by Bill James
Lake and Ng were serious murderers, as opposed to serial murderers. They wiped out entire families, not just once, as Hickock and Smith had done, but at least twice, probably a third time, based on unidentified remains, and for all anyone knows, more. The full extent of their crimes is impossible to ascertain, but it seems safe to say that they killed more than twenty people, although this total may include some crimes committed by Lake without the assistance of Ng.
The next three paragraphs contain perhaps the most unpleasant accounts in the book, and you may wish to skip them. Lake and Ng used a cabin in the woods near Wilseyville, California. A bunker sat near the cabin, a windowless building about the size of a two-car garage. Lake and Ng would gain control of a person, or a couple, or a family, by using some pretext for normal interaction. In one case they called a man who had placed an ad offering to sell a car. The man went to show someone the car, and was never heard from again. Ng brought co-workers out to the forest, offering them odd jobs. They never came back. In one case the murderous pair simply invited their neighbors over for dinner. Lake sometimes stayed in a halfway house in Haight-Ashbury. Three people disappeared from that house in February, 1985. The body of one of them was found in Wilseyville. This is all that is known about the matter. In some cases it is unknown how they made contact with the victims.
In any case, all of the victims came to terrible ends. The men were the luckiest: they were quickly and unceremoniously shot. The women were held prisoner in the bunker and used as slaves for a period of days or weeks. They were assaulted, beaten and tortured before meeting their deaths, all the while pleading for their babies to be brought to them. Lake and Ng took videotapes of themselves abusing the women. The babies were murdered, and may also have been sexually exploited before death.
The bodies were disposed of in all different ways—burned, chopped up into small bits and spread around the property, or buried whole. This made it very difficult to ID the victims, or even to prove that a given victim was actually dead, or even to assemble a list of who all the victims might have been. Then they would loot the victims’ property—steal their cars and jewelry, their furniture and cameras, their credit cards and miscellaneous ID.
They would have garage sales, and sell off some of their victims’ belongings.
Truman Capote wrote about Hickock and Smith that probably neither man would have committed the crime for which they were executed, but that they created a third personality out of their interaction, and that this third personality committed the crime. Ng and Lake were different. Both of them were homicidal, and either of them was entirely capable of killing somebody. Joining forces made them deadlier not because it made them more wicked, but because it made them more effective.
After Ng was arrested in Canada the jurisdiction which was holding him refused to return him to California, citing a long-standing Canadian policy of refusing to grant extradition when the person involved faced the death penalty upon his return. Canada held Ng for four and a half years while the issue was fought out in Canadian courts, becoming a political issue of national interest. Eventually the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Ng could be returned to the United States if the Justice Minister agreed. The Justice Minister gave permission to the warden of the prison which was holding him, and the prison got rid of him as fast as they could; he was back in California within hours after the Canadian Supreme Court had ruled, before the political opposition had a chance to rally.
Ng went on trial in California in October, 1998, and was convicted of eleven counts of murder on February 24, 1999.
The book about the case is Eye of Evil, by Joseph Harrington and Robert Burger. I say this with sadness, but it’s a terrible book. It saddens me to say this because
a) The case itself is quite extraordinary,
b) Burger and Harrington are perfectly capable of writing a good book,
c) They did a solid job of researching the case, operating within the confines of a long-standing gag order, and
d) I believe they approached their subject honestly and in good faith, giving a full effort to tell the story of the crimes without sensationalizing or pandering.
They failed, however, for two easily identifiable reasons. First, they invented a reporter, a Nancy Drew–, Brenda Starr–type character named Tomasina Boyd Clancy, or T. B. Clancy for short, who intrudes relentlessly into the narrative. They spend half the book telling us what this fictional foldout was doing and thinking at every stage of the investigation, the delay, and the pre-trial hearing. From Chapter 22:
Tomasina Boyd Clancy sat on a raised stucco planter box in the Government Center’s courtyard. The sun had come out. The rays from that distant star warmed her face.
Yes indeed, she might have done that, if only she had been a real person. I cannot imagine what in the hell Burger and Harrington were thinking of when they invented this bimbo, or what the editor was thinking of when he let her slip through, but in any case it couldn’t possibly be more annoying.
Second, Burger and Harrington tell the story in careful chronological order—beginning at the moment when the crimes came to light. The better part of a hundred pages are devoted to a chronological account of a pre-trial hearing. They make not the slightest effort, however, to unravel the chronology of the events themselves, the disappearances and assaults. The investigation constantly refers back to one crime or another in a piecemeal fashion—to a piece of identification found buried in a Tupperware container on the property, or to a minor traffic accident involving one of the stolen automobiles, or to the weapons which could somehow be linked to one of the crimes or another.
Clancy nodded. The timing of all this seemed to be Ng’s only weapon.
Burger and Harrington seem to understand, on some level, that the chronology is critical to the story—yet they don’t lift a finger to help the reader put it together. This is bewildering. The crimes are repetitious, involving a large number of common elements. Burger and Harrington offer the reader no list of the victims or possible victims, no chronology, no sub-section reviewing the events in the order they happened. The victims are never developed into three-dimensional or even two-dimensional persons; they’re just names. Although the locale is as critical as the timeline, there are no maps and no diagrams.
The crime spree of Lake and Ng could easily have been ended several murders earlier, had the police system not been in such a mess at that time. Several of the disappearances could easily have been traced to Ng and/or Lake, if a more timely effort had been made to follow up on a missing-persons report. When two of Ng’s co-workers disappeared from the face of the earth in January, 1985, that might have set off alarm bells—and those disappearances could have been traced to Ng. At the time, it just didn’t seem important enough to chase down. These people were missing, but there was no evidence that they were dead, so it was a low priority compared to solving the current homicides.
The police were also unlucky in this case. Some of the disappearances were taken seriously by the police and were rigorously investigated, but they happened to be the ones which could not be easily solved.
Charlie Chitat Ng remains on death row.
XXIX
Jon Dunkle was an affable doofus who lived in the early 1980s in Belmont, California, south of San Francisco.
On Saturday night, November 7, 1981, John Davies disappeared from his Belmont home. Davies was a fifteen-year-old boy. Dunkle, 21 years old by the calendar but more like 14 emotionally, was a friend of the Davies family, almost a member of the family, addressing the parents as “Mom” and “Dad.” The Davies prided themselves on keeping an open house, the door always unlocked and the rules so liberal they couldn’t quite be considered rules. If the boys drink at home, they figured, they won’t have to go somewhere else to drink. The boys drank a lot. They smoked a lot of pot, and they did a fair amount of LSD. The flaw in the theory: if you give them permission to drink at home, you’re giving them permission to drink. The scary part is that their mother was a
school principal.
Anyway, Dunkle more or less joined the family to get the permission to drink. His own father was strict, and would beat the hell out of him if he came home drunk. This doesn’t work either. Dunkle would go over to the Davies house to drink, then sleep it off on their couch.
John Davies disappeared in the middle of the night—and all of a sudden, Jon Dunkle was nowhere to be seen. The Davies thought this behavior odd: he just cut them off, beginning at the moment their son disappeared. The cop initially assigned to the case talked to Dunkle and cleared him of any involvement in Davies’ disappearance.
On October 2, 1984, a Belmont 12-year-old was murdered, stabbed with a knife and left in the bushes. Police worked up a composite drawing of a suspect in that case, and carried it around town. Jon Dunkle was identified as someone who matched the drawing, and so police began trying to arrange a meeting with him. Dunkle left town and tried to gracefully dodge the meeting—at which point a cop working the new case and a cop working the old case, the Davies disappearance, realized that they were both trying to get in touch with the same man. At that point, they decided that they really wanted to talk to Jon Dunkle.
Dunkle lied to the investigators about peripheral issues, and recited a canned alibi which didn’t check out. The cops realized that Dunkle was a serial murderer, and set to work to build a case against him. This proved to be a hellish task. Dunkle had severe dyslexia, resulting in a low measured IQ, but he was cagey. He had left no clues in either murder. Interviewed repeatedly, he confessed to nothing and made no usable incriminating statements. He was open, friendly, and helpful, but gee whiz, he just didn’t know anything about either case.
Belmont police sent a cop undercover to work with Dunkle, flipping hamburgers. Dunkle by this time was living in Sacramento, more than a hundred miles away, so this was a difficult thing to do—a small-city police force running an expensive undercover operation in the middle of the state. Sacramento police cooperated and assisted in the investigation. Dunkle and the cop became friendly, so friendly that Dunkle would introduce her as his girlfriend. They hung out together, drinking heavily. Dunkle enjoyed being the chief suspect in the death of the Belmont 12-year-old, bragged about being suspected, and encouraged people to believe that he was involved—but drunk or sober, he avoided giving anything away, except that he did tip off his involvement in another case, a hit-and-run attempted murder.
The undercover assignment aborted when Dunkle left his cop/girlfriend as a lookout while he broke into an occupied house in the middle of the night. Astonishingly, and tragically, that wasn’t enough to get him sent to prison. The police by this time could place Dunkle at the scene of one murder, knew that he was a close friend of the missing John Davies, knew that he had DUI convictions, had him on tape confessing to an undercover officer that he had run over another youth and left him for dead, knew that he was stealing knives from work, had him on tape talking in a general way about killing young boys, and had actually witnessed him breaking into a house, where he had grabbed a pair of scissors and dragged the blanket off the bed of a sleeping seven-year-old girl. None of that was considered sufficient to hold him awaiting trial, and he was released after a few days in custody.
Near Sacramento on July 2, 1985, Jon Dunkle viciously murdered a 12-year-old boy named Sean Dannehl, a virtual replay of the previous murder. Sacramento police focused on Dunkle immediately, and quickly determined that Dunkle had been at the park where Dannehl was murdered at the time of the crime—and yet, once more the investigation stalled at that point. Dunkle had left nothing behind, had been seen by no one making actual contact with the victim, and could not be coerced into making any incriminating remarks.
By this time police all over California knew almost for certain that Dunkle was the worst of the worst of the worst, a serial murderer who preyed upon children—and yet all they could convict him of was burglary.
In prison, fortunately, Dunkle began to tell his cellmate what he would not tell the cops, what he would not acknowledge even to the cop who had been pretending to be his girlfriend. The cellmate, also a murderer, talked to authorities, not in exchange for anything, but simply because he was appalled by Dunkle’s crimes. Encouraged by police, the cellmate was able to con Dunkle into making a full confession to the three murders he is known to have committed, as well as two other attempted murders.
After stalling for several years with Marsden motions (firing his attorney) and feigned insanity, Dunkle was eventually convicted of two murders. He was sentenced to death, but has not been executed and probably will not be, since he has either genuinely slipped the bonds of sanity or has become so good at feigning madness that psychologists are unable to say for sure whether he is or is not psychotic.
The book about the case, The Boy Next Door, by Gretchen Brinck, is readable but un-remarkable. There was also a made-for-TV movie, In the Company of Darkness, starring Helen Hunt as the cop who pretended to be his girlfriend. The book has an interesting relationship to the police investigation. Most crime books portray the investigators as either:
a) Heroic knights, or
b) Bungling screw-ups.
Ms. Brinck has chosen the cops-as-heroic-knights model, but has to implicitly acknowledge that, for a bunch of heroic knights, they screwed up a lot of things real bad. The Belmont police initially wrote off John Davies’ disappearance as a runaway, didn’t investigate it seriously, didn’t follow through in a timely fashion, and didn’t really even look at Jon Dunkle, despite the suspicions of the victim’s family. They persisted in these things until they had thoroughly alienated the Davies family. But in all fairness, having done that, they did make a truly heroic effort to recover.
Apart from that, there are two things about the case which are unique, or nearly unique: Dunkle’s personality, and the technique of having a woman undercover cop befriend him. On a chart, Dunkle had many or most of the common traits of a serial murderer: he was a nobody, a loser, he had no close friends, he had a kind of intelligence but had never found anything to which it could be suitably applied, and so he had never been successful at anything. He came from an abusive and dysfunctional family. He drank heavily and had a long history of petty crimes.
What was different about him, however, was his affect—the gee-whiz, boy-next-door, shuck-and-grin act which had completely fooled the first investigator of the Davies murder. There are, I suppose, other serial murderers who have projected similar personalities, but it is certainly not common.
Attempting to nail a serial murderer by getting a cop to pose as his girlfriend is, so far as I know, unprecedented. I don’t mean to be unkind, but I don’t think this practice is going to make it into the FBI manual. I admire the Belmont cops’ determination to put the bad guy away, but the decoy investigation was tremendously expensive, since the decoy had to be backed up and tape-recorded at every moment. The effort was dangerous, and it didn’t produce very much. It did not prevent him from murdering again.
The real problem, however, is that having a cop acting as a friend and cohort of a serial murderer presents a feast of ethical, moral and legal perils. Can you spell En-Trap-Ment, boys and girls? It’s not entrapment on the surface of it, but almost anything the cop does in the role of confidant presents the risk of crossing the line. Suppose the cop buys the serial murderer a few drinks, drops him off at home, and the murderer then goes out the back door and kills a neighbor boy. Is that entrapment?
It very well might be, yes. It is entrapment if the crime would not have occurred, but for the actions of the police. Dunkle committed his crimes under the heavy influence of alcohol, as do most men who kill children. If the police buy the alcohol, one can certainly argue that that’s entrapment.
What if the cop gives the murderer a small present? Could that be entrapment? Dunkle was sexually and socially immature, but if the murderer grabs the policewoman’s breast and she doesn’t resist, is that entrapment? If the murderer grabs a breast and she does resist, an argument ensues,
and he commits a murder an hour later, while still angry at the police woman, is that entrapment?
In the actual event, Dunkle left the cop standing watch while he broke into an occupied home which had a child’s toys in the back yard. He didn’t kill anybody while he was in there, but what if he had? That would be a pretty story, wouldn’t it—rabid killer slashes the throat of seven-year-old while two cops meander around in back of the building, knowing full well that
a) he is a child murderer, and
b) he is plundering these people’s house.
If you think through the idea of a cop befriending a serial murderer in this way, you realize that it’s just full of nightmare scenarios.
On the differences between real-life and fictional serial murderers …
In fiction, serial murderers are usually rich. In real life, they most often live at or near the poverty level. I would guess that 50–60% of serial murderers have little or no money, about 30% are middle-class working people, about 15–20% are small businessmen with some resources (like Gacy), and something less than 1% are persons of means.
In fiction, though, they’re almost always well-off. In real life they are complete nobodies, nearly invisible in society. In fiction they are usually prominent people.
The biggest difference between real-life and fictional serial killers, however, is in the extent to which they are organized. Serial murderers are traditionally divided into “organized” and “disorganized” offenders not because this is a productive way to think about them—it usually isn’t—but because that’s the thing you can see at the crime scene. If you start with a group of serial killers and break them down by their characteristics, “organized” and “disorganized” in truth are barely recognizable generalizations after the fact. But if you have to start with the crime scene and have almost no information, that’s something you can “see,” so that’s how they are usually divided.
