "It is as though they never existed."
A death sentence in California is appealed automatically to the state supreme court. Ng's appeal was case S080276. In an oral argument focus letter dated April 22, 2022, his lawyer, Eric S. Multhaup, told the court he would concentrate on three claims: that six counts, Counts II to VII, had been wrongly kept in Orange County instead of being sent to San Francisco; that the trial court had wrongly ended his self-representation; and that he had been subjected to onerous and unjustified physical restraints, including a cage and a stun belt.
The court decided the case on July 28, 2022, in an opinion by Justice Groban that ran to 181 pages, AP reported. Justices Corrigan, Liu, Kruger, Jenkins and Guerrero concurred, with Justice Pollak of the Court of Appeal sitting by assignment, and no justice dissented. "We affirm the judgment in its entirety," the court wrote. It held that the trial court had not abused its discretion in ending Ng's self-representation, finding substantial evidence that he had used it to delay the trial, and it pointed to the 37 Marsden motions and to a statement he made in jail urging another inmate to file Marsden motions to restart his case. It upheld the denial of his 31st Marsden motion, filed the day after jury selection began, finding that he was trying to manufacture a conflict with Kelley. As Justia's summary of the opinion lists the remaining holdings, the court found no reversible error in the venue proceedings in Calaveras and Orange counties or in the refusal to transfer six counts to San Francisco, no due process violation in the competency proceedings or in the physical restraints, any error in the admission of certain evidence harmless, no abuse of discretion in denying a mistrial motion, and no prejudicial error in the penalty phase. AP and CBC News reported that the justices unanimously found his extradition from Canada proper.
AP reported in 2022 that Ng, then 61, still had possible federal appeals. No federal habeas corpus proceeding in his case had been reported by October 2026.
Ng was held at San Quentin State Prison, The Union Democrat and Deseret News reported through 2025. Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in March 2019 and announced plans to close San Quentin's death row, and no execution has taken place in California since 2006, the Lancaster Guardian and The Union Democrat reported. In June 2026 the Lancashire Post reported that Ng, then 65, had been moved from San Quentin to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
The CDCR Condemned Inmate List, updated October 2, 2026, lists him six times, once for each of six offense dates between July 25, 1984, and June 2, 1985, all with Orange County as the trial county. It gives his age as 65 and shows no institution. He remains under sentence of death.
The search of 1985 left a great deal unresolved. AP reported in 2022 that Lake was suspected of killing as many as 25 people, and investigators have used that figure for the possible toll. Great American Trials says at least 25 missing people had known Lake or Ng, and that many of the victims may have been people no one reported missing. "Every time this guy met somebody," Deputy Jim Stenquist said of Lake, "they wound up gone." Lieutenant Greg Stark of the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office told AP in 2022, "I don't think anybody will ever know, due to how they were disposing of the bodies."
More than 1,000 unidentified pieces of remains were kept in a granite vault at a cemetery in San Andreas. On August 17, 2021, the Sheriff's Office cold case team, working with the California Department of Justice and two forensic anthropologists who gave their time, removed them for DNA testing, The Union Democrat reported. Stark said the goal was to "identify the remains in the crypt and if possible return them to the next of kin."
The first result was announced in January 2025. On January 15, 2025, the Calaveras Cold Case Task Force confirmed that one set of remains was that of Reginald Frisby, known as Reggie, who was born in New York State in 1956. He had been living in San Francisco in January 1984 and had not been in contact with his family since 1984. He was never reported missing and had never been suspected as a victim. Some of his remains had been examined at autopsy in 1985. A Utah laboratory produced a DNA profile that genealogists used to develop a lead, and a sample from his mother confirmed the match. The task force is a nonprofit funded by donations and has spent more than 200,000 dollars of donated money re-examining remains in its cases.
Later in 2025 the Sheriff's Office announced that Brenda Sue O'Connor had been identified. "These additional investigative efforts have finally provided answers to the family of Brenda O'Connor," it said. "It is our hope that Brenda can finally rest in peace."
The work continues. In October 2025 Deseret News reported on a woman investigators call Wilseyville Jane Doe, whose remains were found in June 1985. DNA showed that she was born between 1960 and 1965 and had strong family ties to the Sevier Valley in Utah, and it led to three half sisters who had not known she existed. Captain Tim Sturm of the Sheriff's Office, who leads the task force, said: "We recognize that nobody's name is Jane Doe or John Doe." Her name was still unknown.
None of these deaths was charged against Ng, and none has been added to his convictions. Stark said in 2021 that the purpose of the work was to bring families closure, and did not say whether further charges were possible.
Proven by the jury's verdicts and affirmed on appeal: the first-degree murders of Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs, Clifford Peranteau, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Kathleen Allen, Lonnie Bond Sr., Brenda O'Connor, Lonnie Bond Jr. and Robin Scott Stapley, with the multiple-murder special circumstance.
Not proven: the death of Paul Cosner. The jury could not agree, and the count was dropped. The evidence at trial and Laberge's account tied Ng to it; a defense witness tied Lake to it.
Attributed to Leonard Lake, who was never tried: a share in the killings for which Ng was convicted, which the defense said Lake planned and led; and other deaths, including those of Donald Lake, Charles Gunnar and Randy Jacobson, that the defense presented at trial and that investigators linked to the property. Reginald Frisby and Wilseyville Jane Doe are believed to be victims of the killings at Wilseyville; who killed them has not been established.
The number of charged murders is given differently: 12 in the court record, in AP's 1999 report and in the UN committee's account of the extradition request; 13, "12 in Calaveras County and one in San Francisco," in AP's and CBC's 2022 reports. Other figures that differ between sources: the date of the military conviction (July 15, 1982, in the court record; August 15 in McClatchy); the date Ng escaped from military custody (November 14, 1981, court; November 11, McClatchy); the vehicle in the April 1985 Kern County collision (Stapley's truck, court; a motor home, McClatchy); the circumstances of the Calgary arrest (shoplifting, court, CBC and Great American Trials; a fugitive warrant while camping, AP 1999); the age of Lonnie Bond Jr. (an infant, court; 2 years old, The Union Democrat); and the cost of the case (from 6.6 million to about 20 million dollars).
Ng's own account, given at trial, is that Lake planned and led the crimes and that he was a follower who helped with some acts but never agreed to kill. The jury rejected that account on 11 counts.
Ng is born in Hong Kong; at 14 he boards at Bentham Grammar School in England; at 18 he moves to the United States.
Autumn 1979: arrested for hit-and-run in San Leandro, California.
October 13, 1981: weapons stolen from the armory at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe, Hawaii.
November 14, 1981: escapes from military confinement after his arrest.
April 29, 1982: arrested by the FBI at Philo, Mendocino County.
July 15, 1982: convicted by a military court (August 15 in McClatchy's account); held at Fort Leavenworth until June 29, 1984.
July 25 to 27, 1984: Harvey, Deborah and Sean Dubs disappear from their San Francisco home.
October 16, 1984: charged with petty theft in Daly City.
November 2, 1984: Paul Cosner disappears.
January 1985: Clifford Peranteau disappears.
February 24, 1985: Jeffrey Gerald disappears.
April 1985: Michael Carroll and Kathleen Allen (April 14) disappear; Scott Stapley is last seen April 19; Lonnie Bond Sr., Brenda O'Connor and Lonnie Bond Jr. disappear.
June 2, 1985: Lake is arrested in South San Francisco and takes cyanide; Ng flees.
June 6, 1985: Lake dies.
June and July 1985: five-week search of the Wilseyville property; Bond and Stapley are found buried nearby.
Late June 1985: a boy sees Ng in a Calgary park.
July 6, 1985: Ng is arrested in Calgary; a store guard is shot in the hand.
1986: Ng is held next to Maurice Laberge.
February 1987: the United States requests extradition on 19 counts.
November 29, 1988: Alberta Court of Queen's Bench orders him committed for extradition.
May 2, 1989: Alberta Court of Appeal dismisses his appeal.
October 26, 1989: Minister of Justice decides not to seek assurances.
June 7, 1990: the question is referred to the Supreme Court of Canada.
February 21, 1991: Supreme Court of Canada hears the reference.
September 26, 1991: the court rules 4 to 3 against him; he is extradited the same day.
September 27, 1991: first appearance in Calaveras County.
November 5, 1993: UN Human Rights Committee finds that Canada violated article 7 by extraditing him without assurances.
April 8, 1994: case moved to Orange County.
1995: Judge Fitzgerald removed; Kelley restored as defense counsel.
May 15, 1998: allowed to represent himself; status revoked in August 1998.
September 14, 1998: jury selection begins in Santa Ana.
October 26, 1998: opening statements.
February 24, 1999: convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder; no verdict on the Cosner count.
April 30, 1999: jury returns a death verdict.
June 30, 1999: sentenced to death.
August 17, 2021: unidentified remains removed from the San Andreas crypt for DNA testing.
April 22, 2022: defense focus letter before oral argument.
July 28, 2022: California Supreme Court affirms the judgment in its entirety.
January 15, 2025: Reginald Frisby identified.
2025: Brenda O'Connor identified; Wilseyville Jane Doe traced to Utah relatives.
2026: reported moved from San Quentin to the California Medical Facility, Vacaville.
October 2, 2026: listed on the CDCR Condemned Inmate List.