Ng Video Testimony
Two women who were among Charles Ng's alleged murder victims took center stage
at his trial yesterday -- appearing on chilling videotapes in which they are bound,
terrorized and threatened with sexual enslavement or death.
In one clip, Ng taunts his victim and uses a knife to cut off her bra. As the sequence was
shown in the courtroom, several members of the mostly female jury blanched.
The jury also was shown a short clip in which Ng's alleged crime partner, Leonard Lake,
describes his plan to capture young women and hold them as sexual slaves in special cells
built in the basement of his home.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed in their opening statements that the murders Ng
is accused of were the product of a hideous plot, but they differed on who committed them.
Ng's defenders said the slayings were Lake's work and that Ng was not directly involved.
Prosecutors portrayed Ng as a planner and willing participant in the slayings.
Proving which version is true will be complicated by the fact that Lake committed suicide
in 1985, shortly after he was arrested by South San Francisco police at the beginning of
the investigation. Nevertheless, his presence will be felt in the courtroom in coming days
through portions of his diary and homemade videotapes that will be introduced as evidence.
As 12 jurors and six alternates listened intently in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the
Orange County Courthouse, both sides argued that the victims -- seven men, three women and
two children -- were ``collected'' in accordance with the ``Miranda Diaries,'' a journal
Lake wrote over several years.
``These 12 people disappeared off the face of the earth,'' said state Deputy Attorney
General Sharlene Honnaka, who is prosecuting Ng with Calaveras County District Attorney
Peter Smith. ``Leonard Lake and Charles Ng planned and committed the murders charged in
this case.''
Two of the victims were the unwilling stars of horrific homemade videotape clips Honnaka
played for jurors during her opening statement. In one, Kathleen Allen, her hands
tied tightly behind her back, stares wide-eyed as Lake, who is off-camera, gives her an
ultimatum in a voice devoid of emotion: agree to become a slave to Lake and Ng or ``we
will probably put a round in your head.''
``If you don't go along with this, we're going to take you into the bed, tie you down,
shoot you and bury you,'' Lake says as the young woman sits in obvious
terror.
In another segment, Lake tells a bound Brenda O'Connor, ``You will work for us, you will
cook for us, you will f-- for us . . . or we'll take you outside, rape you and shoot
you.''
After O'Connor agrees, Ng, stripped to the waist, walks into the frame of the videotape,
tears off the red-and-white baseball shirt she is wearing, then uses a large folding knife
to cut off her brassiere.
``You can cry and stuff like all the rest of them,'' Ng says as he unties her hands, ``but
it won't do you any good. We're pretty cold- hearted.''
William Kelley, an assistant Orange County public defender who is representing Ng,
portrayed the crimes as solely the work of Leonard Lake, a man he said was obsessed with
``The Collector,'' a psychological thriller written by British novelist John Fowles.
He read passages from Lake's diaries that show his fixation on the book and his
determination to follow its lead by collecting his own group of sexual slaves.
``The challenge of this project, the excitement, the thrill if it succeeds -- even the
excitement if it fails and I get caught -- is very attractive,'' Kelley quoted Lake's
journal as saying.
Perhaps the most unsettling video clip was played for jurors by Ng's own lawyers. In the
short segment, Lake, sitting in a recliner chair, calmly and dispassionately describes his
plan to enslave young women.
``What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner,'' he says, his face devoid of expression.
``I want to be able to use a woman any way I want. And when I'm bored . . . I want to be
able to simply put her away.''
Kelley acknowledged that prosecutors will present a mountain of evidence showing that the
12 victims were kidnapped and killed but argued that none of it is directly connected to
Ng.
He pointed out that Lake is believed to have killed at least four other people, including
his own brother, during a two-year period when Ng was being held in a military prison in
the early 1980s.
Suggesting that Lake killed all the victims himself, Kelley said Ng may have known about
Lake's crimes but did not help him commit them.
``I'm not saying that Charles Ng is an angel,'' Kelley said. ``He's certainly not that.
That's apparent. But he's charged with murder here, remember -- ending people's lives, not
cutting off their clothes.''
The opening statements were almost anticlimactic, considering that it has taken 13 years
for the case to come to trial. The prosecution took only 45 minutes to outline the
evidence it hopes to present, and the defense side took only five minutes longer. In early
afternoon, the first of what promises to be a parade of witnesses took the stand, and the
prosecution began to reconstruct the history of the case for jurors.
As described in testimony by two South San Francisco police officers, the string of
homicides came to light in June 1985 as the result of a bungled attempt to shoplift a vise
from a building supply store in South San Francisco. Ng, who was trying to steal the tool,
got away, but Lake was detained by police.
They found that Lake was using the driver's license and credit cards of Scott Stapley, who
was later identified as one of the murder victims. The license plate on his vehicle was
that of Lonnie Bonds Sr., another alleged victim, and the car itself belonged to Paul
Cosner, a man who had disappeared from his San Francisco home seven months earlier.
After officers arrested him and took him to the South San Francisco police station, Lake
killed himself by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Investigators found evidence in the car he
was driving that helped them track Lake and Ng back to a small compound in Calaveras
County, where they began to uncover evidence of the slayings.
After Lake's capture, Ng made his way to Canada, where he was arrested after trying to
steal merchandise from a Calgary department store. He was confined to a Canadian prison
for the attempted robbery and was extradited upon his release in 1991.
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1