Ng’s Lawyers Blame Killing Spree on His Partner

Attorneys for accused serial killer Charles Ng tried Monday to blame the killing spree on Ng’s alleged accomplice, Leonard Lake, whom they portrayed as a domineering, sadistic ex-Marine with a “God complex” and a deep-seated hatred for women.

Defense attorney William Kelley, an Orange County public defender, opened his case after a month of prosecution testimony against Ng, 38, the San Francisco man accused of the torture-killings of 12 people in a remote cabin in Northern California’s Sierra foothills.

Ng sat silent and motionless as the late Lake’s ex-wife and two other witnesses described Lake as a mentally scarred Vietnam veteran who slowly became consumed by the survivalist movement and developed a deviant sexual appetite that eventually spun into rape and homicide.

Throughout his questioning, Kelley tried to show that Lake, who committed suicide in 1985 after his arrest, preyed upon the vulnerable--the foundation of Ng’s case. Monday’s testimony focused on Lake’s relationships with women and how he used charm and sometimes blackmail to make them submit to his sexual fantasies, which included rough wife swapping and sexual bondage.

Karen Roedl, Lake’s ex-wife, testified that she left him after he beat her. “He was able to--control is the word I can think of,” she said. “Things went his way.”

Another witness, a 40-year-old woman identified as “Ms. L,” told jurors how Lake cajoled her into posing nude in the mid-1970s when she was 16. Lake then raped her, she testified, and threatened to show the photographs to her mother if she told.

“I was scared,” she said. “I did whatever he told me to.”

Another witness, identified as “Mrs. M,” described meeting Lake through a personal ad in a Berkeley newspaper in the mid-1970s. Their relationship started out as caring and loving, she said, but Lake disintegrated into a violent brute who spoke of making his own “snuff film,” saying that to kill a woman on film would be an expression of a “passion for a woman that was unequaled.”

Superior Court Judge John J. Ryan granted a defense motion to withhold the names of the two witnesses, despite objections from some in the news media. Ryan said the witnesses had a valid reason to keep their involvement with Lake secret.

The prosecution in the Ng case alleges that Ng and Lake lured their victims to the remote cabin, stripped them of their belongings and, in the case of two women, used them as sex slaves before killing them. The prosecution also alleges that Ng and Lake buried the victims in and around Lake’s cabin in Wilseyville, a rural town in Calaveras County.

Ng is charged with 12 murders, including those of two infants, and faces the death penalty if convicted.

Lake committed suicide while in police custody after being arrested on suspicion of shoplifting in San Francisco. His arrest led investigators to the Wilseyville cabin, where they discovered the grisly scene.

Prosecutors remained on the sidelines through most of Monday’s testimony, trying to establish during cross-examination that the witnesses knew Lake in the 1970s and had little--if any--contact with Lake or Ng during the time when the slayings took place.

In October, prosecutors played a videotape of some of the murder victims. In one portion, Ng and Lake can be seen taunting Brenda O’Connor, one of the women authorities say was murdered at the cabin.

Prosecutors, who began presenting their case in late October, argued that Ng was an active participant in Lake’s twisted survivalist plot to use and discard victims.

Ng fled to Canada after Lake’s arrest but was extradited in 1991. The trial was moved to Orange County because of extensive publicity about the slayings in Northern California.

Defense attorney Kelley said Monday that he plans to call 60 defense witnesses by Christmas.

When the trial began, lawyers for the prosecution and the defense said they expected it to last nine months to a year.