In the early hours of November 2, 1980, Craig Miller, twenty-two, and his fiancée, Mary Beth Sowers, twenty-one, both students at California State University, Sacramento, were leaving a fraternity dance at a restaurant near the Arden Fair shopping center when a man with a .25 caliber Beretta ordered them into a silver Oldsmobile. A young man who tried to step in was slapped across the face by the woman at the wheel and told he had no business being there. The car pulled away. A friend of the couple who had watched it happen memorized the license plate. By that afternoon the police had traced the Oldsmobile to the Sacramento home of Charlene Williams's parents, and Miller's body had been found near Bass Lake, shot in the back of the head. Sowers was taken to an apartment, raped for hours, then driven to a rural area near Roseville and shot three times at point-blank range. Her body was found three weeks later in a trench near Loomis.
The man was Gerald Armond Gallego, and the couple were the last of the ten people he and Charlene killed in a little over two years. He was born in Sacramento on July 17, 1946. His father, Gerald Albert Gallego, was in San Quentin for auto theft at the time; in 1955, after killing an Ocean Springs police officer and then, from death row, a Mississippi prison guard, he became the first person executed in Mississippi's gas chamber. The boy was told his father had died in a car accident and learned the truth at sixteen. His mother was a sex worker, and he grew up hungry, dirty and beaten by her and her boyfriends, and sexually abused by some of her clients. He was arrested for burglary at ten and sent to a youth facility at twelve for sexually abusing a six-year-old girl. Armed robbery, auto theft, a jail escape and three years in prison followed, along with a string of marriages that ended in violence. Later he sexually abused his own daughter over about seven years.
Charlene Williams, ten years younger, came from a comfortable Sacramento family; her father was a vice president of a chain of meat markets. She was a talented violinist and a good student, and by thirteen she was using amphetamines and drinking. She met Gerald in a poker room in Orangevale on September 29, 1977, and moved in with him within a week. Soon he was telling her he needed sex slaves. She bought a pistol that December.
The couple hunted along Interstate 80 in Charlene's 1973 Dodge van. She made the approach, because a young woman offering drugs, a party or a few dollars for handing out flyers frightened no one. On September 11, 1978, she invited Kippi Vaught, sixteen, and Rhonda Scheffler, seventeen, to a party as they left a shoe store at the Country Club Plaza in Sacramento. Gerald forced them into the back at gunpoint and raped them over many hours in the Sierra foothills. Near Sloughhouse he beat them with a tire iron and shot them; when Vaught, only grazed, tried to crawl away, he went back and fired three more shots into her head. A farmer found them two days later.
On June 24, 1979, at the Washoe County Fair in Reno, Charlene lured Brenda Judd, fourteen, and Sandra Colley, thirteen, to the van with the promise of paid work handing out flyers. They were driven into the Humboldt Sink, sexually assaulted and beaten to death with a shovel, and buried in a pit at Hallelujah Junction, California. Reno police listed them as runaways, and their bodies were not found for more than two decades. On April 24, 1980, after Gerald woke Charlene demanding a girl, they picked up Stacy Redican and Karen Chipman-Twiggs, both seventeen, outside the Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights on the pretext of smoking marijuana. He bound them with macramé rope, raped them, bought a hammer, and killed them in Limerick Canyon in Pershing County, Nevada. The next morning he paid for breakfast with their money and said it was on them. Picnickers found the bodies three months later.
In June 1980, on what they called a second honeymoon after Charlene told him she was pregnant, they gave a ride near Gold Beach, Oregon, to Linda Aguilar, twenty-one, the mother of a one-year-old and four months pregnant. Gerald bound her, raped her, beat her unconscious and buried her in a shallow grave on Myers Creek Beach, using a hubcap as a shovel. Sand in her mouth, throat and nose suggested she had been buried alive. On July 17 they took Virginia Mochel, thirty-four, a cocktail waitress who had often served them drinks, from the parking lot of the Sail Inn in West Sacramento. She begged them to let her go for the sake of her children. Gerald strangled her in the van, and her remains, still bound with fishing line, were found near Clarksburg three months later. When a detective questioned the regulars at the bar, Gerald, calling himself Stephen Feil, said he had been drunk and fishing, and Charlene vouched for him.
After Miller and Sowers the couple ran. They abandoned the Oldsmobile at Circus Circus in Reno, collected wired money in Salt Lake City and drove to Omaha. The FBI watched Charlene's parents drive to Sparks and wire $500 to Omaha's Western Union office, and on November 17, 1980, agents arrested Charlene as she walked in and Gerald as he waited outside in the car. In the van they had since sold, detectives found bloodstained bedding the new owners had kept in their garage. Charlene gave birth to their son in custody in January 1981. In June 1982, after being refused permission to hold him during visits, she told her lawyers about the other seven killings.
Her plea bargain gave her sixteen years and eight months in exchange for testifying. Gerald, who fired his public defender and represented himself, was tried in Martinez, in Contra Costa County, for Miller and Sowers. He claimed that Miller had attacked him and that Charlene had killed Sowers. On the stand Charlene told him, "Gerry, you know very well that you shot and killed those two kids." His nineteen-year-old daughter testified at the penalty phase about the years of abuse. The jury convicted him of two murders and two kidnappings, and on June 21, 1983, he was sentenced to death. He was then extradited to Nevada and tried at the Pershing County Courthouse in Lovelock for Redican and Chipman-Twiggs, in a trial paid for partly by donations from residents. The jury convicted him after less than four hours, and on June 25, 1984, he was sentenced to death again. "You sentenced me to death with no damn evidence at all!" he shouted. The charges for Judd and Colley were later dropped; the killings of Vaught, Scheffler, Aguilar and Mochel were closed on Charlene's information without charges.
In September 1997 the Ninth Circuit overturned the Nevada death sentence because the jurors had been wrongly told he could be paroled if they spared him. At a new penalty hearing in September 1999, after psychologists described severe organic brain damage and psychosis and a judge ruled him competent anyway, he admitted his guilt for the first time and apologized to the families. The jury took an hour to sentence him to death again. He died at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno on July 18, 2002, aged fifty-six, of colorectal cancer, having refused treatment that might have prolonged his life. His DNA, checked against the East Area Rapist in the 2000s, did not match.
Charlene was released on July 17, 1997, under a new identity. She has always said she never assaulted or killed anyone and took part only out of fear of him. Gerald's lawyers and several investigators disputed that, and prosecutor Richard Wagner, who defended her plea bargain, said that in a perfect world she should have received the death sentence.