Gerald and Charlene Gallego: the ‘sex slave’ murders and the wife who testified

• GeraldGerald Armond Gallego, born July 1946; died July 2002 in Nevada prison custody
• CharleneCharlene Gallego, née Williams
• Known asThe ‘sex slave’ killers
• KillingsTen, by Charlene’s account, in California, Nevada and Oregon, September 1978 – November 1980
• ArrestedNovember 1980, Omaha, Nebraska
• Gerald’s sentencesDeath in California (1983) and in Nevada (1984; reimposed 1999)
• Charlene’s sentence16 years 8 months, under a plea agreement; released 1997

Gerald and Charlene Gallego were a married couple from Sacramento who, between 1978 and 1980, abducted young people, most of them teenage girls and young women, and killed them. They were caught after the last abduction, in November 1980, because a witness wrote down the licence number of their car. Charlene then made a plea agreement with prosecutors in three states and became the main witness against her husband. Gerald was sentenced to death in California in 1983 and in Nevada in 1984, and died of cancer in Nevada prison custody in 2002 without being executed. Charlene served 16 years and 8 months and was released in 1997.

The case is one of the few in which most of what is known comes from one of the killers. Charlene’s account, given in two murder trials and in plea negotiations, is the source for the total of ten deaths. Gerald denied it in court and called her a liar.

This account rests on the California Supreme Court’s 1990 opinion in People v. Gallego, contemporary reports by United Press International, the Las Vegas Sun, History.com and Executed Today, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people the Gallegos killed, their families and the Gallegos’ relatives are not named, and nothing is said about Charlene Gallego’s life since her release.

A father in the gas chamber

Gerald Armond Gallego was born in July 1946. His father, Gerald Albert Gallego, was sentenced to death in Mississippi for killing a town marshal, and while awaiting execution he attacked a jailer with acid and beat him to death during an escape. On 3 March 1955 he became the first man put to death in Mississippi’s new gas chamber. His son was nine.

By the time he met Charlene Williams in 1977, the younger Gallego was 31, had a long criminal record and, by his own testimony in court, had been married five times. One of those marriages, in Nevada in 1967, had never been legally dissolved, which is why the California Supreme Court later ruled that his marriages to Charlene were void. She was almost 21. They married in Reno in 1978, and he began using false papers in the name “Stephen Feil”.

Two years of abductions

According to Charlene’s testimony, the killings began in September 1978, about two weeks before the wedding, when the couple lured two teenage girls from a shopping mall into their van and Gerald killed them. Her role, she said, was to find the victims and bring them to him; he wanted, in her words as reported at trial, the perfect “sex slave”.

In April 1980 two 17-year-old girls disappeared from a shopping centre in the Sacramento suburbs. Their bodies were found three months later in shallow graves in a remote area near Lovelock, Nevada. They had been beaten to death. In June 1980, on what UPI called their second honeymoon, the Gallegos picked up a pregnant hitchhiker on the Oregon coast, and she was killed; a month later, in mid-July, they abducted and killed a bartender from a bar in the Sacramento Delta. Charlene later led police to the place where the woman in Oregon had been buried.

The licence plate

In the early hours of 2 November 1980, after a night of drinking, Gerald told Charlene to drive him to a shopping centre in Sacramento. There they forced a young couple, both students at Sacramento State, into their car at gunpoint. A friend of the couple walked up to the car, was told to go away, and noted its licence number as it left; he told another friend straight away. Gerald shot the young man that night. He took the young woman back to the Gallegos’ apartment and later shot her in Placer County.

Police traced the car and questioned Charlene at her parents’ house the next day, where she gave a false account. Once the young man’s body was found, the couple fled: to Reno, by bus to Salt Lake City, then Denver and Pueblo, Colorado, where they obtained false birth certificates. They ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, and were arrested there in November 1980 when they went to collect money wired by Charlene’s parents.

The case against Gerald rested on more than her word. According to the court record, police learned that he had twice fired his pistol into the ceiling of a bar where he had worked as a bartender; detectives recovered the slugs, and experts matched them to the bullets from the victims.

Charlene’s deal

In late June 1982, Charlene began plea negotiations with prosecutors from California, Nevada and Oregon over ten murders in which she implicated her husband. Under the agreement she pleaded guilty to the two November 1980 murders and was to serve a fixed term of 16 years and 8 months, with no time off for good behaviour, in return for testifying truthfully at his trials.

She had taken part in every abduction she described, and the bargain gave her a fixed release date while he faced death. He kept returning to it. At his Nevada penalty retrial in 1999 he asked to call her as a witness, pointing out that she was free with no probation or parole; the judge ruled that her credibility and her plea agreement were not relevant to his punishment.

The California trial

Because of publicity in Sacramento, the trial for the November 1980 killings was moved to Martinez, in Contra Costa County. Gerald chose to represent himself at the guilt phase, denying the account his wife gave and claiming that the young man’s death was an accident and that Charlene had killed the young woman. After a five-month trial, a jury convicted him on 11 April 1983 of two counts each of first-degree murder and kidnapping.

At the penalty phase, now with a lawyer, he faced evidence of the Oregon and Delta killings and of the sexual abuse of his own daughter. In May 1983, after less than three hours, the jury recommended death, and UPI noted that he would go to the gas chamber like his father. The California Supreme Court affirmed the death judgment in 1990, setting aside one of the special circumstances as duplicated but finding the error harmless.

The Nevada trial

Nevada then took him for the murders of the two 17-year-olds found near Lovelock. Pershing County was small and said it could not afford the estimated $60,000 cost of a trial; UPI reported that more than $26,000 in donations arrived from across the country, many from people who thought Nevada more likely than California to carry out an execution. In June 1984 a jury in Lovelock convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and two of kidnapping, and days later the same jury voted for death, with two life terms for the kidnappings.

In the 1990s a federal appeals court ordered a new penalty hearing, because jurors had been given an improper suggestion that he might one day be paroled if spared. The retrial took place in Pershing County in September 1999. According to the Las Vegas Sun, Gallego, then 53, apologised in an unsworn statement for the pain he had caused; the jury took about an hour to sentence him to death again.

Death in custody

Gerald Gallego was never executed. According to the Las Vegas Sun, he had cancer, was moved from death row at Ely State Prison for treatment in March 2002, and died on 18 July 2002, a day after his 56th birthday. Charlene had been released in 1997, at the end of her agreed term.

Where the accounts differ

• The date of the last abduction: History.com says the couple was taken “in July”; the court record and every contemporary report give 2 November 1980.
• Who saw the licence plate: “partygoers” in History.com’s account; one friend of the couple, in the court record.
• Charlene’s sentence: UPI’s 1983 and 1984 reports say 16 years; the plea agreement, as set out by the California Supreme Court, was 16 years and 8 months, the figure History.com and the Las Vegas Sun also give.
• The number of states: UPI in 1983 reported Charlene’s testimony as covering killings in six states; the plea talks involved three, California, Nevada and Oregon.
• The Nevada jury’s deliberation in 1984: two hours in one UPI report, two and a half in another.
• Where Gerald died: the Las Vegas Sun first wrote that he died at the state prison in Carson City, then that he had been moved to the Regional Medical Center there; later accounts place his death in a hospital in Reno.
• The total: ten deaths by Charlene’s account, two of them in California and two in Nevada proven in court; the Oregon and Delta killings were put to the California jury as evidence at the penalty phase.

The portrait

The drawing above is a crop of the Gallegos’ coloring page in the True Crime Activity Book for Adults. The full page surrounds the two of them with details from the case: a shovel, a pistol and loose cartridges, tyre tracks and chains, a skull marked “10”, a small child sitting with her face in her hands, and a Ford van. For other case files from the same book, see Charles Cullen, Christine Falling and Randall Woodfield.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. People v. Gallego, 52 Cal.3d 115Supreme Court of California, 20 December 1990
2. Murder conviction in sex fantasy caseUnited Press International, 11 April 1983
3. Killer sentenced to be executed like his fatherUnited Press International, 25 May 1983
4. ‘Sex slave’ killer Gerald Gallego, the son of a…United Press International, 12 June 1984
5. Sex-slayer son of executed murderer is sentenced to deathUnited Press International, 13 June 1984
6. Serial killer sentenced to death in retrialLas Vegas Sun, 24 September 1999
7. ‘Sex slave killer’ dies of cancer in prisonLas Vegas Sun, 19 July 2002
8. Serial killer couple Charlene Williams and Gerald Gallego apprehendedHistory.com
9. 1955: Gerald Albert Gallego, like father like sonExecuted Today, 3 March 2010

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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