Gerald Armond Gallego was born in Sacramento on July 17, 1946. His father, Gerald Albert Gallego, whom he never met, was executed in Mississippi's gas chamber in 1955 for killing two police officers, which is believed to make them the only father and son in the United States both sentenced to death. He had a long record from childhood and had been married six times by his early thirties.
In 1977 he met Charlene Williams, a bright, well-off young woman from Sacramento with a high IQ and a taste for what she later described as his control of her. In September 1978 they began taking girls. Charlene drove the van and made the approach, because two young women together were not frightening. Rhonda Scheffler and Kippi Vaught, both sixteen, were taken from a shopping centre in Sacramento. Brenda Judd, fourteen, and Sandra Colley, thirteen, were taken from the Washoe County Fair in Reno in 1979. Stacy Redican and Karen Twiggs, both seventeen, from a Sacramento mall in 1980. Linda Aguilar, twenty-one and pregnant, was taken in Oregon and buried alive. Virginia Mochel, thirty-four, was taken from outside the bar where she worked. American reporting called him and Charlene Williams the Sex Slave Killers.
On November 2, 1980, they abducted Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers, a college couple, from a car park after a fraternity dance in Sacramento. A friend of the couple saw it happen and wrote down the number of Charlene's car. Both were shot. The plate led to Charlene's parents and to the pair, who were arrested in Omaha ten days later.
Charlene negotiated a plea in 1982: sixteen years and eight months, in exchange for testifying, and she was released in 1997. Gerald was convicted in California in 1983 and sentenced to death, then extradited to Nevada, convicted there in 1984 and sentenced to death again after conducting part of his own defence. He died of rectal cancer at a Nevada prison medical facility on July 18, 2002, aged fifty-six.