Gerald Armond Gallego was convicted of four murders in two states and sentenced to death in both. A jury in Contra Costa County, California, found him guilty in 1983 of kidnapping and murdering Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers, two Sacramento State students taken from a parking lot in November 1980. A jury in Lovelock, Nevada, found him guilty in 1984 of kidnapping and murdering Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, two 17-year-olds taken from a Sacramento-area mall in April 1980. Six more deaths, among them two girls aged 13 and 14, were attributed to him, largely on the account of Charlene Williams, the young woman who lived with him, called herself his wife and lured or drove his victims for him. Those six were never tried against him.
Williams was the center of both prosecutions. In exchange for her testimony she pleaded guilty to two murders and received a sentence of 16 years and 8 months, with immunity for eight other killings. Federal judges later set aside his Nevada death sentence because the jury had been misled about parole, and a second Nevada jury sentenced him to death again in 1999. He was never executed. He died of cancer in a prison medical center in Carson City in July 2002, the day after his 56th birthday, while his federal appeals were still open.
Gallego was born in 1946, the year given in the Sacramento Public Library's catalog record for the 1988 book about the case by Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox, All His Father's Sins. He grew up in Sacramento and was still described as a Sacramento man when he was resentenced in 1999.
His father, also named Gerald, was a convicted murderer. According to the evidence summarized by the California Supreme Court, a Mississippi lawyer, Frank J. Hammond Jr., testified at the son's 1983 penalty trial that he had represented the father in a murder case in the mid-1950s, and that the father was executed in 1955. Associated Press coverage at the son's death said the father had been convicted of killing a police officer and a jail guard. Donald A. Cabana, writing for Mississippi History Now, published by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, records that in March 1955 a convicted murderer named Gerald Gallego became the first person put to death in the newly built gas chamber at the state penitentiary at Parchman.
At the same 1983 penalty trial, Gallego's mother testified by telephone that he had suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child and that his father had been absent. She also told the jury that his troubles could be traced to Charlene, while admitting that he had abused his own daughter before he ever met her. The jury heard, by stipulation, that he had been adjudicated for lewd conduct at 13 and for armed robbery at 16, and that he spent much of the time between 13 and 17 locked up. It also heard, by stipulation, that he had sexually abused his daughter over several years of her childhood.
By 1980 Gallego was working as a bartender in Sacramento. Police later found that he had fired a gun into the ceiling of a bar where he worked and patched the holes; that detail became important evidence.
Charlene Williams was pregnant with Gallego's child by November 1980, according to the California Supreme Court, and her parents, the Williamses, appear repeatedly in the court record. The two went through two marriage ceremonies, but the courts held that both were void from the start, because Gallego was already legally married to other women each time. The courts therefore call her Charlene Williams, though she was often reported as Charlene Gallego and was called his common-law wife in the press.
Her role is the hardest part of the case to state with certainty, because almost everything known about the uncharged killings comes from her. She told investigators and juries that Gallego was looking for what press reports summarized from her testimony as "the perfect sex slave," that he used her as bait to win the trust of young women, and that he killed the victims himself. She admitted luring girls into the van. In a 2013 interview with CBS Sacramento she said she never wanted to take part, that he controlled her through fear and abuse, that she tried to stop him and to escape, and that she did not kill any of the victims. Her conduct and her own account are covered on her separate page.
The first killings in the record took place on September 11, 1978. According to the facts set out by the Nevada Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court, Gallego pointed out two girls, Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler, at a Sacramento-area shopping mall, and the two were taken in his van up Interstate 80 to a frontage road near Baxter, in the Sierra foothills. They were then driven to an area south of Sacramento near the small town of Sloughhouse, where they were shot.
Their bodies were found two days later. The bullets and casings at the scene came from a single gun, fibers on Scheffler's clothing matched the carpet of Gallego's van, and forensic evidence matched his blood type.
Gallego was never charged with these two deaths. Both of his trials, however, admitted them as evidence of uncharged crimes. In California the judge allowed them to show intent and motive and to rebut his claim of diminished capacity; in Nevada they were admitted to show a common scheme or plan, and the Nevada Supreme Court described them as killings Gallego had earlier committed. They were again put before the 1999 Nevada penalty jury as uncharged California killings. The girls' ages and other personal details were not reported.
In June 1979 two girls from Sparks, Nevada, Brenda Lynne Judd and Sandra Kaye Colley, disappeared during an evening out at the Washoe County Fair in Reno. An Associated Press report gave Brenda's age as 14 and Sandra's as 13; a later AP summary reversed the ages. For two decades their families had no answer.
Charlene Williams later implicated Gallego in their deaths, telling investigators that he killed both girls, and she helped police search for them. Remains were later found in Lassen County, California, and nearly 21 years after the girls disappeared the Lassen County Sheriff's Office announced that DNA tests had confirmed their identities. The Lassen County district attorney, Robert Burns, had not decided at that time whether to file charges against Gallego. No charge was ever brought; the AP reported at his death that he was never tried for these deaths.
On April 24, 1980, Stacey Ann Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, disappeared from a shopping mall in the Sacramento area; the Las Vegas Sun placed it in Citrus Heights. Williams testified that Gallego had her lure them into the van, where they were held and driven across the state line into Nevada.
The girls' bodies were found on July 27, 1980, near Lovelock, in Pershing County. Both had been beaten to death. An uncommon variety of macrame rope was recovered in the case.
This was the case on which Nevada would try him, and the evidence went beyond Williams's word. Investigators found macrame rope in the trunk of Gallego's car that matched it. A photograph taken several years before the killings showed Gallego with friends at the same remote spot, which the state used to show the place was familiar to him. Other evidence showed he was at Lake Tahoe the day after the girls disappeared. The Nevada Supreme Court later held that this evidence, together with the earlier Sacramento killings, connected him to the crime independently of Williams's testimony, as Nevada law requires for an accomplice's account.
Two more killings were described to the California penalty jury in 1983 as uncharged crimes. Neither was ever charged against Gallego in any court.
Linda Aguilar was five months pregnant and hitchhiking to a nearby town on the Oregon coast when the couple picked her up, according to the evidence summarized by the California Supreme Court. Gallego killed her, according to that evidence. Her body was found two weeks later.
Virginia Mochel was a bartender. The couple took her from the bar where she worked in the Sacramento Delta, and Gallego killed her, according to that evidence; her body was found about three months later.
The court records give no dates for either killing and no further details of either woman's life.
Craig Miller was 22 and Mary Beth Sowers, also reported as Mary Elizabeth Sowers, was 21. Both were students at Sacramento State, and they were engaged. Her father, interviewed by CBS Sacramento in 2013, remembered her simply: "She always had a smile."
The California Supreme Court set out what happened on the night they died. Gallego had been drinking at a Sacramento bar until the early hours of November 2, 1980. He told Williams, who was pregnant, that he was "getting that feeling" and wanted her to get him a girl. With Williams at the wheel, he spotted Miller and Sowers in a shopping center parking lot and forced them into the car at gunpoint.
A friend of Miller's saw it happen and confronted the group. Williams slapped him. As the car left the lot, he wrote down its license number, and he told another friend at once what he had seen.
Gallego had Williams drive north toward a lake. There he took Miller's wallet and shot him. Miller's body was found the next morning. Gallego took Sowers to his apartment and, the next morning, drove her to a field and shot her. Her body was not found until about three weeks later, in Placer County.
After the killings the couple cleaned the car and got rid of evidence. When they went to the home of Williams's parents, police were already there interviewing her family. The two fled to Reno and then traveled by bus to Salt Lake City, went on to Denver and to Pueblo, Colorado, where they obtained false birth certificates, and finally reached Omaha, Nebraska, living under assumed names.
They were arrested in Omaha when they tried to collect money that Williams's parents had wired to them. Gallego himself later testified that Williams's mother had cooperated with the FBI and disclosed where they were; the California Supreme Court recorded that as his account, not as a finding.
Meanwhile the physical case in Sacramento grew. Miller's friend picked Gallego out of a photographic lineup. Ballistics experts matched the bullets and casings from both bodies to a single weapon, and the casings also matched casings found in Gallego's apartment, where police found .25-caliber ammunition. Five slugs dug out of the ceiling of the bar where he had fired his gun matched the bullets that killed Miller and Sowers.
Williams's first statement to police was an alibi: she said she had been at a movie with her boyfriend on the night of the killings. Through her first lawyer she then approached police with a story the California Supreme Court described as fabricated. After she hired a new lawyer, Hamilton Hintz, she withdrew that story and gave police another statement, confessing to him and implicating Gallego.
The plea agreement that followed was made with prosecutors in California, Nevada and Oregon together, according to the Ninth Circuit. She agreed to tell what she knew about ten killings and to testify against Gallego in both the California and Nevada cases. She pleaded guilty to two murders and received a sentence of 16 years and 8 months, subject to approval by California's Board of Prison Terms, and was granted transactional immunity for the other eight killings. She had no immunity from prosecution for perjury and was required to testify truthfully. The courts describe her pleas differently: the California Supreme Court wrote that she pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder, while the Nevada Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit wrote that they were second degree murder counts. CBS Sacramento reported that her plea was to the kidnapping and murder of Mary Beth Sowers.
Gallego was arraigned in Sacramento County, and in 1981 he moved for a change of venue, pointing to heavy coverage by the Sacramento press. The trial was moved to Contra Costa County, where it was heard before Superior Court Judge Norman Spellberg.
After warnings from the judge, Gallego was allowed to represent himself at the guilt phase. During the trial he asked several times to have his former lawyer reinstated; the judge refused, and the California Supreme Court later held that his waiver of counsel had been knowing and intelligent and that his later confusion did not undo it. A standby lawyer sat with him in a limited role.
The prosecution's case rested on Williams's testimony, the friend's identification and license number, the ballistics, and recordings of conversations between Gallego and his visitors at the jail, which the court later upheld as justified by jail security. Over defense objection, the judge admitted evidence of the Vaught and Scheffler killings to show intent and motive and to answer his diminished-capacity defense. Williams's second lawyer, Hintz, testified that she had confided in him and implicated Gallego.
Gallego testified in his own defense. He claimed intoxication, amnesia and diminished capacity. He said he "believed" he had shot Miller, but he denied shooting Sowers and suggested that Williams had killed her.
The jury found him guilty of two counts of first degree murder and two counts of kidnapping. It found that he had been armed with and used a firearm, and it found two special circumstances for each killing: multiple murder, and murder committed during a kidnapping. Closing arguments came about six months after the guilt trial began.
For the penalty phase Gallego accepted an appointed lawyer. The prosecution presented the Aguilar and Mochel killings, the abuse of his daughter, and evidence of an escape plot: deputies had found a torn note under another inmate's mattress, and a handwriting expert testified that Gallego wrote it. The defense called the Mississippi lawyer who had represented his father, his mother by telephone, and a group of mental health experts. A clinical neuropsychologist, Dr. Charles Golden, testified that the right frontal lobe of his brain was damaged and that alcohol and drugs made the condition worse. A psychiatrist, Dr. William Reed, testified to a severe personality disturbance. Experts on each side disagreed about whether he had been too intoxicated to premeditate.
The jury returned a death verdict after about two and a half hours. He was sentenced to death in 1983.
California's sentence did not end the case. Nevada wanted to try him for Redican and Twiggs, and he was brought to Lovelock, in rural Pershing County. He was arraigned there on January 12, 1984. Jury selection began on May 14, 1984, after about four months of preparation; he later argued that this was too little time, but the federal courts found no showing that it had cost him any important witness.
The trial drew heavy local attention. Gallego later listed about 23 examples of what he called negative coverage, among them a restaurant menu offering "Guilty Porker" pork chops and a local fund to which residents donated to help the county pay for the prosecution. Nearly every prospective juror knew something about the case. The Nevada Supreme Court and the federal courts concluded that the coverage had been largely balanced, that the victims were not local girls, that many residents had opposed holding the trial there because of the expense, and that no confession had been published. They found no showing that any seated juror had formed an opinion of guilt.
Williams testified again. The judge refused Gallego's request for psychological testing of her and kept out evidence of her conduct in prison, ruling that it was character evidence. The Ninth Circuit later noted that she had faced a withering cross-examination that brought her to tears at least once, and that the jury knew of her plea bargain.
The jury convicted Gallego of two counts of first degree murder and two counts of first degree kidnapping with substantial bodily harm. He was sentenced to death for the murders, with two consecutive terms of life without parole for the kidnappings. Northern Nevada Business Weekly reported at his death that he was sentenced in June 1984.
The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences on December 20, 1985, in an unsigned opinion. It rejected his claims about venue and publicity, held that the independent evidence was enough to corroborate Williams, and held that he could not invoke spousal privilege against her because the two had never been lawfully married. It upheld the use of the uncharged Sacramento killings at both phases. On a question Nevada had not decided before, it held that his California murder convictions could count as an aggravating circumstance even though they came after the Nevada killings, so long as they existed by the time of the penalty hearing; reading the law the other way, the court said, would be "both absurd and counterproductive." Its conclusion was that he had been fairly tried, convicted and sentenced. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for review in a case titled Gallego v. Nevada on May 17, 1993.
The California Supreme Court decided his automatic appeal on December 20, 1990, in an opinion by Chief Justice Lucas. It rejected his challenges to the waiver of counsel, the refusal to order a competency hearing, the role of standby counsel, the venue ruling, the jail recordings, the evidence of the Sacramento killings, Hintz's testimony and a series of other guilt-phase rulings, finding no error or only harmless error. The California death sentence still stood in 2002, when his challenge to it was before the federal Ninth Circuit.
Gallego's federal petition against the Nevada judgment went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard argument on December 10, 1996, and ruled on September 4, 1997. Judge Leavy wrote for a panel that also included Judges Canby and Norris.
The court rejected nearly all of his claims. It found no presumed or actual prejudice from the publicity, no harm from the four months of preparation, no violation in the limits on cross-examining Williams, enough corroborating evidence, and no ineffective assistance by his trial lawyers. It also rejected a claim that the prosecutor had been compromised by a book deal; the court noted that the prosecutor had received about $5,000 in royalties from a book about the case on which he had collaborated with two investigators and Williams, but found no prejudice.
The penalty instructions were another matter. The Nevada jury had been told that a sentence of life with the possibility of parole meant parole eligibility after ten years, and it was told about executive clemency in terms that suggested even a life sentence without parole might be reduced. Gallego had asked for an instruction explaining that, with a California death sentence waiting, a Nevada life term would not realistically lead to his release. The trial court refused. The Ninth Circuit held that the instructions "inadequately stated the law as applied to the facts of Gallego's case," that they could have prompted the jury to speculate wrongly that he might be free in ten years or less, and, in its words, "That is not the law." Nevada statutes would have barred parole for at least twenty years on a reduced sentence. The court ordered the writ granted unless Nevada resentenced him. His convictions were left in place.
The district court appointed the Nevada State Public Defender. In October 1998 Gallego told the court, "I am my attorney," and asked to represent himself; a month later he said he wanted "another lawyer, one I can talk to, a real lawyer like [the State] got." He complained that his lawyer's defense did nothing but "offer me up to the D.A. for execution." An evidentiary hearing on his competency was held from May 10 to 12, 1999, and the court found him competent. In August 1999 it denied both his request to represent himself and his request for a new lawyer.
The penalty retrial opened in Lovelock in September 1999 before a visiting district judge, John McGroarty, and a jury of nine women and three men. The state presented the Redican and Twiggs murders, the California convictions for Miller and Sowers, and the uncharged killings of Vaught and Scheffler. The defense offered written declarations about the abuse he suffered as a child and testimony from a psychologist, Dr. Myla K. Young, and a psychiatrist, Dr. David V. Foster, who said that testing and a CAT scan pointed to significant brain damage and to post-traumatic stress disorder. His lawyers argued that he was brain-damaged and had been severely punished as a boy for wetting the bed.
Gallego wanted to testify and to call Williams, saying that "Even a Lovelock jury would see the mitigation of Charlene walking through the door." The judge ruled that her credibility and her plea bargain had nothing to do with punishment. When Gallego learned that he could not use the witness stand to deny his guilt, the judge reminded him, "Your guilt has already been decided." Gallego replied that if he could not tell the whole truth he had no choice but to give up his right to testify. He gave an unsworn statement instead. The Las Vegas Sun reported that he stood and apologized for the pain he had caused. The Nevada Supreme Court later recorded that he repeatedly obstructed the proceedings, at least twice turning his back on the court and several times refusing to answer at all.
After four days of testimony the jury deliberated for about an hour. It found all three aggravating circumstances (a prior murder conviction, a prior violent felony conviction, and murder during a first degree kidnapping) and sentenced him to death for each murder. He accepted the verdict calmly, the paper reported.
On May 17, 2001, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed. In an opinion by Justice Shearing, it held that his request to represent himself had been timely but was properly denied because he had "repeatedly and intentionally obstructed the proceedings," and that his complaints about his lawyer were disagreements over strategy, not good cause for a new one. It found a prosecutor's remark in closing improper but harmless and rejected his other claims.
Gallego spent about 18 years on Nevada's death row, most recently at the maximum security prison in Ely. In March 2002, seriously ill with cancer, he was moved to the Regional Medical Center at the state prison in Carson City for treatment. He died there on the night of Thursday, July 18, 2002, one day after his 56th birthday, of colon cancer that had spread through his body. His death ended his pending federal appeal of the Nevada sentence; his challenge to the California sentence was then before the Ninth Circuit. He had not been executed in either state. Northern Nevada Business Weekly noted that no one had been executed in Nevada since Sebastian Bridges was put to death "a year ago May," and that Gallego was the third death row prisoner to die of natural causes since then.
Williams completed her sentence. CBS Sacramento reported that she was released in 1997 under her plea agreement after 17 years in custody; the AP reported in 2000 that she had been paroled in 1998, and the Las Vegas Sun reported in 1999 that she had completed her term. She later changed her name. The father of Mary Beth Sowers told CBS Sacramento in 2013 that she was "just as guilty as he was" and that he never wanted to know where she had gone.
Proven in court and final: Gallego's convictions for the first degree murders and kidnappings of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers (California, 1983) and of Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs (Nevada, 1984). Both sets of convictions were affirmed on appeal. The Nevada death sentence was set aside in 1997 and reimposed in 1999; the California death sentence was still under federal review when he died, and he was never executed.
Proved as uncharged crimes, never charged: the killings of Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler in 1978. Both of his trials admitted them, and the Nevada Supreme Court described them as killings he had committed, but he was never tried for them.
Attributed to him, never charged or tried: the deaths of Linda Aguilar and Virginia Mochel, heard as uncharged crimes at the 1983 penalty phase, and the deaths of Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley, which rest on Williams's account and on the later identification of their remains. The Lassen County district attorney had not decided whether to charge Gallego when the girls were identified, and no charge followed.
The count of ten deaths comes from Williams's plea agreement, which covered information about ten killings, and from news reports, which described him as implicated in the deaths of nine women and one man. CBS Sacramento also counted Linda Aguilar's unborn child.
Williams's own part remains contested. Her statements are the only source for much of the uncharged record, she gave a fabricated account before she cooperated, and she has said she never killed anyone and acted out of fear of Gallego. Sowers's father has said she was just as guilty. The courts treated her as an accomplice whose testimony needed corroboration.
The press label used for the case comes from Williams's testimony that Gallego was looking for "the perfect sex slave." It describes his motive as she told it, not a finding of any court.
Points on which sources differ: whether Williams pleaded guilty to first or second degree murder (California Supreme Court, first degree; Nevada Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit, second degree); whether she was released in 1997 or paroled in 1998; the ages of Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley (14 and 13 in the 2000 AP report, 13 and 14 in the 2002 report); the spelling of Stacey Redican's first name (Stacey in the court records, Stacy in some reports) and of Karen Chipman Twiggs's surname (Twiggs in the court records); and the place of his death (the state prison in Carson City, or the prison system's Regional Medical Center there).
1946: Gerald Armond Gallego is born.
1955: His father is executed in Mississippi, the first person put to death in the new gas chamber at Parchman (March 1955).
Age 13: adjudicated for lewd conduct; much of the next four years is spent in custody.
Age 16: adjudicated for armed robbery.
September 11, 1978: Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler are taken from a Sacramento-area mall; their bodies are found two days later.
June 1979: Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley disappear from the Washoe County Fair in Reno.
April 24, 1980: Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, disappear from a Sacramento-area mall.
July 27, 1980: their bodies are found near Lovelock, Nevada.
November 2, 1980: Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21, are taken at gunpoint from a Sacramento shopping center parking lot; Miller's body is found the next morning, Sowers's about three weeks later.
After November 2, 1980: Gallego and Williams flee through Reno, Salt Lake City, Denver and Pueblo, and are arrested in Omaha.
1981: Gallego moves for a change of venue; the California case goes to Contra Costa County.
1983: a Contra Costa County jury convicts him of the murders and kidnappings of Miller and Sowers and returns a death verdict.
January 12, 1984: arraigned in Pershing County, Nevada.
May 14, 1984: jury selection begins in Lovelock.
June 1984: sentenced to death in Nevada for the murders of Redican and Twiggs.
December 20, 1985: Nevada Supreme Court affirms.
December 20, 1990: California Supreme Court decides his automatic appeal.
May 17, 1993: U.S. Supreme Court denies review in Gallego v. Nevada.
December 10, 1996: Ninth Circuit hears argument.
September 4, 1997: Ninth Circuit sets aside the Nevada death sentence over the clemency and parole instructions.
1997 or 1998: Williams is released.
October 1998: Gallego asks to represent himself.
May 10 to 12, 1999: competency hearing; he is found competent.
September 1999: a new Lovelock jury sentences him to death again after deliberating about an hour.
Year not stated in the report: remains found in Lassen County, California, are identified by DNA as Brenda Judd and Sandra Colley.
May 17, 2001: Nevada Supreme Court affirms the 1999 death sentence.
March 2002: moved from Ely to the prison medical center in Carson City.
July 18, 2002: dies of cancer, the day after his 56th birthday.
January 31, 2013: CBS Sacramento interviews Williams, living under a new name.