All language subtitles for Episode 04 Charles Ng and Leonard Lake

-On June 2, 1985,

police were called
to a lumberyard in San Francisco

to apprehend a shoplifter.

When they got there,

the suspect,
Charles Ng, had fled;

but his partner, Leonard Lake,
was still at the scene.

-Lake and Ng are a dominant
and subservient pair

of lust killers,

one having the lust fantasy;

the other, going along
with the lust fantasy.

-Leonard Lake was arrested.

Then, in custody,

he swallowed a cyanide pill
and died

before he could answer

for his crimes.

-Leonard Lake becomes obsessed

with having women
as his sex slaves,

keeping women in an enclave.

-Investigators soon discover

that Lake and Ng
had a sinister secret.

They were, in fact,

a serial-killing duo

with a hidden bunker
where they kidnapped,

raped, tortured, and murdered

men, women, and children.

-The horror that
they go through,

when you actually
see it on video,

to actually see a woman

begging for her baby
and asking for her baby.

-Serial-killing partners
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng

had carved their names in infamy

as two of the
world's most evil killers.

-It was a serial-killing spree
that horrified a nation

and terrified the citizens
of San Francisco, California.

In just 11 months, between
July 1984 and June 1985,

friends, neighbors,
and entire families --

women, men, and children --
vanished without a trace.

In that time,

11 innocent people
were later proved

to have been
kidnapped and killed.

Many were also
tortured and raped

by the serial-killing pair

Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

-Team serial killers make up
around a quarter

of the serial murder cases
in the U.S.,

but the difference,
with Ng and Lake,

is that this particular
serial-killing team

got away with a lot of murders
before they were apprehended.

-The MO was this:

They would answer
an ad in a paper.

Usually, the ad was for some
merchandise that they needed.

They would kidnap whoever
was selling the merchandise,

take the merchandise,

use the woman
for their sexual pleasure.

They would make her a slave
and, whoever the man was

that was with her
would be summarily killed.

-When investigators searched

the killers' cabin in the
Northern Californian woods,

they found what they thought
to be the remains

of at least 11 corpses

that had been buried
in shallow graves.

Ed Erdelatz was with

the San Francisco
Police Department at the time.

-I spent 23 years
of my career in homicide,

worked a lotta murder cases,

but this is right
at the top of the list

of being one
of the most difficult

to deal with personally.

These two were

incredibly cold.

They really didn't care
and the way that they treated

their victims:
they humiliated them;

they tortured them.

This was what
they thought was fun.

The story

of the serial-killing duo began

just over 70 years ago,

in 1945.

The elder of the pair,

Leonard Lake,
was born in the wake

of World War II.

Lake had a troubled childhood.

-His family have got a history
of working the U.S. Navy.

They move around a lot.

There's quite a lot of
volatility in the family unit,

quite a lot of drinking.

-Age 6,
Lake's parents separated

and he and his siblings

were sent to live
with their grandparents.

There, his grandmother allegedly
encouraged some lewd behavior.

-He, as a boy,

had been encouraged
by his grandmother

to take naked pictures
of his sisters

and I think that this
gave him this fixation

that meant that he was always,

to some extent,
wanted to manipulate women.

-As a young man,
Lake developed his own,

unhealthy urges.

-Leonard Lake identified
with a book by John Fowles

called "The Collector,"
which was written in 1963,

and basically the story of
"The Collector" was a clerk

called Frederick Clegg.

He collected butterflies

and, for some reason,

suddenly developed a fixation
on a girl called Miranda

and decides to abduct Miranda,

so that she becomes part
of his butterfly collection.

-Lake becomes obsessed

with having women
as his sex slaves,

keeping women in an enclave
that he's gonna develop

'cause he's going to survive
a nuclear Armageddon.

-In 1965, age 19,

Lake joined
the U.S. Marine Corps

and served two tours

in the Vietnam War
as a radar operator.

-I think it tipped him
over the edge,

the possibility that he would
find himself in close combat,

fighting,
and, essentially, he snapped,

and that was the genesis

of the man that became,
really, a ferocious killer.

-In 1971,

Lake was diagnosed with
schizoid personality disorder

and was given
a medical discharge.

He reemerged in San Francisco,

where he began to explore
his dark fantasies.

-He married in San Francisco
in 1975.

His wife, finally,

couldn't stand him because
he made amateur porn films,

a lot of sadomasochism,
a lot of bondage.

His wife was very upset by that
and effectively threw him out.

-In 1977,

still in the
San Francisco Bay area,

Lake met his second wife.

Nicknamed Cricket, she indulged
his peculiar habits.

-Cricket was an active
participant in his, again,

amateur porn films,
and appeared in many of them.

-This is the thing about
abusive men, like Leonard Lake.

They're not abusive
all of the time.

They're able to charm.

They're able to manipulate.

They're able to spin
a good story

to people who they want
to support them.

-Fifteen years younger,

Charles Ng seemed

an unlikely choice for a friend.

-Charles Ng was born
in Hong Kong in 1960,

the son of a wealthy
Chinese businessman,

a harsh disciplinarian.

One of Ng's releases was
to be a kleptomaniac.

He stole things.
He stole things because

it made him feel better
about himself

and he did it repeatedly.

-Aged 15,

Ng was sent to a boarding
school in England,

but it did not go well.

-Charles Ng's family were
consistently embarrassed by him,

so he was moved around
from school to school.

He ended up at a boarding
school in Yorkshire,

where he carried on
with this behavior.

He did academically well
for a while,

so he was a child
who was quite bright,

but he just couldn't

help himself,
in terms of stealing,

and created all of this chaos,

and I think he was
quite enjoying that.

In 1978, aged 18,

Ng moved to the U.S.
on a student visa.

He moved to California to study,

but he soon got
into trouble again.

He was involved
in a hit-and-run.

In October 1979, aged 18,

Charles Ng was arrested

and forced to pay
for the damages.

Then, in a strange twist,
a year later,

the Hong Kong resident
and British citizen

lied about his nationality

and joined
the U.S. Marine Corps,

but, less than a year after he
joined, old habits resurfaced.

-In 1982,

when, by this time,
Ng was 22,

he was arrested for stealing
explosives and weaponry.

Ng was sentenced

to 14 years in military
detention in Hawaii.

It was while he was in jail

that Ng formed an uncommon
friendship with Leonard Lake.

-Ng was in military detention
and he was reading a magazine

and there was an ad
in this magazine

Leonard Lake had placed in that,
and he responded to this ad.

So it was a real chance
encounter and you wonder,

had he not have been reading
that particular magazine,

had he have been
in a different place,

that these two would
never have come together,

but they did meet
and they wreaked absolute havoc.

Lake's post,

advertising weapons
he had for sale,

appeared to have been the basis
of their friendship.

-As is so often the case,

weapons are a fascination
to many people,

many of whom have
a sense of insecurity.

They feel that weapons
give them a sense of power,

so I think that what
really linked the two

was a fascination with weapons.

The details are murky,

but, somehow,
Ng stayed in touch with Lake,

who became a mentor
for the young, would-be killer.

-I think what Ng found in him
was a kind of surrogate father,

someone who would
understand him.

He was suggestible enough

to fall under the spell of a man
of a stronger,

older disposition,
which Lake certainly was.

Charles Ng managed to escape

from military detention
in early 1983.

-And the one person he deserted
to run away to

was Lake, who was living,
at this point,

in a mobile home
in Northern California.

-However,
the net was closing in.

An FBI SWAT team arrived

by helicopter,
raided the mobile home,

and arrested Charles Ng.

They made a discovery that would
also get Lake arrested:

illegal firearms.

But Lake was freed on bail

and then went into hiding
in California.

His friend Ng was sent

to the U.S. State Penitentiary
in Leavenworth, Kansas.

After serving 18 months,

he was dishonorably discharged
and released in 1984.

That same year,

the two friends reunited.

Charles Ng moved into Lake's
new remote ranch in the

Northern Californian wilderness.

-It was the combination of the
two individuals that made them

into the terrible killing
machine that they became.

-Here, Lake and Ng shared
their depraved fantasies

and, together,
they devised a fearsome plan

to murder men, women,
and even infants,

on an industrial scale.

On the grounds
of the 2-acre property,

Lake had built
a subterranean bunker

for his and his partner, Ng's,
murderous purpose.

In Calaveras County,

east of San Francisco,

where, effectively,
Lake set up

the dungeon
that he'd always wanted

for his Operation Miranda,

where Ng came to join him.

Based on Lake's obsession

with the book "The Collector,"
the pair teamed up

to put Leonard Lake's
fearsome fantasy,

his so-called Miranda plan,
into motion.

-The Miranda plan was the means
by which he was going to be

the one who fathered all
the new children in the world

after the nuclear Armageddon
had happened

and he was in his enclave
with all of his sex slaves.

-That's what he was
creating with Ng

and that's what he had been
fantasizing for 20 years

before he met Ng.

The project's aim is
to capture your ideal woman,

enslave her, and have her be
your sexual slave

until you're done with her,
at which time you kill her.

In the case of Ng and Lake,
the killings involve

much more than killings,
much more than just sex.

They involve torture.

They involve the
photographing of victims.

It was a nightmare that
somebody from Hollywood

could not dream up
for a horror movie.

-Ng arrives, and in a sense,
they combust the fantasy

because they start saying
to each other,

"What we need is
to have lots of children

to repopulate the world
and make better citizens,"

a kind of a social-
engineering project

through a very odd prism.

-Ng was a very shy person

who himself could not
have done this,

but happily joined the venture,
so he would have a chance

of the kind of sexuality

his shyness made impossible.

-On July 25, 1984,

Lake and Ng's perverse
Miranda plan was begun.

The first woman
they were thought

to have abducted and enslaved

was Deborah Dubs.

The duo would, in fact,
murder her;

her husband, Harvey;

and their 16-month-old
son, Sean.

Answering an ad
for video equipment,

Lake and Ng showed up
at their apartment

in San Francisco.

The pair likely killed Harvey
and the baby soon after.

Lake and Ng

then kidnapped
33-year-old Deborah

and took her back
to their underground bunker.

-In the case
of the Dubs family,

they took all of their
photographic equipment.

Mr. Dubs used to do
photography work on the side.

They abducted his wife
and raped her.

-In Wilseyville,
in Calaveras County,

Lake and Ng kept
Deborah prisoner.

In what would become
their modus operandi,

the callous killing team

would torture, defile,
and humiliate Deborah.

They would subsequently subject
all their female victims

to the same awful acts.

-The women are made to disrobe.

They're told they will
cooperate, or they'll be killed.

-They construct a one-way
mirror, so they can watch her.

She is literally a specimen
which they can abuse;

obviously, rape; peep;

and, even more horrifying,
they video it.

They video her ordeal,

subjecting her
to an equally awful,

degrading humiliation
over a period of weeks.

-The pair used
a hog-tying technique

to restrain their abductees.

-Hog-tying involves
binding the ankles

and binding the wrists and neck

with somebody facedown
and their legs bent,

so, if they try
and straighten their legs,

it places pressure on the neck.

So it is a vicious method
of restraining somebody,

and extremely painful
and extremely cruel.

Lake seemed to be

the more domineering of the two.

-It's clear that Lake
is the one

that's giving the instructions
and telling Charlie what to do

and, if Charlie doesn't do
something quick enough,

Lake kind of takes him to task,

but Ng was a very
willing participant.

-I think Ng, he'd always had
these sort of violent fantasies

and he wanted to get involved
in this kind of thing,

and now he's able to
and he's got somebody to follow.

-Lake and Ng are a dominant
and subservient pair

of lust killers,

one having the lust fantasy;

the other, going along
with the lust fantasy.

The pair derived great pleasure

from the horror they were
inflicting on the innocent.

Victims of kidnapping

will often try and identify
with their kidnappers.

They'll try and develop
a connection with them

that'll give them
information about them.

It was never gonna work
with Lake and Ng

because they were
emotionally turned off.

-After weeks of torture,

Lake and Ng shot

and murdered Deborah.

-Life means nothing.

At that moment that
the killing takes place,

they can barely understand

that this is a living person
in front of them.

-It plays to the deepest fears
of every woman,

that she is simply being
subjugated, humiliated, used.

She is simply there
as a plaything of these two men.

Eventually,
they tire and kill her.

-But their lust for blood
was not confined to enslaving,

then murdering, women
for their Miranda plan.

Lake and Ng also preyed

on single men, too.

With Lake skipping bail
and now in hiding,

they would randomly kill men,
then steal their money,

their driver's licenses,
and their identities.

One such victim was
34-year-old Randy Jacobson.

Unemployed, he had placed an ad
to try and sell his van.

-Most of the murders were
committed in Calaveras,

but most of the victims were
from San Francisco.

They were either kidnapped
and taken up to Calaveras;

or they were lured up there,

with a promise of work
or some other incentive;

and then, they would
kill 'em and murder them

and then began to collect their
Social Security-type benefits.

-In October 1984,

shortly after Leonard Lake
answered his ad,

Randy Jacobson vanished.

Around the same time,

38-year-old Donald Giuletti
had answered an ad, too.

This time, it was posted

by Charles Ng,
and offered free sex.

The San Francisco DJ responded

and he was later found murdered
in his own home.

He was shot three times.

Donald's roommate
would later identify

Charles Ng as the killer.

By the end of 1984,

six months since
the Miranda plan began,

Ng and Lake's lust for murder
knew no bounds.

-Ng and Lake were just

the worst possible two
to ever get together.

I think they fed off each other.

I think they both enjoyed
what they were doing

and I think their enjoyment
by doing it together

was actually increased
exponentially.

-Sometimes they get bored,

so they start preying
on their neighbors.

So, obviously, these are people
with families, with friends,

with employers,
who are gonna miss them,

who are gonna alert
the authorities,

but I think it's because
they feel invincible

at this point in time
and they think

they're just gonna keep
getting away with it.

-One of the things that they did
that is extraordinary is,

ahem, before killing a woman,

if the woman had connections --

she had a job,
she had a husband --

they would have the woman,
in her own hand,

write a letter saying
she was going away,

taking a job in another city,
and wouldn't be coming back,

and they sent it,
to the employer,

the friend, the husband,
so that they wouldn't know

that she was actually
missing and dead.

This is the kind of careful
planning that they did.

-In April 1985,

Lake and Ng
needed another woman

to satisfy their deviant desires
and fulfill their Miranda plan.

This time, the victims
would simply be

targets of opportunity:

their neighbor Brenda O'Connor;

her partner, Lonnie Bond;

and their one-year-old,
infant son, Lonnie Jr.

-Bond and O'Connor
and their son

are presumably invited
to Lake and Ng's cabin

and, pretty speedily,

the two dispatch both father
and infant son, kill them;

and they make the girlfriend,
Brenda O'Connor, a prisoner.

-After weeks of torture,

they murdered Brenda O'Connor.

June 2, 1985.

San Francisco, California.

For the last 11 months,
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng

had indulged their
depraved fantasies.

They included kidnap, rape,
torture, and murder.

But, on this fateful
summer's day,

the pair walked
into a lumberyard

to buy supplies for their
atrocious activities.

When Charles Ng was caught

stealing a table vise
from the store,

it would be the beginning
of their end.

The police were now involved.

-Charles Ng goes on the run.

He literally just abandons
his partner in crime.

It's all about his own
self-preservation now.

-Ng ran away.

Lake stayed and tried
to talk his way

out of the shoplifting incident

and the South San Francisco
police officer went to the car

to recover the vise

and also found
a .22 pistol in the back.

-They found that
Leonard Lake's firearm

was fitted
with an illegal silencer.

With their suspicions piqued,

the police took Leonard Lake
into custody.

-Lake is now
in a pretty fragile state

and, I suspect,

realizes that the whole thing
is going to unravel.

As soon as they brought him in

and he asked for a piece
of paper and a pencil

and you're thinking,
as an investigator,

"Maybe he's ready to sign
a confession, so, great.

I'll go run and get him
a piece of paper and a pencil,"

and then when you come back,
he's dead on the floor.

-What investigators
did not know, yet,

was that Lake had acted

before his awful secret
was discovered.

He did not want to go

to the electric chair and so
Lake took the precaution of

providing for himself
cyanide pills,

in case he was ever captured,

which he sewed into his jacket.

-It's clear that
Leonard Lake knew

that he would kill himself
when he got caught.

He did all these
terrible things

and he never wanted to stand up

and face the consequences
of them, so that he was ready

and he had those
cyanide tablets on him,

in the event he ever got caught.

-Lake was dead, but his partner,
Ng, was now on the run.

The FBI and Interpol
launched a national

and international manhunt
for Charles Ng.

At the same time,
they processed

the license plate
on the brown Honda

that Leonard Lake had parked

outside the lumber store.

-After Leonard Lake
kills himself,

then they start kind of
pulling on the string

and everything
starts unraveling.

-Subsequently found out
that the car

had a different,
switched, license plate

and the car belonged
to Paul Cosner.

Paul Cosner was a man who lived

in the Marina District
in San Francisco,

last seen alive when he
purportedly left the house

to show a prospective buyer
of his car

to take them for a test drive
and he was never seen again.

-A forensic examination
of the Honda

revealed a single bullet hole

in the roof
at the front of the car.

It was surrounded
with a blood splatter.

Investigators also found
a driver's license

belonging to yet another
San Francisco man

who had disappeared.

-The missing-persons detectives
from San Francisco

were immediately notified.

They went down
to South San Francisco.

Inspector Irene Brunn
and Tom Eisenmann.

So, at that time,
there was still

no involvement in homicide.

-Inside the brown Honda,

investigators also found
a utility bill,

in Lake's ex-wife's name,

for a place in Calaveras County,
in Northern California.

The detectives questioned her

about the electricity bill
found in the car.

The interview led them
to a ranch with a log cabin

in the wilderness,
150 miles east of San Francisco.

The detectives didn't know
what they would find,

but they were aware of a number

of missing-persons cases
in the region.

One in particular stuck
in their mind.

At the time, there were

a couple
of missing-persons cases

that were kind of unusual.

One was this Dubs family,
a family of three were missing

under very strange
circumstances.

-As they walked
through the cabin,

they noticed a bed with holes
drilled in the posts

and on the floor,
seemingly for restraints.

But that's not all
that Detectives Irene Brunn

and Tom Eisenmann found.

Irene Brunn noticed a VCR

and some other electronic
equipment

that, she thought,
resembled equipment

that was missing
from the Dubs's home,

and she ran the serial number
of a couple of those items

and, sure enough, she got a hit.

So she knew, at that point,
not only had she linked

Lake and Ng
to Paul Cosner and the car,

but now she'd linked them
into yet

another missing person:
the Dubs family.

-Thought to be the first
victims of their Miranda plan,

the entire Dubs family had
disappeared 11 months earlier,

murdered by Lake and Ng.

-Evidence of wrongdoing
was mounting.

And then, the case took
an even darker turn.

-Until the missing-persons
investigators got to the cabin,

there was no connection
to the Dubs family,

so, once that link
was established,

then there were a connection

to four probably
murdered people.

What had begun as a response

to a shoplifting incident

was now a mass-murder
investigation,

with Leonard Lake and his
partner in crime, Charles Ng,

the prime suspects.

-So, at that point,
the case was transferred

from missing persons to homicide

and my partner, Jeff Brosch,
and I

ended up heading up a team
of probably

about 20 investigators
from San Francisco.

On June 5, 1985,

a team of San Francisco and
Calaveras County investigators

returned to the cabin
in the woods.

It was just three days

since Lake had killed himself
and Ng had gone on the run.

-The police get to the cabin
and they begin a series

of absolutely
horrifying discoveries.

-Armed with a warrant,

they searched
the subterranean bunker,

or so-called fallout shelter,
situated next to the cabin.

-And it was built
into the side of the hill

and, when you entered
this bunker,

there was like a workshop

and areas where tools were,
and so on.

-On the walls,

21 photos of young women,
in various stages of undress.

At the back
of the workshop area,

detectives found a false wall.

Behind it,
another sobering surprise.

There was like a cell area

that had been built
into the back of the bunker,

in which we later learned
that they would

keep female captives there

for a period of time

before killing them.

-They discovered the dungeon
and the false room,

which is hidden,
and the two-way mirror

and where the women
had been kept.

-Investigators meticulously
searched the 2-acre property

used as the pair's
killing grounds.

-They discover two 5-gallon
drums which had been buried,

one of which contains IDs,
paraphernalia,

for up to 25 people
who might have been missing;

and the other one contains

Lake's journals
for 1983 and 1984

and the videotapes

of the victims.

-Appallingly, the videos showed
in vivid detail

the depths of depravity
that Lake and Ng indulged in.

-You can see how the victims
are full of fear

and just horrified

and I think
they got off on that.

That brings it
to a whole new level.

It was on a horrific level,

why you would wanna
tape this stuff,

but if you view those tapes,
they were quite disturbing.

-Brenda O'Connor,
she had a little baby

and, on the video,
she is repeatedly distraught

and asking Leonard Lake
and Charles Ng,

"What have you done
with my baby?

Where's my baby?"

It's very difficult to watch.

-But, that wasn't all.

During the search
of the grounds,

investigators made
a gruesome discovery:

human remains.

-My partner, Jeff Brosch,

pretty much stayed
up in Calaveras

and he worked
with the detectives up there

and what they were doing,
at that point,

was uncovering a lot of evidence
that had been buried.

We know, of course,
that the videos and the gun

and the journals
had been buried,

and they began finding
more bodies.

-You can see that,
as their killing went along,

in the beginning,
they're very organized.

They're kind of sticking to the
rules that they've made up,

but, towards the end,

they are getting quite careless;
they are getting quite sloppy

and we are able to identify
particular victims

from some of that evidence
that they left.

-Detectives found,
bedded in shallow graves,

what they thought to be
at least 11 bodies,

as well as fragments that
suggested there was a 12th body.

Lake and Ng had disposed
of all the evidence

they thought
might lead back to them.

And what Lake and Ng did is

they buried all the contents
of their neighbors' cabin

in the trench and covered it up.

They wanted the authorities
to think that Brenda O'Connor,

who is the woman with her baby;

and her boyfriend;
and a friend, Scott Stapley;

had just left the area
and moved on.

-The detectives were both
identifying the victims,

whilst, at the same time,

trying to determine
the cause of death.

-They definitely shot people.

They also, in addition
to burying a lot of the buries,

they chopped them up and put
them in piles and burned them.

One of the things that
the detectives up in Calaveras

were finding a lot of
were little, small, bone chips

that had previously been burned.

I believe they had
a big bonfire,

so, in some of the cases,
it's hard to definitely

determine what the exact
cause of death was

because the bodies had been
so badly burned and chopped up.

-In all, the team gathered

45 pounds of charred remains.

They belonged
to at least 11 victims,

killed in the 11-month spree,

including six men,

three women, and two babies.

All had been identified.

-Ng and Lake,

one of the most unusual things
is that they were said

to have fed some of the remains
of their victims

to chickens, of all things.

It actually makes
a kind of perverse sense.

If you've burnt a body,
you're left mainly with bone.

It can be ground up

and that's the sort of thing
a chicken could eat.

-Now that investigators knew
about the terrible crimes

that Lake and Ng
had callously committed,

they had to catch the fugitive
serial killer Charles Ng.

Ng leaves and runs,

crosses the border into Canada,

Calgary,
to where his sister lives.

-Leonard Lake
had committed suicide,

but his serial-killing partner,
Charles Ng, was still alive,

and detectives were now
determined to catch him.

It would not take long.

Over 1,200 miles away,

and less than a month
after he fled San Francisco,

Ng would succumb to his
shoplifting urges once again.

This time, it would lead
to the serial killer's demise.

July 6, 1985.

Calgary, Canada.

The net was closing in
on Charles Ng.

-Based upon information

one of his associates
had given to the FBI,

we felt he probably had gone

across the border
up into Canada,

so his picture was being
distributed up there.

-Now, Canada, the FBI has
international offices in Canada,

so, when somebody like Ng
flees there,

the FBI can be on it
fairly quickly.

-Less than a month
after he fled

the San Francisco Bay area,

Charles Ng fatefully succumbed

to one of his urges.

-That strain of kleptomania

that had run
through his childhood

didn't disappear in adulthood

and, indeed,
it was Ng's kleptomania

that, in the end, saw him caught
and brought to justice.

It's almost pathetic.

He goes and he steals a can
of salmon in a supermarket.

-And a couple of store
detectors approach him

and he was armed
and he pulled out his gun

and shot one
of the store clerks.

-The security guard manages
to hang onto him,

despite having been shot
in the hand,

and the police are called.

Ng is taken, and then,
almost immediately,

they realize that
they have the man

that the American
authorities want.

-But getting Ng back to the
United States to face justice

would take years of litigation.

-Ng actually committed
a crime in Canada, so,

he has to face justice
in Canada,

like any other criminal would,
before they're willing

to consider sending him
to the U.S.

-Charles Ng was sentenced
to 4.5 years

for attempted murder
and shoplifting.

He served his time in Canada

and he fought tooth and nail
to stay in the country.

-Ng knew how to make
the process work for him,

delaying and delaying.

He told one of his cellmates,
I think, that,

"All I have to do
is fire my lawyers

and I get another extension,"

and so he tried that
a few times.

So he really was able to sit
in that Canadian jail

and really work the system.

-When you look at Ng's behavior,

when he's facing these
really serious charges,

it's still "Me, me, me."

He's only concerned
about himself.

He's trying
to dodge extradition.

He's trying to kind of create
a bit of drama around his case,

so, now that he's incarcerated,

he loses quite a lot of control
over many things in his life,

but he will cling onto those
last vestiges of power, so,

the things that he can

exert control over,
he's going to.

-Six years later, in 1991,

Ng was finally sent
to California

to answer for his crimes

and those of his serial-killing
partner, Leonard Lake.

-By now, he's become very adept,
indeed, in the ways of the law

and he starts a series
of battles

with the Californian
state authorities.

-If you look at some
of his behavior at this time,

it's incredibly arrogant;
it's very narcissistic.

He's complaining
about the length

of the commute
to the courthouse.

He's moaning about the food.

He's complaining
about a whole host of things

that he feels wronged by,
that he feels entitled to,

so here's somebody
who really can't see

beyond the end
of their own nose.

-In California,

Charles Ng continued his fight
to stay out of the courts

for another 7 painstaking years.

-It took a long time.

It was, to the families,
it was a frustrating time.

-He's not gonna make
a very easy time of it

for the people who were looking
after him in prison

and he's gonna be a nightmare
for his lawyers

and the legal teams
that are involved in this.

-By the time Charles Ng
faced trial, in October 1998,

Leonard Lake had been
dead for 13 years.

But, he had left a series
of diaries,

written in his own hand

and found at the scene
of the crime.

After they deciphered
some coded entries,

investigators were certain

that Lake had committed
several murders on his own.

-Many of these crimes
were referred to in code.

He would codename
different planned killings

or crimes with names.

One was fish, Operation Fish.

We finally determined that,
in addition to the women

that Lake and Ng
had kidnapped and raped,

there was a crime,
several murders,

that Leonard Lake had committed
before he and Charles Ng

hooked up for their
11-month crime spree.

-Acting alone,

Lake likely murdered his brother
in early 1983.

Donald Lake had disappeared
in April of that year.

Lake's best man, Charles Gunnar,

vanished in 1983, too,

but the exact date he was killed
is still a mystery.

But just one month

before Ng went on trial,
in September 1998,

Charles Gunnar's body
was found buried

on the 2-acre property,
15 years after the fact.

-We did find,
kind of inadvertently found,

Charles Gunnar's body
up on the property

and it was when,
I think it was a phone company

or PG&E crew came through,
doing work,

that some of their equipment

unearthed
Charles Gunnar's grave.

Long gone,

Lake would never face trial
for the crimes he had committed,

but his serial-killing partner,
Charles Ng, would.

On October 26, 1998,

in the Santa Ana, California,
courthouse,

14 years after his
killing spree began,

Ng finally faced trial.

To secure a conviction,

a 36-foot-long truck full
of evidence was ferried

400 miles south
to the courtroom

in Orange County,
in Southern California.

Having found what they assumed
to be 12 burnt bodies,

Ng was being prosecuted
on 12 counts of murder.

-The evidence
was so overwhelming.

When you consider the fact
that you had him on film

with a number of the victims,

telling them that he was
going to kill 'em,

along with all of the other
evidence that was found,

it was a pretty rock-solid case.

I went down to Orange County
and testified

and the fact that he never
made eye contact with me

and I never saw him really make
eye contact with anybody else,

he just kinda looked down
the entire time.

-In February 1999,

nearly 17 years
after the serial killers

began their murderous pursuits,

Charles Ng was convicted
on 11 counts of homicide.

The jury found him guilty
of murdering

six men, three women,
and two infant children.

They deadlocked
on the 12th count.

There was simply
not enough evidence

for the jury to convict him.

-He's convicted of killing 11,

including two infants,
three women, and six men.

Ng is sentenced to death,

but he's now on death row
in San Quentin.

-When, if ever, that ever
happens is anybody's guess,

but that's where he is.

But at least he's locked away.

I don't think he'll
ever get out.

More than 30 years on,

and the memories
of the mass murders perpetrated

by partners
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng

still plague
the homicide detectives

who worked on the case.

-After a while, you become
somewhat hardened, I guess,

but, when you're dealing
with small children or babies,

they're just innocent people
taken advantage of and abducted

and then you see the horror
that they go through.

Then, to actually see a woman

begging for her baby
and asking for her baby,

that's very unusual
and very difficult to deal with.

-When I look
at the Lake and Ng case,

we've got a meeting of two
incredibly twisted minds, here,

and, together, they created this
alternative, depraved reality,

but I think the scariest
thing is

these two weren't mad;
they weren't crazy.

They knew exactly
what they were doing

and, yet, they chose
to do it, anyway,

and the thought of people
deciding and choosing

to do the things they did really
does chill me to the bone.

-It's, you know,
a really good thing

that that shoplifting
incident happened

because that's what was
the domino that fell

to start the whole process,

or else these guys
may still be out there.

-The suicide of Leonard Lake
and the conviction of Charles Ng

finally brought an end
to the serial-killing spree,

but the lessons learned
by investigators

will hopefully help them
catch and convict

the next murderous pair
before they, too,

join the ranks of the
world's most evil killers.