Charles Chitat Ng, the son of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, lived in a bizarre fantasy world that may have made him capable of participating in the brutal slayings of at least 25 people in a rural cabin in northern California.
He was born in Hong Kong on Christmas Eve, 1961, and displayed his tendency toward violence at an early age.
The evidence of that violence allegedly culminated with the discovery in early June of three bodies near a cabin in rural Wilseyville, Calif., about 125 miles northeast of San Francisco.
Throughout June, investigators uncovered additional bodies at the cabin and an international search was launched for Ng, who had disappeared.
Ng was expelled from more than one elementary school before being sent at the age of 16 to Bentham Grammar School in Yorkshire, England, where his parents hoped the teenager would learn discipline, said Rufus Good, Ng's uncle.
But during the nine months Ng spent in England in 1977 and 1978, he kept to himself at the school and was nicknamed 'Charlie-boy,' a title he did not like, Good said.
One teacher said Ng was a studious, quiet pupil interested in the martial arts.
'The other boys would keep out of his way, because they knew he was stronger than they,' said the instructor, adding that Ng also was known for angry and violent explosions.
In 1978, Ng was caught stealing $20 from another student at the school, said John Hagan, the former headmaster.
Ng later was arrested in a clumsy shoplifting incident at a department store, his uncle said.
After graduating from high school, Ng went to live with relatives on a student visa in San Leandro, Calif., 10 miles southeast of San Francisco, but he flunked out of the College of Notre Dame in nearby Belmont after one semester.
In the autumn of 1979, Ng was convicted of fleeing a minor auto accident and ordered to pay restitution. Instead,he enlisted in the Marines and fraudulently listed his birthplace as Bloomington, Ind.
Ng believed he was a reincarnated 'Ninja warrior,' the black-garbed assassins who roamed medieval Japan, Honolulu attorney Earle Partington said.
'Ng seemed to live in a fantasy world where he thought he was a Ninja,' said Partington, who represented one of three Marines charged with helping Ng in the October 1981 theft of weapons from a Marine Corps base in Hawaii.
Lance corporal Ng was convicted of stealing $11,500 in military weapons, including three grenade launchers, two assault rifles, seven pistols and a night-vision rifle scope from the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station armory.
He later broke out of the Marine stockade and fled to California, where he joined Leonard Lake, a former Marine he apparently met through a classified advertisement in a survival magazine.
Lake, 39, an alleged accomplice in the California slayings, committed suicide after being arrested June 2 on a shoplifting charge.
The two lived, along with Lake's wife, Claralyn 'Cricket' Balazs, on a ranch in the California town of Philo, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
In April 1982, the FBI tracked Ng to Philo and a SWAT team arrived by helicopter and arrested him.
He was tried on the weapons theft charges and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He was released in June 1984, but the Marine Corps failed to tell the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that Ng should be deported.
In October 1984, Ng was arrested again for shoplifting in Daly City.
In April 1985, police said Ng was seen taking valuables from the San Francisco apartment of the Dubs family, later reported missing.
After Lake was arrested on June 2, Ng asked Balazs, who had been divorced from Lake, to drive him to his San Francisco apartment, police said. She did. That was the last trace of him until his arrest July 6 in Canada.
