Charles Chitat Ng was born in Hong Kong on December 24, 1960, to a wealthy and severe family, and was sent to a boarding school in England, from which he was expelled for theft. He came to the United States on a student visa, enlisted in the Marines under a false claim of citizenship, and was court-martialled in 1981 for stealing weapons from the armoury at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. He escaped, was recaptured, and served time at Leavenworth.
He met Leonard Lake through a survivalist magazine, and by 1984 the two were living at a property near Wilseyville in Calaveras County, where Lake had built a bunker with a cell in it. Over roughly two years they lured or took at least a dozen people there: men killed for their vehicles, money and belongings, women held in the bunker, and infants who disappeared with their parents. Some of the sessions in the bunker were recorded on videotape.
On June 2, 1985, Ng was caught taking a vice from a lumber yard in South San Francisco. He ran. Lake, stopped at the car, swallowed cyanide at the police station and died four days later. Ng crossed into Canada and was arrested in Calgary on July 6, 1985, after wounding a store security guard.
Those named in the record are Harvey Dubs, his wife Deborah and their infant son Sean; Lonnie Bond Sr, his partner Brenda O'Connor and their infant son Lonnie Bond Jr; Clifford Peranteau; Jeffrey Gerald; Michael Carroll; Kathleen Allen; and Scott Stapley.
Canada would not extradite a man to face the death penalty, and the argument ran for six years, up to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled against him in 1991. Pre-trial motions in California then ran for another seven, with Ng repeatedly dismissing counsel. The trial finally opened in Orange County in October 1998, on a change of venue, and the cost to the state has been estimated at close to twenty million dollars.
On February 24, 1999, he was convicted of eleven murders: six men, three women and two baby boys. He was sentenced to death and is held at San Quentin. He has never accepted responsibility, and his account has always been that Lake did the killing and he was present.
In 2024 he was returned to court in Calaveras County on additional charges relating to a further victim, an indication of how much of what happened at Wilseyville has never been resolved. Twelve victims have been identified. Investigators have long put the real figure at up to twenty-five.