Charles Chi-Tat Ng, it is the judgment and sentence
of this court of which the jury found you guilty on
February 24, 1999.
And it's just like I told the judge, may God forgive me.
I want him dead.
Charles Ng has shown nothing but contempt for
life, for law, for anything and everything good.
He has killed many people and for no reason other
than for his amusement.
They were dismembered, burned, and then I feel
that they were crushed in some manner.
And the jury having found all 11 murders to be of
the first degree.
This is a cartoon that shows a Asian individual,
and he has a child by the legs.
And it appears that what he's doing is he's cooking this child.
What kind of person does that to a child?
To a baby?
And the jury having returned a verdict that
the penalty shall be death.
I mean, if I had to deliver a message to Charles Ng,
it would be, you know, you better repent now,
because when the angel of death comes,
the time for mercy is over.
...... case is, Mr. Ng.
In 1984, Charles Ng, a Hong-Kong British subject,
and Leonard Lake, a native Californian, committed a
series of horrific crimes that devastated the lives
of everyone they touched.
Can't stop. Can't stop.
Won't stop. Won't stop.
Their shared obsessions of militarism and lurid
sexual fantasy led to kidnap, torture, and murder.
And the evidence they left behind stands as testimony
to the mayhem they created.
Lake recorded his state of mind in his journal.
Ng charted the murders in a series of cartoons.
And they videoed the torture of the women they
held as sex slaves.
Ng talked to us in prison during his trial.
These are horrendous stuff that they accuse me of doing.
You know, I can't even hurt a puppy.
And Lake talked about their fantasies in his
home-made philosophy tape.
What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner.
The combined sadistic energies of these two men
became a lethal cocktail, and their story shows how
devastating such deviance can become when it goes undetected.
When Leonard Lake was arrested in 1985,
he committed suicide.
And it has taken 15 years to bring Charles Ng to justice.
And whilst Ng protests his innocence, and this woman,
Lake's ex-wife, has immunity on 19 counts of murder,
this is simple story of the horrors
created by this trio and their devastating impact
on the lives of so many more than their 25 victims.
Charles Chi-Tat Ng, you are remanded to the care, custody...
Charles Ng has spent those 15 years in solitary confinement.
And the man that knows Ng better than most is his lawyer,
public defender Bill Kelley.
In speaking about Charles Ng's personality, if you...
appear annoyed or irritated he initially...
let's say you're arguing with him about something,
he starts to assert himself.
Once he asserts himself, you assert yourself.
Typically he just withdraws, and he becomes
very meek and kind of goes into a shell.
I would say he's without confidence,
almost child-like in a lot of ways.
Born on Christmas Eve, 1960, in Hong Kong,
Charles Ng was a constant disappointment to his
demanding father.
As a child, he fought hard against his family's expectations.
This led to severe and repeated beatings.
Patrick Callahan, a criminal psychologist and
an authority on this case, has spent many hours in
conversation with Ng.
Kenneth Ng, Charles' father, was seriously
physically abusive of, uh, Charles.
Interesting to note is that while he was being
physically abusive, he was saying it was to make him strong.
Him, Charles, strong.
And he was also saying while he was being beaten
and tethered to a window, "I love you.
I'm doing this to make you strong.
It's for your own good."
But this only made Ng withdraw further into a
fantasy world of violence and martial arts.
He began to set fire to cars and to his school.
Charles Ng had become a disgrace to his proud,
middle-class family.
So in 1977, he was sent to a private school in England.
But Ng could not bond with this new environment.
He became more violent, stole from fellow pupils,
and harassed his teacher with sexually explicit letters.
He was then sent to San Francisco to live with relatives.
And in October 1979, using a fake birth certificate,
Ng joined the U.S. Marines.
Can't stop. Can't stop.
Won't stop. Won't stop.
Now, the Marine Corps, of course, is not an individual,
but he saw the organization as something
that he could belong to and attach himself to and
be part of - something he never really felt with his father.
Can't stop. Can't stop.
Won't stop. Won't stop.
Ng had also found an environment that
encouraged his love of violence.
But within two years, Ng had been arrested for
stealing weapons.
He escaped, went on the run, and sought out an
ex-Marine he had contacted through a right-wing
survivalist magazine.
That man was Leonard Lake.
He was to become the father figure Ng had been
searching for and would fuel his violent sexual fantasies.
Good evening.
It's a Sunday in October.
Twenty-second, twenty-third,
something like that.
Very close to my 38th birthday.
And I'm starting this tape without script or without
any real organization of what I want to say,
but I do feel a need to explain.
At 17, Lake was an angry loner,
showing signs of retarded sexual development.
When he read a classic novel called
"The Collector," it proved the catalyst for the deviant
fantasies that would shape his adult life.
The Collector is a chilling story of an
obsessive young man isolated from the world.
He fixates on a young woman, Miranda,
and imprisons her in the hope she will grow to love him.
Lake became obsessed with this tale and over the
next 20 years distorted it into a plan to imprison
women as sex slaves.
He called this plan "Project Miranda" after
the imprisoned woman in The Collector and called
his victims M-Ladies.
He even laid out a set of rules by which he would
force his Miranda to live.
Just to quote, number three is,
"I must never show my disrespect, either verbally or silent.
I must never cross my arms or legs in front of my body,
or clench my fist and, unless eating,
must always keep my lips parted."
So you can see from that, that Leonard not only
wanted physical domination,
but he wanted psychological domination.
He wanted them to be totally open to him so
that they lost their individuality,
lost their personhood and totally became his victim.
I believe that I can, if I can construct a holding cell,
I can create a facility that is so stark,
and so empty that, fairly quickly, by a combination
of, uh, painful punishments when I'm displeased,
I can quickly condition a young woman to
cooperate with me fully.
It may not work; however, I want to try.
What had led Lake to such a warped attitude towards
women was a repeated and compounding series of rejections,
first as a child when his adored
mother abandoned him, then by his beloved Marines
when he was discharged with severe psychological
problems after two tours of Vietnam.
And the last straw was his first wife divorcing him,
as he later confided to his sister.
In looking back on all of the events,
I think it certainly was a significant one in terms
of his developing or re-enforcement,
I should say, re-enforcement of his hatred of women.
Huh, let's see.
Despite this hatred, Lake was to find a woman who
shared his extreme sexual appetite.
In 1980, he met Cricket Balazs, and a year later
they were married.
..... into my sweet little lap.
Her strong sexual hold on Lake would give Cricket a
controlling influence over him until his death.
He felt so rejected by women that someone like Cricket,
who was not particularly beautiful or intelligent,
for him to be involved with someone like that,
I think, reflects his own self-esteem problems.
That, to me, was clearly a dynamic.
Even though he claimed to be smarter and cleverer
than her, he had no power in the relationship.
But the relationship Lake could control was about to begin.
Charles Ng was on the run after his arms theft from
the Marines.
He fled to Leonard Lake, his survivalist pen pal.
Ng remembers the first time he met this man.
At the time, I needed somewhere to stay, so this
is why I was led to him.
He's older than me, of course, like ten years or more,
and, you know, I just took to him much like a,
a brotherly fatherly figure.
As a threesome, they got along very well,
and they spent a lot of time together.
They lived very cooperatively and collaboratively.
They shared care of the dog.
I mean they lived like a family.
In Charles Ng, Lake had found the perfect father
to help him realize his Project Miranda.
And Ng's initiation was his exposure to the
extreme sexual games played by Lake and Cricket.
I mean that, that they, they got this kind of bondage,
like whips and handcuffs, and uh,
and stuff like that in the house.
So, I mean, like, I overheard it,
sometimes when I was in the living room or kitchen, cooking,
when they were doing these things in the bedroom.
When he observed that, there was an abreaction or
there was a connection between the wedding of
pain and love that he felt in his relationship with
his father and his mother.
And, and that, again, bonded him more closely to
Lake and to Cricket.
Ng's life with his surrogate family was
abruptly shattered when he and Lake were arrested by
the FBI for weapons theft.
Ng went to prison, while Lake jumped bail and began
life as a fugitive.
And as he wrote in his journal, Lake completely
severed his links with society.
Amazing.
Our land of the free is not prepared to deal
effectively with a truly free man.
What can they do to one who carries cyanide in his
pocket when death holds no fears?
From the time that Lenny became a fugitive,
he had told us that he'd been experimenting to find the
right dose of cyanide that would, um, kill a man,
an adult male and that he was to keep this cyanide
capsule with him at all times - um, a fresh one so
that in the event that he were ever captured, that
he was, that he would rather die than be imprisoned.
In 1983, Lake persuaded Cricket to buy a house in
the remote hills of Calaveras County, three
hours from San Francisco.
The quiet hamlet of Wilseyville was the
perfect place for Project Miranda.
Wilseyville is, is typical of a small town up here in
the foothills.
I think most people are drawn up here for its
beauty and its quiet and its openness.
I think Leonard Lake was drawn here for the isolation.
It was a ideal place for him.
Nobody bothered him.
Nobody recognized him.
Nobody would ask him any questions.
Lake began his obsessive search for the perfect
M-Lady, the woman he would hold captive in his bunker.
I like very slim women, very pretty, of course, petite,
small-breasted, long hair.
I certainly enjoy sex, I certainly enjoy the
dominance of climbing on a woman and using her body.
Lake needed a new identity, which meant cold
bloodedly murdering his best friend Charles Gunnar.
And he needed money to build the bunker close to
his house, so he lured his brother Donny up to Wilseyville.
Lenny came to pick up Donny to take him to this
supposed house-sitting job.
He shot him in the head while he was asleep.
He put like, point blank, he shot him in the head.
To pull of project Miranda, Lake would
require a constant supply of money and new identities.
Gunnar and Lake's brother, Donny, were only the beginning.
Then, in June 1984, Ng was released from prison.
He headed straight for his new-found family in Wilseyville.
Finally, Leonard Lake, Charles Ng, and Cricket
Balazs were together again.
Now, operation Miranda could truly begin.
Within the next year, a total of 25 people would
disappear from San Francisco and the
Wilseyville area, never to be seen again.
The bunker was ready, and Project Miranda had indeed begun.
Lake's chilling fantasy was finally underway.
It will be interesting to see how far this tape and
I actually go.
Leonard Lake - a name not seen or much used these days.
My next year as a fugitive, still with death
in my pocket and fantasy my major goal.
The bunker was built.
Project Miranda was go.
And the next year would see at least 25 violent deaths.
The murders that were perpetrated by Leonard
Lake and Charles Ng are very complex.
They include individual murders.
They include families where a whole family is
murdered, and they include the murder of children.
Sean Dubs, and his parents Harvey and Deborah, were
abducted from their home in San Francisco when Lake
and Ng came to buy their video camera.
And back in Wilseyville, Brenda O'Connor,
Lonnie Bond, and their baby were abducted from the house
next door to Lake's.
The fate of Sean Dubs and Lonnie Bond, Jr.
is unknown, but Ng's cartoons suggest a horrifying end.
The children were perhaps tortured to further gain
the compliance of the women.
Brenda O'Connor, Kathy Allen, and possibly
Deborah Dubs were imprisoned as M-Ladies,
tortured and then killed.
The men were killed quite quickly because they were
a physical threat to Lake and Ng.
And again, the fact that they couldn't leave any
witnesses led to the death of many of these people.
But when Lake and Ng abducted Paul Cosner,
they could not have reckoned on the desperate persistence
with which his sister, Sharon Sellitto,
would search for Paul.
My connection with the Ng case is that, uh,
my brother Paul Cosner was one of their victims.
He put an ad in the Chronicle in 1984 to sell a car,
a Honda Prelude, and, uh, Leonard Lake
answered that ad and decided my brother looked
enough like him to use his ID.
Sharon reported Paul's disappearance to the
police but was told they wouldn't look for a
missing person over six years of age,
but they would look for a stolen car.
My brother's missing, nobody cares at all or
will even do anything, but a $5,000 stinking car is
gone and you're gonna send somebody over right away.
So Sharon undertook her own search, fly-posting
the city with pictures of Paul.
Now I didn't sleep, I didn't eat.
I kept thinking if I could think of everything to do.
But it's like if I forgot one thing, that it
wouldn't work.
Sharon's fight to find her brother was not completely
in vain.
By reporting his car missing every month for
seven months, she kept the vehicle on the hot sheet,
and on June 2, 1985 this was instrumental in the
capture of the men that abducted her brother.
Because on that day, Lake and Ng went to a hardware
store in San Francisco and attempted to steal a vice.
When confronted, Ng fled the scene, leaving Lake to
deal with the police.
On checking the Honda Prelude Lake was driving,
the police found a gun with an illegal silencer.
At the police station, Lake was cautioned and
asked for his identity card.
The car was traced to Paul Cosner and the ID card to
another missing person, Scott Stapley.
Determined not to be taken alive, Lake swallowed two
cyanide capsules he kept sewn in the lapel of his jacket.
Before he poisoned himself, Lake wrote a
suicide note to Cricket, his ex-wife.
Dearest Cricket, I love you.
I forgive you.
Freedom is better than all else.
Love, Leonard.
Before he lost consciousness,
Lake gave the police Ng's name.
Mr. Ng is very clear.
He believes that, uh, he was given up by Leonard
Lake in order to give time for Cricket to get away,
and for her also to, uh, dispose of whatever
evidence there may be up at Wilseyville.
But Ng was not completely betrayed, Cricket took him
downtown to collect his clothes and guns.
Then she drove him to San Francisco Airport,
and while Lake was unconscious in hospital, Ng escaped.
Cricket had called and told me that Lenny had
swallowed his cyanide capsule.
He was on life support.
So about midnight that night, my mother and my
younger sister and I went to Kaiser/Cosner,
and there were detectives waiting for us
in the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit who
wanted to ask us questions about Lenny, and, of course,
at this point, we had no idea of anything
that was about to unfold.
Within the four days it took Leonard Lake to die,
this insignificant shoplifting incident grew
into a horrifying case of mass murder.
Police had searched Paul Cosner's car and found
bullet holes as well as an electricity bill in the
name of Cricket Balazs that linked her to the
Wilseyville property.
After being questioned by the police, Cricket took her chance.
It was June 3rd.
It was the day after my brother swallowed the
cyanide capsule that Cricket came to my mother's house.
She was very nervous.
She was very agitated.
She actually asked me to go up with her to the
Wilseyville house to what she said get some personal
belongings out of the house that she did not
want the police to see.
Lake's sister refused to go with Cricket, but
Lake's mother agreed.
And my mother told me later that she filled
several cardboard boxes of things, including videotapes.
The next day, police went with Cricket up to Lake's house,
but there was no way they could ever have
imagined the magnitude of the crimes they would
uncover there.
The case just started, just mushrooming up from there,
and when the Inspector from San
Francisco found that video equipment to the Dubs family,
I think that's when things really started to roll.
The police found bullet holes and blood stains in
the house.
This is the bed with the sides had the four holes
or the two holes for each hand, that looked like
were used for restraint.
And next to the bed was the video camera stolen
from the Dubs family, the camera Lake had used to
film the building of his bunker and the execution
of his crimes.
So, here it is, a cut on the earth about 21 feet across.
The backhoe worked for 24 hours.
Myself and two young men with our little picks and
shovels and wheelbarrows worked for another three
or four days.
Cricket became more nervous with every find
and refused to let the police search the
padlocked bunker close to the house.
Later on that day, we, uh, we the brought the search
warrant to the residence and took a look around the
grounds, and at that point in time there was a, uh, a tool shed.
It had all the regular tools, just a typical workshop.
And it was from there, detectives, after looking at it,
noticed that the wall went farther back
into the hillside.
And then as they dug around a little more,
they found that there was quite a bit of the building that
went back into the dirt.
So, that made them think, well, how do you get in.
And they started looking and they found a secret passageway.
What we're looking at is what has been as described
as the inner cell area of this bunker.
As you can see, the door was hidden with a two false,
three false shelves.
The inner cell of the bunker was actually two
different compartments.
In the first, they found a copy of The Collector. Attached
to the wall were photographs of 21
semi-clothed young women.
A two-way mirror provided a spy hole into the second
compartment, which was, in fact, a tiny airless cell.
Next to the mirror was a night sight, allowing Lake
to see into the darkness.
So actually in the cell, if you go in there,
and close the door, and turn the lights on, it's very
much like being in a mineshaft.
It's just pitch black, and you can't hear.
The police assumed that people had been held captive here,
but who were they?
And why were they held?
Lake had buried evidence in front of the bunker
that would enable the police to unravel this mystery.
The discovered Lake's journal, detailing the
last 18 months of his life, and his philosophy tape,
expounding his plans for Project Miranda.
But most chilling was a video labeled
"The M-Ladies Tape," filmed in Lake's house, and showing
Lake and Ng torturing innocent women.
If you don't go along with us, we'll probably take
you into bed, tie you down, rape you, shoot you,
and bury you.
What appears interesting is, at least of the two
M-Ladies that we know, that they were not as easy
to control as Leonard had thought, and thus, I, uh,
I think their deaths were premature.
At first, police had no idea who these two women
were or whether they were alive or dead, until they
found a trench that was 50 yards long and contained
the driving licenses of Kathy Allen and Brenda
O'Connor, the two women on the M-Ladies tape.
Amongst hundreds of other items of personal
belongings, the police also found Paul Cosner's ID,
and evidence that Brenda's best friend had
also perished.
So it was right in here that they found articles
of clothing belonging to some of our victims,
one of them being Scott Stapley.
He had a shirt that had his name Scott written
above the pocket.
The property was literally strewn with human bone
that had been burnt or crushed.
And this is a plot, or plot five, and in this
area it appeared that they would bring the ashes down
and just throw 'em out.
It took police eight weeks to sift through these
grizzly remains.
We found some teeth, we found some baby teeth,
so we knew there was, at least one child that had
been murdered as well.
We wound up with probably about 45 pounds of this
bone that could constitute as many as six or eight humans.
So, we knew that we had a large number of people
that had been killed.
At this point, only six identifiable bodies had
been found.
From the bones and other evidence, they estimated
at least another 17 victims.
They dug a big section like this out...
Three weeks later, the police found more bodies,
of two men, released into the woods, and then hunted
down for sport and shot as they tried to escape.
One of the bodies had handcuffs, had ligatures.
Both of these victims were shot.
And it was right down in this area that there were
tuffs of fabric and material on the ground
that had been dug up by predators, and that's
where the bodies of Lonnie Bond and Scott Stapley were found.
The pistol was shoved down his throat, and it was
rammed around, breaking all of his teeth out,
and then he was shot.
It just makes us shudder to think of the torture
and what he must have been going through.
Why did this have to happen to these people and
two men causing such tragedy in the lives of so
many people, and not just the family lives of the
victims but other people who were affected during
the investigation?
It's been hot and tedious....
For the victim's families, their fight for justice
was just beginning.
Many had no loved ones to bury.
The police had no suspects to question.
And the families' pain was being made all too public
by the media.
And my answer machine was blinking, and I turn it
on, and they said, uh, Mr. and Mrs. Stapley,
this is so-and-so from such-and-such television
station in San Francisco.
We would like to talk to you about your son Robin
and the murders in Calaveras County.
Our telephone number is blah-bla-bla-blah.
Please call us.
But today we have pictures, pictures that
will probably leave many....
We were watching the news one night and all of a sudden,
on the TV, there's my daughter sitting in the
chair, in shackles, and him cutting her clothes off,
and she was begging for the baby.
These are some of the bone fragments that have been found.
Pieces of human beings.
Investigators say there are countless...
And they just kept talking.
They showed their hands on the TV at night and they
would have marble-sized chunks of bone,
and you didn't know if it was Paul, you know.
But in nobody's wildest imagination did we expect
it to be this bad and this horrible.
The shocking discoveries at Wilseyville had left
the police with many questions,
and the victims' relatives reeling, desperate for justice.
But Lake was dead, and Cricket refused to give
any information without immunity.
That left Charles Ng, and he had vanished.
An international manhunt was underway.
Then on July 6, 1985, Ng attempted to shoplift from
the Hudson Bay Department Store Calgary in Canada.
He was arrested.
Within hours, FBI agents were in Calgary to verify
that this man was Charles Ng and to take him back to California.
But the Canadian Government refused to
expedite Ng to a State where he could face the
death penalty.
It took six years of campaigning by Sharon Sellitto
and other victims' relatives as well
as political wrangling between governments before
Ng faced an extradition hearing.
He doesn't have any rights.
He made a decision, and it was the wrong one,
and he deserves to suffer the consequences.
Once the expedition was granted, Ng was on a plane
back to California within the hour.
And I knew that they had this Ng taskforce all the time,
this whole six years that he'd been in Canada.
They were just gonna kind of have to pick him up and
dust him off and the process would begin.
And, um, that's not what happened.
The next seven years saw a succession of delays due
to mismanagement of the case and Ng turning
jailhouse lawyer.
Ng isn't even an American citizen, and he's managed
to use our legal system better and longer than any
criminal in the history of the United States that was
born here.
He, um, changed attorneys like he changed his socks.
Five teams of defense lawyers, seven judges,
and three trial start dates came and went.
Finally in 1994, Ng was given the lawyer that
would defend him at trial.
I was appointed Charles Ng's lawyer in November of 1994.
Immediately, I went up to
Calaveras County just to get a sense
of how large the file was, and I was, of course, dumbstruck.
Six tons of paper and machinery and bookshelves,
and all that.
Probably four tons paper.
That's what we estimated.
Ng had been charged with the murder of 12 of the 25
Wilseyville victims.
Kelley needed three years to prepare this huge case.
Then we realized that we had waited 14 years for a
trial that was a farce.
They had spent 20 million dollars, um, putting this together,
um, for what?
It was unbelievable.
It is ludicrous for this defendant to come to court
and ask for any release.
What we're looking at now is a motion for new trial...
Ng did everything he could to disrupt the trial.
He presented dozens of motions to the court,
including complaints of travel sickness and bad food.
I'm sorry, Mr. Ng appears to be sort of dozing off here.
Mr. Ng are you able to listen to what's going on?
No, I'm not able to concentrate, sir.
Why?
I'm real tired.
How much sleep did you get last night?
I stayed up all night.
Why?
I changed the motion of, these motions, sir.
You were working on the motions that you filed today?
Yes.
Not much to pack.
The last straw came when Ng telephoned a juror in
an effort to cause a mistrial.
After I found out that it was, in fact, Charles Ng
that had called me and had been able to reach out
from his cell and get into my house.
And it's scary.
He doesn't belong here.
I couldn't just leave it at court anymore.
It was at home with me now, and I resent that.
Leonard Lake clearly had a great deal of influence
over Mr. Ng...
The victims' relatives endured eight months of
horrific evidence and a defense case that
presented Lake as the manipulator and Ng merely
an accomplice.
The evidence fails to show that he was an actual killer.
The one person who knew the truth was not
questioned in the trial by either side for fear she
would damage their case.
But despite damning evidence, Cricket Balazs
had been given immunity on 19 counts of murder.
She knew what was going on.
I think she procured.
Girl, I think she lured people up there for them,
and I think, um, she was a willing participant, also.
Um... let's see.
We've talked about underage performers, and...
There's one particular conversation where Cricket
is actually seen looking at photographic albums of young girls.
...But I've seen some awfully cute-looking girls
- 14, 15 year olds that I .... watching them
do something interesting.
And they mention, uh, making some of the girls
at the school disappear at that time.
Cricket was a teacher's aide at a school.
I think it was a high school.
They're actually talking about making people disappear.
But the immunity agreement stood.
I mean, she, you know, they couldn't prove that
she lied, and so there it was, and so off she went.
So the prosecution could get Cricket Balazs to
court, but they could not risk questioning her on
the stand.
But they did have two pieces of evidence that
were damning proof of Ng's true roll in the
Wilseyville murders.
Now, unfortunately, Ng did a number of drawings, some
of which specifically were connected to the victims
in the trial.
As pieces of evidence, uh, they were not good from my
perspective.
What you have here is two individuals, and it
appears that what they are doing is they are dropping
this person into a fire.
We just don't want to believe that these two men
were capable of taking living human beings and
placing them into a fire, because we know from the
fourth picture that they were awake because they
were able to speak when they were placed in the fire.
Few of the victims' bodies were ever found.
Just the crushed bones from the many burn sites
scattered around the property.
However the evidence that finally proved Ng's guilt
to the jury was the M-Ladies tape.
Kathy Allen and then Brenda O'Connor were
kept prisoner in the bunker cell.
The videotape shows them brought to this room in Lake's house.
Their clothes were cut off at knifepoint.
They were threatened with rape, beatings, and the
death of their babies and themselves.
These tapes cannot be taken lock, stock,
and barrel the way it is.
This is like the three scenes of them.
You know, the first scene is Leonard Lake with Kathy Allen with me.
The second scene was a massage scene?
The third scene was Leonard Lake talking to,
uh, Kathy Allen when I'm not on the property at all.
The fourth scene is the Brenda O'Connor scene with Leonard Lake, me.
That's basically the totality of the tapes.
The tape that my daughter was on, it was a tape of torture.
Mental torture and him cutting her clothes off
and everything, had a truly big effect on the jury.
The one juror still has nightmares, still hears my
daughter's voice.
And Brenda just wanted to know where her baby was,
and they all sleep like a rock.
And laughing at her.
And making fun of her.
And then when they had her strip down to take her to
the shower, she got faint.
And Leonard Lake is over there, fondling her and
pretending to be nice to her and, oh, here, let me
help you, and it just made me sick.
It still makes me sick.
Just, the tape only lasts, I mean, the segment that I
was involved in only lasts, at the most, 20 minutes.
And the prosecution tries to tell the jury that this
20 minutes, this is the real Charles Ng.
But there's no doubt that, that Charles Ng enjoyed
what he did.
And in his drawings, the cartoons that he produced,
he does state in one of them, "No kill, no thrill,"
which would suggest that, for him, the enjoyment,
what he got out of the behavior that is
exhibited on M-Ladies was the thrill of control.
The trial they had waited 14 years for lasted eight
months, and in February 1999, the jury gave their
verdicts on 12 counts of murder.
For Sharon Sellitto, those verdicts proved a
devastating end to her long fight for justice.
Before they ever even started, my mother was
sitting there with her hands in her lap,
turned up, and the tears were just running down her face
and filling up her hands, and the court clerk got up
and read the verdicts.
We, the jury, in the above entitled case,
find the defendant, Charles Chi-Tat Ng, guilty...
They go, you know, "Count one."
and they go, "Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,
guilty, guilty."
and they'd say "Count two."
and go "Guilty..."
It was 11 murder one's.
And a mistrial on Paul, and I couldn't take it.
It was like 124 damn guilties and they couldn't
do one stinking guilty for Paul?
My name is David Douglass Bond, I'm the brother of
Lonnie Wayne Bond, and the uncle of Lonnie Wayne,
Jr. and, uh, brother-in-law of Brenda O'Connor.
In '85, Mr. Ng took their lives by murder, rape, and pillage.
Part of the punishment is listening to what you, to
the havoc that you have caused, the pain that
you've caused to the families, and that they
are your victims, too.
The baby was beautiful, and he loved his grandpa.
He followed him all over.
May God forgive me, but I want Charles Ng dead.
Everybody in that courtroom, every family
member was the victim of Charles Ng and Leonard Lake.
I don't have any fancy speech to give you.
I just wanted to come up here and stand before you
and tell you that my sister was loved and is
missed very, very much.
There are times, many times, Dwight and I cling to,
and hold each other, and silently scream for
the unendurable loss of our youngest son.
We sometimes cry for hours and hours with longing to
see our dear son, Scott, again.
No one should ever have to lose a child, especially
in such a sadistic manner.
Human beings deserve dignity in death.
Deborah, Harvey and Sean Dubs, Kathleen Allen,
Brenda O' Connor, Lonnie and Lonnie Bond Jr.,
Scott Stapley, Clifford Peranteu, Jeff Gerald,
Michael Carroll, and my brother deserve to live.
And Charles Ng, you deserve to die.
Charles Chi Tat Ng, it is the judgment and sentence
of this court that you shall be punished by death.
This penalty shall be inflicted within the walls
of the California State Prison in San Quentin,
California.
You may show up proud and fuck me, Judge.
Let alone the case is, Mr. Ng....
Charles Ng is now on death row in San Quentin Prison.
His execution is unlikely to happen within the next 15 years.
Leonard Lake is dead and has never been punished.
And Cricket Balazs is enjoying a new life in San Francisco.
Most of the victims' families have no remains
to bury and so have never been able to lay their
loved ones to rest.
Remarkably, some can draw hope from this terrible ordeal.
There have been good things happen to us all
the way through.
You know, people are good.
There's a saying that no matter how anything evil happens,
good will come of it.
And this has been just about as evil as anything can be,
and everything we've had is just as good
as anything could be.