Charlene Adell Williams was born in Sacramento on October 10, 1956, an only child of prosperous parents. She was tested at an IQ around 160, played the violin well enough to consider it professionally, and skipped a grade. She was also using drugs by her early teens and had two brief marriages behind her when she met Gerald Gallego in 1977, at twenty.
Between September 1978 and November 1980 the two of them abducted, raped and murdered ten people in California, Nevada and Oregon. Charlene's part was the part that made it work. She drove the van, and she made the approach, because two girls together at a shopping centre are not frightening and a man alone is. She took Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught out of a Sacramento mall, and Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley from a fair in Reno, and Stacy Redican and Karen Twiggs from another mall, and each time the girls got into the van willingly.
It ended in November 1980 when a friend of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers watched the couple being taken from a Sacramento car park and wrote down the number of Charlene's car.
She negotiated. In 1982 she pleaded guilty in exchange for a term of sixteen years and eight months and full testimony against Gerald, and her evidence convicted him in both California and Nevada. She was released in 1997, aged forty-one, and lives under another name. Her account, that she was terrorised into it, has been believed by some and rejected by others; the prosecutors who dealt with her have said publicly that the deal was the price of convicting him and that they did not much like it. She is one of the very few people in an archive like this to have served their sentence and gone home.