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LANDLORD GUILTY: MAN ADMITS TO SETTING APARTMENT FIRES. PAGE 2

HENLEY TRIAL: JURORS TO CONTINUE DELIBERATIONS TUESDAY. PAGE 4

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Metro INDEX COUNTY COURTS 4 LINE 3 HEALTH .2 COUNTY OBITUARIES 4 SCAN 3 POLICE 2 DEATH RELIGION 5 NOTICES 4 WEATHER 6 THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER, SATURDAY, MARCH 25, 1995

I NEWS F O ^

O.C TO HOST TRIAL FOR CHARLS NG, ACCUSED OF 12 KIUJNGS IN

A NOTORIOUS CASE By STUART PFEIFER The Orange County Register

judge , ruled Friday that serial-killing sus-pect Charles Ng will stand trial in Orange

.County for some of California!s . most notorious slayings, rejecting a defense mo-tion to transfer the case back to Northern California.

Randy Kraft victim goes home to family plot UPDATE: Twenly-two years after his death, a man slain by the noto-rious serial killer is buried in Arizona. By TONY SAAVEDRA The Orange County Register

In death, Kevin Clark Bailey has found the home that eluded him in life.

Dumped on a Huntington Beach roadside by serial killer Randy Kraft, Bailey, 17, went un-identified for 22 years, buried in an unmarked grave.

But the mystery, was solved this month by a deputy coroner, and Bailey's body was moved within days to a family plot at his parent's homestead in Snow-flake, Ariz.

Diagnosed as hyperactive, the youth had spent much of his life escaping from mental institu-

tions and hitchhiking home. But he never stayed long, said his mother, Barbara Parry.

Now he is home for good, and : that has opened the way for the ; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-

day Saints to conduct the proce-! dures to send his soul on the road to heaven. ^

The death of Bailey, whose body was found by a police offi-cer April 14,1973, came at a time when there were no high-speed computers to analyze thousands of fingerpirints from throughout the Western United States.

It also came at a time when Orange County was still burying its "John Does" in public plots at El Toro Memorial Cemetery.

. If he had died more recently, he would have been cremated, his ashes spread at sea if they had not been claimed within two years, said Gerran Brown, whose family owns Brown Colo-nial Mortuary in Santa Ana.

The mortuary handled the pa-perwork and exhumed the body March 15 at cost.

Kevin Bailey's body, shrouded in plastic,^ was transported by car to Snowflake, a 10-hour drive, said Jewkes Mortuary, which handled the burial March 17 in Arizona.

COURTS: The ex-Marine is suspected of torturing victims a decade ago in Cala.veras

County. Testimony would begin in 1997. It could take two years before a

jury begins hearing testimony against Ng, whose trial is expect-ed to be one of the longest and costliest in state history. A ver-dict is not expected until 1998, attorneys said.

Because state money is al-

ready budgeted for Ng's trial, bankrupt Orange County will be required to pick up little of the trial cost, according to attor-neys. The state is also paying for Ng's defense, which could run as much as $3 million.

Attorneys from Orange Coun-

ty's Public Defender's Office vowed to appeal Friday's ruling keeping the trial in Orange Coun-ty. They contend that Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzger-ald should be prohibited from making any rulings in the case until a motion to remove him is decided.

Public defenders say Ng, a for-mer Marine, wants the case transferred to San Francisco County so he can be reunited with

NG: Judge rules that suspect will be tried in Orange County. Case was moved from Northern California.

the attorney who represented him before the case was trans-ferred to the Santa Ana court-house.

In a motion filed last week, Ng's defense attorneys alleged that Fitzgerald has allowed his desire to try the case to interfere with Ng's right to a fair trial.

Fitzgerald, one of the county's Please see TRIAL Page 2

TRYING TO BREAK THE 'CONTRACT'

PAUL E. RODRIGUEZH'he Orange County Register

Members of the National Treasury Employees Union demonstrate the House of Representatives, on Friday afternoon in front of the against the 'Contract With America,' the Republican political agenda in Federal Building on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana.

Corona del Mar cliffs to be rebuilt ENVIRONMENT: Three homes appear safe af-ter the landslide. Engi-neers hope to head off slippage with truck-loads of earth. By JOHN WESTCOTT The Orange County Register

NEWPORT BEACH Corona del Mar's failed slope is getting a facelift.

Crews today begin a 10-day re-construction'of the slippery cliff near three homes on Sandcastle Drive, applying the first of 10,000 cubic yards of dirt to the west side of Buck Gully.

The homeowners continue to live in the houses, though they say they are ready to leaye should the slide worsen. Despite this week's rains, the homes ap-pear to be on solid ground for now.

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and hear a strange noise," said Bob Riblett of 974 Sandcastle Drive. "It's very unsettling. But we're hang-ing in there."

On March 17, Riblett and his neighbors woke to find 200 feet of the slope had fallen about 20 feet into the gully, land owned by the Irvine Co.

The reconstruction, which will layer thick, clay-bearing soil on top of porous, sandy soil, is a temporary fix, said Dawn Mc-Cormick, Irvine Co. spokeswom-an.

"Right now we're making sure the homes are safe," she said.

Sandy soil will speed drainage of water, while the top layer will block moisture from getting in, she said.

NMG Inc. of Irvine is still in-vestigating the cause of last week's landslide to determine a permanent solution.

McCormick said a possible cause for the slippage was ex-cess water causing the bedrock to slip, but engineers will contin-ue to investigate.

Penny-pinching pupils make cents count toward trip to Disneyland EDUCATION: The chil-dren at Kennedy Ele-mentary School get a basic lesson in math. By JOHN GITTELSOHN The Orange County Register

SANTA ANA Math and pa-tience.

The 780 students at John F. Kennedy Elementary School are learning lessons in both as they go about collecting 1 million pen-nies $10,000 for a trip to Disneyland.

Now 18 months into the proj-ect, the children are a quarter of the way to their goal, having

amassed 250,000 pennies. "They bring two or three

each," kindergarten teacher Paula Caldwell said Friday. "That's their contribution."

The students nicknamed the "Penny Pinchers" scrounge pennies from sidewalks, apart-ment roofs, railroad tracks, couches and garbage cans.

But money is scarce. Ninety-five percent of Kennedy students are in free-lunch programs. Few get weekly allowances.

"Sometimes my mom gives me money when she has it," said fifth-grader Edgar Martinez. "But when she don't have no money, I don't get any."

Each Friday, the students as-

semble the week's proceeds, dol-ing them by tens into paper cups and by hundreds and thousands into plastic bags. The most pen-nies collected in a single day is 16,000.

This week, they banked 5,300 pennies $53 enough for two tickets to the Magic Kingdom.

At this pace, fifth-grader Sam-uel Ortega calculated, it will take about seven years to raise enough money for all the stu-dents to go to Disneyland.

That has Principal Sally Mel-ton considering a new objective.

"We might have to think about Knott's Berry Farm, kids," she said. "That might be in our price range. That's a nice dream."

Mummified poultry a lesson, not lunch EDUCATION: Seven chickens give their pu-trid all to demonstrate ancient burial practices. By KATIE HICKOX The Orange County Register

HUNTINGTON BEACH Seven mummified chickens, each gaily festooned with se-quins and plastic pearls, took their final journey into the after-life sometime after the lunch bell rang.

Nearly 270 mourners Friday bore the dead poultry to a shal-low grave at the corner of the schoolyard. Throughout the brief burial ceremony for King Klucks I through VII, some members of the sixth-grade class of Dwyer Middle School tried particularly >r ' "

hard to stand still. As part of a monthlong study of

ancient Egypt, the kids mummi-fied seven freshly killed chickens and buried them in a 4-foot-deep hole.

"These kids are going to re-member this more than anything else in their sixth-grade experi-ence," said Principal Ian Collins.

Teachers stuffed the chickens with Borax and baking soda, sewed up all bodily cavities, and placed the chickens in plastic containers. As part of the study of the Egyptian embalming pro-cess, the kids visited the decay-ing poultry in the basement boil-er room every Friday to watch the bodies turn blackish-blue and develop a powerful, rotting odor.

"It was killer," said Justin Pe-truna, 12. "It's just pretty wild how it all works."

BRUCE CHAMBERS/The Orange County Register

DOLING IT OUT: Edgar Martinez, left, and Samual Ortega, both 11 and fifth-graders at Kennedy Elementary School in Santa Ana, on Friday count out pennies that were collected in the past week.

Vietnamese night owls can find Voice on KWIZ

MICHAEL GOULDINGAThe Orange County Register

CHICKEN A LA PHARAOH: Dwyer Middle School sixth-graders Jennifer Wong, left, and Skye Underwood transport mummified chickens to their burial ground, actually a corner of the schoolyard.

Since the county bankruptcy has forced the school to cut back on extra activities, Karen Lem-pert and three other social-stud-ies teachers paid up to $40 each for embalming powders and freshly killed chickens from an Asian poultry store. The effort was appreciated by Marie Harri-

A

son, 45, who attended the burial with her son Jonathan.

"They make it a hands-on ex-perience for the kids, so they're not just reading the books and writing the report," Harrison said. "The kids are actually du-plicating what the ancient peo-ples did."^

MEDIA: Overnight ra-dio program will offer news, entertainment, English lessons and call-in segments. By PAUL G. ZIELBAUER The Orange County Register

In a modest house on a residen-tial street in unincorporated Orange County, a group of Viet-namese-Americans is putting the finishing touches on a soundproof booth smaller than most bath-rooms. Four microphones,three compact-disc players and one mixing board are in place, one high-speed computer left to go.

On April 15, Voice of Vietnam-ese radio will begin broadcasting an all-night mix of news, talk and entertainment on what has be-come the hottest Vietnamese-

language station in Orange Coun-ty. In booking the program into the overnight time slot, Pasade-na-based KWIZ-FM 96.7 can-celed two programmers and be-came virtually all Vietnamese, all the time.

Sandwiched between midnight and morning news shows. Voice of Vietnamese will connect night-owl listeners to a fortune teller, provide tips to immigrants bon-ing up for their U.S. citizenship tests, and offer English lessons around 4 a.m. A professional psy-chiatrist also will offer help to listeners, program manager Tuong Thang said.

"Our target audience is third-shift workers and the elderly people who have a hard time sleeping at night," said Michael Nguyen, one of eight Voice of Vietnamese investors hoping to

Please see RADIO Page 2

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