Remains exhumed: Calaveras sheriff hopes to identify victims of 1980s serial killers
The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Team has exhumed the remains of people killed decades ago by two serial killers with the hope of identifying them through updated DNA technology.
Advances in technology over the years have improved the ability to identify human remains, including those previously determined to be unsuitable for DNA analysis, according to a press release.
The unidentified human remains are associated with the Charles Ng and Leonard Lake serial killings, which occurred in Wilseyville in Calaveras County and in other places in California in 1984 and 1985.
Lake killed himself while in custody 1985. Ng was convicted in 1999 of 11 murders of women, men, an infant and a young boy. The men also tortured and raped the women before killing them.
Ng, now 60, was sentenced to death and remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
In a 1999 jailhouse interview following his conviction, Ng told The Bee, Lake killed all the victims. Even though he’d helped Lake burglarize the apartment of three of his victims and torture two female captives, Ng said he didn’t know about the murders until he helped Lake bury the bodies of two of the victims.
According to Bee archives, the most incriminating evidence at the trial was a videotape of Lake and Ng taunting two female captives and threatening to kill them if they didn’t become sex slaves.
At the conclusion of Ng’s trial and conviction, the remains of the unidentified victims were placed into a crypt in a cemetery located in San Andreas.
Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Greg Stark said the remains were found in unmarked graves at the time of the investigation in and around a property in Wilseyville. Because they could not be identified, it’s unclear how many people the remains account for, but Ng and Lake are suspected of killing as many as 25 people.
“We are going to test every fragment that we have ... we project it will take several months,” he said.
Discussions, meetings, and planning have occurred over the past two years to exhume the remains and submit them to the California Department of Justice for DNA analysis, according to the press release.
On Aug. 17, the remains were removed from the crypt following a few words and an invocation by a sheriff’s chaplain.
The Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Team is working directly with criminalists from the California Department of Justice and two expert forensic anthropologists to respectfully catalog and analyze the remains to determine their viability for DNA analysis, according to the press release.
If they are, the California Department of Justice will compare the DNA obtained from the remains to the DNA of participating families of victims.
The Sheriff’s Office is also attempting to locate families of missing persons who may have fallen victim to Ng and Lake.
Any unmatched DNA will be submitted to the Missing Persons DNA Database for comparison and with hope of future identification.
“Through this project, the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office is seeking to bring closure to the victims’ next of kin by potentially identifying their loved ones’ remains,” according to the press release.
At the conclusion of the analysis, remains will be held as legally necessary, returned to loved ones, or reinterred.
This story was originally published August 23, 2021 at 10:15 AM with the headline "Remains exhumed: Calaveras sheriff hopes to identify victims of 1980s serial killers."
