Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  There’s a great deal of emotional cruelty when he says that the baby will have to live without her, that she wasn’t a fit mother, that he’s gone to a better home.

  Seconds later the sexual threats begin as he says ‘Jeans off. Panties off and everything else. Shove them down.’ When he was doing this consensually with Cricket it was erotic, a consensual powerplay fantasy – but now it’s an ugly criminal act.

  Ng rips open her blouse then produces a knife and cuts her bra off. He tells her that he and Leonard Lake now own her. She explains that she feels nauseous but Lake’s only response is to show her a whip. Later he softens slightly and tells Ng to bring her a glass of water. He explains that he’s about to rape her but that his friend Charles is going to shower with her first. Ng adds ‘Make sure you’re clean before we fuck you. That’s the house rule.’

  The men persuade her to remove the rest of her clothes then she’s seen walking dejectedly to the shower. As usual, they benefited financially out of the abduction, stealing Brenda’s boyfriend’s car, wallet and worldly goods.

  Another male victim

  With Brenda imprisoned (or already murdered) and Lonnie dead, it was easy for Lake and Ng to lure Brenda’s lodger, Robin Scott Stapley – always known as Scott – to the property. We may never know the exact sequence of events, but it’s likely that they gave him a headstart then hunted him down like a deer. Leastways, the pathologist speculated that he’d been shot in the shoulder and the leg whilst running, and then shot again through the head and the mouth at much closer range. The pistol had been shoved down his throat so viciously that it had broken all of his teeth. He was gagged, his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles tied with rope before being buried inside a sleeping bag. Ng would later claim that this bondage was added after death to make it look like a biker kill.

  Both Lake and Ng dug his grave, and his still-bound body would later be found buried at the property in Blue Mountain Road. Lake and Ng then went to Scott’s house and took all of his clothes and various other possessions. Lake would offer up Scott’s driving licence when he was finally arrested by the police, and Scott’s camera was in Charles Ng’s bag when he was eventually overpowered by security guards in Canada.

  In early May, a blood-covered Leonard Lake answered the door to an insistent gas meter reader. He told the startled man that he was butchering an animal, but it’s more likely that he was sawing up a body, for many of the bones later found on his land were sawn through.

  Further victims

  Twenty-three-year-old Mike Carroll was one of the next victims to disappear. He’d spent time in prison with Charles Ng so was happy to receive a telephone call from his former acquaintance. But afterwards he vanished from work and home. Then his girlfriend Kathy Allen, whom he’d been living with, received a phone-call at the supermarket where she worked. She left hurriedly and would never again be seen alive in the outside world.

  But she was kept alive at Leonard Lake’s retreat for several days as he videoed himself and Charles Ng abusing her. On the first film they shot, they tell her that her boyfriend is dead. This is doubtless true as Mike’s bullet-ridden body would later be found buried on Lake’s property.

  Lake and Ng soon went to Mike’s house and removed his belongings. By now they had pots of coins hidden all over the property, but they were endlessly greedy for more. Both men were possessed of a criminal mindset where they’d rather steal even when they could afford to buy.

  Meanwhile Kathy was videoed in bondage, stripping at the men’s command. Charles Ng helps to remove her clothes then pushes her into the shower.

  In another scene she’s seen rubbing lotion into Charles Ng whilst he tells her ‘don’t forget to…get my ass, too.’ Two other videos show her putting on lingerie which Lake has chosen. He tells her ‘I’m having a little war within myself between what I want to do and what I think I should do.’ He admits that he wants to whip her. Later, according to cartoons drawn by Charles Ng, he would.

  Suicide

  The men had benefited financially from their numerous kills, but greedy as always, they now went out on another stealing mission. They drove to a large hardware outlet in southern San Francisco on Sunday 2nd June 1985. Despite the heat, Charles Ng wore a parka. He used its bulk to hide a vice while stealing it from the store.

  But a clerk had seen the theft and Ng was apprehended in the car park. He fled, leaving Leonard Lake behind. Lake gave a false name and offered to pay for the vice but the manager called the police.

  Interviewed in the car park, Leonard Lake said that his name was Robin Scott Stapley, but a quick check showed that Robin (officially missing) was twenty-six whilst Lake was clearly in his forties. A search of Lake’s car revealed identification belonging to Charles Gunnar, Lonnie Bond and Paul Cosner, the latter also reported missing. Lake was handcuffed and taken into custody.

  Realising that the police would return to his house and find the bodies, he asked for a glass of water. He wrote a note to Cricket saying that he loved her and forgave her, then took out the cyanide capsule he kept hidden about his person and swallowed it.

  Leonard Lake swiftly slid into unconsciousness. Taken to hospital he remained in a coma. His mother rushed to his side. The police also informed Cricket that her ex-husband was on the critical list – but her first response was to go to the house and remove various items. She and Leonard’s mother also cleaned the place up. She’d later tell police that she’d removed a dozen videos of herself in sex scenes with Leonard Lake, and they were able to verify this.

  Lake remained on a life support for three days but it was apparent that he was brain-dead so his mother gave permission for the hospital to switch the support machine off. Charles Ng was now left to face the music alone.

  The body farm

  At Lake’s retreat, the police soon found the bunker with its soundproofed chamber. On the wall was a list of instructions that the captive slaves must follow to avoid punishment. They located the video of Kathy Allen and Brenda O’Connor being mentally tortured, stripped and threatened with rape. Kathy was also shown lying on a bed on her stomach wearing only denim shorts. Lake referred to these women as the M Ladies after Operation Miranda in John Fowles’ The Collector, his favourite novel since adolescence. The police found a copy of the classic text at the house.

  In the videos both Lake and Ng threatened their captives with death so the authorities began to dig up the property. Almost immediately they found a male corpse which was never identified and other male corpses which were. Several had been gagged with ball gags, handcuffed and tied up then shot. Some also had plastic bags tied tightly around their heads. One had been strangled with a rope whilst another had been poisoned with cyanide, the poison with which Lake had killed himself.

  Charred internal organs were believed to come from a child aged three who was never identified. They also found badly burnt handcuffs – and Charles Ng had drawn screaming men being dropped into a fire.

  The horror continued when pieces of Kathy Allen’s and Brenda O’Connor’s teeth were found. Another woman – Cheryl Okoro – was identified through DNA taken from a single bone, all that remained.

  The main house also held its share of horrors, with bindings attached to all four corners of the bed. The dressing table was filled with bloodstained lingerie and there were blood spatter patterns on the walls and bullet-holes in the plasterboard. There were further bullet-holes in the living room ceiling and in the kitchen floor. Visitors had entered the house having been offered refreshments, only to suddenly face the worst horror of all.

  Arrest

  Charles Ng now phoned Cricket and told her what had happened and she drove him to the airport. He immediately fled to Canada where he had relatives. But it was clear that the FBI and Canadian Mountain Police were after him so he couldn’t stay with them. Instead, he fashioned himself a survivalist’s retreat in a campsite and was based there for the next five weeks.

  But again shoplifting was to be his undoi
ng, as on 6th July 1985 he was seen stealing a large quantity of tinned food and biscuits from a supermarket. A security guard tried to arrest him and Ng promptly shot him in the hand. He was overpowered and taken into custody where he lost control of his bowels, tried to hang himself with his soiled underpants and was put on suicide watch.

  When interviewed, Charles Ng began to talk but his comments were unsurprisingly self-serving. He said that Lake had murdered various men (some of whom were Ng’s co-workers, men who Ng hated) and that Lake had also murdered baby Lonnie Bond. Ng said that Lake had done so by strangling the child, with Ng exhorting him not to let the baby suffer. But the police had drawings that Ng had made of babies held above woks or being put into microwaves and they knew that one of Ng’s favourite comments was ‘baby fries’. Ng had also told a friend that he had ‘roasted a sucker’ (his word for a child or baby) and that Lake had released some of the adult victims into the forest then tracked them down like prey, but Charles Ng had allegedly told his friend that he’d done most of the executions as Leonard didn’t enjoy that side of things.

  Trials and tribulations

  The only known crime which Charles Ng had committed in Canada was the shoplifting and wounding charge. For these he was sentenced to four and a half years in a Canadian prison. America now fought desperately to get him extradited so that he could face a multiple murder charge. Meanwhile some of the other prisoners shoved their waste products under his door and made it clear that he was beneath their contempt.

  But officially Canada didn’t want the alleged torture-murderer to die, the radio announcer who broke the story stating ‘We Canadians feel strongly enough about barbaric state-sanctioned executions to have outlawed them in our own country.’ Meanwhile the American public were left to reflect on the barbaric executions which Charles Ng had allegedly carried out…

  Ng spent his time in a Prince Albert penitentiary studying law, knowing that he might face extradition. He also practiced his martial arts and was so good that he terrified the other prisoners. He told one that he would kill a guard in order to remain in Canada and he told another that he liked to torture women with pliers.

  Numerous legal hearings took place but eventually, six years after his arrest, the Canadian government agreed to send Ng back to California. The date was 26th September 1991. He then stayed in Folsom prison in Sacramento to await trial. There, Ng did what Lawrence Bittaker had done, filing endless complaints against the prison and legal system. He also asked to represent himself then changed his mind and tried to sue his legal team for malpractice. Incredibly, these legal arguments kept the system busy for another seven years and it was 26th October 1998 before his trial began.

  The prosecutor opened with the words ‘Leonard Lake and Charles Ng turned Blue Mountain Road into a mass graveyard, a killing field.’ She showed the videos of Kathy Allen and Brenda O’Connor being psychologically tortured and stripped. The defence countered with ‘He is charged with murder, not cutting off people’s clothes, as offensive as that might be.’

  On trial for twelve murders

  But Ng wasn’t just on trial for the murders of Brenda O’Connor and Kathy Allen. He was also the defendant in the murders of Harvey Dubs, Deborah Dubs and their one-year-old son Sean Dubs, Paul Cosner, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Lonnie Bond senior and his baby Lonnie Bond junior, Robin (known as Scott) Stapley and Clifford Peranteau.

  The court heard that he’d been unexpectedly absent from work during the first three days of Kathy’s captivity. He’d worked alongside victims Jeffrey Gerald and Clifford Peranteau who’d left town to meet him and immediately disappeared. And, after stealing from the military, he’d spent time in prison with Mike Carroll. Documents and electrical goods belonging to many of the victims had been found at Ng’s apartment. Moreover, he had admitted to helping his friend bury Robin Scott Stapley and Lonnie Bond, though he’d suggested Lake had done the actual killing. Ironically, Robin had been a founding Guardian Angel, trained to peaceably end trouble whenever possible – but he’d had no chance against the gun-toting survivalists Lake and Ng.

  Ng denied that he’d had sex with Brenda O’Connor, saying that he felt sorry for her. He added ‘I tell Lake this is getting too far.’ But he couldn’t explain why he stayed with Lake if the man’s actions were so repugnant to him. At another point in the trial he said that he loved Leonard and Cricket, that his family had been unable to show him closeness and that the couple were the family he’d never had.

  Charles Ng’s earlier military theft was also brought to light. An investigator for the marines had asked him why he stole the weapons and he’d replied ‘I feel I am a born fighter and I like to…perform clandestine operations… My main feeling is just to prove that I can do something nobody did before.’

  Immunity

  Some of the evidence against Charles Ng was circumstantial, so in an effort to find out more from Cricket, the authorities gave her immunity. She then took the stand and admitted that she’d gone along with Lake’s capture-a-sexslave fantasies (and had even suggested that a woman she’d fallen out with would make a suitable victim) but had never believed he’d put them into practice. She’d given him several hundred dollars to help build his bunker but apparently didn’t believe he would put it to use. She added disingenuously ‘I guess it just got out of control’ rather than accepting that she’d had some choice in the matter. She had taken police to the burial site of one of the bodies, a man that Leonard Lake was believed to have killed.

  Changing face of a killer

  At the pre-trial hearing, Ng mainly presented himself as the subdued houseboy of the dominant Leonard Lake. Ng, who had been a slender but strong young man at the time of the murders, had now put on several stone in weight and looked passive, but the authorities knew that the martial arts expert could still be dangerous and they transported him from one venue to another in a cage inside a van. During the trial itself he was attached to a stun-gun so that he could be temporarily disabled if he attacked anyone in court. It was a fitting irony as he’d been shown in one of the videos threatening a captive with such a gun.

  The evidence

  Charles Ng presented himself as a harmless submissive to the court, but the prosecution pointed out the numerous links between him and many of the male murder victims, and the fact that he’d been seen using their documentation and belongings. He’d also been seen leaving the Dubs’ family home after their disappearance and he’d made sadistic drawings of them.

  The defence countered that Leonard Lake had harboured a deep hatred of women – and that he could have carried out the murders with Cricket helping him. Lake also had a motive for killing the men as he needed their documents to help him remain a fugitive.

  It was certainly true that Ng hadn’t murdered all twenty-six of the named victims. (He was only being charged with twelve.) He’d been in jail when Lake’s friend Charles Gunnar had disappeared – and Lake had admitted in his diary to the murder. He’d similarly been out of the picture when Leonard murdered his own brother, Donald, the sibling he’d always loathed.

  But there was a suspicion that Ng had killed other victims that weren’t included in the known Lake-Ng deaths. He’d told Cricket about murdering a gay taxi driver and a Hawaiian woman. And he was heard on the tape to Brenda O’Connor saying ‘You can cry like the rest of them.’

  The court heard that thousands of bone fragments had been found, but that the bodies had been so extensively smashed up and burned that it was impossible to identify their source.

  Charles Ng insisted on taking the stand in his own defence, explaining that he’d liked and admired Lake, who he saw as a patriot. He said that he’d gleaned victim details from the newspapers in order to draw the sadistic cartoons. He denied that he’d told another prisoner that he’d killed Deborah Dubs and her baby Sean, that he felt strange about killing the latter. He denied strangling Deborah whilst anally raping her. He also denied repeatedly sodomizing Kathy Allen at knifepoint and penetrating he
r vagina with a gun, all things that he’d allegedly told a prison friend. He denied hammering nails into Paul Cosner’s hands and using a chainsaw on his genitals.

  But he admitted to seeing the dead bodies of Robin Scott Stapley and Lonnie Bond, stating that Leonard had killed them. Ng claimed to have merely helped tie them up and had put a ball gag in the men’s mouths so that they would look like biker murders. He’d also helped to bury them.

  Ng’s take on the crimes was that he’d done everything to please Leonard Lake but that he’d had no idea that anyone was going to be murdered. He said that the statement the prisoner in the next cell had made was all lies. But the prisoner had known that Kathy was dressed only in tights with the crotch cut out, information which wasn’t made public and that only Ng could have passed on.

  The verdict

  The jury retired on 8th February 1999, returning on 24th February with their verdict. They found Ng guilty of eleven of the twelve murders. He wasn’t charged with the murder of Paul Cosner as there was insufficient evidence. (Lake almost definitely killed Paul Cosner for his ID and his vehicle, but there was no way of proving that Charles Ng had played a part.) Ng immediately tried to fire his lawyers, claiming that they’d misrepresented him. His own legal work, plus the level of caution shown by the courts, made his trial the most expensive in American history.

  Formative experiences

  Prior to the penalty phase, the court heard that Ng’s frequent beatings from his father had left him with a dependent personality, that he was totally in Leonard Lake’s thrall.