The Hillside Strangler(s)

The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later two, American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered in the hills surrounding greater Los Angeles. It was initially believed that only one individual was responsible for the killings. The police, however, knew from the positions of the bodies that two individuals were working together, but withheld this information from the press. These two individuals were eventually discovered to be cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., who were later convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering 10 women and girls ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old.

The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of three sex workers who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles between October and early November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not sex workers, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to prominence.

There were two more deaths in December and February before the murders abruptly stopped. An extensive investigation proved fruitless until the arrest of Bianchi in January 1979 for the murder of two more young women in Washington State and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case. The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of these crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Background

In January 1976, Kenneth Bianchi left Rochester, New York and moved to Los Angeles, California to live with his cousin, Angelo Buono Jr.  Buono provided a strong role model for the docile Bianchi. When Bianchi was short of money, Buono came up with the idea of getting some girls to work for them as prostitutes. Two teenage runaways, Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears, met Bianchi and Buono and, once under their control, were forced to prostitute themselves. Eventually, Spears happened to meet lawyer David Wood, who was appalled at her situation and arranged for her to escape from the city.

Encouraged by Spears' escape, Hannan ran away from Bianchi and Buono a short time later. With their pimping income gone, they had to find more teenage girls. Impersonating police officers, they eventually found another young woman and installed her in the previous girl's bedroom. Also, they bought from a prostitute named Deborah Noble a supposed "trick list" with names of men who frequented prostitutes. Deborah and her friend, Yolanda Washington, delivered the trick list to Buono in October 1977.

Murders

Yolanda Washington

Yolanda happened to mention to Buono that she always worked on a certain stretch of Sunset Boulevard. When Bianchi and Buono found that Deborah had deceived them about the list but were unable to find her, they decided to take out their rage on Yolanda. Her naked body was found on October 17, 1977, on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, and Detective Frank Salerno of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was called to the scene.  It was determined that the corpse was cleaned before being dumped; faint marks were visible around the neck, wrists, and ankles where a rope had been used. The victim had also been raped.

Judy Miller

On November 1, 1977, police were called to Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta, a neighborhood 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found naked, face up on a parkway in a middle-class residential area. The homeowner had covered her with a tarp in the early morning hours to prevent the neighborhood children from viewing her on their way to school.  Ligature marks were on her neck, wrists and ankles, indicating to police she was bound and strangled. The body had been dumped, indicating she was killed elsewhere.

Det. Salerno also found a small piece of light-colored fluff on her eyelid and saved it for the forensic experts. A coroner's report further detailed that she had been raped and sodomized.  The girl, who was described as being "small and thin, weighing about 90 pounds and appearing to be about 16 years old",  was eventually identified as 15-year-old Judith Lynn Miller, a former student of Hollywood High School, runaway and occasional sex worker.

Judith was last seen alive on October 31, 1977, talking to a man driving a large two-tone sedan on Sunset Blvd next to Carneys Express Limited. The stranglers told her they were undercover police officers, handcuffed her, and took her to Buonos Upholstery Shop on Colorado Blvd in Glendale where she was murdered.

Lissa Kastin

Five days later, on November 6, 1977, the nude body of another woman was discovered near the Chevy Chase Country Club, in Glendale. Like Miller, she bore five-point (neck, wrists and ankles) ligature marks and of having been strangled and brutally raped, but not sodomized.  The woman was identified as 21-year-old waitress Elissa Teresa "Lissa" Kastin, who was last seen leaving the restaurant where she worked the night before her body was discovered.

Kastin was also a professional dancer for The L.A. Knockers and unlike the two previous victims was not a prostitute, drug user or runaway. The stranglers followed Kastin after she was seen driving home from work, pulled her over on the street she lived on, presented a fake police badge, and told her that they were detectives. They then handcuffed her and told her they needed to take her in for questioning.

Aborted murder of Catharine Lorre Baker

At some point in early November 1977, the two men approached 24-year-old Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of actor Peter Lorre — famous for his role as a serial killer in Fritz Lang's film M — with the intent of abducting and killing her. However, when they found a picture of her sitting on her father's lap among her identification, they let her go without incident. She did not realize who the men were until they were arrested, at which point she recalled that two men flashing L.A. police badges had approached her in the past.

Dolly Cepeda and Sonja Johnson

On Sunday, November 13, 1977, two girls, 12-year-old Dolores Ann "Dolly" Cepeda and 14-year-old Sonja Marie Johnson, boarded an RTD bus in front of The Eagle Rock Plaza and headed home. The last time they were seen was getting off the bus on York Blvd and Ave 46 and approaching a two-tone sedan which reportedly had two men inside. Their two corpses were found by a nine-year-old boy who had been treasure hunting in a trash heap on a hillside near Dodger Stadium on November 20, 1977.  Both of the girls' bodies had already begun to decompose. It was determined that they had been strangled and raped.

Kristina Weckler

Earlier that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the naked body of twenty-year-old Kristina Weckler, a quiet honors student at the Art Center College of Design deemed by Detective Bob Grogan of the Los Angeles Police Department to be a "loving and serious young woman who should have had a bright future ahead of her", on a hillside between Glendale and Eagle Rock. When found by Grogan, ligature marks were on her wrists, ankles and neck, and when he turned her over, bruises on her breasts were obvious and blood oozed from her rectum. Unlike the first three victims there were two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that indicated a drug addict.  It was later revealed that Weckler had been injected with Windex, a hard-surface cleaner.

Jane King

On November 23, 1977, the badly decomposed body of 28-year-old Evelyn Jane King, an actress who had gone missing around November 9, was found near the Los Feliz off-ramp of the Golden State Freeway.  The severity of decomposition prevented determination as to whether she had been raped or tortured but she had been strangled like the others. In response authorities created a task force — initially composed of 30 officers from the LAPD, the Sheriff's Department and the Glendale Police Department — to catch the predator now dubbed the "Hillside Strangler".

Lauren Wagner

On November 29, 1977, police found the body of eighteen-year-old Lauren Rae Wagner, a business student who lived with her parents in the San Fernando Valley, in the hills around Los Angeles's Mount Washington. She had ligature marks on her neck, ankles and wrists. There were also burn marks on her hands indicating she was tortured.  Lauren's parents had expected her to come home before midnight, and the next morning when they found her car parked across the street with the door ajar, her father questioned the neighbors.

He found that the woman who lived in the house where Lauren's car had been parked saw her abduction. This woman stated that she saw two men: one was tall and young, the other one was older and shorter with bushy hair.  She also stated that she heard Wagner cry out, "You won't get away with this!", during her abduction.

Kimberly Martin

On December 14, 1977, the body of 17-year-old sex worker Kimberly Diane Martin, which was naked and showed signs of torture, was found on a deserted lot near Los Angeles City Hall. Martin had previously joined a call girl agency because she feared exposing herself on the streets with the Strangler on the loose. The killers happened to place a call to her agency from a Hollywood Public Library pay phone and she was the call girl who was dispatched. When the police investigated the apartment she had been dispatched to, they found it vacant and broken into.

Cindy Hudspeth

The final victim was discovered in Los Angeles on February 17, 1978, when a helicopter pilot spotted an orange Datsun abandoned off a cliff on the Angeles Crest Highway.  Police responded to the scene and found the body of the car's owner, twenty-year-old Cindy Lee Hudspeth - a student and part-time waitress - in the trunk. Her corpse again showed ligature marks, and she had been raped and tortured. It appeared she had been strangled and put in the trunk of her car, which was then pushed off the cliff above.

Investigation and trial

In January 1979, after intensive investigation, police charged Bianchi and Buono with the crimes. Bianchi had fled to Bellingham, Washington, where he was soon arrested by Bellingham Police Department for raping and murdering two women he had lured to a home for a house-sitting job. Bianchi attempted to set up an insanity defense, claiming that he had dissociative identity disorder and that a personality separate from himself committed the murders. Court psychologists, notably Dr. Martin Orne, observed Bianchi and found that he was faking, so Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against Buono in exchange for leniency.

At the conclusion of Buono's trial in 1983, Presiding Judge Ronald M. George, who later became Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, stated during sentencing, "I would not have the slightest reluctance to impose the death penalty in this case were it within my power to do so. Ironically, although these two defendants utilized almost every form of legalized execution against their victims, the defendants have escaped any form of capital punishment."  Bianchi is serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, at Calipatria State Prison in California, where he was serving a life sentence.

Veronica Compton

In 1980, Bianchi began a relationship with Veronica Compton. During his trial, she testified for the defense. She was later convicted and imprisoned for attempting to strangle a woman she had lured to a motel in an attempt to have authorities believe that the Hillside Strangler was still on the loose and the wrong man was imprisoned. Bianchi had given her some smuggled semen to use to make it look like a rape/murder committed by the Hillside Strangler. She was released in 2003.

Media

1989:  The Case of the Hillside Stranglers--Dennis Farina, Billy Zane, Richard Crenna as Police Sergeant Bob Grogan.  Made for television; based on Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien.

2001:  The Hillside Stranglers--Ron Gilbert, Jeff Marchelletta.  Made for television; also known as Supersleuth.

2004:  The Hillside Strangler--Nicholas Turturro, C. Thomas Howell, and Marisol Padilla Sánchez as Christina Chavez (based on Veronica Compton).               

2006:  Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders --Tomas Arana, Clifton Collins Jr., Brittany Daniel as a psychiatrist.  Direct-to-video

Television

The Hillside Stranglers have been referenced three times on the police procedure crime drama Criminal Minds. C. Thomas Howell (as mentioned above) later portrayed George Foyet/The Reaper in the show's fourth and fifth seasons.

Charles Ng

Charles Ng Chi-Tat (Chinese: 吳志達; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born 24 December 1960) is a convicted Hong Kong-American serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento.  After his 1985 arrest and imprisonment in Canada on robbery and weapons charges, followed by a lengthy dispute between Canada and the US, Ng was extradited to California, tried, and convicted of 11 murders.  He is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

Early life

Ng was born in British Hong Kong, the son of a wealthy Hongkonger executive and his wife. As a child, Ng was harshly disciplined and abused by his father.  As a teenager, he was described as a troubled loner and was expelled from several schools. After his arrest for shoplifting at age 15, he went, at his father's insistence, to Bentham Grammar School, a boarding school in North Yorkshire, England.  Not long after arriving, Ng was expelled for stealing from other students and returned to Hong Kong.

Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978, and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.  He dropped out after one semester.  At that time, he met Leonard Lake. Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

U.S. Marine Corps

Ng became a Marine in 1979 with the help, he claimed, of a recruiting sergeant and false documents attesting to his birth in Bloomington, Indiana.  After less than a year of service, he was arrested by military police for theft of automatic weapons from MCAS Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii. Facing court-martial, he escaped custody in 1980 and made his way back to northern California, where he reunited with Lake.

In 1982, federal authorities raided the mobile home they shared in Ukiah, seizing a large stash of illegal weapons and explosives. Lake was released on $6,000 bond. He jumped bail and drifted around the state, using a series of pseudonyms.  Ng was returned to the Marines' custody and pleaded guilty to the theft and desertion charges. Under the terms of his plea deal, he was paroled and discharged in 1984 after serving 18 months in the military stockade at the United States Disciplinary Barracks Fort Leavenworth.

Murders

After his release, Ng immediately contacted Lake, who was renting a remote cabin near Wilseyville in Calaveras County and invited Ng to join him.  Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon". He probably had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and Gunnar's identity. Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture and murder.

Their victims included their neighbor, Lonnie Bond; their neighbor’s girlfriend, Brenda O'Connor; Lonnie Jr., the Bonds’ infant son; Harvey Dubs; Deborah Dubs; and their young son Sean. According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately but kept the women alive, raping and torturing them, before murdering them or allowing them to die from their injuries.  Other known victims included relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O'Connor, two gay men and some workmates of Ng.

Ng and Lake's rampage might have gone on longer if not for Ng's kleptomania. On 2 June 1985, Ng was caught shoplifting a vice from a South San Francisco hardware store and fled the scene. Lake later drove to the store and attempted to pay for the vice, but by then the police had arrived.  Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driver's license, which carried the name of Robin Stapley, a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier. After a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of Lake's vehicle, he was arrested and positively identified via a fingerprint search. In custody, while awaiting arraignment, Lake swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothes and died four days later.

The license plate on Lake's vehicle was registered to him, but the vehicle itself was registered to Paul Cosner, who had disappeared in November 1984. Lake's auto registration led detectives to the property in Wilseyville, where they found Stapley's truck and Bond's car, and behind the cabin, the dungeon. In a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed roughly 40 pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments corresponding to a minimum of 11 bodies.

They also found a hand-drawn "treasure map," leading them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One contained envelopes with names and victims' IDs, suggesting that the total number of victims might have been as high as 25. In the other bucket were Lake's handwritten journals for the years 1983 and 1984, and two videotapes documenting the torture of two of their victims. In one of the tapes, Ng is seen telling 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." In the other, Deborah Dubs is shown being assaulted so severely that she "could not have survived."

Ng, meanwhile, had fled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his sister lived.  He lived, undetected, in a lean-to in Fish Creek Provincial Park until his penchant for theft did him in yet again. On 6 July 1985, he was arrested by the Calgary Police Service after shooting security guard Sean Doyle in the hand while resisting arrest for stealing a can of salmon from a Calgary department store.  He was charged and subsequently convicted of shoplifting, assault with a weapon, and possession of a concealed firearm, and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.  After serving his sentence, he remained incarcerated pending an extradition request from California authorities.

Ng fought a protracted legal battle against extradition on the grounds that Canada, which does not have the death penalty, would be violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by permitting him to stand trial in California for capital murder. A habeas corpus petition and an appeal to the Alberta Court of Appeal were both denied. In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada also ruled against him, and he was extradited to California later that year.

Murder trial

In Calaveras County, Ng was indicted on twelve counts of first degree murder. After a change of venue to Orange County, he initiated a protracted series of pretrial motions. He sued the state over his temporary detainment at Folsom Prison, where he was caught hiding maps, fake IDs, and other escape paraphernalia, and filed challenges against four of the judges assigned to his case. He lodged a long series of complaints regarding the strength of his eyeglasses, the temperature of his food, and his right to practice origami in his jail cell.

Ng went through a total of 10 attorneys, some of whom ended up defending him a second time. He also filed a malpractice suit against several of the attorneys, citing incompetent representation.  After claiming that he had lost trust and confidence in all of his lawyers, he was allowed to represent himself, which delayed the trial another year while he researched applicable laws.  His trial finally began six years after his extradition in October 1998.

Leonard Lake's wife, Claralyn Balazs, cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution.  Court records stated that Balazs turned over weapons and other material to authorities during the investigation. Balazs was called as a key witness in Ng's trial in 1999. Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, in a surprise move, dismissed Balazs without asking any questions. Kelley later declined to explain his actions. Balazs was on the witness stand for a few minutes as Kelley read sections of her immunity agreement. Balazs was expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned.

Despite the video evidence and information in Lake's voluminous diaries, Ng maintained that he was merely an observer, and that Lake planned and committed all of the kidnappings, rapes, and murders unassisted.  He further maintained that he was dependent upon Lake for direction, that the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father was a mitigating factor, and that his good behavior behind bars showed that he should be imprisoned for life rather than executed.

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian testified that Ng had dependent personality disorder, but admitted under cross-examination that he had not viewed the tapes that showed Ng participating in the crimes. Clinical psychologist Abraham Nievod agreed with the diagnosis of dependent personality disorder, and opined that Ng's behavior in the tapes indicated that he was attempting to "mirror" and please Lake. Four prison guards, two sheriff's deputies, a prison library employee, and a prison counselor all testified that Ng was a model prisoner. Four former Marines who had known Ng while he was serving in the Marine Corps testified that he was quiet and well-behaved. Ng's parents both testified about his troubled childhood, and expressed remorse for their son's actions.

Ng insisted on taking the stand in his own defense, which allowed prosecutors to introduce additional evidence that helped define Ng's role in all aspects of the crimes. One significant item was a photo of Ng in his prison cell, with cartoons he had sketched of his victims hanging on the wall behind him.

 In February 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven of the twelve homicides: six men, three women, and two male infants; jurors deadlocked on the twelfth charge. Ng was sentenced to death, and the presiding judge rejected a motion to reduce the jury's verdict to life imprisonment. "Mr. Ng was not under any duress," he said, "nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake." Ng's prosecution cost the State of California approximately $20 million, at the time the most expensive trial in the state's history.

As of July 2019, Ng remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison.  No executions have taken place in California since 2006.

 

 

 

Leonard Lake

Leonard Thomas Lake (October 29, 1945 – June 6, 1985), also known as Leonard Hill and a variety of other aliases, was an American serial killer. During the mid-1980s, he and accomplice Charles Ng raped, tortured and murdered an estimated 11 to 25 victims at a remote cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills 150 miles east of San Francisco.  After his arrest in 1985 on illegal weapons, auto theft, and fraud charges, Lake swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothing, and died four days later. Human remains, videotapes, and journals found at the cabin later confirmed Ng's involvement, and were used to convict him on eleven counts of capital murder.

Early life

Lake was born in San Francisco, California. When he was six years old, his parents separated, whereupon he and his siblings moved in with their maternal grandmother.  Lake was reportedly a bright child, but after habitually photographing his sisters nude, which his grandmother apparently encouraged, he became obsessed with pornography.  He reportedly extorted his sisters to perform sexual acts. He also collected mice and killed them by dissolving them in chemicals, in the same manner he would later dispose of his human victims' corpses.

After attending Balboa High School, Lake enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1964.  He served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War as a radar electronics technician. During this period, Lake was first diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder.  After what was termed a "delusional breakdown" in Da Nang, he received psychotherapy and, in 1971, a medical discharge.

Lake settled in San Jose and enrolled at San Jose State University, but dropped out after one semester upon becoming enamored with the hippie lifestyle in San Francisco. He moved to a commune there, and married briefly in 1975. The marriage dissolved after his wife discovered that he was making and appearing in amateur pornographic movies, usually involving bondage or sadomasochism.

For the next eight years, Lake lived at the Greenfield Ranch, a 5,600 acre back-to-the-land settlement near Calpella, north of Ukiah in northern California. There, he met and eventually married Claralyn Balazs — nicknamed "Cricket" — who became involved in Lake's fantasies and appeared in many of his pornographic films.  Lake's growing fear of impending nuclear holocaust prompted him to begin construction of a "bunker" on the settlement grounds, until the owner of the property became aware of the project and ordered it halted.

Murders

Lake met fellow Marine Charles Ng through a war gamer magazine advertisement he placed in 1981.  In 1984, Ng was dishonorably discharged after serving time for theft and desertion, and Lake invited him to share a cabin near Wilseyville that he was renting from Balazs.  Next to the cabin, Lake had built a structure described in his journals as a "dungeon". He probably had already murdered his brother Donald and his friend and best man Charles Gunnar, stealing their money and Gunnar's identity.

Over the next year, Lake and Ng began a pattern of rape, torture, and murder. Their victims included their neighbor Lonnie Bond, his girlfriend Brenda O'Connor, their infant son Lonnie Jr., and Harvey and Deborah Dubs and their young son Sean. According to court records, they killed the men and infants immediately but kept the women alive, raping and torturing them, before murdering them or allowing them to die from their injuries.  Other known victims included relatives and friends who came looking for Bond and O'Connor, two gay men and some workmates of Ng.

Arrest and suicide

On June 2, 1985, Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in San Francisco and fled the scene. Lake later drove to the store and attempted to pay for the vise, but by then police had arrived.  Officers noticed that Lake bore no resemblance to the photo on his driving license, which carried the name of Robin Stapley; a San Diego man reported missing by his family several weeks earlier. He was arrested after a gun equipped with a prohibited silencer was found in the trunk of his vehicle, and later positively identified via a fingerprint search. While in custody, Lake swallowed cyanide pills that he had sewn into his clothes, and died four days later.

The license plate on Lake's vehicle was registered to him, but the vehicle itself was registered to Paul Cosner, who had disappeared in November 1984. Lake's auto registration led detectives under the command of San Francisco Police Homicide Lieutenant Gerald McCarthy to the property in Wilseyville, where they found Stapley's truck and Bond's car, and behind the cabin, the dungeon. In a makeshift burial site nearby, police unearthed roughly 40 pounds of burned and crushed human bone fragments corresponding to a minimum of 11 bodies.

Two bodies, later identified as Bond and Stapley, had been gagged and executed by gunshots to the head. Police also found a hand-drawn "treasure map", leading them to two buried five-gallon buckets. One contained an assortment of ID papers and personal possessions, suggesting that the total victim count could be as high as 25. In the other were Lake's handwritten journals for the years 1983 and 1984, and two videotapes documenting their torture of Brenda O'Connor and Deborah Dubs. In one of the tapes, Ng is seen telling 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." In the other, Dubs is shown being assaulted so severely that she "could not have survived".

Lake's wife, Claralyn Balazs, cooperated with investigators and received legal immunity from prosecution. Court records stated that Balazs turned over weapons and other material to authorities during the investigation. Balazs was called as a key witness in Ng's trial in 1999. Yet in a surprise move, Ng's lawyer, William Kelley, dismissed Balazs without asking any questions. Kelley later declined to explain his actions. Balazs was on the witness stand for a few minutes as Kelley read sections of her immunity agreement. Balazs was expected to shed light on what happened inside the mountain cabin that her parents owned.

Ng was captured in Canada and eventually extradited to California, where he was indicted on 12 counts of first-degree murder. Despite the video evidence, and the detailed information in Lake's diaries, Ng maintained that he was merely an observer, and that Lake planned and committed all of the kidnaps, rapes, and murders unassisted.  In February 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven of the twelve homicides — six men, three women, and two male infants. Jurors deadlocked on the twelfth charge, but Ng was sentenced to death. The presiding judge noted that "Mr. Ng was not under any duress, nor does the evidence support that he was under the domination of Leonard Lake."  As of August 2018, official California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) records show Ng still waits on death row at San Quentin State Prison.