It seemed like just another afternoon of shopping at the mall when a young girl Charlene approached teenagers Rhonda and Kippi. That girl seemed cool, especially when she suggested they smoke a marijuana joint in the parking lot. The minors did not hesitate for a single second, what could go wrong in this new adventure? However, Charlene was a decoy and what happened next was a trap.
Inside the vehicle, a man, Gerald, was waiting for them with a threatening attitude and a gun in his hands. The girls obeyed, sat down, and were bound and gagged with duct tape. Hours later, their bodies were buried after suffering the greatest sexual aberrations imaginable and dying from a gunshot. They had been used as sexual slaves.
Gerald Armond Gallego was born on July 17, 1946 in Sacramento, California, into a broken family. His father, a dangerous convict, died in the gas chamber after killing two police officers. As for his mother, she was dedicated to the world of prostitution and, since he was a child, Gerald, grew up among pimps. This led to his own criminal career.
Until 1977, Gerald had already been arrested at least 23 times, and served time in various county jails. In addition, he also had time to marry and divorce five times and be the father of a daughter. Then came September, a poker game at a dive bar in Sacramento, and his life changed forever: Charlene Adelle Williams walked through the door.
The Californian, originally from Stockton, was born on October 10, 1956, but her childhood was very different from Gerald’s. Charlene came from an upper-middle class family, dedicated to the world of food and with significant purchasing power. Since she was a child, our protagonist had an exclusive education and a prodigious talent for the violin. However, that IQ of 160 was ruined when she started high school and surrounded herself with bad company.
Good Charlene went from being a spoiled child to becoming a troublemaker: she started drinking and taking drugs, as well as having sexual relations with some of the bad boys in the class. She didn’t get her degree, she had two weddings and quick divorces… And then, along came Gerald and his crush.
“I thought he was a very nice, neat guy,” Charlene said years later. And that attractive young man with blonde hair managed to win her over in a few days: she sent him a dozen pink roses with a card that said “to a very sweet girl.” After a few weeks, the couple began to live together and share their most perverse fantasies.
Gerald talked to her about having young sex slaves and Charlene listened, absorbed and even excited. “We had this sexual fantasy, so we did it… I mean, it was easy and fun and we really enjoyed it, so why wouldn’t we do it?” the young woman once said.
His first sadomasochistic foray was with an exotic dancer, but it ended badly. Gerald threw the girl out of the window claiming that she had lost her libido and, after beating her, he asked Charlene to help him find her arousal again. And for this it was necessary to look for victims, sexual slaves, who could be used and eliminated without leaving a trace. Charlene succumbed and accepted.
The couple’s modus operandi was always the same: they hung around malls in the Sacramento area or at county fairs, since they knew there would be minors there who were easy to cajole, and while Charlene acted as bait, Gerald waited in the truck.
Once inside, they tied them up and took them to secluded places where he harassed, raped and murdered them while she watched. The wave of crimes they perpetrated was called the Sex Slave Murders.
On September 11, 1978, the Gallegos kidnapped two teenage girls, Kippi and Rhonda, from the Country Club Plaza shopping center in Sacramento, raped them, and shot them to death. Then they left their bodies buried in a field. In the following two years, the couple, who married in Reno after this first double murder, continued the hunt while living a seemingly normal life.
During the day, Gerald worked as a meat distributor and Charlene as a secretary in an office, but in the evening things changed. Her only objective was to find new sex slaves. Her next four victims were all minors.
While investigators were looking for clues to find those responsible for this series of crimes, the Gallegos put their foot down and changed their name to avoid being located. They even married a second time under the surname of Feil and later killed two adult women, one of them while pregnant.
However, at the same time that they were adding deaths behind them, the relationship between them was crumbling. On the one hand, Gerald became increasingly violent towards Charlene and did not hesitate to abuse her for almost anything, and on the other, Charlene could no longer tolerate her beatings and threats. For that reason, she decided to leave him and move in with her parents. But Gerald couldn’t allow it and he returned to conquer her.
This is how Gerald convinced Charlene to commit their last two murders together. To do this, they took the Williams car and drove to a shopping center. It was the morning of November 2, 1980. There they ran into a couple, Craig and Mary Elizabeth, whom they kidnapped at gunpoint. Craig was shot and his body was dumped in a secluded area, and Mary Elizabeth was raped for several hours before her life was shot three times at point-blank range.
What the murderers did not count on is that, while they kidnapped the couple, a classmate from the same fraternity as Craig saw the scene, wrote down the car’s license plate and notified the authorities. As soon as Gerald and Charlene arrived at the Williams’ house, their criminal adventure ended and they were arrested. At that time they had already found the bodies of the young people and the witness had identified them by photo.
From this point on, investigators tried to link the deaths of Craig and Mary Elizabeth to the other eight murders. Justice managed to prove the participation of Gerald and Charlene in four of the crimes. The death penalty awaited them. However, she decided to rat him out and reach a plea deal with the prosecution.
Charlene assured that “he did his thing with the girls while I waited and watched until he was satisfied. Then he killed them.” Consequently, she had not committed any of the crimes and, furthermore, she was yet another victim of Gerald’s sexual fantasies. The court sentenced her to 16 years and 8 months in prison and she was released in July 1997.
As for Gerald Gallego, courts in California and Nevada sentenced him to death for four first-degree murders. Although Nevada’s sentence was overturned in 1997, the predator was still sent to death row at Ely State Prison, where he remained until July 18, 2002. On that date, Gerald was transferred to a medical center due to rectal cancer with metastases to the liver and lungs. He died hours later without having received any visitors.
