11 Guilty Verdicts Fall 1 Short, Victim’s Sister Says

For 14 years after her brother’s disappearance, Sharon Sellitto put her life on hold to help ensure that Charles Ng, the man she believes killed her brother, was brought to justice.

On Tuesday she held back tears and shook her head in disbelief as an Orange County jury returned guilty verdicts on all but one of the 12 murder counts Ng faced.

The jury had deadlocked on the count charging Ng with the murder of Sellitto’s brother, Paul Cosner, a San Francisco car dealer who vanished in late 1984. Now all the efforts she and her family spent traveling from her home in Ohio to courts in California and Canada to track Ng seem to her a “waste of time.”

“I can’t believe it,” Sellitto said amid a crush of reporters outside the Santa Ana courtroom after the verdicts were read. “He murdered my brother dead to rights.”

Despite the jury’s impasse, Sellitto expressed satisfaction that Ng will face a stiff punishment and is eligible for the death penalty.

“It’s a moral victory for us,” she said. “I am really happy they reached guilty verdicts on 11 counts, but it should have been 12.”

Sellitto’s bittersweet reaction typified many of the feelings expressed by other victims’ family members at the close of one of the longest and costliest prosecutions in California history.

During the 14 years of legal twists and turns, many family members forged friendships from their shared grief.

Throughout the four-month trial, Sellitto and her mother, Virginia Nessley, 74, sat in the front row of the courtroom next to Lola and Dwight Stapley, parents of murder victim Scott Stapley. The only family members who attended the entire trial, they often talked and reassured one other as the case progressed.

When the court clerk read the first-degree murder conviction for the death of Stapley, Dwight and Lola Stapley did not show the great relief they felt; only a brief look of satisfaction passed between them.

Afterward, they said they were “ecstatic” with the verdicts but disappointed that Cosner’s family couldn’t share in the victory.

“It’s heartbreaking. My heart just bleeds for them.” said Lola Stapley. “Justice worked for me, but it didn’t work for them.”

Ng was convicted of murdering 11 people, including two women who the prosecution contended were used as sex slaves before being killed and buried at a remote Calaveras County cabin in 1984 and 1985. Ng’s alleged accomplice, Leonard Lake, the owner of the cabin, killed himself after being arrested in 1985. Ng has denied killing anyone.

It is unclear why the jury deadlocked in Cosner’s case. The 39-year-old, whose body was never found, disappeared shortly after he advertised his car for sale in a local newspaper. His bullet-riddled, bloodstained Honda Prelude was the car Ng and Lake were driving just before they were seen shoplifting at a South San Francisco lumberyard.

Lake was arrested; Ng fled to Canada, where he was apprehended and extradited. Sellitto attended many Canadian court hearings, fighting for extradition.

The jury’s decision befuddled Sellitto, who said some of the other guilty verdicts resulted from less convincing evidence. She said the fact authorities cracked the case while Ng and Lake were in possession of Cosner’s car was evidence enough that Ng killed her brother.

“If it wasn’t for my brother, we wouldn’t have had a trial,” she said. “They’d still be snatching people and burying them up there.”

After so many years tracking the case, the families of Stapley and Cosner said they plan to follow the saga to its conclusion. They said they will attend the penalty phase of the trial, scheduled to begin March 8.

Stapley said Ng deserves the death penalty, but the 70-year-old worries that she won’t be able to see the execution if the jury returns a death sentence. Ng, she said, will no doubt mount a lengthy legal battle to overturn a death sentence.

“I’m going to start taking my vitamins so I will live to see” the execution, said the Garden Grove resident.