California Supreme Court Affirms Death Penalty for Sadistic Serial Killer Charles Ng
California court upholds expiry penalty for Charles Ng in '80s sex slave murders
The serial killer was captured by two security guards in downtown Calgary on July 6, 1985
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The California Supreme Courtroom on Th upheld the conviction and decease penalisation for one of two men implicated in at to the lowest degree 11 notorious 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 afterwards, authorities are still trying to identify the remains of some of their victims.
Charles Ng, at present 61, was convicted in 1999 of killing vi men, 3 women and ii baby boys in 1984 and 1985. He was initially defendant of 13 slayings — 12 in Calaveras Canton and i in San Francisco.
Ng was captured in Calgary onorth July half dozen, 1985, during Stampede week, when Sean Doyle, a teacher who moonlighted as a security guard at the Hudson'due south Bay shop in downtown Calgary, spotted Ng stealing a tin can of salmon. Doyle followed Ng out into a crowded street, where he and another security guard attempted to arrest the mass killer. During a tussle, Ng shot Doyle through the hand, permanently damaging his middle finger. Despite the wound, the shoplifter was subdued until police arrived.
Ng 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 i of those stories that'south been passed down through time in this customs," said Calaveras County Lt. Greg Stark, whose father worked for the department at the fourth dimension of the slayings. "There'due south been wild estimates and in that location's been conservative estimates, and honestly I don't think everyone will ever know, due to how they were disposing of the bodies."
Ng and Lake held their victims in a remote 2 1/2-acre Sierra Nevada fenced chemical compound near 241 kilometres eastward of San Francisco. Information technology included a bunker with iii rooms, two of them behind a subconscious doorway. One hidden, locked room was furnished like a prison cell, with a bed covered with a cream pad, a plastic bucket and a roll of toilet paper.
Lake killed himself with a cyanide sheathing after police force arrested him for shoplifting in San Francisco in 1985 and were questioning him before whatever bodies were found.
The justices said in a detailed 181-page analysis of the case that Ng received a off-white trial, including a change of venue from Calaveras County to Orange County because of pretrial publicity.
It was i of California'due south longest and virtually expensive trials at the time, costing millions of dollars, partly because the court said Ng repeatedly attempted to delay and disrupt his ain trial. That included extended debates over whether he could represent himself and who would exist his attorneys.
The justices also unanimously concluded that Ng was properly extradited after he fled to Canada. He fought extradition for six years before the Supreme Courtroom of Canada ordered him returned.
The men incriminated themselves with videotapes of them tormenting jump, terrified women they used as sexual activity slaves before their murders.
Jurors were shown a tape of one woman pleading in vain for the men to spare her husband and infant equally Ng cutting off her shirt and bra with a pocketknife in front end of the photographic camera.
Investigators also discovered piles of charred basic, blood-stained tools, shallow graves and a 250-page diary kept past Lake.
4 law enforcement agencies spent v weeks scouring the property, according to the court's detailed description.
They found thousands of cached teeth and bone fragments throughout the property, with at least four of the dental specimens belonging to a child under age three. "Many hundreds" of the bone fragments had been burned.
Two forensic anthropologists eventually concluded that the remains belonged to at to the lowest degree four adults, ane child and one infant. Two men were found in a shallow grave non far from the property. They had been jump, gagged and fatally shot.
Officials in Calaveras County terminal year exhumed boosted bones and other human remains from a crypt in a cemetery where they had been kept since Ng's conviction, in hopes that modern DNA tracing could reveal their identities.
They are initially hopeful that enough viable DNA is left for a comparison, said Stark, simply the Section of Justice hasn't yet been able to run the comparisons, in part considering of more urgent active cases.
Investigators plan to compare the Dna to that from co-operating next of kin of the known victims, and run it through Deoxyribonucleic acid databases in hopes of a comparison.
"Regardless if there are 11 (slayings) or more than 11, we're hoping to categorize the remains and if possible return them to the families to give them their due respect and interment," Stark said. "If we find boosted identifications, we'll definitely look into them and their connectedness to the instance."
Ng joined the Marine Corps later he came to the U.s. from Hong Kong. He earlier was imprisoned at Leavenworth, Kan., for weapons theft while serving in the Marine Corps.
He and his defence attorneys argued that he was under the influence of Lake, an older human and survivalist who they said engineered the serial slayings. Ng denied participating in many of the crimes.
His attorneys argued at the time that Ng was shaped as a child, when he was browbeaten by his male parent.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on the capital punishment so long equally he is governor, and Ng however has the possibility of other federal appeals.
Source: https://calgaryherald.com/news/crime/california-court-upholds-death-penalty-for-charles-ng-in-80s-sex-slave-murders
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