Ng’s father took the stand and admitted viciously beating him – but unlike most heavy-handed parents he said that he now recognised that this was wrong, that in his day they hadn’t understood the dangers of corporal punishment. Throughout his father’s entire testimony, Charles looked away. Ng hoped that the jury would accept that he had a dependent personality disorder, that he had been led astray by the more sexually experienced Leonard Lake. But the jury returned with the verdict that the victims’ relatives longed for – death.
Charles Ng swiftly returned to his legal books and instructed his lawyers to file motion after motion. Still protesting his innocence, he was moved to San Quentin’s Death Row.
An archaic system
It had taken thirteen years and over sixteen million dollars to bring Charles Ng to justice, years in which he’d mocked America’s archaic legal system. Harrington & Burger, who wrote a book about the delays in the case, Justice Denied, noted that ‘it is an extreme demonstration of the absurdities of our present justice system.’ They explain that US lawyers and judges are ‘victims of a protocol that rewards delay and punishes change’ and recommend the French system which is swifter and has shorter sentences, uncomplicated by the possibility of parole.
Remembering the victims
Because the media concentrated on the videos showing Kathy Allen and Brenda O’Connor and knew that a similar fate had befallen Cheryl Okoro and Deborah Dubs, the Lake-Ng murders have largely been seen as sex murders. But the male victims also deserve to be remembered – namely Donald Lake, Charles Gunner, Maurice Rock, Randy Jacobson, Harvey Dubs, Sean Dubs, Paul Costner, Cliff Peranteau, Jeffrey Green, Lonnie Bond senior, Lonnie Bond junior and Robin Scott Stapley. A seventeenth body, that of an African male, was also found at the property and has never been identified. Nor has the three-year-old child whose burnt internal organs were found buried on the property.
Culpability
Charles Chitat Ng will never be paroled, but debate still continues as to his role in the Wilseyville murders. Many people have assumed that Leonard Lake was the cruellest of the duo, probably because Lake kept a misogynistic diary and built the concrete bunker. But Ng commented that Lake didn’t enjoy the killing – and Lake himself admits on video that the better part of him balked at being cruel. In contrast, the teenage Charles Ng bullied younger children and, after becoming Lake’s best friend, he produced increasingly sadistic cartoons.
A law enforcement agent who profiled both men noted that Leonard Lake wanted ‘psychological domination’ and enjoyed playing mind-games. In contrast, Charles Ng had an ‘intense need to physically abuse as well as dominate females’ and was ‘considered to be the executioner.’
Journey into evil
In August 2000 Britain’s Channel Five broadcast a documentary about the Lake-Ng murders called Journey Into Evil. The documentary said that by age seventeen Leonard Lake was suffering from ‘retarded sexual development.’ It discussed how Ng committed the murders ‘for his amusement’, the bodies being ‘dismembered, burnt, crushed.’ Police had spent eight weeks sifting through the ashes and bone fragments, their discoveries including baby teeth.
Psychologist Patrick Callahan acknowledged that Ng’s father had been physically abusive whilst Ng’s lawyer, Bill Kelley, said that if other adults asserted themselves, Charles would go into his shell and become almost childlike.
Ng had alleged that Leonard Lake gave Ng’s name to the police in order to give Cricket time to escape or hide vital evidence. The documentary showed brief footage of Cricket in one of Lake’s home videos saying that she’d like to ‘do interesting things’ with cute fourteen-year-old girls.
One of Lake’s sisters courageously spoke on camera, admitting that Cricket had a lower IQ than Leonard Lake and was not particularly pretty. But Lake had such low self-esteem that he’d felt lucky to have her in his life, and ‘he had no power in the relationship.’
Paul Cosner’s sister Sharon was also interviewed and it transpired that her determination to find out what happened to her missing brother had helped crack the case. Paul had disappeared after placing an advert to sell his car but when his sister went to the police she was told that they wouldn’t search for a missing adult, only for a stolen vehicle. Consequently, Sharon re-reported the car as stolen every month. (She also distributed flyers around the area and searched tirelessly for Paul.) When Leonard Lake was found driving Paul’s stolen car – at the ironmongers when Charles Ng stole the vice – it ensured that the police arrested him. The rest is history.
Meeting Charles Ng
In February and March 2004, I interviewed Paul A Woods, a London-based researcher and writer. Paul was the originator of the Journey Into Evil documentary about the Lake-Ng murders. He provided me with some of the details found earlier in this profile including material which hasn’t been broadcast before. Paul interviewed Charles Ng by phone in December 1998 and March 1999. In April 1999 he went to California to interview Charles in person, visiting him three times whilst he was on remand in Santa Ana, Orange County. Paul also interviewed forensic psychologist Dr Patrick Callahan and Assistant Public Defender Bill Kelley and met some of the victims’ families.
He got close to the ranch house where Lake lived – it’s now inhabited by a new owner who understandably wants his privacy. The bunker where the captives were held has been destroyed.
So what made Charles Ng talk to a British researcher in the visitor’s enclosure at Orange County? ‘He’d heard that there were these liberal English people around who were concerned about a British subject receiving the death penalty,’ Paul says, adding that the director and producer of the documentary were opposed to capital punishment. And it’s clear that Ng was desperate. ‘He was literally fighting for his life over the weeks that we spoke.’
Paul’s initial impression of Ng was that he was a quiet, almost submissive individual. He didn’t feel at all threatened by him. Bloated through years of prison food and lack of exercise, he was a far cry from the powerful young man trained in martial arts whose favourite saying was ‘no kill, no thrill.’ Paul even found him quite personable – but Ng’s occasional flashes of violent anger revealed that he still has a dangerous side.
‘I appreciated the hours of his time he took to speak to me and his courtesy and politeness, apart from the occasional manic outbursts,’ says Paul. But he has no illusions about the killer, adding ‘His agenda was to spin-doctor the most horrific evidence as being something other than what most people assumed it was. To a large degree he succeeded in showing himself as a self-absorbed individual whose self-pity was far more real to him than the suffering of the victims.’
As the interview progressed, Ng talked about his childhood. Paul says ‘He described being tied up by his wrists to a windowsill so that he couldn’t move, and beaten with a bamboo cane. But he didn’t make a great deal out of it.’ He believes this is because Charles disagreed with his defence counsel who wanted to use his father’s brutality in the penalty phase as a mitigating circumstance for the murders – but Charles Ng’s stance was to deny responsibility for the murders and suggest that his childhood suffering hadn’t helped turn him into a sadistic killer. He had to admit that he was guilty of kidnapping and torture but said that he’d only done this to please the only white man he’d ever liked, Leonard Lake.
Paul continues ‘But the defence described him as a morbidly shy child who, during his early Hong Kong schooldays, would be beaten with a cane by his father when his teachers complained he didn’t speak up in class – he was debased, devalued, told he was stupid.’ This emotional cruelty continued for many years – Charles’s sister Betty told the court that her father had thrown the boy’s favourite toy in the rubbish bin, a doll that he loved as much as his sisters. Betty also admitted that Kenneth Ng had brutally disciplined them.
Paul adds ‘Charles described how, after the first few beatings, he resolved not to cry. He reached a point, like many kids who suffer cruelty, when he wanted to beco
me calloused, and to feel that no one could ever hurt him again.’
The prisoner, however, was mainly respectful when discussing his father, though he seemed to blame him for his disastrous deference to the wrong people (principally Lake) in later life, citing how he was never allowed to make any decisions for himself when he was at home.
The researcher found that Ng became a bully as he matured, occasionally picking on weaker kids and lashing out at them. ‘But as for cruelty in its purest form, the way that we usually perceive it denotes sadistic tendencies, I don’t believe there’s any evidence of that in his early life.’
When his parents decided he’d brought shame on them and shipped him out to relatives in the West, he felt totally adrift, Paul explains. ‘He’s admitted at various times that he didn’t get on with white people, and felt very much alone.’ The seventeen-year-old was miserable in Yorkshire, even though he was accompanied by his sisters. ‘I think it compounded the defensiveness and hostility he already felt. He was expelled for stealing from a classmate, and arrested for shoplifting from a department store in Lancaster.’
The researcher sees this as symbolic of the young Charles Ng. ‘He was an unhappy kid who reacted to this sense of entitlement, this feeling that he should be a lot happier than he was, by stealing anything that he fancied. That was a constant throughout his life, and it’s ironic that, given the enormity of the crimes he was convicted of, it should be his track record as a compulsive and very unsuccessful thief that brought him down.’
Some of the interview with Paul A Woods comprised of Charles Ng negating his reputation as a violent and dangerous prisoner and emphasizing his supposed deference to more dominant figures. ‘He kept talking about the incontrovertible evidence of the case, but trying to put his own spin on it. I think it’s emblematic of years of building up false hope in Canada, and that Ng will probably be trying to file appeals against his conviction up until the day he dies.’
Ng claimed that he took the rap for what Lake had done, telling Paul in his broken English ‘Basically what happened is after Leonard Lake died, I think they try to build a case on the evidence that was left behind by him – the circumstantial evidence – and his wife, his ex-wife. You know, even though she didn’t know much about the situation, because I believe Lake essentially compartmentalized all these things that he’s doing during the time that we associate with him. And the fact that his wife is scared, and his lawyer, his criminal lawyer is probably try to encourage her to co-operate with the police in the sense of thinking that she’ll have something to offer, to give that information to prosecute me… So that’s the scapegoat. They want to blame me for everything Leonard Lake had done.’
Charles Ng continued: ‘Even she had property where Leonard Lake was residing, and where the bodies and remains were found. And also equally, victims’ property were found in her possession, in her house. That she was not charged with the crime and yet they used the same rationale – well, they turned it around, and used the same evidence essentially in my case, in my situation, and charged me with it…I’d say during that period of time between 1984-85 when – June when I was arrested – she was there for at least ten or twelve times.’
Despite Ng’s protestations that he isn’t violent, the items sequestered from his San Francisco apartment by the police in 1985 included rice flails (heavy batons joined by a chain), kung fu stars, a hollowed-out book with a gun compartment, a 9mm Walther PPK and Chinese-made ammunition. Equally damning was his obsession with sadistic cartoons.
Paul Woods, who has some of Charles’s cartoons, notes ‘there’s a strong homoerotic element, an obsession with and simultaneous disdain for gay sex…and a strong element of pederasty.’ (It’s very likely that Ng shot dead a gay taxi driver who had fellated Lake when he was in his sexual experimentation phase. Leastways, an Asian answering Ng’s description was seen to shoot the taxi driver at his home before fleeing from the property.)
Outwardly, both Lake and Ng were macho men who saw themselves as fugitives and survivalists. They lived off the land whenever possible and Lake’s property included numerous DIY tools. So does Paul think that Ng took the vice for carpentry purposes or to use as an implement of torture, given that he told a prisoner he used pliers on his victims’ genitals?
‘I think that the intended use for the vice would have been a purely secondary matter to Charlie at the time he was stealing it,’ the researcher says, ‘Bearing in mind what a compulsive thief he was, he was probably just conforming to Leonard Lake’s edict that “You never pay for anything unless you have to.” But there’s little doubt in my mind that all DIY implements at Ranch Apocalypse were used for torture.’
He believes that it’s likely that Lake and Ng were in the South San Francisco area to procure another victim, but also stresses that the sex slaves were only a small proportion of the victims. ‘Leonard was quite happy to commit murder over small amounts of money or to steal ID cards, and to torture the male victims when it might be used to obtain credit card or bank account information.’
Paul recollects some of the male victims’ fates: ‘Randy Jacobson – a thirty-five-year-old homeless Vietnam veteran from the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco, and an acquaintance of Lake, paid for knowledge of the Blue Mountain Road bunker with his life. Shot through the head execution-style with a .22 handgun, his death probably prefigured the ultimate end faced by most of Lake’s victims. As Ng was in military prison at the time, no one could ever stand trial for Jacobson’s murder once Lake committed suicide.’
‘Ditto two unidentified workers from the black area of San Francisco – perversely recruited despite Lake’s overt racism from a barbershop frequented by black men. They were found decomposing in a trench near the bunker, below the bodies of Scott Stapley and Lonnie Bond (both of whom later died, along with his baby son, so that Lonnie’s common-law wife Brenda O’Connor could be made a sex slave.) They were also probably shot dead to erase their knowledge of Lake’s private sanctum.’
He also remembers some of Ng’s likely victims. ‘Cliff Peranteau and Jeff Gerald – mid-twenties workmates of Charlie Ng at the Dennis Moving Company, not seen since 19th January/24th February 1985 respectively. Though neither body was ever recovered, evidence that links them with Blue Mountain Road suggests they may have been lured in order to obtain their cash and bank account numbers – presumably obtained under torture – by the promise of payment for maintenance work and possibly by the lure of Leonard’s homegrown marijuana.’
Ng had allegedly admitted to fellow prisoner Laberge that he had murdered Scott Stapley by smashing a handgun through his teeth and firing. Needless to say, it’s a charge that the convicted murderer now denies.
This author had assumed that Leonard Lake alone murdered Paul Cosner, as Mr Cosner had told his girlfriend that he was going to meet a ‘funny looking man’ and if he’d been going to meet Ng he’d surely have said ‘an Asian man.’ But Paul Woods found evidence to suggest that more than one killer was involved. ‘There were bullet-holes found in the front passenger seat of his car suggesting he was shot from behind while someone else drove. Charlie couldn’t drive – literally every attempt he every made to learn ended in a minor crash. It suggests there were probably two other people in the car when Cosner was murdered.’ He adds that, in this case there’s no conclusive forensic evidence as his body has never been found.
So, if Paul hadn’t known of the mutilated male bodies that were found on Lake’s property and if he hadn’t seen part of the M Ladies tape, would he have believed that Charles Ng, the soft-spoken man sitting across from him in the prison visitor’s enclosure, was capable of so many torture-killings?
‘I can only answer in the words of one of my old drinking buddies, the great noir novelist Derek Raymond: “One does not describe evil by giving it six fingers.” In other words, assess people by their actions rather than their outward demeanour or whatever opinion they have of themselves.’
But he’s aware that others ar
e understandably more swayed by appearances. ‘One of the jurors in the Ng trial was torn by mixed emotions. She was traumatised by the M Ladies tape, and Brenda O’Connor’s pleading for her baby, but found it difficult to reconcile the chubby, docile Charles Ng in the courtroom with the vicious young man on the video monitor. But of course, Ng dispelled any residual sympathy she might feel when he violated her sense of security by telephoning her at home, shortly before the jury returned their recommendation of death.’
Paul adds: ‘I think Ng, who seems to have a short fuse since his abused childhood, certainly had a proclivity toward crime, although he would never have made a successful criminal. He was also violent, and it’s quite possible he committed murders of his own accord that were acts of male-on-male aggression. But in terms of the wholesale mass murder and sex murder that Lake initiated, I think Charlie was an associate. Dr Callahan called him the sorcerer’s apprentice.’
He continues: ‘Ng lacked the cruelty to pets which so many embryonic serial killers display, and Leonard Lake mocked him for being unable to discipline the household’s new puppy. Ng was actually sentimental toward animals, in a manner that I’ve often found with men who are violent but not necessarily sadistic.’ He believes that Leonard Lake gave Charles Ng the freedom to become more cruel and that Ng’s actions ‘echo the pessimistic findings of Harvard University psychological researcher Stanley Milgram and his 37% of those experimental participants in the late 1960s who refused, when confronted with disturbing faked evidence, to participate further in inflicting pain on human subjects. The majority (63%) continued to inflict staged but seemingly authentic electrical shocks.’ He adds ‘Whereas I don’t feel Charlie Ng was predisposed toward sex murder, I believe he allowed himself to learn to like it under Leonard’s tuition.’
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