Killer Couples (14 page)

‘I was stupid and I lied, but I never had any idea what he had done,’ she tells people. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

The couple who were once on the verge of promising til death do us part are now firmly at war. Maxine can’t understand why the most vicious headlines tend to be reserved for herself
rather than her former lover. Huntley made a tape recording before his last suicide bid in which he blamed Maxine for masterminding the entire cover-up operation after the girls were killed.

In the case of Maxine Carr, love was blind and love was shallow. Love was manipulative and love allowed itself to be manipulated; love was self-serving and self-obsessed. And in the end, love blew itself to pieces in an explosion of bitterness and recriminations.

Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman would still be dead, with or without Maxine Carr. It was immature, controlling Ian Huntley with his penchant for under-age girls, his history of sexual attacks and his volatile, ungovernable temper who was the murderer. But it was Maxine who lied for love and, in doing so, compounded the agony of two sets of grieving parents and destroyed her own life in the process.

A
ndy Beal just didn’t get it. Why were Craig and Mary Beth sitting in the back of that strange car? Most of the other students had already left the car park of the Carousel Restaurant in the Arden Fair shopping mall, where a college Founder’s Day Dance had been held, tripping over crumpled ball dresses in their drunken high spirits and crushing wilted corsages underfoot. So what were Craig and Mary Beth doing hanging around in that unfamiliar big Oldsmobile which looked to have no one at the wheel?

If it had been any other couple, he might have suspected something dodgy – a drugs deal maybe. But not Craig and Mary Beth.

Every high school, every university campus, every small town has its own golden couple – the ones who sail through exams
while excelling at sport and music, and somehow still manage to be popular as well. At California State University in Sacramento (CSUS) that couple was Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers.

Both from wealthy, respected families, Craig and Mary Beth were going places. Only 21 and 20 respectively, they’d managed to so impress the employers for whom they’d worked even while completing their degrees at CSUS that they were guaranteed high-ranking jobs when they graduated. Everyone who knew them was hoping for an invite to their wedding on the last day of the following year, New Year’s Eve 1981. They were just the kind of people that you’d want to be around in the hope that some of their effortless luck might just rub off on you.

They weren’t the kind of couple who’d be sitting in the back of a strange car in a near-deserted car park in the early hours of the morning.

‘Hey, what’s up?’

Andy opened the driver’s door of the car ready to slide in and find out what was going on, but one look at the grim faces of the couple in the back seat froze the smile right on his face.

‘You don’t belong in this car, Andy,’ Craig told him tersely.

As his friend was speaking, Andy became suddenly aware of the man in the passenger seat – dark, squat, unsmiling and at least ten years older than most of the people they knew.

Surprised and confused, Andy pulled back out of the car, but as he turned around, he found himself face to face with another stranger – this time a woman. Tiny and frail-looking, the woman nevertheless seemed possessed by a fury that belied her size.

‘Get the hell away from my car!’ she screeched, her delicate face contorted with anger. Then, to his astonishment, she reached up and slapped him around the face, the force of her anger causing him to stumble backwards, clutching his cheek.

Before he knew what was happening, the Oldsmobile was pulling away, the tops of Craig and Mary Beth’s heads just visible over the back seat. Despite his shock, Andy was able to memorise the number plate as it sped towards the exit, fumes from its exhaust lingering momentarily in the fresh November air.

He just couldn’t make sense of it. True, Craig and Mary Beth had lots of friends, but not like these two – the silent man and the woman with her flushed, outraged face. Who were these strange people who’d just driven off with his friends? Should he call the police, or would that just cause problems for Craig and Mary Beth, who’d clearly not wanted him to know what was going on?

Still unable to decide what to do, Andy went home but when he returned to the car park after a few sleepless hours and found Mary Beth’s car still parked there, eerie in its solitude, he knew he had to report it. Little did he know when he made that call how many more sleepless nights were to come. Nights when he’d lie in bed going over and over what happened, seeing once again the man’s bulky presence, the woman’s face, screwed-up in anger. Nights when he’d wish again he’d done something, said something… Because the two strangers Andy Beal had just encountered in the shopping mall were Charlene and Gerald Gallego, who would soon become infamous as the Sex-Slave Murderers.

Craig and Mary Beth, the golden couple whose dazzling future shone bright and vivid in their intelligent, attractive faces, would be their latest victims.

Charlene Williams shot another furtive glance over at the man playing poker in the card-room adjoining the shabby cocktail bar where she sat. He was not handsome, that was for sure. Broad and stocky, with a barrel chest that seemed, when he stood up to go to the bathroom, too bulky to be supported by his short jeans-clad legs, he was not exactly leading man material. But there was something about his rugged features, something about the way his macho-man long dark sideburns contrasted with his big puppy-dog eyes that drew her to him.

She liked the way he swaggered when he walked, as if he owned the place. Also, how he sat at the table, a man among men, knowing she was looking his way but letting her sweat it out.

Charlene nudged the friend she was with.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, giggling.

Her companion looked over at the coarse little man with his greasy black hair and rough-looking companions then back at the petite and innocent-looking, well-spoken Charlene, who looked to be at least a decade his junior. Really, Charlene did have some strange taste in men! But then, despite her little-girl looks, she was a big girl of 21 now, already with two failed marriages under her slim-line belt.

‘Go for it,’ she shrugged.

Gerald Gallego proved every bit as unlikely a choice for Charlene Williams as he’d first appeared. Like her, he’d already been married before – six times to be exact – but there the similarities ended.

Charlene was an only child from a loving, upwardly
middle-class
Californian family. Her father, Charles, was a supermarket executive and her doting parents showered their little princess with time and attention, encouraging her with her school work and all the other extra-curricular activities well-off children in Arden Park, Sacramento took for granted. As a result, Charlene grew up self-assured and confident. She was also extremely bright and a precociously talented violin player.

Her father, to whom she was exceptionally close, delighted in introducing his pretty, intelligent daughter to his friends and colleagues, and she in turn adored her strong-willed charismatic Daddy. It would take an exceptionally large character to step into those smartly polished shoes.

Neither of her two husbands remotely fitted the bill. By the time she married the first at 18, Charlene had strayed considerably from the path her ambitious parents had imagined for her. Like many middle-class Californian teenagers with an instinct to rebel but nothing to rebel against, she’d settled instead for self-sabotage, replacing her earlier academic and musical promise with an equal talent for drugs and casual sex. Both her short-lived early marriages were a result of that rebellious instinct for immediate gratification, but in each Charlene quickly discovered that neither lived up to her ideal of a real man. Gerald Gallego, however, was different.

Gerald Gallego was the kind of man Charlene’s parents warned her against when she was younger. His father had been executed in Mississippi for killing two policemen when Gerald was just a boy, a crime for which he declared he felt ‘no regret or sorrow whatsoever’. His mother had dabbled in prostitution, and the young Gerald had grown up believing that sex was pretty much inseparable from power. As a young child, he was always in trouble, sometimes for thieving, others for sexual aggression. By the time he was 13, he’d been arrested for having sex with a 6-year-old girl.

‘Bad blood will out,’ people would whisper.

When he met Charlene in 1977, Gerald was 32 years old and he’d already served time in jail, been arrested at least 23 times as well as married 6 times and rarely managed to hold down a job for more than a few months at a time. He was certainly no catch, and yet, something in the loud, cocky, chauvinistic poker player appealed to Charlene. Maybe she thought that, like her father, here at last was someone to look up to, a man’s man who’d be strong enough to take care of her.

For his part, Gerald Gallego was equally taken with the petite blonde who kept catching his eye across the seedy poker bar. On closer examination, he’d find her to be older than he’d originally thought, but at first glance, Charlene Williams, barely five feet tall with a tiny un-womanly frame, looked like a young schoolgirl. Which was just the type that Gerald Gallego liked.

‘You’re a real sweet girl,’ he told her, the second time they met for a date.

‘And you’re a nice guy,’ she replied, gazing up at him from beneath her floppy blonde hair.

Both would be proved wrong.

Within weeks of their first meeting, Charlene and Gerald were living together. At first it was exciting for Gerald was dynamic and highly sexed – he reminded her of a young Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, all unarticulated passion and clumsy but overpowering sexuality. She didn’t even mind the fact that he expected her to support him – Charlene had grown up in a household with a healthy respect for hard work and for the advantages it brings. She was proud of the fact that she found it easy to find, and keep, reasonably well-paid jobs. This was something Gerald couldn’t compete with, and it made her feel good to see the grudging respect in his eyes when she handed over her pay packet, and to feel like he needed her.

However, the honeymoon period didn’t last long.

‘You’re not doing it right,’ Gerald would snap at her, lying rigid on his back, his flaccid penis limp against his leg like a used sponge. ‘If you were a proper woman you could satisfy me. This is all your fault!’

Charlene, dressed up as per orders in a short schoolgirl’s skirt and long socks, would break off from her exertions, almost crying with frustration.

‘I’m doing just what you told me, Gerry,’ she’d plead, feeling suddenly silly with her hair in bunches just like a 10-year-old.
She couldn’t understand how the sex, which had started off so good, could have deteriorated so quickly.

‘It’s no good,’ Gerald would rage. ‘I need something different.’

Then he’d be off on his recurring fantasy, the one he came back to again and again.

‘What I need is a couple of young girls I can keep as sex slaves and force to do whatever I want,’ he’d start, his erection slowly stirring into life as he detailed his desires in which violence always shared equal stage with violation. Charlene was willing to do whatever he wanted in bed, but that was part of the problem – she was
too
willing. What he needed was to see fear in a girl’s eyes, to feel the thrill of power as he forced her, resisting all the way, to do his bidding.

And Charlene would lie there and listen, glad to join in with anything that got him going sexually, using the imagination that had so impressed her English teachers to come up with warped suggestions of her own.

‘That sounds like fun, Gerry,’ she’d tell him, approvingly, watching his erection return.

What she didn’t know at the beginning was that the sex slave fantasy wasn’t just a figment of Gerald Gallego’s twisted imagination, something he dredged up to revive a flagging sex life, but a very real plan, and one that he would expect his pretty young girlfriend to help him put into action.

It was the summer of 1978 when Gerald decided it was time to stop daydreaming and start acting. The Sacramento apartment
he shared with Charlene was hot and cramped and the
sweat-soaked
nights made him irritable and aggressive.

Up until now it was Charlene who’d borne the brunt of his over-heated moodiness, and she still bore the bruises of times he’d lashed out at her in frustration and over-heated ill temper. But now he had new victims in mind – cool, fresh, unsullied young girls who’d quiver with terror and make him feel virile, potent and in control.

As Gerald described his plan, Charlene felt sickened and enthralled in equal measure. On the one hand, the middle-class little girl she’d once been recoiled from the savagery of it, the sheer sadism of getting pleasure through other people’s pain. But on the other, she recognised that this was just an extension of the very thing that had drawn her to Gerry in the first place – his wild untamed character, his disregard for the law. Ever since adolescence, she’d wanted a bad boy. Well, now she’d found one.

‘Want to come and smoke a bit of pot with me?’

Charlene had been chatting to the two pretty long-haired teenagers for quite a while before she casually tossed the invitation into the conversation.

Rhonda Scheffler, 17, glanced over at her 16-year-old friend Kippi Vaught, and saw she was already smiling. Shopping was only really fun if you had loads of money, which they didn’t. The idea of escaping the crowded mall for a few moments to relax and get high with their new friend seemed pretty appealing.

Neither of them was naïve; they’d never have dreamed of going off somewhere with a strange man they’d only just met, but the blonde woman who’d approached them a few moments before was so friendly, and so young-looking – hardly older than them – they didn’t have any qualms about following her outside the Country Club Plaza mall to where she said her van was parked. After all, she was so tiny it seemed as though one little gust of California wind would have blown her clean away. But it was 11 September and summer was still clinging determinedly on, so of course there was no wind, just the scorching Californian sun, beating down on the tarmac and reflecting like white heat off the car bonnets.

Approaching the van, with its distinctive air-brushed exterior depicting a futuristic landscape of sinister twisting hills, one topped with a hunch-backed vulture, Charlene began to talk loudly and quickly.

‘Just a tiny bit further, girls… Here, this is it.’

Gerald, waiting inside, heard their voices and felt a current of adrenaline rush through him. This was it: this was the day all his fantasies were going to come true.

Relaxed and unwary, the girls didn’t stand a chance. No sooner were they through the van door than Gerald was on them, brandishing a gun, binding their wrists and ankles with tape.