California court upholds death penalty for Hong Kong-born serial killer Charles Ng in 1980s sex slave murders
- Charles Ng was sentenced in 1999 to die for the brutal murders of 11 people in a killing rampage in 1984 and 1985
- Ng has denied participating in many of the crimes, and said he was under the influence of his criminal partner
The California Supreme Court has upheld the conviction and death penalty for one of two men implicated in at least 11 notorious horrific torture-slayings in the mid-1980s in which the duo kept their victims hidden in a secret bunker in the Northern California woods.
Thirty-seven years later, authorities are still trying to identify the remains of some of their victims.
Hong Kong-born Charles Ng, now 61, was convicted in 1999 of killing six men, three women and two baby boys in 1984 and 1985. He was initially accused of 13 slayings – 12 in Calaveras County and one in San Francisco.
He and his criminal partner, Leonard Lake, committed a series of kidnappings in which they engaged in bondage and sadism ending in murder. They were initially suspected of killing up to 25 people.
“This is one of those stories that’s been passed down through time in this community,” said Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Greg Stark, whose father worked for the department at 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 remote 2½-acre Sierra Nevada fenced compound about 240km (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 bed covered with a foam pad, a plastic bucket and a roll of toilet paper.