Charles Ng

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Ng, a Hong Kong-born man who now sits on California's death row, was undone by a theft worth $75. On the 2nd of June 1985, an employee at the South City Lumber Store in South San Francisco spotted a man carrying a vise out without paying for it. A single call to the police followed. It pulled loose a chain of events far larger than anyone in that parking lot could have guessed. At the far end of it lay a remote cabin in the mountains, a bunker, and a growing list of missing people. How did a boy from a wealthy Hong Kong family end up in that parking lot? Why did a legal fight between two countries follow? And why did the most expensive trial in California history still leave so much argued over?

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• 2. Hong Kong To Leavenworth

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  Ng Chi-tat was born on the 24th of December 1960 in British Hong Kong. He was the youngest of three children and the only son of a wealthy executive. His father disciplined him harshly and abused him.

  At age 15, an arrest for shoplifting prompted his father to send him to Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in North Yorkshire, England. Not long after he arrived, the school expelled him for stealing from other students, and he went back to Hong Kong. Teachers and others described him as a troubled loner, and he had been expelled from several schools.

  In 1978, Ng moved to the United States on a student visa to study biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California. He left after one semester. Soon afterward he was involved in a hit and run accident, and he joined the United States Marine Corps to avoid prosecution.

  Ng entered the Marines in October 1979. By his own account, a recruiting sergeant helped him, along with false papers giving his birthplace as Bloomington, Indiana. Within a year, military police arrested him for stealing automatic weapons from the armory at the Kaneohe Bay base. Facing a court-martial, he escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California. There he met a man named Leonard Lake.

  In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home that Ng and Lake shared in Ukiah. They seized a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives. Ng was caught and returned to Marine custody, where he pleaded guilty to theft and desertion. Under that plea deal he served eighteen months in the stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was paroled and dishonorably discharged in 1984. Lake, who had been freed on bond, had skipped bail and gone into hiding at a remote cabin belonging to his wife, Claralyn Balazs.

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• 3. The Wilseyville Cabin

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  Wilseyville is a community in Calaveras County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about 60 miles from Sacramento. When Ng came out of Leavenworth, he rejoined Lake at the cabin there. Lake and Balazs had divorced by then but stayed on good terms. Beside the cabin, Lake had built a structure that his own journals called a "dungeon."

  Two deaths are believed to predate Ng's arrival. In 1983, Lake is thought to have lured his brother Donald to the cabin and shot him in his sleep. He also killed his friend and best man, Charles Gunnar, whose body was dug up on the Wilseyville property in 1992.

  Over the following year, court records say, Lake and Ng began kidnapping men, women, and infants. The men and infants were killed immediately. The women were held as slaves and subjected to rape and torture before they were killed.

  The violence also reached into San Francisco. In July 1984, an Asian American man broke into the apartment of disc jockey Don Giulietti and his roommate, Richard Carrazza, and shot both. Giulietti died. Carrazza was the only known survivor of either Lake or Ng, and he later named Ng as the gunman. Soon afterward, Ng found work at a moving company in the Bay Area. What finally ended the pair's run was not a detective's insight but Ng's kleptomania.

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• 4. The Honda In The Lot

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  A 1980 Honda Prelude sat in the lumber store's parking lot, and Ng had tossed the stolen vise into its trunk when the employee confronted him. He then ran off on foot. When police arrived minutes later, an officer looked in the trunk and found the vise next to a .22 caliber pistol fitted with an illegal silencer. Lake, who had been waiting nearby, insisted it was all a misunderstanding and that he had paid for the vise. Police arrested him for possessing the modified weapon.

  The officer noticed that Lake looked nothing like the photo on his California driver's license. The name on it was Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man whose family had reported him missing several weeks earlier. The Honda was registered to Paul Cosner, who vanished from San Francisco on the 2nd of November 1984 after leaving his apartment to show the car to a possible buyer. Its license plate belonged to yet another missing person, Lonnie Bond of Wilseyville. The pistol was registered to Stapley.

  In custody, Lake admitted who he was and named his accomplice as Ng. He then asked for a pencil, a piece of paper, and a glass of water. Left alone in the interrogation room, he wrote a note to his ex-wife and swallowed a cyanide capsule he had hidden in his jacket. He was rushed to nearby Kaiser hospital and pronounced dead on the 6th of June. Meanwhile, a closer look at the Honda was already pointing investigators toward Wilseyville.

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• 5. Bunker And Buried Buckets

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  The Honda itself held a bullet hole in its roof, blood spatter, a stun gun, and several unspent bullets. Under the passenger seat lay a utility bill in the name of Claralyn Balazs, with a Wilseyville address.

  On the 4th of June, San Francisco police detectives and Calaveras County sheriff's investigators searched the cabin with Balazs's permission. In one bedroom they found video equipment belonging to Harvey Dubs. He had vanished from his San Francisco apartment in July 1984, along with his wife Deborah and their infant son, Sean. Vehicles belonging to Bond and Stapley were parked on the property. Bond had rented a house just 50 yards from the cabin with his girlfriend, Brenda O'Connor, and their infant son, and Stapley, a friend, had been staying there. Detectives found it empty, with months of rent unpaid.

  Beside the driveway stood a cinder-block bunker that Lake had built. Inside were tools, handcuffs, women's clothing, makeup, and a copy of The Collector. John Fowles published that novel in 1963. It follows a man who captures a woman named Miranda and keeps her as a slave, hoping she will come to love him. Lake had read it as a teenager and was fascinated by it. He named his own scheme "Operation Miranda." On a wall hung typed rules for female captives and pictures of 21 women, some of them nude. Behind a hidden door was a tiny windowless cell with a small mattress and a bucket. Investigators believed women had been imprisoned there.

  Nearby, police dug up roughly 45 pounds of burned and crushed bone fragments, enough to account for at least 11 bodies. Other victims named in the case included Paul Cosner, Randy Jacobsen, Mike Carroll and Kathy Allen, Jeff Gerald, Stapley, Clifford Peranteau, Cheryl Okoro, Maurice Rock, and Reggie Frisby. In 2025, investigative genetic genealogy identified the remains of O'Connor and Frisby. Identifinders International, Intermountain Forensics, and the Calaveras Cold Case Task Force did that work.

  A hand-drawn "treasure map" led police to two buried five-gallon buckets. One held envelopes with names and victims' identifications, which suggested the toll might be as high as 25. The other held Lake's handwritten journals for 1983 and 1984 and two videotapes documenting the torture of two victims. On a tape labeled "M-Ladies," Ng tells Brenda O'Connor, as he cuts her shirt off with a knife, "You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won't do any good. We are pretty … cold-hearted, so to speak." The man on that tape had by then been gone for days.

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• 6. Flight To Canada

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  After running from the lumber store, Ng went to Balazs's home and told her he had to leave town immediately. She drove him to San Francisco International Airport, where he boarded a flight to Chicago under the alias "Mike Kimoto."

  A friend drove him from Chicago to Detroit and across the border into Canada. He ended up in Calgary, Alberta, where he lived unnoticed in a lean-to in Fish Creek Provincial Park. On the 6th of July 1985, Calgary police arrested him. He had shot a security guard named Sean Doyle in the hand while resisting arrest for stealing a can of salmon from the Hudson's Bay Department Store.

  In December 1985, a Canadian court convicted him of shoplifting, assault with a weapon, and possession of a concealed firearm. The sentence was four and a half years in prison. When it ended, he stayed in custody while California's extradition request moved forward.

  Ng fought that request for years. Canada had no death penalty for most offenses, and he argued that letting California try him for capital murder would violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A habeas corpus petition failed, and so did an appeal to the Alberta Court of Appeal. On the 26th of September 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against him by a vote of 4 to 3. Former Alberta prosecutor Scott Newark says Canada deported Ng to California just 18 minutes after the ruling. The fight in Canada was over, but the one in California would run for years.

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• 7. Ng Against The Court

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  In Calaveras County, Ng was indicted on twelve counts of first-degree murder. A change of venue moved the case to Orange County, and there he launched a long run of pretrial motions. He sued the state over a temporary stay at Folsom Prison, where staff caught him hiding maps, fake IDs, and other escape gear. He challenged four of the judges assigned to him. His complaints also covered the strength of his eyeglasses, the temperature of his food, and his right to do origami in his cell.

  Ng went through ten attorneys, and some ended up representing him a second time. He filed a malpractice suit against several of them, citing incompetence. Then he said he had lost trust in all of his lawyers, and the court let him act as his own counsel. The trial slipped another year while he studied the law.

  The bench changed too. In June 1994, Judge Donald McCartin disqualified himself after a challenge from Ng. Judge Robert Fitzgerald took over on the 21st of October. By September 1998, Judge John J. Ryan had replaced Fitzgerald and would preside at the trial.

  Primary jury selection began on the 14th of September 1998, and opening arguments followed on the 26th of October. The trial would run four months. The prosecution rested on the 17th of November, and the defense began on the 30th. Balazs had cooperated with investigators and received immunity from prosecution. Court records say she handed over weapons and other material. She was called a key witness. Yet Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, dismissed her without asking a single question, in a surprise move, and later declined to explain why.

  At one point Ng somehow got the phone number of one of the nine female jurors. He called her at home, trying to force a mistrial. Staff later found the number in his cell, and from then on he spent recesses in a metal cage inside a room. His most consequential move came later, when he asked to testify.

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• 8. Verdict And Aftermath

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  Video evidence and Lake's voluminous diaries did not shake Ng's story. He maintained he was only a bystander and that Lake alone planned and carried out every kidnapping, rape, and murder. He said he depended on Lake for direction. His lawyers also pointed to his father's abuse as mitigating and argued that his good conduct in custody justified life in prison rather than execution.

  Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian testified that Ng had dependent personality disorder, but conceded on cross-examination that he had not watched the tapes showing Ng taking part. Clinical psychologist Abraham Nievod agreed with the diagnosis. He said Ng's behavior on the tapes showed an effort to "mirror" Lake and please him. Four correctional officers, two sheriff's deputies, a prison library employee, and a prison counselor called Ng a model prisoner. Four former Marines described him as quiet and well-behaved. His parents spoke about his troubled childhood and expressed remorse for what their son had done.

  The defense first concluded on the 25th of January 1999. The next day, Judge Ryan granted Ng's request to reopen its case so he could testify about the murders. On the stand for the first time, Ng blamed Lake for all of them. His insistence on testifying let prosecutors introduce more evidence that defined his role. One item was a photo of Ng in his cell, with cartoons he had drawn of his victims hanging on the wall behind him. Prosecutors declined to question him further on the 2nd of February and summarized their closing arguments again. The defense closed on the 3rd, and deliberations began on the 8th.

  After three weeks, the jury returned its verdict on the 24th of February 1999. It convicted Ng of first-degree murder on eleven of the twelve counts. The victims were Sean, Deborah, and Harvey Dubs, Clifford Peranteau, Jeffrey Gerald, Michael Carroll, Kathleen Allen, Lonnie Bond Sr., Lonnie Bond Jr., Robin Scott Stapley, and Brenda O'Connor. Jurors also found the multiple-murder special circumstance true. They acquitted him on the twelfth count, the murder of Paul Cosner. That was despite Lake and Ng having driven Cosner's car for seven months and Cosner's California driver's license turning up at Wilseyville.

  Ng was sentenced to death. Judge Ryan rejected a motion to reduce the sentence to life, saying, "Mr. Ng was not under any duress, nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake." The prosecution cost California approximately $20 million, the most expensive trial in the state's history at that time. The O.J. Simpson trial of 1994-1995 had cost $9 million.

  On the 28th of July 2022, the California Supreme Court upheld Ng's conviction and death sentence. As of 2022, he still had possible federal appeals, despite a moratorium on the death penalty declared by Governor Gavin Newsom. As of 2025, Ng remains on death row at California Medical Facility. No executions have taken place in California since 2006.

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