For Victim’s Family, a 13-Year Wait in Ng Case

It was inside a small courtroom in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1988 that Lola Stapley first laid eyes on Charles Ng, the man accused of killing her youngest son, Scott, and a dozen other people three years earlier.

She sat in the front row with her husband, Dwight, and looked hard into Ng’s eyes from the moment he entered court for an extradition hearing. She remained fixated on him until he was led out hours later.

“We wanted him to know that we know what he did and that he was going to get the supreme punishment,” she recently recalled. “It’s going to take awhile, but he’ll get it. Of course, we didn’t know it was going to take forever.”

Since they made that first trip to Canada, the Garden Grove couple have watched with anguished disbelief as the case--already expected to be one of the longest and costliest in state history--drags through the legal system at a snail’s pace.

The Stapleys have seen trial dates come and go, attorneys and judges replaced and the mammoth case moved from Northern California to Orange County on the grounds that media reports made a fair trial impossible in rural Calaveras County, where many of the victims lived.

The couple, married 50 years, have vowed to see the case through and spent much of their retirement nest egg traveling to court hearings in Canada and Northern California. When the case was moved from Calaveras County to Orange County Superior Court in 1994, the Stapleys were relieved that the trial would be taking place only 10 miles from their home.

Still, they wonder, what is taking so long?

“The other trials have come and gone like the O.J. Simpson trial, the Menendez brothers trial, the Night Stalker trial and the [John J.] Famalaro trial,” said Lola Stapley, 69. “What is so different about this trial?”

Earlier this month, Judge John J. Ryan delayed the start of the trial another seven months because an additional attorney has joined the defense team. The new trial date of Sept. 1, 1998, will come more than 13 years after the slayings were committed, a fact that has almost destroyed the Stapleys’ once-strong belief in the legal system.

“We’re shaken,” said 71-year-old Dwight Stapley, a retired high school principal. “Is this really a system that works?”

Ng, a 35-year-old former Marine, is accused of torturing and killing 13 people in 1984 and 1985, most of them at a hideaway in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The victims included two babies and their mothers. He has pleaded not guilty and could face the death penalty if convicted. A second suspect, Leonard Lake, committed suicide by ingesting cyanide after he was arrested.

The trial could last as long as a year because it is several murder cases folded into one. It involves about six tons of paperwork.

The latest delay came when the defendant refused to cooperate with Orange County Deputy Public Defender William G. Kelley and wanted San Francisco County Deputy Public Defender Michael Burt reappointed to the case. Ryan approved Burt’s joining the defense and set the new trial date.

Ng has made numerous motions since 1991 to have his attorneys replaced and at one point made a motion to represent himself. He also had filed a motion to have the original judge in the case disqualified and filed a $1-million civil malpractice lawsuit against two of his former attorneys.

“There’s something about this one person that he seemingly can manipulate the legal system,” Lola Stapley said. “To me, he has made a joke out of it. It’s just as if everyone’s afraid of him.

“They need some rights for the criminals, but they have gone completely overboard to the other side of the spectrum,” she added. “The victims and the victims’ families almost become like case numbers in a dusty book back on a shelf someplace.”

The case is being co-prosecuted by the Calaveras County district attorney’s office and the California attorney general’s office. Matt Ross, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said the prosecution is sympathetic to the Stapleys and the other families.

“We want to finally bring this case to trial for the victims and the victims’ families,” Ross said. “The families have suffered enough.”

Amid the endless legal entanglements, the Stapleys do not want the memory of their child to be lost. The son they describe as “a human teddy bear” was 26 years old at the time of his death and the founding member of the San Diego chapter of the Guardian Angels. He was set to start graduate school in the fall of 1985 at San Diego State University and wanted to become a teacher.

He began his involvement in the Guardian Angels while still in college and continued after graduation, spending time in New York City training with national founder Curtis Sliwa in some Harlem neighborhoods.

In April 1985, he told his parents that he wanted to take a backpacking trip to Yosemite “to clear the cobwebs from his head,” his mother recalled. He had planned to backpack for about four weeks. He told them not to worry about him if they didn’t hear from him for a while.

The Stapleys, who have three other children, last saw Scott Stapley in late March 1985 when they stayed overnight at his apartment in San Diego. They spoke with him shortly before he left for the trip but began to be concerned after more than a month had passed without any word from him.

In early June, Lola Stapley came home from work and there was an ominous message on her machine from a reporter from a San Francisco television station saying, “We’d like to talk to you and your husband about your son Scott and the murders in Calaveras County.”

“I almost dissolved,” she said, not knowing whether her son had been killed or was accused of the slayings.

It was at least two agonizing days before they were able to get any answers.

“Oh, it was horrible,” Dwight Stapley said of the wait.

The couple know they will probably never know exactly how their son died. What they do know is that he died helping out friend Brenda O’Connor, also a homicide victim, along with her toddler son and boyfriend.

O’Connor had moved to Calaveras County with her boyfriend, Lonnie Bond, and their son, Lonnie Jr., and was renting a cabin about 50 yards from the cabin where Ng and Lake were staying. Scott Stapley had agreed to give her a ride back to Northern California because she was wrapping up a visit to San Diego about the same time he was to embark on his trip.

“It apparently happened the night they arrived up there,” Dwight Stapley said. “We don’t know if they were ambushed as they arrived or if they were just invited over to dinner or something. Really, who knows?”

“Nothing had been unpacked,” Lola Stapley added. “The baby’s clothes hadn’t been unpacked.”

They hope the trial will provide some answers, but they are aware that they probably will never find out everything.

“I’m sure Ng isn’t going to tell us what happened,” Lola Stapley said. “I’d really like to talk to him and ask him, ‘Why? Why did you do that to my son?’ ”

Shortly after their son’s memorial service, they visited the crime scene in August 1985. They went to O’Connor and Bond’s cabin and the one shared by Lake and Ng. The Stapleys were then taken to the shallow grave where the remains of their son were found.

“That hurt,” Dwight Stapley said. “But we needed to know where it happened and why.

“It’s kind of ironic,” he added, “here we’ve lost a son, but in ways we feel that we are fortunate because we at least got his bodily remains back. [Other families] have nothing.”

They have been asked to travel to Sacramento to help with victims’ rights legislation and to attend parole hearings and become involved in support groups. But they have declined.

“We have each other, and that’s about all we want to deal with,” Dwight Stapley said. “We’ve leaned on each other. For years, we would be in the house and all of a sudden break out crying and hang onto each other.”

“We can talk about it most of the time without crying or growing emotional,” Lola Stapley added. “It’s just so frustrating that it has gone on and on and on and on.”