Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings/Conspiracy Theories Book II

Charles Ng

Charles Ng Chi-Tat (Chinese: 吳志達; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born 24 December 1960) is a convicted Hong Kong-American serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured, and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento. After his 1985 arrest and imprisonment in Canada on robbery and weapons charges, followed by a lengthy dispute between Canada and the US, Ng was extradited to California, tried, and convicted of 11 murders. He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Early life

Ng was born in British Hong Kong, the 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. Not long after arriving, Ng was expelled for stealing from other students and returned to Hong Kong.

Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978 and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California. He dropped out after one semester. At that time, he met Leonard Lake. 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 became a Marine in 1979 with the help, he claimed, of a recruiting sergeant and false documents attesting to his birth in Bloomington, Indiana. After less than a year of service, he was arrested by military police for theft of automatic weapons from MCAS Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. Facing court-martial, he escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California, where he reunited with Lake.

In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home they shared in Ukiah, seizing a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives. Lake was released on a $6,000 bond. He jumped bail and drifted around the state, using a series of pseudonyms. Ng was returned to the Marines' custody and pleaded guilty to the theft and desertion charges. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was paroled and discharged in 1984 after serving 18 months in the military stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks Fort Leavenworth.

Murders

After his release, Ng immediately contacted Lake, who was renting a remote cabin near Wilseyville in Calaveras County and invited Ng to join him. Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon". He probably had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and Gunnar's identity. Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture, and murder.

Their victims included their neighbor, Lonnie Bond; their neighbor's girlfriend, Brenda O'Connor; Lonnie Jr., the Bonds' infant son; Harvey Dubs; Deborah Dubs; and their young son Sean. According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately but kept the women alive, raping and torturing them, before murdering them or allowing them to die from their injuries. Other known victims included relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O'Connor, two gay men, and some workmates of Ng.

Ng and Lake's rampage might have gone on longer if not for Ng's kleptomania. On 2 June 1985, Ng was caught shoplifting a vice from a South San Francisco hardware store and fled the scene. Lake later drove to the store and attempted to pay for the vice, but by then the police had arrived. Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's license, which carried the name of Robin Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier. After a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of Lake's vehicle, he was arrested and positively identified via a fingerprint search. In custody, while awaiting arraignment, Lake swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothes and died four days later.