Walnut Creek Man Charged in Third Murder Tied to Mistress's Lover

Howard Wang already faced two counts of special-circumstance murder for the September 18, 2025 shootings of his wife, Linlin Guo, and his mother-in-law, Beimin Cheng, inside their Walnut Creek home on Kelobra Court. Prosecutors announced this week he now faces a third: the killing of 41-year-old Chengli Li, the boyfriend of Wang's mistress, who was shot dead outside his apartment on the 100 block of Walnut Grove Avenue in San Gabriel at approximately 1:35 a.m. on June 8, 2024, more than 15 months before the Walnut Creek double homicide.

The Contra Costa District Attorney's Office charged Wang, 43, alongside a second suspect, 33-year-old Demarques James Pearl of Los Angeles, in Li's death. According to prosecutors, Wang and Pearl drove together from the Bay Area to Los Angeles County on June 7, 2024, planned the killing, and shot Li outside his apartment the following morning. The Los Angeles County case will be consolidated with the Walnut Creek prosecution and tried in Contra Costa County.

The thread connecting all three alleged killings runs through a single woman: Yan Wang, 45, Howard Wang's girlfriend and a co-defendant in the broader case. Li was her partner at the time of his death. Yan Wang faces charges of accessory after the fact and first-degree residential burglary for allegedly entering the Kelobra Court home on September 19, 2025 with intent to commit larceny. She is also charged with misdemeanor destruction of evidence for allegedly destroying cellphones on September 18, the same day Linlin Guo and Beimin Cheng were found dead. Howard Wang's children were inside that home at the time of the killings.

Consolidating the cases into a single Contra Costa County prosecution reflects a deliberate trial strategy: presenting jurors with one unbroken arc of alleged motive rather than two isolated incidents. Cell-phone data, surveillance footage, and forensic evidence from both scenes, including a spent shell casing recovered at the San Gabriel scene, reportedly provided investigators with the cross-county links needed to bring the new charge. The special-circumstance enhancements already attached to Wang's charges make him eligible for life without parole under California law, and a third murder count tied to the same alleged motive only adds weight to that exposure.

Both Wang and Pearl were scheduled for arraignment on March 30 at the A.F. Bray Courthouse in Martinez, but defense attorneys in both cases requested continuances. Pearl's arraignment was rescheduled to April 1; Wang's to April 14. For prosecutors, the consolidated case now spans nearly two years of alleged violence, two counties, and three victims, all bound together by one relationship Wang is accused of weaponizing from the start.