Post by elantric on Oct 22, 2020 15:33:23 GMT -6
www.bizarrepedia.com/charles-ng/
Operation Miranda”
Sick couple tried to pull off the sick and twisted operation called Miranda.
Part of the operation was having sex slaves, video equipment and vicious torture and mutilation.
In 1985, a man named Charles Ng stole a vise from a hardware store in San Fransisco. The shopkeeper caught him on the act and alerted police. Charles ran away, but Leonard Lake, his closest friend at the time, decided later to go to the store and try to pay for the stolen vise. Police at the scene found Lake and his car suspicious — the license plates were registered to another vehicle, the ID he carried belonged to a missing man named Robin Stapley. He was arrested when the routine search revealed a gun with a suppressor lying in the trunk.
While in custody and true identity revealed, he swallowed cyanide pills hidden carefully beforehand in his clothes that sent him into convulsions and eventually killed him four days later. The strange incident led police to a ranch transformed into a house of horrors. The fortified bunker was with hoarded illegal weapons, dead bodies, video equipment and tapes with vicious torture and mutilation of women.
In his diary, filled with sexual fantasies of sex slaves he planned to keep in the nuker after a nuclear holocaust, he wrote:
“God meant woman for cooking, cleaning house and sex. And when they are not in use, they should be locked up.”
The rules hanged on the wall of the bunker the female victims had to obey.
Leonard Lake
Lake’s childhood was anything but normal. Despite being a bright child, he enjoyed dissolving small animals in chemicals — a technique he later used to dispose of human victims. He was brought up by his grandmother, had sexual relationships with his sisters whom he liked to take nude photographs, apparently with the encouragement of his grandmother that was raising him.
After high school, he joined the military as a marine and served in Vietnam where he was first diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. After 7 years in service, he was given a medical discharge because of his fragile mental state.
Living in San Francisco, he was involved in hippie lifestyle where he became increasingly obsessed with the idea of coming nuclear holocaust. In a hippie commune near Ukiah in California, he met Claralyn Balazsm who starred in pornographic movies Lake started to produce. Eventually, they got married. It was the second marriage for Lake. His first wife left him when she found out he was shooting and appearing in amateur porn involving bondage and sadomasochism.
Charles Ng
Charles was born in Hong Kong to a wealthy and disciplined Chinese family. From a young age, he was unable to refrain himself from the urge for stealing. He was 15 when he was expelled from school in North Yorkshire, England for stealing and returned to Hong Kong.
In 1978, at the age of 18, he moved to the United States on a student visa and studied biology in a College located in California, but dropped out after just one semester. At that time, he first met Leonard Lake, was involved in a hit-and-run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps using false documents, claiming he was born in the United States.
Charles was unable to refrain from the urge for stealing; just after a year in service, he was arrested by the military police for stealing automatic weapons. And again trying to avoid the prosecution, he made his way back to Northern California to meet Lake, where he was arrested for a stash of illegal weapons and explosives. He pleaded guilty, and under a plea deal he was dishonorably discharged and paroled after spending 18 months in the military stockade.
• • •
Lake’s favorite pastime hobby was collecting pornography, automatic weapons, and video equipment. He owned a cabin deep in the Sierra Nevada, California. It was a gift from his parents as a future retirement home, but Lake had a very different idea how to use the remote cabin — he transformed it into a house of horrors where he can keep sex slaves and prepare for the nuclear holocaust.
After serving his time in the military prison, Charles immediately contacted Lake. Both men had (failed) military and criminal history, interest in perverted sex and torture. It didn’t take long until Lake invited Charles to join him to enjoy the custom-built dungeon next to the cabin.
Lake had already started his killing spree murdered his brother Donald and his friend Charles Gunnar. The motive was money and need for a new identity.
House of horrors: The custom-built bunker.
“Operation Miranda”
Over the years, Lake had managed to construct an elaborate underground dungeon next to the cabin. This dungeon became the place where Lake and Ng would hold their victims while they tortured and raped them (sometimes for months on end). After they were done torturing these poor souls, they killed them.
www.youtube.com/user/earthconfidential/videos
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In the video, Charles tells his victim Brenda O’Connor, “You can cry and stuff, like the rest of them, but it won’t do any good. We are pretty… cold-hearted, so to speak.”
An undated photo of Leonard Lake, probably taken at the time he was constructing the nuclear bunker.
The victims, from top left: Don Guiletti, Kathleen Allen, Michael Carroll, Robin Scott Stapley. Randy Johnson, Charles Gunnar, Donald Lake (brother of Charles Lake) and Paul Cosner.
The End
Lake dead, Charles was on the run once again, this time to Canada where he spent five long years fighting against his extradition to the United States.
Ironically, he was busted in Canada for shoplifting. Again. Trying to resist the arrest, he shot the security guard in hand. He spent four and a half years in prison before he was extradited back to the United States to face 12 counts of first-degree murder charges.
Security guard Sean Doyle was shot in the hand as he detained Charles in a Hudson Bay store.
His trial finally began after six years. While both, the defence and State’s prosecutor were preparing, Charles kept the court system busy with complaining about things like the strength of eyeglasses, temperature food, right to practice origami and demanding for new attorneys.
He decided to represent himself, delaying the process another year while he was busy researching the law. The prosecution was the most expensive trial in the history of the State of California — $20 million of taxpayers money. Charles remains on death row in the biggest and State’s oldest prison in San Quentin. San Quentin has a gas chamber, but since 90’s the execution method is lethal injection.
www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-aug-17-mn-13936-story.html
Old memories--13 years old. But with Charles Ng set to go to trial in two weeks in Orange County for allegedly torturing and murdering a dozen people in one of the state’s most horrific murder sprees, many here see their best chance to finally put the memories to rest.
“It used to be, people thought of Calaveras County and they thought of Mark Twain, frog-jumping and not much else,” said county Administrative Officer Brent Harrington. “But now there’s Charles Ng. . . . It never goes away. It’s absolutely absurd. People just want this to be over.”
The agonizing years of legal delays in trying Ng (pronounced “Eng”), now 37, have only deepened the community’s wounds and fueled its bitterness.
The delays are now notorious, chronicled faithfully by small local papers in the Sierra foothills and blared reproachfully on network TV shows as an outrageous example of a legal system run amok. Some of the victims’ relatives have sat through more than 70 hearings. The death penalty case, which has generated more than six tons of paperwork, is considered one of the longest-running and most expensive in the state’s judicial history.
The case has been plagued by years-long extradition battles, elaborate security measures, fired defense lawyers, accidentally destroyed evidence and a transfer to Orange County in 1994 because of pretrial publicity in Calaveras County. There has been an endless stream of legal arguments and delays over such mundane issues as the strength of the defendant’s eyeglasses, the temperature of his lunches and his right to practice origami--the Japanese art of paper-folding--in his jail cell.
Justice System Faulted
The laborious case has included all that and more--at a cost to state and Calaveras County taxpayers of $9.5 million and rising--and there are still many here who doubt that it will go to trial this time, no matter what the lawyers say.
“The real injustice here is the justice system,” said Tad Folendorf, mayor of the only incorporated city, Angels Camp, in a rustic county of 36,500. “This should have been over and done with long ago. . . . The drain on public funds, that’s almost a crime in itself.”
The biggest villain here in the Mother Lode region was once a legendary Gold Rush-era robber nicknamed “Black Bart,” a romanticized figure who held up more than two dozen stagecoaches at gunpoint in the late 1800s and sometimes left poems for his victims.
Then came the morbid discoveries of that first week in June 1985. This time, there was nothing romantic about the crimes or the alleged murderers, who authorities said sadistically tortured and killed at least 19 random victims from the Bay Area and the local community before burning and dismembering their bodies and burying them in the accused’s yard.
It was the routine arrest of Ng’s alleged accomplice, Leonard Lake, that set the case in motion. The 39-year-old survivalist was picked up in South San Francisco for stealing a $75 vise from a lumberyard. Once in custody, he swallowed a cyanide pill while police weren’t looking and died a few days later.
Ng was at the lumberyard too, police said, but the ex-Marine fled the scene and remained on the lam. Investigators managed to track Lake’s steps back to a rural home where he and Ng allegedly lived in the Calaveras County town of Wilseyville, population 500. They were shocked to discover the remnants of a brutal killing spree over the previous year.
On the sloping grounds of the modest two-bedroom home, investigators would unearth 45 pounds of charred bone fragments and teeth, along with jewelry, torn clothing, Lake’s rambling diary, a body in a sleeping bag and a videotape showing two women being tortured. A cinder-block bunker, thought to have been used as a torture chamber, stood as a symbol of the madness.
Nightmare Unfolds
Terry Parker, who doubles as the elected coroner and the operator of the area’s only two mortuaries, remembers the grim beginnings of the search.
“When that first started, we didn’t have a clue what we were getting into,” he said in an interview. But then more and more evidence kept turning up--a bone here, a shoe there, an entire body in a ditch. “It got to the point where you were thinking: ‘Am I walking on [someone’s remains] now? There could be more under every rock. How much longer could this go on?’ ”
In a county that suffers perhaps a handful of murders in a bad year, he said, “we’d never seen anything like this. . . . It was amazing.”
For weeks, shellshocked residents asked: Where is Ng? Will he be back?
“I think it startled a lot of people out of their feelings of security around here,” said California Highway Patrol Officer Bill Claudino. “People started locking their doors and listening for noises and wondering who lives next door. You still see that.”
A month after the first remains were discovered, Ng was captured in Calgary, Canada, when he tried to shoplift a soda. That ended a worldwide manhunt, but it began the 13-year marathon to his trial date next month.
Because Canada does not have a death penalty, it took a ruling by that nation’s highest court six years later, in 1991, to force Ng’s extradition.
Ng’s return to California triggered a legal proceeding at Calaveras County’s small, rural courthouse that was unprecedented in its security and celebrity.
Ng was driven in from Folsom State Prison with a helicopter escort for a cavalcade of pretrial hearings that would span three years. Spectator spots were at a premium--"You had to know someone,” Harrington recalls--and the county had to find a portable metal-detector to use for onlookers because of security concerns spurred by the communitywide animosity toward Ng.
Armed officers stood watch on the roof of the courthouse, and Cheryl Scheftner, who owns a Western-style clothes store in town, remembers her surprise at how aggressively she and other potential jurors were searched as they strolled into court for duty.
“They were real concerned that someone would sneak in and try to kill [Ng],” she said. “He probably wasn’t 10 feet away from me in court. It gave me the chills just to be that close to him.”
Bolstering the argument for transferring the case to Orange County, one defense survey several years ago found an extraordinary 98% of Calaveras County’s residents familiar with the case--with half believing Ng is guilty.
If the acidic sentiments of the diners at Station 49 in San Andreas one recent morning are any indication, those feelings haven’t softened much today.
The mere mention of Ng’s name evoked bitter profanities as the breakfast crowd, made up mostly of graying miners and retired laborers, lingered over the morning’s eggs and coffee.
“You want justice?” asked one diner in a weathered Raiders cap. “Let ‘em bring him back up here [from Orange County] and see what happens. We’ll give him justice.”
Seventy-two-year-old Charlie Segale chimed in: “People in Calaveras County just want to hang him and get it done with.”
At the counter, 63-year-old diner owner Schell was more thankful than vengeful.
He remembers answering Lake’s ad for car parts a few weeks before the murder spree was discovered, talking to Lake and checking out a few of his cars on the property. The killers had allegedly used advertisements to meet several victims.
“It was pretty scary to think I could’ve been one of the victims,” Schell said. “Those guys touched a lot of people around here.”
Touched more than most are the people around the murder scene in Wilseyville, a sparsely populated, downtrodden area that boasts mock street signs like “Poverty Lane” near the general store, the post office and the dump at the center of town.
A Lingering Presence
Some locals are so tired of the infamy that the subject has become taboo, and they shoo away the passersby who inevitably seek a glimpse of the tree-shrouded murder scene. A thick, padlocked gate and a “Keep Out” sign buffer the desolate site, and townspeople say they aren’t even sure who, if anyone, lives there now.
“We just try to forget it,” said Shirley Brown, who runs the general store in Wilseyville.
In nearby San Andreas, waitress Patty Hook says she can’t even drive through that area without “getting the creeps. . . . Just the word Wilseyville, when I hear that, I go uuugh.”
Schembri, a jack-of-all-trades whose car shop sits just a few miles down the road, summed up the attitude of many when he said: “Enough is enough. Everyone just wants an end to this whole thing.”
That could come next month if Ng’s trial gets underway in Orange County as planned. But first there is a pretrial hearing Friday, and Ng--acting as his own lawyer--will be making a new run at an old theme: He wants the trial delayed six months.
The 13-Year Trek to Trial
July 1984-May 1985: At least 12 people in Northern California disappear.
June 2, 1985: Leonard Lake, 39, is arrested at a Bay Area lumberyard for shoplifting and dies a few days later, after ingesting a cyanide pill while in custody. Charles Ng, 24, flees the lumberyard.
June, 1985: Lake’s arrest leads authorities to a rural home in the foothills of Calaveras County that he and Ng allegedly shared. There they find the buried remains of at least 19 people that allegedly had been tortured, killed, dismembered and burned.
July, 1985: Ng is captured in Canada after shoplifting a soda.
September 1991: After years of international haggling, the Canadian Supreme Court allows Ng to be extradited to California to stand trial in the capital case, even though Canada does not have a death penalty.
October 1992: Ng files a $1-million civil malpractice lawsuit against two of his U.S. lawyers.
September 1994: The case is moved to Orange County because of extensive pretrial publicity in Calaveras County. Bankrupt Orange County would later worry that it can’t afford the litigation’s hidden costs, but the case has remained there under an agreement that calls for the county to be reimbursed by the state and Calaveras County.
May 1997: In the latest in a wide-ranging series of motions by Ng over his accommodations, an Orange County judge rules that the defendant may not do origami paper-folding in jail because of the possibility that contraband will be smuggled to him in the paper.
October 1997: It is disclosed that key evidence, including bullets and blood samples, was accidentally destroyed by San Francisco police who mistakenly listed the case as closed. The prosecution would later suffer another setback when a key witness is killed in a car accident.
June 1998: Ng debuts as his own attorney in Orange County after fighting to remove numerous court-appointed lawyers over the years. He wins a one-month delay after complaining about bad eyeglasses.
Sept. 1, 1998: Ng is scheduled to stand trial on charges of murdering 12 people.
