Charles Ng

Charles Chi-tat Ng (born Ng Chi-tat) (born 24 December 1960) is a convicted Hong Kong-born serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States.

Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978 and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.

He dropped out after one semester.

Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

Ng joined the Marines in October 1979 with the help, he claimed, of a recruiting sergeant and false documents attesting to his birthplace as Bloomington, Indiana.

After less than a year of service, he was arrested by military police for stealing automatic weapons from the Kaneohe Bay base armory.

Facing court-martial, Ng escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California, where he met Leonard Lake.

When confronted by the employee, Ng tossed the vise into the trunk of a 1980 Honda Prelude in the parking lot, then fled on foot.

The police arrived minutes later.

An officer looked into the car's trunk and saw the stolen vise along with a .22 caliber pistol equipped with an illegal silencer.

Lake asserted there was a misunderstanding and that he had paid for the vise; he was arrested for possessing the illegally modified weapon.

The arresting officer noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his California driver's license, which bore the name of Robin Scott Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier.

In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home Ng and Lake shared in Ukiah, seizing a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives.

Lake was released on bond, but he jumped bail and hid at a remote cabin owned by his wife, Claralyn Balazs, in Wilseyville, a community in Calaveras County located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Ng was captured and returned to Marine custody and pleaded guilty to the charges of theft and desertion.

He is believed to have raped, tortured, and murdered between eleven and twenty-five victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, 60 miles (96 km) from Sacramento, between 1983 and 1985.

After his arrest and imprisonment in Canada on robbery and weapons charges, followed by a lengthy dispute between Canada and the U.S., Ng was extradited to California, tried, and convicted of eleven murders.

He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Charles Ng was born as Ng Chi-tat in British Hong Kong, the youngest of three children and only son of a wealthy Hongkonger executive and his wife.

As a child, Ng was harshly disciplined and abused by his father.

As a teenager, he was described as a troubled loner and was expelled from several schools.

After his arrest for shoplifting at age 15, he went, at his father's insistence, to Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in North Yorkshire, England.

Not long after arriving, Ng was expelled for stealing from other students and returned to Hong Kong.

Before Ng's arrival, Lake is believed to have already murdered his brother Donald, whom he lured to the cabin and shot in his sleep in 1983, and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar.

Under the terms of this plea deal, he was paroled and dishonorably discharged in 1984 after serving eighteen months in the military stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

After his release from Leavenworth, Ng rejoined Lake, who was still living at the Wilseyville cabin.

By then, Lake and Balazs had divorced but remained on good terms.

Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon."

In July 1984, an Asian American man broke into and robbed the apartment of Don Giulietti, a San Francisco disc jockey, and his roommate, Richard Carrazza, shooting both men in the process.

Giulietti died in the attack, but Carrazza, the only known survivor victim of either Lake or Ng, later identified Ng as his assailant.

Soon afterward, Ng managed to get a job at a Bay Area moving company.

The duo's rampage would have gone on longer were it not for Ng's kleptomania.

The Honda was registered to Paul Cosner, who disappeared from San Francisco on November 2, 1984, after leaving his apartment to show the car to someone interested in purchasing it.

The car's license plate was registered to yet another missing person, Lonnie Bond, of Wilseyville.

The gun was registered to Stapley.

On June 2, 1985, Lake and Ng entered the South City Lumber Store in South San Francisco.

An employee observed Ng stealing a $75 vise and called the police.

Gunnar's body was unearthed from the Wilseyville property in 1998.

Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of kidnapping and murder of men, women, and children.

According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately, whereas they subjected women to a period of enslavement, rape, and torture before killing them.