Killer Couples (15 page)

‘You watch them,’ he ordered Charlene, jumping behind the wheel.

As the van pulled out of the car park, Charlene perched on the ice-box in the back of the van, ignoring the girls’ faces down on
the floor, their eyes gazing up at her in mute, terrified appeal. Instead, she concentrated on the scenery out the window, the shopping mall receding into the distance through the back window, shimmering in the heat haze like a dream, an illusion – as unreal as the kidnapping they’d just carried out. And now she could see oak trees through the window as the van left urban Sacramento behind, heading for the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which wore their pine forests like a patchwork cloak. A person could easily get lost among the folds, absorbed into the dense stillness, shivering in the sudden shadows…

In a deserted forest clearing, Gerald finally stopped the van.

‘You stay here,’ he told Charlene gruffly, hardly able to speak for the power-lust that coursed through his body like larva, cutting off all messages to his brain so that the only thing that remained was his overwhelming need to degrade, to debase, to twist, to force, to own, to destroy.

Grabbing a sleeping bag, he untied the tape from the girls’ ankles so that they could walk and forced them from the van at gun-point.

‘Over there,’ he ordered, pointing into the shadows, where the pine trees formed a natural canopy, heavy and dark as the lid of a coffin. Whimpering softly, the girls did as they were told – two young women full of promise, heading on legs that quaked and shook into the living nightmare of one man’s perverted desires.

But Charlene didn’t want to be left out. If this was Gerald’s fantasy, she wanted to be part of it. Joining the figures under the trees, she stripped off her own clothes and showed Gerald just
how much she’d learned from him. Years after giving up on school, she was once again eager to prove just how enthusiastic a student she could be.

Later, Gerald had Charlene drive home to give herself an alibi and return at midnight to pick them up in her own car, a
silver-blue
Oldsmobile.

And what did she think as she put her dainty foot down on the accelerator and pulled away into the darkness? Had she spared a thought for what would happen to the two girls who’d given her their trust, whose handbags lay abandoned on the floor of the van? Did she wonder what had become of the girl she’d once been, who’d worked hard and practised the violin and dreamed of a future where the world opened up to her like a flower? Or was she conditioned by now to think only of satisfying her man’s desires, so bound up with her own, and content to just let reality trickle over her gently like a stream that barely registered?

By the time she returned, Gerald had finished with the girls and was ready to discard them. The car hadn’t gone far when he ordered Charlene to pull over into a field stretching endlessly into the darkness.

‘Turn the music up,’ he commanded her. ‘Loud!’

Then he yanked the girls out, and, one by one, took them off into the black night. Charlene tried not to notice the way the moonlight reflected off the gun in Gerald’s hand as he disappeared into the shadows, did her best not to think of the noises and flashes in the distance, or what it meant when he
returned to the car alone. He was her man: he was a man’s man, he was taking care of things and he’d take care of her.

Later that night, when Gerry held her and whispered how wonderful she was, how special, Charlene told herself that it had all been worth it. He’d lived his fantasy now and she’d not only made it possible, but also made herself part of it. She’d proved herself to him and now he’d realise just how much she meant to him. From this day forth they were bound together and there was nothing either of them could do about it.

When Gerald and Charlene were married in Reno, Nevada, on 30 September 1978 it wasn’t the happy occasion it should have been for the blushing bride. For a start, memories of the two girls kept popping into her mind. Then there were the child molestation charges.

Just a few days before, the couple had learned that Gerald’s daughter from one of his earlier marriages had gone to the police to accuse him of sex abuse. According to the 14-year-old, her father had been sexually assaulting her on a regular basis for the past eight years.

‘I haven’t done anything wrong. I love that girl!’ Gerry raged.

Charlene thought of the schoolgirl skirts he liked her to wear, and how he wanted her to put her hair into bunches, but she said nothing. She was fast learning that, when it came to her unpredictable boyfriend, silence was often the best policy.

The result of the charges was that Gerald decided they had to get out of California for a while. Houston, Texas sounded a
good option. Charlene’s father said he’d pull some favours to find Gerald a job down there, and they liked the idea of putting some distance between themselves and what had just happened over the last few weeks.

On the way, they stopped off in Reno to get married. Neither of them voiced the thought that kept going round inside their heads: A wife can’t testify against her husband.

‘Happy?’ Gerry asked Charlene, outside the Reno
courthouse
. She nodded, resting her blonde head briefly on his broad shoulder. Inside she wasn’t so sure. She knew she loved her new husband, and she was more excited by him than any other man she’d ever known. Her fate was tied up in his – but happy? She didn’t know if she remembered what it was like to be happy.

In Houston, Gerald acquired a new identity to go with his new life: from a stolen birth certificate in the name of Stephen Feil. But Texas life didn’t suit them. Gerry didn’t settle in and constantly fought with the other staff at the bar where he was working, so pretty soon he and Charlene were back in Reno, where once again Charlene supported them with a well-paid job while Gerry lay about in their apartment, alone with his memories and his fantasies. With sex between the couple again once again unsatisfying and Gerald’s impotence returning, it became only a matter of time before his thoughts once again turned to kidnap, rape and murder.

At Washoe County Fair, 14-year-old Brenda Judd and
13-year-old
Sandra Colley were just heading off to the exit where they were supposed to be met by one of their older sisters when
they bumped into Charlene. It was 24 June 1979 and the petite blonde looked hot and bothered.

‘Wanna help me deliver some leaflets?’ she asked, in a voice that carried a weary hint of previous refusals. ‘There’ll be some money in it for you.’

The girls nodded. Why not? After all they’d spent so far today, they might as well make a little bit back.

‘Great! Come with me to my van and we’ll pick up the leaflets,’ Charlene explained.

But there were no leaflets – just Gerald, with his gun and his tape, and a thin mattress on the floor that seemed somehow more terrifying even than the weapon pointed in their faces.

This time Charlene drove, feeling that same mixture of excitement and sick dread as she listened to the sounds coming from the back of the van. They coasted out into the countryside beyond Washoe County, where a person can pitch a tent for days and not see anyone else, where the two girls were marched away from a van into a darkness that swallowed them whole.

And now there were two secrets binding the couple intrinsically together, four ghosts weaving between them a web of suspicion and fear.

‘I love you, Baby,’ Gerry told her and she felt like a star pupil who’d made the teacher proud – but at what cost?

Now Gerald Gallego had killed four times, and he had also got away with it four times. He’d abused his own daughter for eight years, and still he was walking around free. No wonder he
started to believe he was above the law. Gratification was the name of the game, he told himself. This was a dog-eat-dog world and if a few little girls had to die to keep him happy, well, that was just the way it was. If there was one lesson life had taught this son of a murderer and a prostitute, it was that if something’s worth having, it’s worth taking by force.

24 April 1980 saw Gerald waking up in what he’d begun to call ‘one of those moods’. He’d been building up to it for days, spending hours brooding on his own, lost in who knows what dark reveries where he relived everything he’d done, everything he’d made those girls do. Now he was like a heroin addict in need of a fix.

‘Come on, Baby. One more time,’ he wheedled to his wife, as though he was asking her to go and sit through a movie she’d seen before and hadn’t enjoyed.

What was Charlene to do? She looked at the powerful body, capable of inflicting such pain; she looked at the gun he carried around with him like a lucky talisman, at those puppy dog eyes she’d fallen in love with just two short years before.

‘I’ll get my purse,’ she said.

Stacy Ann Redican and Karen Twiggs had had enough of shopping. The Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, just outside of Sacramento was OK as shopping centres go, but there comes a time when you’ve just had it with trailing around store after store looking at the same old things. The two 17-year-olds were due for a break. And then they met Charlene Gallego.

‘I’ve got my van just outside,’ she told them, after they’d all got chatting outside a shop. ‘Fancy going for a ride and maybe having a joint?’

They didn’t need asking twice. But they didn’t see Gerry, with his by now familiar kidnapping kit until it was too late…

Suddenly the van was moving and the tiny blonde
girl-woman
who’d been so friendly in the mall wasn’t meeting their eyes and they prayed for this not to be what it seemed. And then they were face down on the stinking mattress in the back of the van and the man with the gun was telling them to take off their clothes. After that, they just prayed for oblivion.

At Limerick Canyon near Lovelock, they got their wish. One at a time, Gerald Gallego walked them off into the countryside, like a courteous suitor seeing his dates home. Each time he returned to the van alone.

By now it was like a drug – the rape, the terror, the killing. No sooner had Gerry disposed of the evidence from one attack than he was getting jittery, wanting to do another.

Gerald and Charlene were supposed to be having a mini vacation in Oregon when he spotted his next victim. Even though the woman was heavily pregnant and older than his chosen type, even though she was walking along a busy road in the middle of the day when anyone could have seen them, as soon as Gerry saw Linda Aguilar, he wanted her.

It was 7 June 1980, just weeks after the deaths of Stacy and Karen. Charlene, who’d recently discovered that she too was expecting a baby, had thought her husband would be content to
lie low for a while but now she realised, and not for the first time, that she’d misjudged her bad boy.

‘I want her!’ Gerry announced suddenly when they’d almost passed seven months’ pregnant Linda by the side of the road. ‘I’m pulling over.’

Linda didn’t have time to think before he’d wound the window down.

‘Need a lift?’ he called, with his cheeriest rogue smile. Linda looked from the grinning man behind the wheel to the woman sitting next to him, whose blonde hair seemed to reflect the sunshine right back out of the van.

‘Sure,’ she replied.

When they pulled up in the countryside some time later, Linda was to find her pregnancy won her little sympathy from her
sex-obsessed
captors. Power was the name of the game with Gerald and Charlene, and if the victim was more defenceless because of being young or heavily pregnant, well, that just added to their excitement.

When it was over, Linda, like her predecessors who’d had the misfortune to lie on that same stained and stinking mattress, was taken off and killed. By this stage Gerald had dispensed with the gun and was carrying out his murders by hitting his victims over the head with a rock or a hammer and then strangling them. He didn’t mind the extra manual labour – knowing he had someone’s life literally in his hands increased his feelings of power. He was in control, Gerald Gallego: he was the man.

By now Gerald had killed seven girls and Charlene, at first an enthusiastic participant in his warped fantasy, was waking up to
two pretty unpleasant facts – first, he wasn’t going to stop any time soon and second, she could be the next at any moment.

Even though there were times when Gerry still told her he loved her, he was also likely to beat her up the next minute, so she could never be completely certain how she stood. He may not have had the educational advantages she’d had, but even he could work out that now Charlene knew a little too much about him and what he’d done than was altogether comfortable.

Charlene Gallego, daughter of a master-strategist who’d pulled himself up from butcher to supermarket executive, was nothing if not pragmatic. It was a pity all those girls had died, but really it hadn’t been her fault. She’d done what she’d had to out of fear of Gerry and because she felt a kind of duty to keep him sexually satisfied. She’d chosen him for his raw sexuality – surely she couldn’t try and stop him expressing it now?

Back in California, as the rest of the world drew their blinds against the relentless sun and stayed indoors with the air con on full, leaving the outside world free for overheating tourists and panting dogs lying in the shade of the palm trees, Charlene continued to make excuses to herself. Meanwhile, the monster that lived inside her new husband grew ever fatter and more hungry to be fed.

‘This is damned useless!’

Gerald, whose attention span rarely lasted longer than the average TV advertisement, was already fed up. For what seemed to him ages, he and Charlene had been fishing on the banks of
the Sacramento River, but they hadn’t caught much of anything. Instead they’d got steadily drunker, swigging vodka out of plastic cups as the blood-orange sun sank lower in the sky. It was 16 July 1980 and the heat of the summer seemed to mingle with the alcohol, warm and heavy through their veins.

‘Let’s go and get a drink.’

Of course it was futile for her to say that they’d already had far too many drinks than were good either for a pregnant woman or for someone about to get in a van and drive. Instead, Charlene packed up the fishing gear.