Jury Urges Death for Killer Ng

SANTA ANA — Convicted serial killer Charles Ng should be executed for his role in the murders of 11 people in a mountain cabin 14 years ago, a jury recommended Monday after one of California’s longest and costliest prosecutions.

Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan will hand down Ng’s sentence at a future hearing.

For relatives of Ng’s victims, the death penalty recommendation marked a long-awaited but satisfying act of justice in a marathon case that often left them frustrated and angry.

“We are so happy,” said Lola Stapley, 70, whose son, Scott, was killed in 1985. “[Ng] is going to wake up every morning and know that he is one day closer to death.”

Stapley and the dozens of other people packed into the Santa Ana courtroom sat in silent anticipation as the jurors slowly filed in.

The Stapleys clutched their hands tightly, their eyes focused on the court clerk. When the recommendation was announced, the room was filled with sighs and the clicks of camera shutters.

“I just felt myself lifting up,” Dwight Stapley, 72, Lola’s husband, said afterward. “Fourteen years and two weeks, that’s how long we’ve been waiting.”

The jurors, who sat through six months of sometimes graphic testimony about the murders, quickly left the courtroom without talking to reporters. Outside the courthouse, they hugged one another and said their goodbyes.

In February, the jury convicted Ng of participating in the killings. Prosecutors alleged that Ng and his friend Leonard Lake lured their victims to Lake’s remote cabin in Wilseyville, a rural town nestled against the Sierra Nevada foothills in Calaveras County.

Lake, 39, killed himself shortly after being arrested in 1985 outside a South San Francisco lumberyard where he and Ng were spotted shoplifting.

The pair, authorities say, wiped out whole families in their quest for money and sexual pleasure. At least two of the female victims were forced to become sex slaves, including a neighbor of Lake whose pleas for her baby’s life the pair captured on videotape. Authorities believe the baby was already dead when the video was made.

As many as 25 people are believed to have perished in Lake’s cabin in 1984 and 1985, including two baby boys Ng was convicted of killing.

When the death recommendation was read, Ng, 38, stared blankly--a reaction that contrasted with his behavior at other points during the trial, when he lodged objections and bypassed his attorneys to argue his own motions.

When Ryan asked if he would waive his right to a formal sentencing so his attorneys could seek a new trial, the Hong Kong native did not respond. After a long pause, Ryan simply set a hearing date for June 29. The case will automatically be appealed.

The families of Ng’s victims--who have followed the legal saga for more than a decade and attended court sessions together--expressed satisfaction Monday.

Sharon Sellitto’s brother Paul Cosner was among the 12 people that Ng was charged with killing, but the jury deadlocked on Cosner’s count. Nonetheless, Sellitto said the death recommendation was vindication. Shortly after the court action, she called her 74-year-old mother, Virginia Nessley, in Columbus, Ohio, to give the news.

“Mother?” Sellitto said as television cameras zoomed in. “Death. . . . Death. . . . Death. Yes.”

Nessley had followed the trial from the first day. But after the jury was unable to reach a verdict in the killing of her son, she returned home.

“She just started crying,” Sellitto said of her mother after hanging up the phone. “She said it made up for Paul, almost.”

Dramatic evidence in the trial included videotaped footage of two women forced to participate in sex. The grainy, muffled images of the shackled women being threatened by Lake and Ng presented some of the most damning evidence in the trial.

As authorities made the gruesome discovery in Lake’s cabin, Ng fled to Canada, but he was captured and extradited to California in 1991. The case was transferred to Orange County in 1994 because of pretrial publicity in Northern California.

Ng’s defense team argued during the penalty phase that their client had a submissive personality that was shaped by a harsh upbringing. In an interview with The Times before the penalty phase, Ng said he saw Lake as a father figure.

Ng’s attorney, William Kelley, acknowledged Monday that he has had a difficult relationship with his client, who publicly criticized him as being incompetent.

“It is just distracting,” Kelley said. “I still feel in spite of it we put on a good defense.”

The Stapleys and others criticized the slow pace of the case and blamed Ng for stalling the process with a string of legal maneuvers, including multiple motions aimed at firing his court-appointed attorneys. The trial has cost about $10 million, according to the most recent figures from Calaveras County authorities.

Jurors spent three days deliberating before recommending death for Ng. Earlier in the trial, they had talked about seeking group counseling to deal with the gruesome nature of the testimony, according to a former panelist.

“It’s not an easy task,” Ryan told the jurors Monday. “I saw a lot of tears.”

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Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Tini Tran contributed to this story.