Charlene Gallego was the partner of Gerald Armond Gallego and, by her own sworn account, the person who approached the girls and young women he wanted. Between September 1978 and November 1980 she invited them to parties, walked them to a van, or stopped a car beside them. Ten people died in that period in California, Nevada and Oregon, according to the account she later gave investigators. After the couple were caught in Omaha in November 1980, she pleaded guilty to murder in two states under an agreement that set her term at 16 years and 8 months, and she became the main prosecution witness against him.
Her testimony helped send Gerald Gallego to death row twice. A California jury convicted him in April 1983 of kidnapping and murdering two Sacramento State College students, Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers. A Nevada jury convicted him in 1984 of kidnapping and murdering two 17-year-old girls, Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs. He died of cancer in 2002 while his Nevada appeal was still pending. She served her term and was released in 1997, according to CBS Sacramento. She has since lived under another name.
What she was, in law, rests on her own pleas. She admitted murder. Whether she acted out of fear or by choice is a question she and her critics have answered differently, and the courts that heard her did not have to decide it.
The California Supreme Court records that Charlene and Gerald Gallego met in 1977, when she was almost 21 and he was 31. He told the court he had already been married five times. She was the daughter of a couple the court calls Mr. and Mrs. Williams, and her parents' home in Sacramento would become the place where police first found her.
The two went through a wedding in Reno in 1978. It had no legal effect. Gerald Gallego had married a woman in Nevada in 1967 and had never ended that marriage, so both the California and Nevada supreme courts later found his marriages to Charlene illegal and void. That finding mattered at his trials: because they were never lawfully married, the marital privilege that might have kept her off the witness stand did not apply.
Gerald Gallego's father was executed in Mississippi's gas chamber in 1955, when Gerald was nine, for killing a town marshal, United Press International reported. At his California penalty hearing in 1983, the prosecution also presented evidence, by agreement of both sides, that he had sexually abused his daughter beginning when she was a young child.
The first killings she described took place in mid-September 1978, two weeks before the Reno wedding. The Nevada Supreme Court gives the date as September 11, 1978.
According to her testimony, summarized by the California Supreme Court, Gerald Gallego pointed out two girls at a Sacramento shopping mall in the late afternoon. They were Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler. Charlene went up to them, invited them to a party and walked them to the van. Inside, he held them at gunpoint and bound them, and he drove them out of the city.
He then sent her back to Sacramento to be seen there and to clean the van. She returned that night, at about 10:30, and signaled to him. Both girls were shot. Their bodies were found two days later. The next day, the couple took the cash from the girls' purses and threw the rest of their belongings, the gun and a tire iron into a river.
No one was charged with these deaths for years, and the case against Gerald Gallego was never tried on its own. Its value to prosecutors came later. At his California trial the judge admitted Charlene's account of the 1978 killings, backed by matching bullets, cartridge cases and carpet fibers, to show his motive and intent and to answer his claim of diminished capacity, though not to prove identity. The Nevada court admitted the same evidence to show a common plan. Their ages and the details of their lives were not reported.
In June 1979 two girls from Sparks, Nevada, Brenda Lynne Judd and Sandra Kaye Colley, disappeared during an evening at the Washoe County Fair in Reno. An Associated Press report gave Brenda's age as 14 and Sandra's as 13; a later report reversed the two.
Charlene Gallego told investigators that Gerald Gallego had assaulted and killed the two girls. For two decades no trace of them was found. Their remains were eventually found in Lassen County, California, and identified, with DNA tests confirming the identifications, according to the AP report. A 2002 report said that Charlene had helped police search for the girls' remains years after the killings. The Lassen County district attorney had not decided whether to charge Gerald Gallego at the time of the AP report, and he was never tried for their deaths.
On April 24, 1980, two 17-year-old girls, Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, disappeared from a shopping mall in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. Their bodies were found on July 27, 1980, in Pershing County, Nevada, according to the Nevada Supreme Court. Both had been beaten to death.
This was the case for which Charlene Gallego pleaded guilty in Nevada, and the one in which her testimony was most closely tested. At Gerald Gallego's trial in Lovelock in 1984, she told jurors that she had helped lure the girls into the van at the mall and had driven the van into Nevada while he held them. He took each girl away from the van in turn and killed her, she said. The next morning, on the drive back toward Sacramento, he threw a hammer out of the window, and the couple stopped in Lovelock for breakfast. The Nevada Supreme Court described her account as showing that she took part in the kidnapping and the transport of the girls knowing that they would be killed.
She cried as she testified, and at one point she could not go on and the judge called a recess, UPI reported. Asked by the public defender why she had not shot Gerald Gallego when he came back to the van, with two guns inside and knowing how to use them, she answered, "Gerald was security." She said she had stayed with him because she "didn't want to be alone."
In June 1980, about five months before the Sacramento killings, the couple offered a ride to a hitchhiker on the Oregon coast highway. She was Linda Aguilar, 21, who was five months pregnant. According to Charlene's testimony, Gerald Gallego ordered her to walk off into a meadow while he was alone with Linda Aguilar, and he later killed her. After her arrest, Charlene led police to the place. Linda Aguilar's death was never tried; it was presented as evidence at the penalty phase of his California trial.
In mid-July 1980, after a day of fishing in the Sacramento Delta, the couple went to a bar where Virginia Mochel was working as the bartender. UPI gave her age as 35. They kidnapped her, and during the drive she pleaded with them for the sake of her children, according to Charlene's testimony. According to that testimony, Gerald Gallego strangled her. Charlene later helped police find her body.
A detective looking into the disappearance asked Gerald Gallego whether he had been at the bar that night. He said he had, but that he had been too drunk to remember anything. Charlene told the detective that he was a truck driver who was often out of town, which was false. As with Linda Aguilar, Virginia Mochel's death was never tried and was presented only at the California penalty phase.
The last two victims were students at Sacramento State College: Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21. CBS Sacramento later described them as engaged. Her father remembered her in 2013 as a young woman who "always had a smile."
On the night of November 1, 1980, after an evening of drinking at a Sacramento bar, Gerald Gallego and Charlene, who was then pregnant, drove to a shopping center. Charlene was driving. At his order she stopped the car, and he forced the couple into it at gunpoint. Craig Miller threw his car keys out of the window; Gerald Gallego told Charlene to find them, and she could not.
A friend of Craig Miller saw the confrontation in the parking lot and came over to the car. Charlene slapped him and told him to leave. As the car drove off, he wrote down its license number. He gave it to the police, and it was the start of the case against both of them.
The couple drove Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers out of the city. Near a lake, Gerald Gallego took Craig Miller's wallet and shot him. His body was found the next morning, Sunday, November 2. Gerald Gallego took Mary Beth Sowers to his apartment and then to a field, where he shot her. Her body was found three weeks later. Ballistics experts matched the bullets and cartridge cases from both scenes to a single gun, the same gun, they found, that Gerald Gallego had fired into the ceiling of the bar earlier; police recovered five slugs from that ceiling.
After the killings, by Charlene's account, he had her clean the car. They went out for doughnuts, and he told her that he loved her. The couple threw the gun and some of Mary Beth Sowers's jewelry into a river.
Police traced the license number to the car and went to the home of Charlene's parents. Charlene arrived while they were there, wearing a T-shirt with the words "I'm the very best," taken from Gerald Gallego's apartment. She told the officers that she had been at a movie with a boyfriend she called "Steven Feil." She gave conflicting accounts of which car had been used, and she let them search a car. They found nothing.
The friend who had taken down the license number picked Gerald Gallego out of a photographic lineup. Under a search warrant, police searched his apartment and found .25-caliber ammunition but no .25-caliber gun.
When Craig Miller's body was found, the couple fled. They went to Reno, then to Salt Lake City, Denver and Pueblo, Colorado, where they obtained false birth certificates, and on to Omaha, Nebraska, under assumed names, according to the California Supreme Court. Gerald Gallego had Charlene prepare talking points for her calls home to her mother. One read, "Say nothing about anything to the police or the D.A."
Her parents wired them money. When the couple went to pick it up in Omaha, they were arrested. The exact day has not been reported.
Her first statement to police was, by her own later admission, invented. In it she said that Gerald Gallego had introduced her to the victims and that he had come back the next morning with blood on his jacket, a version that kept her at a distance from the killings.
She then changed lawyers. With her new counsel, Hamilton Hintz, and his co-counsel Fern Laetham, she withdrew that story and gave a second statement. It was in this later account that she described the earlier killings, including those of Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler, which she had not mentioned before. At trial Gerald Gallego made much of the delay, asking why she had waited about four years to speak about 1978.
In California she pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers. The agreement, as the California Supreme Court described it, was that she would be sentenced to 16 years and 8 months in prison. The term needed the approval of the state Board of Prison Terms. If the board did not agree, she could either go to trial on the original charges or plead guilty to related charges for the same term. She was required to testify truthfully, and the court noted that she "enjoyed no immunity for perjury."
In Nevada she pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs, and she had been sentenced before Gerald Gallego's Nevada trial began, according to the Nevada Supreme Court. The date and terms of that sentence have not been reported in detail. UPI reported in 1983 and 1984 that she had received a 16-year term under her plea bargain.
None of the other six deaths she described was ever charged against her.
The case against Gerald Gallego for the Miller and Sowers killings was moved from Sacramento County to Contra Costa County, where it was tried in Martinez before Superior Court Judge Norman Spellberg. He represented himself during the guilt phase. The trial lasted about five months, by UPI's count; the California Supreme Court put it at about six.
Charlene was the central witness. She described the night of November 1, 1980, and, as evidence of his intent, the 1978 killings of Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler. Her lawyers were called by the prosecution to rebut the claim that they had helped her make up a story.
Gerald Gallego's defense rested on attacking her. He argued that she had every reason to blame him, that she had waited years before saying anything about 1978, that she and her lawyers had invented the earlier killings to win a better deal, and that her memory was faulty, pointing for example to her uncertainty about whether a tire iron or a crowbar had been used. He questioned her about the T-shirt, and she said she owned several of them. He also told the jury he had been under the influence of drugs and alcohol, that he had shot Craig Miller by accident, and that Charlene had killed Mary Beth Sowers. He denied her account that he had been acting out a fantasy about holding young women captive.
The prosecution also played recordings made at the jail. Gerald Gallego knew his visits were taped, and in his talks with visitors, among them Charlene's mother, he appeared to be making up alibis, the court found. Deputies found evidence of a planned escape with another inmate, including a note a handwriting expert said he had written.
The jury convicted him on April 11, 1983, of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of kidnapping, with special circumstances of multiple murder and murder during a kidnapping. In May 1983, after less than three hours of deliberation, a jury of seven women and five men chose death, UPI reported. At the penalty phase the prosecution had also presented Charlene's account of the deaths of Linda Aguilar and Virginia Mochel. The defense called witnesses who said that he had suffered brain damage and a severe personality disorder, though he was not insane.
Nevada tried Gerald Gallego in Lovelock, in Pershing County, in May and June 1984, before District Judge Llewellyn Young. Lovelock was a small community, and the cost of the trial, estimated at $60,000, became a public matter; people around the country sent more than $26,000 to help pay for it, UPI reported.
Under Nevada law, an accomplice's testimony alone cannot support a conviction; it must be corroborated. The state had that corroboration. Rope recovered in the case was an uncommon kind of macrame rope, and rope matching it was found in the trunk of a car Gerald Gallego owned. A photograph showed him at the same place years earlier, and other evidence put him at Lake Tahoe the day after the girls disappeared.
The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of first-degree kidnapping with substantial bodily harm. In June 1984 a jury of six men and six women deliberated about two and a half hours and returned a death sentence, with two terms of life without parole for the kidnappings. District Attorney Richard Wagner told the jury that Gallego had used human beings and "discarded them like garbage." The public defender, Thomas Perkins, said the defendant was "pathetic" and asked the jury to send him back to California, where he already faced death.
Both convictions survived appeal. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the Nevada convictions and death sentence on December 20, 1985. It held that Charlene's testimony had been properly admitted, that it was sufficiently corroborated, that the spousal privilege did not apply because the claimed marriage was void, and that the evidence of the 1978 Sacramento killings was properly used.
The California Supreme Court decided Gerald Gallego's appeal on December 20, 1990. It rejected his claims about his waiver of counsel, the denial of a second change of venue, the jail recordings and the 1978 evidence. It found that any error in admitting Hamilton Hintz's testimony about Charlene's earlier statements was harmless, given the other evidence, and that a dispute over the T-shirt "pales in significance when viewed in the context of Charlene's entire testimony and the supporting independent evidence of defendant's role in the crimes."
In 1997 the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered a new Nevada penalty hearing, because the jury had been wrongly told that he might be paroled if it spared his life. The new hearing was held in Pershing County in September 1999 before a visiting judge, John McGroarty. Gerald Gallego, then 53, wanted Charlene called to testify about mitigating factors; the judge did not allow it, ruling that her plea agreement and her credibility had no bearing on his punishment, the Las Vegas Sun reported. His lawyer told the jury that she had taken an active part in the crimes, had lied to the authorities several times and had received a plea bargain, but did not call her, treating her as a hostile witness. After about an hour, a jury of nine women and three men again returned death. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed that sentence on May 17, 2001, noting that she was no longer serving prison time.
Gerald Gallego died of colon cancer on July 18, 2002, at the prison medical center in Carson City, Nevada, one day after his 56th birthday. He had been on Nevada's death row for 18 years and had been moved from the maximum security prison at Ely in March of that year. His death ended his federal appeal of the Nevada sentence. He was never executed in either state, and he was never tried for the deaths of Kippi Vaught, Rhonda Scheffler, Brenda Judd, Sandra Colley, Linda Aguilar or Virginia Mochel.
Charlene served her sentence. The AP reported that she served nearly 17 years. CBS Sacramento reported in 2013 that she had been released in 1997 under her plea agreement and had lived under a new name since then. The AP report gave the year as 1998 and described her as paroled.
In January and February 2013, she gave interviews to CBS Sacramento, her first public comments in years. She said she had never agreed to the killings and that Gerald Gallego had controlled her through fear, abuse and threats against her family. "I did not kill any of them," she said of the ten victims. She called him "one sick bastard" and said she had tried to stop him. She said he had once held a gun to her stomach while she was pregnant.
She also spoke of remorse. "I'd do anything in the world to make up for it, anything in the world, and I always will," she said, and, "I should've been able to stop all of this."
Mary Beth Sowers's father told the station that Charlene "was just as guilty as he was." He said he had never really wanted to know where she went after her release. Asked whether she could change, he said, "Yeah, she could change. I'm sure of that."
Who killed Mary Beth Sowers. Charlene testified that Gerald Gallego shot her. He told the California jury that Charlene was the one who killed her. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder; Charlene has said she did not kill any of the victims, while her guilty plea in California covered that death.
The earlier killings. Six of the ten deaths rest on Charlene's account and were never tried against anyone. Gerald Gallego argued at trial that she and her lawyers had made up the earlier killings to win a better deal. The California and Nevada courts admitted her account of the 1978 Sacramento killings, and in that case physical evidence (matching bullets, cases and fibers) supported her. The remains of Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley were later found in Lassen County, California, and identified by DNA tests, after she had described their deaths to investigators.
Her role. In court she admitted luring the victims, driving, cleaning up and lying to police, and the Nevada Supreme Court said her testimony showed she took part knowing the girls would be killed. In 2013 she said she acted under his control and through fear. At the 1999 penalty hearing his lawyer described her as an active participant. No court was asked to decide between these accounts; her pleas settled her own cases.
Other crimes. In 2013 she told CBS Sacramento she believed Gerald Gallego might have been the serial rapist known as the East Area Rapist, who attacked about 50 women in the Sacramento area. Sacramento County sheriff's detectives had at one time considered the idea, but DNA ruled him out. "Those two have not matched," Detective Paul Belli said. Belli also said investigators believed Gerald Gallego had committed sex crimes as a teenager and might have killed before he met Charlene. "I think there are crimes that Gallego just has not been connected to," he said. No further killings have been proven against him.
Ages and dates. Accounts differ on some details. Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley are given as 14 and 13 in one report and 13 and 14 in another. The year of Charlene's release is given as 1997 by CBS Sacramento and as 1998 by the AP.
1977: Charlene, almost 21, meets Gerald Armond Gallego, 31.
September 11, 1978: Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler are taken from a Sacramento mall and killed; their bodies are found two days later.
1978: Charlene and Gerald Gallego go through a wedding in Reno, later held void.
June 1979: Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley disappear from the Washoe County Fair in Reno.
April 24, 1980: Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs, both 17, disappear from a mall in Citrus Heights.
June 1980: Linda Aguilar, 21, is picked up while hitchhiking on the Oregon coast and killed.
July 1980: Virginia Mochel is kidnapped from the bar where she worked in the Sacramento Delta and killed.
July 27, 1980: the bodies of Stacey Redican and Karen Twiggs are found in Pershing County, Nevada.
November 1 to 2, 1980: Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers are kidnapped in Sacramento and killed; a friend of Miller records the car's license number.
November 1980: the couple flee and are arrested in Omaha.
Later: Charlene recants her first statement and pleads guilty in California to two counts of first-degree murder under an agreement for 16 years and 8 months; in Nevada she pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.
April 11, 1983: a Contra Costa County jury convicts Gerald Gallego of the Miller and Sowers murders.
May 1983: the jury chooses death.
May and June 1984: Nevada trial in Lovelock; Charlene testifies; Gerald Gallego is convicted and sentenced to death.
December 20, 1985: the Nevada Supreme Court affirms.
December 20, 1990: the California Supreme Court decides his appeal.
1997: the Ninth Circuit orders a new Nevada penalty hearing; Charlene is released (CBS Sacramento; AP gives 1998).
September 1999: a Pershing County jury again sentences Gerald Gallego to death.
May 17, 2001: the Nevada Supreme Court affirms the new death sentence.
July 18, 2002: Gerald Gallego dies of cancer in Carson City.
January and February 2013: Charlene speaks to CBS Sacramento.
Date not reported: remains of Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley are found in Lassen County, California, and identified by DNA (AP).