Killer or Not, Ng Deserves No Mercy

My flesh crawls when I see Charles Ng.

I picture him in the woods with the depraved Leonard Lake, lending a hand, burying a corpse. He’s admitted to that. He did not confess to the killing of seven men, three women, two children. May he rot in hell regardless.

Whether he did everything or did nothing while enslaved victims cried and died, Ng was party to mass murder. He was there. He told no one. He saved no one.

He was by Lake’s side while defenseless humans were held captive, then methodically violated, tortured, slain, dismembered. There is little as fiendish as a man who appears on a videotape, telling a terrified, tied-up woman: “You can cry and stuff like the rest of them. It won’t do you no good.”

For 14 or 15 years, from the time this slaughter of innocents began, Charles Ng has been able to avoid a punishment befitting the crimes. He is a boogeyman, a craven disgrace to the Marine uniform he once wore, who waited until Lake took a last life--his own--and then fled the country, eluded the law, robbed a store in Canada and shot a guard.

At least that person lived.

Few who crossed Ng’s path did.

As his long-delayed trial finally nears an end, Ng--pronounced “Ing”--took the witness stand Wednesday at his trial in Santa Ana, and was back there Thursday.

His jury soon has a choice to make. It must decide whether Charles Ng was a monster, or merely an assistant monster.

*

Seven men, five women, two kids.

Just when you have encountered a Jeffrey Dahmer and you’ve seen the evil that men do and think mankind can get no worse, you get a Charles Ng and a Leonard Lake.

You get Ng on the stand, talking about how Lake was older and how “I’d follow his advice and respect his judgment.”

What a defense.

Then it gets worse. Then you get a nightmarish vision on video of a woman, Kathy Allen, 18, practically still a girl, lying half-naked, face down, listening to Lake.

“I don’t want you to die and I don’t want me to die,” the psycho says, as if that’s supposed to reassure her. “What do I do to prove to you that I’m serious?”

A lawyer defending Ng asks if the defendant was present when this video of Lake and a woman was made. Ng says no, as if this were a point for his side.

Yet he was present, of course, a short while before, because this same kidnap victim--frightened out of her wits--was commanded to give Ng a massage.

He was present when Allen was ordered to be a sex slave or be put to death.

And he had knowledge that her boyfriend, Mike Carroll, was captured too.

And he also knew that another man, Lonnie Bond, 27, a neighbor of Lake, had been killed. And when Robin Scott Stapley, 26, had been killed. He knew it because he helped put each man in a grave.

One of so many graves.

Ng knew all. He saw Lake take the young Allen woman for a walk to a hillside, near the wilderness cabin Lake had in Calaveras County, and never bring her back. He testified to that Thursday.

But did Ng merely watch, or do the murders himself? That’s what the jury will decide, a jury that is already armed with the knowledge that Ng was no innocent bystander. He was at the very least a guilty bystander, cruel and inhuman and directly involved in unconscionable bloodthirst.

Lake is dead. He got picked up for shoplifting and swallowed a cyanide capsule. Saved the government millions in court costs.

Ng just slithers along. He fought extradition from Canada, fought the moving of his trial from one venue to another, fought the appointment of his attorneys. He possibly disobeyed their direct counsel, when he made a last-minute decision to testify.

Up he gets, a devil in an untucked shirt. You wonder what possessed him.

Oh, right . . . Lake’s advice. “He was older than I was, and I’d follow his advice.”

Seven men, five women, two kids.

*

Here is the monster or co-monster, talking Thursday in his own defense:

The subject was Brenda O’Connor, his prisoner, his slave. On tape, Ng slices off her shirt, her bra. Her year-old child has already been killed.

Ng tells her, “It’s better your baby is dead.”

A lawyer asks why he said this.

“I don’t know why,” Ng answers. “I just said that in the heat of the moment.”

Seven men, five women, two kids.

Like I said, rot in hell.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com