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Thread: Gerald Armond Gallego - California/Nevada

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    Gerald Armond Gallego - California/Nevada


    Charlene Adelle Gallego and Gerald Armond Gallego


    Summary of Offense:

    Gerald Armond Gallego and Charlene Adelle Gallego terrorized Sacramento, California and Washoe County, Nevada between 1978 and 1980. They killed a total of 10 victims, mostly teenagers, whom they kept as sex slaves before killing them.

    Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death in Sacramento County in April 1983. He was also sentenced to death in Nevada in 1984. However, his Nevada death sentence was overturned in 1999 and he won the right to a new sentencing hearing, but the new jury also sentenced him to death.

    Charlene Gallego was sentence to 16 years and eight months in prison.

    Victims: Rhonda Scheffler, 17, and Kippi Vaught, 16 / Brenda Judd, 14, and Sandra Colley, 13 / Stacey Redican, 17, and Karen Chipman Twiggs, 17 / Linda Aguilar, 21, and unborn child / Virginia Mochel, 34 / Craig Miller, 22, and his fiancée Mary Elizabeth Sowers, 21

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    October 28, 1997

    Ex-Con Starts Life Anew

    She lured victims for her serial-killer husband in late '70s

    By Joan Ryan
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Charlene Williams is 41 now, an attractive woman in a sleek suit and light makeup. As she sipped a latte in a cafe one recent morning, she betrayed no hint of the woman she once was -- a 24-year-old who lured young women into the hands of her husband, serial killer Gerald Gallego.

    Their crime spree, from 1978 to 1980, was one of the most chilling in recent history, making front- page news as the "sex-slave murders." With promises of parties or jobs, Williams persuaded women to get into cars with her so Gallego could play out brutal sex fantasies. He raped and killed nine women and murdered one young man before he and Williams were captured in 1980.

    In her first interview since her release from prison this summer, Williams seemed determined to distance herself from the grisly crimes that put her behind bars for nearly 17 years and her husband on death row. But she knows she can never be free of them.

    The memories are flooding back to her now like waking nightmares: innocent girls hammered to death, shot in the head, raped, bound, dumped in ditches. "It might be a word, a scent carried on a breeze, happening upon a certain location, and everything comes back," Williams said. "I have days when it takes all morning to get it together. The memories will be with me the rest of my life.

    "And then there's the added element of looking over my shoulder."

    Williams fears for her life, saying that Gallego has a contract out on her for testifying against him. So she spoke cautiously, refusing to disclose which state she lives in, what kind of work she is doing or what relationship she has with the son she delivered in prison three months after her arrest. (The boy, now 16, was raised by Williams' parents.)

    She wouldn't allow a newspaper photographer to take even an unrecognizable silhouette of her, and she balked, too, at the photographer taking her attorney's picture, fearful that she could be traced through him.

    The threats on her life turned her release from the Nevada Women's Correctional Facility on July 17 into a scene from a TV movie. A female deputy dressed as Williams boarded a van outside the prison at 8 that morning as a decoy to journalists and others waiting in the parking lot.

    But Williams had already been taken at 6 a.m. to a secret location known only to her attorney, who had been notified of the plan the night before. The warden kept the time and location of Williams' release a secret from all but the handful of deputies who escorted Williams and her attorney out of the county.

    For the first few weeks, she stayed with friends she knew from church long ago. "She felt a little lost for a while," said her attorney, Joseph Murphy of Sacramento. "She didn't know anybody except the friends from church. Before she got out, prison officials asked her how she thought it would be on the outside. And she said she didn't know. Being with Gallego, she felt she had never been a free adult woman."

    Williams agreed to The Chronicle interview, then, in a panic, canceled just minutes before it was to begin. Murphy calmed her, and an hour later she arrived at the cafe with him. Despite the warm day, Williams kept a coat pulled tightly around her. She said she wanted to do the interview so she can help women who are victims of abusive men. After nearly two decades of counseling, that is how she sees herself, as a victim rather than a criminal.

    "When I first went to prison, I truly believed I deserved the death penalty," she said, "even though there was no evidence against me. I knew somebody had to take responsibility for everything, and I knew he wouldn't."

    Now, she says, and her attorney agrees, that what happened to her could happen to any woman who is physically and emotionally abused by a manipulative man. Williams recounted how charming and gentlemanly Gallego was when she met him on a blind date, set up through an acquaintance. He didn't even try to kiss her, and he sent flowers the next morning.

    Williams was 20 years old at the time, the only child of an upper- middle-class couple who gave her a life of violin lessons and after- school clubs. She was working as a journeyman meat wrapper, operating her own flower and glassware boutique (a graduation present from her parents, she says) and taking classes at Sacramento State. But she felt like a failure. She had already seen one marriage end in an annulment and another in divorce. Gallego made her feel special.

    Williams says she didn't know that Gallego, 10 years her senior, had spent 3 1/2 years in prison for robbery and had been charged with rape, incest, auto theft and assault with a deadly weapon. She also didn't know that his father had died in the Mississippi gas chamber in 1955 for killing two law officers.

    "He portrayed to my parents that he was a super family guy," Williams said. "But soon it was like being in the middle of a mud puddle. You can't see your way out because he eliminated things in my life piece by piece, person by person, until all I had around me were members of his family, and they're all like him, every one of them. . . . Prison was freedom compared to being with him."

    When the rapes and killings began, Williams said, she didn't escape because she believed Gallego would have hunted her down, even if she turned to the police. "There were victims who died and there were victims who lived," she said. "It's taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I'm one of the ones who lived."

    The families of the murder victims -- some of whom harbored more hatred toward Williams than Gallego during the trials -- are not likely to accept such a claim, nor this one from Murphy, her lawyer: "Under the control of a madman like Hitler, the German people did things they would never have dreamed of doing on their own. She was in that kind of situation."

    After their arrests, Williams agreed to testify against Gallego in exchange for the minimum first- degree-murder sentence of 16 years and eight months in both Nevada and California, with the sentences to run concurrently. (She pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in California and one count of second-degree murder in Nevada.)

    Nevada was ready to release Williams six years ago for good behavior, but California officials threatened to arrest her on other charges if she didn't serve the full sentence. She feared going to a California prison, believing that Gallego had stronger connections there in which to carry out his threats. So she pleaded guilty to another second-degree murder charge so Nevada could keep her an additional six years.

    While in prison she studied a wide range of subjects, from psychology to business to Icelandic literature. "She's a pretty intellectual woman," said Nevada District Judge Richard Wagner, who was the lead prosecutor in Gallego's Nevada trial. "She has a phenomenal mind, which made her a tremendous witness. . . . She had almost a photographic memory about the victims, down to their shoes and clothes."

    Williams says she wants to put her studies and experience to use. She wants to advise law enforcement officials and judges on dealing more compassionately with battered women. She wants to lecture women's groups once she feels safer from Gallego threats. Yet she's vague about how, exactly, she can help prevent other women from walking the same horrific path she did.

    Perhaps we ought to establish a hotline like 911 just for battered women, she said, although she admitted that she would have been too fearful to have called it herself. Or perhaps, she said, she can give women warning signs to watch for, although she said Gallego took such quick control of her that warning signs probably wouldn't have helped.

    But she feels a need to do something.

    "(Gallego) didn't kill me. I didn't get the death penalty. God for some reason decided I needed to be here," she said. "And it's to help other people. The past can't be undone, but the future can be helped."

    The adjustment to her new life has been a slow process. She had trouble sleeping. She has felt alone and out of place. But she found a clerical job, learned how to drive again, updated her clothes and hairstyle. She has managed to knit together an appearance of normality. She believes completely that the normality will, one day soon, be real.

    "I know I have a purpose, and when somebody has a purpose, it makes life meaningful," Williams said. "And it's not a self-serving purpose. That's important, too."

    THE GALLEGO/WILLIAMS CRIME SPREE

    For two years, Charlene Williams and Gerald Gallego committed a series of gruesome murders in California and Nevada.

    THE KILLINGS

    Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler, 17, both of Sacramento, were kidnapped on Sept.11, 1978 from a shopping mall. Their bodies were found two days later in a field east of Sacramento.

    Brenda Lynn Judd, 13, and Sandra Colley, 14, kidnapped in Reno on June 24, 1979. Their bodies were never found.

    Linda Aguilar, 21, of Oregon, hitched a ride with Gallego and Williams on June 7, 1980. Her body was found two weeks later in Gold Beach, Ore.

    Virginia Mochel, 34, of West Sacramento, was kidnapped on July 17, 1980 from the parking lot of a bar where she worked. Her body was found in nearby Clarksburg (Yolo County).

    Stacy Redican and Karen Chipman Twigs, both 17 and from Citrus Heights, Calif., raped and beaten to death with a hammer in April 1980. Their bodies were dumped in Nevada.

    Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, were kidnapped after a Sacramento State fraternity dinner on Nov. 2, 1980. Their bodies were later found in the foothills east of Sacramento.

    THE ARRESTS

    Gallego and Williams arrested on Nov. 17, 1980, in a Western Union in Omaha, Nebraska.

    Charlene Williams delivers baby while in jail on Jan. 18, 1981.

    WILLIAMS CONFESSES

    Williams confesses in July 1982 that she helped in 10 murders and strikes a deal with district attorneys in California and Nevada in exchange for testifying against Gallego.

    CALIFORNIA TRIAL

    Gallego trial begins in Martinez in November 1982. Gallego found guilty on April 12, 1983, after the jury deliberates for three days. Jury recommends the death penalty for Gallego May 1983.

    NEVADA TRIAL

    The second trial for Gallego begins May 1984. Jury takes two hours to find him guilty of first degree murder in June 1984. He is sentenced to death, but continues to appeal his sentence.

    WILLIAMS' RELEASE

    Williams released from prison on July 17, 1997, exactly 16 years and 8 months from her arrest.

    http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/B...573.php#page-1

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    July 20, 2002

    'Sex-slave' killer dies of cancer in Nevada prison hospital

    By Michael Taylor
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Gerald Gallego, the "sex-slave" killer who, with his wife, cut a lethal swath through California and Nevada more than 20 years ago, died of cancer in a Nevada prison hospital Thursday night, cheating the state out of executing him.

    Gallego, who was 56, started his criminal career as a thief in Sacramento before his notorious kidnappings and murders of young couples in Oregon, Northern California and Nevada in the late 1970s and 1980.

    He had been on Nevada's Death Row since June 1984, after being convicted of the April 1980 murders of Karen Chipman Twiggs and Stacey Redican, two 17- year-olds kidnapped from a mall near Sacramento whose bodies were found in desert graves near Lovelock, Nev. He was convicted in California a year earlier of kidnapping and killing two young Sacramento sweethearts.

    "I've never seen anything to equal his pure depravity or lack of remorse," said Nevada state judge Richard Wagner, who prosecuted the Nevada case when he was Pershing County district attorney in 1984.

    Gallego was so reviled that when it was learned that the impoverished county might not be able to afford the $60,000 it needed to try him, a Sacramento newspaper columnist urged the public to send money to the county to help the prosecution.

    More than $20,000 came roaring in -- one-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills -- along with such bold-stroke messages as, "may the trial be swift and the noose tight" and "Please purchase three bullets and shoot that bastard Gerald Gallego three times."

    Legal experts said then that it appeared to be the nation's first murder prosecution to be partly financed by private contributions.

    In March of this year, he was transferred from the state prison's Death Row in remote Ely to the prison medical facility in Carson City, according to Nevada Department of Corrections assistant director Glen Whorton.

    Whorton said Gallego had managed to stave off a date with lethal injection through "multiple appeals, and he was pursuing those appeals when he died." Asked how Gallego's prison time went, he said, "He didn't stand out at all. He was a compliant, nonproblematical inmate."

    Gallego's first murder trial took place in Martinez in 1983. He was convicted of kidnapping and killing Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21.

    During the trial, his common-law wife, Charlene, who had made a deal with the prosecution, testified against him.

    Angry, frightened and weeping, Charlene Gallego had to undergo a bizarre cross-examination by Gallego. Acting as his own attorney, he seemed disconnected from the rest of the courtroom as he roamed about, emulating the best of TV defense lawyers, cozying up to the jury and glaring at the prosecution and its star witness.

    "Now, Charlene," Gallego said matter-of-factly, "you've indicated that I killed Craig Miller."

    "Yes, you did, Jerry," she said, her lips trembling.

    "How did I kill him?"

    "With a gun," she said. "You were standing there face to face with him."

    Prosecutors spent three months painting a picture of a couple that inveigled young people into their fold and then promptly shot the young man, if there was a couple, and later shot the woman.

    After Gallego was sentenced to death in California, Nevada authorities tried to extradite him for their case, but Gallego managed to get court injunctions that kept him safely on San Quentin's Death Row, where because of backlogs and appeals it was doubtful he would be executed soon.

    Wagner, the Pershing County, Nev., district attorney at the time, said Friday that he succeeded in getting Gallego extradited to Nevada by deputizing Sacramento Sheriff's Detective Ray Biondi and having him poised to whisk Gallego out of San Quentin the minute the court order blocking extradition was momentarily lifted. The ploy worked.

    Wagner, now a judge in Pershing County, prosecuted Gallego in Lovelock, won a conviction and saw Gallego sent to Death Row. In those days, many people in California thought that the state Supreme Court would never allow Gallego to die and that it was a blessing he was going to Nevada.

    Asked Friday what he thought of Gallego's perennial appeals, Wagner said, "I guess I've been disappointed in the judicial system. This case points out the absurdity of the appeals process. God's justice beats the hell out of man's justice."

    When Wagner learned that Gallego was terminally ill, he tried to get a deathbed confession.

    "He even refused that," Wagner said. "He can take up his appeal with God directly."

    Prison officials declined to say whom, if anyone, they contacted after his death.

    Gallego was preceded in death by his father, the senior Gerald Gallego, who was put to death in Mississippi's gas chamber in 1955 after killing a town marshal in Ocean Springs, Miss. After arriving in prison, and before he was executed, the elder Gallego hurled cleaning acid into the eyes of a jailer and then beat him to death with a pipe.

    http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/articl...da-2793643.php

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    January 31, 2013

    Sacramento’s ‘Sex Slave Murders’ Killer Discovered Living In Area; Speaks After Years Of Silence


    SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – Young girls were hunted and turned into sex slaves. Ten victims would die before investigators captured the serial killer couple behind the crime spree.

    Charlene Williams served her time, and now CBS13 has learned she’s returned to the Sacramento area and is living among us.

    Williams is now opening up about the murders after years of living a new life.

    Williams, now in her 50s, is soft-spoken and focused on her future. Ask her about the past and she has a hard time saying her real name and Gerald Gallego’s name, the man who had her kidnap girls for his sexual fantasies.

    Even after more than 30 years, the memories haven’t faded away and neither has the pain for Hal Sowers, who lost his only daughter.

    “She always had a smile,” said Sowers of his daughter Mary Beth. “She’s with us everyday.”

    Williams says she didn’t kill Mary Beth, but pleaded guilty to the kidnap and murder of Sowers’ only daughter.

    Mary Beth wasn’t the only victim.

    “I did not kill any of them,” said Williams of the 10 victims.

    She says she never even wanted to be a part of the killings.

    “No, for God’s sake no. No I never did. I wouldn’t be sitting here right now if I did,” she said.

    Williams is sticking with the story she told on the stand three decades ago, claiming it was all Gallego, her boyfriend at the time.

    “He is just one sick bastard, he was,” Williams said. “I would’ve done anything I could if I could’ve stopped him. I know I couldn’t have stopped him; I tried to stop him.”

    Williams agreed to speak to CBS13 if her identity was hidden. For the last 15 years, she’s lived among us under a new name. She says she changed it to hide from Gallego and his family, fearing for the safety of her family.

    “I put him on death row. Am I proud of that? Yes I am,” said Williams.

    Gallego died of cancer awaiting his execution. Williams’ confession to the crimes and plea deal earned her a second chance at life, but while she was freed after 17 years behind bars, Williams says, her past keeps her prisoner.

    “I see it everyday. I always see it; it never goes away. There isn’t one more than the other. They’re all horrible, horrible memories, every single one,” said Williams.

    The couple would hunt for many of their victims at Sacramento-area malls. Williams testified in court she was the one who lured girls into their van where Gallego waited with a gun. The victims, half of them teens, were bound, repeatedly raped, murdered, and then dumped or buried.

    Williams insists she never agreed to Gallego’s plans. Yet, the couple’s trail of terror, which began in 1978, continued for two years, in three different states, and claimed 10 victims as well as an unborn child. The crime spree was dubbed the “Sex Slave Murders.”

    “You know, I tried; I tried to save some of their lives,” said Williams.

    She says Gallego controlled her with fear, threatening to kill her family, raping and abusing her.

    “I tried to get away. I tried, and people, especially women, will say, ‘well, if you want to get away you can always get away.’ It’s not that easy; it’s not that easy at all,” she said. “I don’t know (why Gallego didn’t kill me), because he sure tried.”

    Many believe Gallego never killed Williams because she was his partner in crime.

    “She was just as guilty as he was,” said Sowers.

    In 1997, as part of her plea agreement, Williams was released.

    Sowers never cared to know where Williams had disappeared.

    “Didn’t want to know really,” he said.

    All that mattered is Williams seemed to disappear, until now.

    “I mean, it’s bad enough I have to deal with Mary Beth,” said Williams.

    For years, Williams lived undetected in the Sacramento area. But instead of returning to a life of crime, Williams says she turned to charity work.

    “I’d say 100 percent of my life,” Williams said of dedicating her life to charity.

    Now more than ever, Williams says she’s dedicated to giving back, especially to the military after losing a family member to war.

    “He was a very special, special person,” Williams said. “I’ve always wanted to make up for the past one way or the other, but that isn’t why I’m doing it. It’d be a lie to say that isn’t part of it, because I’d do anything in the world to make up for it, anything in the world.”

    Williams never told investigators where she and Gallego dumped Mary Beth. Three weeks after her disappearance, Mary Beth’s body would be found in Placer County near Loomis.

    The 21-year-old was bound, shot three times and still wearing the same dress she wore on her last night alive with her fiancé, Craig Miller, who as also shot three times.

    Williams says while she can’t undo the past, she’s determined to prove she belongs among the very same people, who decades ago, feared they would be her next victim.

    “It isn’t so much that I really changed, it’s just so much that I was finally able to be myself,” she said.

    So, does Sowers think that there is a possibility that Williams has changed her life?

    The answer to that question and Williams’ emotional reaction, along with why she thinks Gallego could be connected to a terrifying and unsolved crime spree that left Sacramento County paralyzed in fear will air on CBS13 News Sunday after Super Bowl XLVII.

    http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/...rs-of-silence/

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