Gerald and Charlene Gallego

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Gerald and Charlene Gallego were an American couple who went down in criminal history as serial killers .

Short biographies

Gerald Gallego

Gerald Armand Gallego (born July 17, 1946 in Sacramento , California , † July 18, 2002 in Nevada ) was the son of Gerald Alberto Gallego and Lorraine Pullen Gallego. Gerald Jr. never met his father because he was in San Quentin State Prison at the time of his birth . Gallego Sr. later managed to escape, but was arrested in Mississippi after the murder of two police officers and, in 1955, was the first prisoner to be executed in the gas chamber in Mississippi. Gerald Junior grew up believing his father was killed in an accident.

Gallego was known to the police at a young age for several thefts. In 1959, at the age of 13, he raped a six-year-old girl from the neighborhood. In July 1961 he was paroled. In the spring of 1962, he and his half-brother David Hunt committed an armed robbery and were admitted to the Mule Creek State Prison in Ione . Although he managed to escape shortly afterwards, he surrendered to the police and was incarcerated until 1963 when he was released again on parole.

In December 1963 he married a 21 year old woman and in April 1964 his daughter Krista was born. This marriage was divorced between 1964 and 1965 (details vary). On July 12, 1966, Gallego married a second time. The marriage ended in divorce after just 26 days because of Gerald's violence against his wife. His third marriage, which he entered into on October 14, 1967, was divorced in less than a month for the same reasons. In March 1969, he married a fourth time in Reno . It was a marriage of convenience as his 19-year-old wife Harriette von Gallego was pregnant without knowing Gallego's predilection for BDSM . Harriette divorced him after only a month.

On October 25, 1969, Gallego and Hunt committed another armed robbery of a motel in Vacaville . Once again, the two managed to escape from Solano County Jail shortly after their sentence began . However, they were arrested after four days and sentenced to five years in prison. While he was still in prison, Gerald married a fifth time on October 5, 1974. He was released on December 12, 1975; his fifth marriage was divorced in August 1977. On September 10, 1977 Gallego met Charlene Williams, who should commit several murders with him.

Charlene Gallego

Charlene Adell Gallego , b. Williams (born October 10, 1956 in Sacramento , California) grew up in contrast to her future husband in a middle-class family. Her father, Charles Williams, ran a supermarket in Stockton .

Williams was a good student and learned many musical instruments, so her parents would have loved to see Charlene accepted into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music . However, she came into contact with drugs at the age of twelve and became addicted to alcohol at the age of 14 .

She barely graduated from high school and dropped out of college after a semester. Wanting to be a business woman, following the example of her father, she opened a gift shop in Folsom with the financial support of her parents , but soon had to file for bankruptcy.

After two failed marriages, she met Gerald Gallego, ten years her senior, on September 10, 1977 and began a relationship with him.

Living together

A week after they met, Charlene Williams and Gerald Gallego moved into a house on Bluebird Lane in Sacramento. Gallego invited an underage runaway to their home and they had a threesome sexual relationship. When Gallego found Charlene Williams alone in bed with the girl in the spring of 1978, she told him that she was bisexual . Gerald Gallego then beat up his partner and threw her roommate out of the house.

Later, Gallego broke his finger when he slapped Williams in the face, and Williams wounded his head with a club.

In July 1978, on Gerald Gallego's 32nd birthday, Charlene Williams invited his daughter Krista to her home. The father raped his 14-year-old daughter. It later emerged that Gerald Gallego had sexually abused his daughter Krista on a regular basis since she was six.

Series of murders

In the early afternoon of September 11, 1978, they drove their Dodge to a mall in downtown Sacramento to look for a victim. Charlene Williams invited 17-year-old Rhonda Sheffler and her 16-year-old friend Kippi Vaught to smoke marijuana . She took the two of them to the parking lot, where Gerald Gallego threatened the youths with his .25 ACP weapon and asked them to get into the car.

Two days later, on September 13, 1978, farmers at Baxter , 15 miles from Sacramento, discovered the bodies of the battered youths. The girls had been killed with a jack and shot in the head from a short distance.

A short time later, Gerald and Charlene moved to Reno (Nevada) and married on September 30, 1978 in the presence of Charlie's parents, but against their wishes. Using the false name of Stephen Robert Feil , Gallego found a job as a truck driver for a Texas company so that he could commute between Sacramento and Reno. Charlene Gallego found work at a meat packing factory in Reno.

After Gerald became unemployed in early June 1979, Brenda Lynne Judd, 14, and Sandra Kay Colley, 13, disappeared from a Washoe County fairground on June 24, 1979 . They were sexually assaulted in a remote area of ​​the Nevada desert and shot at close range. Their skeletons, buried in the ground, were only discovered over 20 years later in November 1999.

In September 1979, the Gallego couple left Nevada and returned to California after a year of absence. In Sacramento, Gerald found a job as a bartender and was in an extramarital relationship with a woman named Patty. When he became pregnant in early 1980, he forced her to have an abortion, as did Charlene, who had noticed her pregnancy in May 1980.

Gerald and Charlene Gallego's next victims were found on April 24, 1980 in Citrus Heights , a suburb of Sacramento. They were the two 17-year-old girls Karen Chipman Twiggs and Stacy Ann Redican. They too were forced into the couple's car with a gun, both sexually abused and beaten to death with a hammer. With the bodies of the teenagers in their trunk, they crossed the state of California and buried them near Lovelock, Nevada. The bodies of the two girls were found three months later, on July 27, 1980.

On June 1, 1980, they renewed their wedding vows in Reno and were married again as Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Robert Feil.

Shortly thereafter, they drove to the US state of Oregon , where they took 21-year-old hitchhiker Linda Aguilar with them on June 8, 1980 near Port Orford . The dark-haired woman, who was four months pregnant, did not fit into the typical Gallegos grid. The victim was raped and the skull was struck with a stone. Tied with a nylon cord around his hands and feet, Aguilar was thrown alive into a pit and buried. The body was found two weeks later, on June 22, 1980, by German tourists near Gold Beach .

One month later, on July 17, 1980, the murderous couple found their eighth victim, 34-year-old Virginia Mochel. She was abducted from the parking lot of the West Sacramento pub where she worked after the end of her shift and was the first victim the Gallegos took home and raped there. After they mistreated Mochel with a whip, Gerald strangled her in his van. A fisherman found her skeletonized corpse almost three months later, on October 3, 1980, in Clarksburg , California .

arrest

At gunpoint, the Gallegos kidnapped 22-year-old Craig Miller and his fiancée, 21-year-old Mary Elizabeth Sowers, in their own car on the night of November 2, 1980, after they had come from a fraternity ball. Ball guests who noticed the kidnapping wrote down the license plate and notified the police. Despite a major manhunt in the greater Sacramento area, it was not until the next day that Craig Miller's car was found in the driveway of Charlene's parents' home. At this point the young couple was already dead. Craig Miller's body - he was the only male victim in the series of murders - was found shortly afterwards at Bass Lake . Mary Sower's remains were not recovered in a ditch in Placer County until November 22, 1980 .

The investigators now had the names of the perpetrators, who were meanwhile on the run. The couple spoke from Omaha ( Nebraska ) by calling the parents of Charlene and asked them to transfer them money. The conversation was bugged by the police and the FBI in Nebraska was notified. On November 17, 1980, Gerald and Charlene Gallego were arrested at a branch of the Western Union Bank.

process

At first, the Gallegos denied their act. While in custody, Charlene gave birth to a son on January 17, 1981. He later grew up with his grandparents - Charlie's parents. Afterward, Charlene accused her husband. Faced with the death penalty , she offered to provide investigators with information in exchange for mitigation. The investigators promised her a prison sentence of 16 years and eight months.

Gerald Gallego's trial opened in Martinez on November 15, 1982 and lasted seven months. In the case of Craig Miller and Mary Sowers, the couple's last murder victims, Gallego was sentenced to death on June 22, 1983.

Gallego was transferred to Nevada to answer for the murder of Karen Chipman Twiggs and Stacy Ann Redican. California residents launched a petition requesting the death penalty for the couple. The second trial in Pershing County from May to June 1984 resulted in another death sentence. Gerald Gallego was thus one of the few criminals who sat de jure on death row in two US states.

End of the case

Both Gerald and Charlene Gallego were placed in Carson City Federal Prison . Charlene, due to be released in 1991 for good conduct, chose to serve the entire sentence and was released in August 1997 at the age of 40.

Gerald Gallego made several requests for clemency to governors and federal agencies over time, but to no avail. After the skeletons of Sandra Colley and Brenda Judd, who were murdered in 1979, were identified in November 1999, the murderer was tried again. The jury sentenced him to death.

A revision was requested in all three trials because the jury had received false legal information. The Nevada Attorney General appealed against it. This resulted in a legal process that lasted years.

Gerald Gallego died of cancer on July 18, 2002, the day after his 56th birthday in Nevada Detainee Hospital .

literature

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