Charles Chitat Ng was born Ng Chi-tat in Hong Kong on December 24, 1960, the youngest of three children and only son of a wealthy executive who disciplined him harshly and beat him. He was a troubled loner, expelled from several schools, and after a shoplifting arrest at fifteen his father sent him to Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in North Yorkshire, England, which expelled him for stealing from other boys. In 1978 he came to the United States on a student visa and studied biology for a semester at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California. To avoid prosecution over a hit-and-run he enlisted in the Marines in October 1979, on papers claiming he had been born in Bloomington, Indiana. Within a year military police arrested him for stealing automatic weapons from the armory at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. He escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California.
There he met Leonard Lake. In 1982 federal agents raided the mobile home they shared in Ukiah and seized a stockpile of illegal weapons and explosives. Lake jumped bail and hid at a cabin owned by his wife, Claralyn Balazs, near Wilseyville. Ng was returned to the Marines, pleaded guilty to theft and desertion, and served eighteen months at the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth before his dishonorable discharge in 1984. Then he rejoined Lake, and by 1984 the two were living at the property near Wilseyville in Calaveras County, sixty miles from Sacramento. Lake had built a bunker there with three rooms, two of them behind a hidden doorway. One was locked and furnished as a cell, with a bed, a foam pad, a plastic bucket and a roll of toilet paper. Some of what happened in it was recorded on videotape.
On June 2, 1985, an employee at the South City Lumber Store in South San Francisco saw Ng take a seventy-five-dollar vise. Ng dropped it into the trunk of a Honda Prelude and ran. Police found a .22 pistol with an illegal silencer beside it, and Lake, who said he had paid for the vise, was carrying the driver's license of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing. The Honda belonged to Paul Cosner, who had disappeared in November 1984 after going to show it to a buyer, and its plates to Lonnie Bond. Lake gave his real name and Ng's, and before any bodies had been found he swallowed a cyanide capsule at the police station and died four days later. Ng crossed into Canada and was arrested in Calgary on July 6, after shoplifting and wounding a store guard.
The eleven he was convicted of killing were 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. Six men, three women and two baby boys. The Dubs family and the Bond family were killed whole, and relatives who came to the property looking for missing people were killed too.
He was charged with thirteen: twelve in Calaveras County and one in San Francisco. The San Francisco count concerned Donald Giulietti, a thirty-six-year-old disc jockey shot dead in July 1984 when a man broke into his apartment. His roommate, Richard Carrazza, was critically wounded and survived, the only known surviving victim of either man, and identified Ng from a photograph.
Canada would not extradite a man to face execution, and the argument ran for six years to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled against him in 1991. Pre-trial motions in California then ran another seven, with Ng repeatedly dismissing his lawyers and, the state Supreme Court later found, attempting to delay and disrupt his own trial, including extended argument over whether he could represent himself. The trial opened in Orange County in October 1998 on a change of venue granted because of the publicity in Calaveras County. It was one of the longest and most expensive in California history.
On February 24, 1999 the jury convicted him of eleven murders. His defense had argued that he acted under Lake's influence, as a father figure he wanted to please, and pointed to his father's beatings. On June 30, 1999, in Santa Ana, an Orange County Superior Court judge sentenced him to death in a courtroom full of the victims' relatives, and Ng sat stone-faced.
The California Supreme Court affirmed on July 28, 2022, twenty-three years later. Justice Joshua Groban wrote for a unanimous seven-member court in a decision of a hundred and eighty-one pages: the judgment was affirmed in its entirety. The court identified two trial errors and held that neither had affected the outcome, and rejected his complaint that an electric stun belt had been forcibly strapped to him during the trial. He is held at the California Medical Facility.
He has never accepted responsibility. His account has always been that Lake did the killing and he was present.
The number is the part of this case that has never closed. Investigators in 1985 linked the two men to the disappearance of as many as twenty-five people, working from scattered bone fragments and from entries in Lake's diary. Twelve victims were identified. A Calaveras County lieutenant whose father worked the case at the time put it plainly in 2022: there have been wild estimates and conservative estimates, and he does not think anybody will ever know, because of the way the bodies were disposed of.
Work on the remains has continued. In January 2025 a set found at the property on June 7, 1985 was identified through investigative genetic genealogy, forty years after it was recovered, as Reginald Frisby, known as Reggie, who was about twenty-eight. He had disappeared from public records in January 1984 and was buried alongside another man, which suggested the two were killed at about the same time.
One of the missing was Cheryl Okoro, who was twenty-six. She had been sexually abused as a child, ran away from home, and was working as a prostitute. In 2023 a woman who had been adopted as a baby learned that Okoro was her mother. What she has of her is a letter of eleven pages, written by Okoro about her own life, and she has said that those eleven pages are all she has.