THE CHAMBER
PAGE 8 OF 8
| "The dumb bastard walked right into our f***ing arms. We let him scream and squeal for a while. Then we wasted him." |
hether intentional or not, Ng's choice of Canada as a sanctuary was a clever
one. With no death penalty itself, the country had a known policy of resisting
extradition for accused criminals facing the death penalty in the U.S. Ng was
tried in Canada for shoplifting and assault and sentenced to four and a half
years in prison. He would not be allowed to return to the U.S. until he had
served his Canadian sentence, and some of the country's highest officials
believed he should never be allowed to leave unless American prosecutors
agreed not to seek the death penalty. A long legal battle began, during which
Ng studied books on American law while sitting in his Canadian prison cell.
Immediately after his arrest, Ng was interviewed in a Calgary police station by San Francisco police officers. He blamed Lake for most of the Wilseyville killings, and according to court documents released in 1988, he admitted to helping dispose of Paul Cosner's body.
"After being advised of his Miranda rights, Ng admitted that he met Lake in Cosner's Honda on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco," said a 1986 affidavit filed by one of the officers. "Ng stated that he (Lake) had just shot Cosner, whose body was in the car."
During the extradition battle between American and Canadian officials in 1989, news reports surfaced about a series of grisly drawings Ng had created in prison. The drawings have not been released to the public, but sources said they contain details that only someone intimately familiar with the Wilseyville killings would have been able to produce.
One of them was reportedly titled, "25 Years Later," and pictured Ng sitting in his prison cell surrounded by drawings of the people he had killed, with their names written above each picture. Another reportedly depicted the parents of Ng's victims leaving a coroner's office, carrying away the remains of their children in body bags.
An identified man who said he met Ng while serving time at Fort Leavenworth told reporters that he had spoken to the suspect several times on the phone in 1984 and 1985, conversations in which Ng allegedly described his killing spree and asked for advice about how to conveniently dispose of human bodies. The man said Ng told him that he and Lake had once played a game in which they released a prisoner and then hunted him down like an animal. "They let him think he was getting away," the man said. "Ng laughed and said, 'The dumb bastard walked right into our fucking arms.' He was all proud of that. He told me: 'We let him scream and squeal for a while. Then we wasted him.'"
Finally, after six years of wrangling, American officials succeeded in extraditing Ng on Sept. 26, 1991 when the Canadian Supreme Court turned down Ng's final plea to remain in the country on a 4 to 3 vote. Minutes later, Ng was whisked onto a plane and flown to McClellan Air Force Base, after which he was transferred to Folsom State Prison near Sacramento. The transfer happened so quickly that his Canadian lawyer never had a chance to phone him. But the legal headaches were far from over. The ensuing four years have seen dozens of hearings over such matters of changes of attorneys and the location of the trial. One defense team performed a survey that indicated 98 percent of the people in Calaveras County were familiar with the Ng case and more than half believed he was guilty, making it nearly impossible to find a completely impartial jury locally.
Further slowing matters was Ng himself, who apparently used his time well in Canada to bone up on American law. He filed a $1 million malpractice suit against his own attorneys, claiming they were incompetent, and even filed a motion to represent himself. He changed his mind after the judge gave him a week to think it over.
He also filed actions against the state because of the conditions of his confinement. He claimed that he was forced to take carsickness medication to endure the 50-mile van ride from Folsom to San Andreas to appear in court, and the drugs made him too sleepy to participate effectively in the pretrial proceedings. Even the condition of his prison-issue food on court days‹he claimed his cheese puffs were too soft‹became the subjects of a lawsuit. "The problem is, we may all be old and dead before this case comes to trial," said one Superior Court judge after rejecting Ng's request for new attorneys.
Ng's motions reached the California Supreme Court at least five times, and a dozen judges have presided over his case in the U.S.
Finally, on April 8, 1994, a judge in San Andreas ordered the case transferred to Orange County. Even that move became controversial, however, because a financial crisis forced the county to file for bankruptcy protection in December of that year, and county supervisors claimed it would be impossible to hold the costly trial in Santa Ana. They were later mollified when state officials agreed to pay the entire tab.
Charles Ng celebrated his 34th birthday in jail on Christmas Eve, 1995, having spent more than a third of his life in prison. One wonders what went wrong with a person like Ng, whether something happened to him during his upbringing or he was simply some kind of freakish birth defect, a child born without a conscience. Dangerous enough alone, through some dark cosmic accident he befriended a man who would teach him to set free any of his remaining inhibitions against murder.
The Vietnam War and a loveless childhood might be partially held to blame for the creation of the monster that was Leonard Lake, but there's no telling who or what is to blame for Charles Ng. [1996]
Editor;s Note: In the spring of 1999 Charles Ng was sentenced to death by a judge of the Santa Ana Superior Court following a trial in which his primary defense was that he had acted entirely under Lake's overwhelming influence. The sentence will likely face a series of appeals lasting at least several more years..
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