California Supreme Court upholds death penalty for Charles Ng in notorious ’80s sex slave murders

The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the conviction and death penalty for considered one of two males implicated in at the least 11 notorious horrific torture-slayings in the mid-Nineteen Eighties in which the duo stored their victims hidden in a secret bunker in the Northern California woods.

Thirty-seven years later, authorities are nonetheless making an attempt to determine the stays of a few of their victims.

Charles Ng, now 61, was convicted in 1999 of killing six males, three ladies and two child boys in 1984 and 1985. He was initially accused of 13 slayings – 12 in Calaveras County and one in San Francisco.

He and his legal companion, Leonard Lake, dedicated a collection of kidnappings in which they engaged in bondage and sadism ending in homicide. They had been initially suspected of killing as much as 25 folks.

“This is one of those stories that’s been passed down through time in this community,” stated Calaveras County Lt. Greg Stark, whose father labored for the division on the time of the slayings. “There’s been wild estimates and there’s been conservative estimates, and honestly I don’t think anybody will ever know, due to how they were disposing of the bodies.”

Ng and Lake held their victims in a distant 2 1/2-acre Sierra Nevada fenced compound about 150 miles east of San Francisco. It included a bunker with three rooms, two of them behind a hidden doorway. One hidden, locked room was furnished like a cell with a mattress lined with a foam pad, a plastic bucket and a roll of bathroom paper.

Lake killed himself with a cyanide capsule after police arrested him for shoplifting in San Francisco in 1985 and had been questioning him earlier than any our bodies had been discovered.

The justices stated in an in depth 181-page evaluation of the case that Ng obtained a good trial, together with a change of venue from Calaveras County to Orange County due to pre-trial publicity.

It was considered one of California’s longest and most costly trials on the time, costing hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, partly as a result of the court docket stated Ng repeatedly tried to delay and disrupt his personal trial. That included prolonged debates over whether or not he may signify himself and who could be his attorneys.

The justices unanimously additionally concluded that Ng was correctly extradited after he fled to Canada, the place he was arrested in Calgary, Alberta, in 1985 for shoplifting and wounding a retailer guard. He fought extradition for six years earlier than the Supreme Court of Canada ordered him returned.

The males incriminated themselves with videotapes of them tormenting sure, terrified ladies they used as sex slaves earlier than their murders.

Jurors had been proven a tape of 1 lady pleading in useless for the lads to spare her husband and child as Ng minimize off her shirt and bra with a knife in entrance of the digicam.

Investigators additionally found piles of charred bones, blood-stained instruments, shallow graves and a 250-page diary stored by Lake.

Four legislation enforcement businesses spent 5 weeks scouring the property, in keeping with the court docket’s detailed description.

They discovered hundreds of buried tooth and bone fragments all through the property, with at the least 4 of the dental specimens belonging to a toddler underneath age 3. “Many hundreds” of the bone fragments had been burned.

Two forensic anthropologists ultimately concluded that the stays belonged to at the least 4 adults, one youngster, and one toddler. Two males had been discovered in a shallow grave not removed from the property. They had been sure, gagged and fatally shot.

Officials in Calaveras County final 12 months exhumed further bones and different human stays from a crypt in a cemetery the place they’d been stored since Ng’s conviction, in hopes that trendy DNA tracing may reveal their identities.

A sheriff’s chaplain learn a quick invocation, and shortly California Department of Justice criminalists and two forensic anthropologists started sorting and analyzing the stays.

They are initially hopeful that sufficient viable DNA is left for a comparability, stated Stark, however the Department of Justice hasn’t but been in a position to run the comparisons in half due to extra pressing energetic circumstances.

Investigators plan to check the DNA to that from cooperating subsequent of kin of the recognized victims, and run it by DNA databases in hopes of a comparability.

“Regardless if there are 11 (slayings) or more than 11, we’re hoping to categorize the remains and if possible return them to the families to give them their due respect and internment,” Stark stated. “If we find additional identifications, we’ll definitely look into them and their connection to the case.”

Ng joined the Marine Corps after he got here to the United States from Hong Kong. He earlier was imprisoned at Leavenworth, Kansas, for weapons theft whereas serving in the Marine Corps.

He and his protection attorneys argued that he was underneath the affect of Lake, an older man and survivalist who they stated engineered the serial slayings. Ng denied collaborating in most of the crimes.

His attorneys argued on the time that Ng was formed as a toddler, when he was overwhelmed by his father.

According to a 1999 article in the Los Angeles Times, Ng’s father testified that he typically whipped his son with a stick. 

“I tried to bring him up right,” Kenneth Ng, then 69,  testified, in keeping with the newspaper. “Unfortunately, I used the wrong way. I thought this was normal. But now I know how wrong I am.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on the death penalty as long as he’s governor, and Ng nonetheless has the opportunity of different federal appeals.