Killer Couples (16 page)

It was getting dark anyway, and it might be nice to find a quiet little bar some place where they could talk – Gerry had been in an uncharacteristically affectionate mood earlier, telling her how pretty she was, how lucky he was to have her. Aware of how his moods could switch more quickly than the flick of an iguana’s tail, Charlene was keen to take advantage of his rare good humour. Despite everything that had happened – the murders, the fact she knew he was seeing at least one other woman, the way he lashed out at her in one of his blind rages – Gerald Gallego could still make her feel weak at the knees. One look from those big wide eyes of his and she felt her insides soften like butter in the sun. She was still his baby, she was still his number one girl. All she had to do was keep quiet and carry on helping him out.

‘This place looks all right,’ Gerry gestured to a cosy-looking bar with a sign outside that read The Sail Inn.

Inside the Gallegos chatted a bit with the bartenders and a group of guys who’d also spent the afternoon fishing. The
drinks flowed freely and Charlene felt a warm glow. Maybe it would be all right after all. Perhaps the baby would turn them back into a normal couple with nothing more pressing on their minds than worrying about how to pay the rent.

As the lone remaining barmaid got ready to close up the bar, the Gallegos stumbled out into the car park, Charlene giggling slightly and clutching onto Gerry’s arm for support. Then all of a sudden Gerald stopped walking.

‘What about the barmaid?’ he asked hoarsely.

Charlene didn’t need to ask him what he meant. His whole body had gone tense, and even without looking at his face, she knew he’d be wearing that dark, closed look.

‘No, honey,’ she told him, trying to drag him over to the van. ‘Lots of people saw us talking to her in there. Let’s get home.’

But as they were driving out of the car park, they saw the barmaid, Virginia Mochel, getting into her own car, ready to go home after her long shift. For Gerald, this was too much temptation.

‘Hey, what are you doing? Don’t be crazy!’ – but Charlene’s protestations fell on deaf ears as her husband swung the van over to Virginia’s car. Seconds later he’d pulled the stunned woman out of her car at gun point and was ushering her into the back of the van.

Charlene was expecting them to go out into the countryside as usual but this time Gerry headed the van in the direction of their apartment.

‘It’s too risky,’ Charlene warned.

But Gerald had an image in mind. He and Charlene and their terrified prisoner on their own bed, with their own ‘play things’ – the dildos and whips they used in their own sex games. And the best thing was, in the privacy of their own home there were no time limits. They could extend the fantasy all night if they wanted. Which is exactly what they did.

‘Why don’t you kill me now?’

The Virginia Mochel lying on the couple’s mattress as the first signs of light began to filter through the drawn blinds was a long way from the cheery blonde waitress they’d met at The Sail Inn just a few hours before. Gone was the welcoming smile, gone the shiny, well-brushed hair and the frank, friendly gaze. Now Virginia’s eyes were glazed and empty. Her hair was tangled and matted together, and she had the haunted look of someone who would never smile again.

‘Why don’t you kill me?’ she repeated, as the van wended its way out of the residential area, with its low-rise apartments and small family homes surrounded by neatly mown lawns.

Gerald Gallego was only too pleased to oblige.

As summer gave way reluctantly to autumn and Sacramento breathed easy again in the fresher breeze blowing down from the mountains, Charlene observed her ever-growing bump with mixed feelings. On one hand she wanted a baby and she had some kind of crazy idea that bringing new life into the world would, in some way, wipe out the bad stuff that had gone before, as if she too could be reborn along with her baby. But things
were hardly ideal at the moment. For one thing, she was back living with her parents. Gerry’s mood swings and violence had got out of control and the couple had finally gone their separate ways, although she didn’t believe she’d ever be able to leave him behind for good, not after all they’d been through. Not only this but she was becoming increasingly hooked on cocaine and didn’t need to be told what a bad combination babies and drugs were.

When Charlene picked up the phone on the first day of November, she was surprised to hear Gerry’s voice on the other end.

‘I just wondered if you wanted to come out with me for the evening,’ he asked her, tentatively, once again the polite, respectful guy he’d been when they first started dating. ‘You know, just hang out. How we used to.’

Charlene hesitated. He’d acted so crazy the last few weeks they were together and she was almost sure he was seeing another woman. But as usual, she allowed herself to be swayed by him. He was still her husband after all, and the father of her baby. Why not spend some time together for old times’ sake?

This was to prove one of the worst mistakes of Charlene’s life.

At first everything was fine. They’d driven round to a few bars, catching up on all that had been happening in each other’s lives. Well, edited highlights at least. Charlene wasn’t stupid enough to tell her hot-headed ex exactly what she’d been up to; and Gerry, well, he’d long been of the opinion that whatever he did was his business and no one else’s.

But as the evening wore on, Charlene noticed the familiar
telltale signs that meant her estranged husband was getting restless. His hands moved constantly as though rehearsing for something and his eyes, which had been the first thing to draw her to him, darted about edgily. As she drove into the car park of another shopping mall, where a brightly lit restaurant/bar showed signs of a party in progress, Charlene was overwhelmed with that same feeling of sick dread mixed with a kind of almost detached fascination. It was as though she was witness to an inevitable train crash. She could see the obstruction on the track, see the high speed engine hurtling ahead oblivious, but there wasn’t nothing she could do about it. And even if there had been, she didn’t know if she really wanted to.

The gaily decorated restaurant was the venue for a college dance being held by one of the fraternity houses at California State University of Sacramento. Waiting in a shadowy part of the car park with the headlights turned off, Charlene and Gerald could get a clear view of the students spilling out of the hot steamy party into the sudden chill of the early November night.

To Charlene, still just 23, the breathless girls in their long formal ball gowns, with their gleaming hair and their rosy futures that they wore pinned to them as visibly as their brightly coloured corsages, were a painful reminder of the world she’d left behind, the lost life that could have been hers.

Gradually the crowd of departing students thinned out until there was just the odd straggling pair, laughing at the unaccustomed gloom, men’s jackets slung chivalrously over women’s bare shoulders.

‘Those two!’

Gerald’s voice was barely audible. He was concentrating on a couple approaching a nearby Honda, his body like a cat about to pounce. And then he was out of the car, gun held close to his chest. Now the couple were in the back seat of the car, staring straight ahead, shock freezing their mouths into perfect round ‘o’s.

Crash!

The boy dropped his bunch of car keys out of the open window. Cursing, Charlene got out of the driver’s seat and went round the other side of the car to find them, leaving Gerry in the front seat, his gun trained on the two reluctant passengers. Which is when Andy Beal, seeing his friends Craig and Mary Beth in the back of an unfamiliar car, went to investigate.

‘Get the hell away from my car!’ Charlene screeched, flying back round the car and landing a stinging slap on the side of the young man’s face.

And then they were off, pulling out of the car park, the bemused stranger growing ever smaller in the rear view mirror, his hand still clutched to his face.

‘That was really stupid,’ Charlene hissed, her heart pounding painfully in her skinny chest.

‘Shut up!’

Gerald never could take being called stupid.

As the car edged its way off the highway and into the hills out of town, where the only lights come from the odd farmhouse or the stars themselves, Gerry called to Charlene to stop.

‘Do you want him?’ he hissed, gesturing to Craig. She shook her head.

Then Craig Miller, acting on instructions from Gerald, and still clinging to the all-American rulebook that says if you do what you’re told, you get rewarded, got out of the car and started walking uncertainly along the dark, silent road. Gerry got out after him. A shot was fired, and then two more.

Charlene tried not to look at the large shape lying motionless by the side of the road or to consider the girl in the back of the car, stiff and mute with fear – and with the growing realisation of what was about to happen to her.

‘Let’s go,’ Gerry was back in the car. ‘Back to my place!’

Inside the shabby apartment where Gerald had been living while separated from Charlene, he shoved the shaking student in her rustling formal gown ahead of him into the bedroom. Charlene, pumped full of resentment for all this girl had and all she herself had lost, followed behind.

The Mary Beth who saw the sun rise the next morning in the company of Mr and Mrs Gallego was almost unrecognisable from the assured, confident student who’d left the dance just hours before.

‘We’re going for another drive,’ Gerald told her, gruffly, forcing her into the back seat behind he and Charlene. When the big Oldsmobile pulled back into the driveway a couple of hours later, there were only two people inside.

But that night, 2 November 1980, was when Gerald and Charlene’s luck finally ran out. Andy Beal, standing alone and
confused in a mall car park, his cheek still stinging from a slap he hadn’t seen coming, had memorised the number plate. It didn’t take long for the car to be traced back.

‘I wasn’t driving the car last night,’ Charlene told the police officer who came to interview her. ‘I was with my boyfriend in his car. His name is Stephen Feil.’

The police ran a check on Feil. A photocopy of his driving licence photograph was shown to Andy Beal, who immediately identified him as the man he’d seen with his friends the night before. When a call came in to say that Craig Miller’s body had been found Stephen Feil went from being a suspect in an abduction to becoming the suspect in a murder case.

Gerald Gallego’s apartment was searched, and he and Charlene decided to flee.

‘It’s all a mistake,’ Charlene told her worried parents. ‘They’ve got the wrong people.’

But the Williams weren’t convinced. By now they were slowly realising what their son-in-law was accused of doing, and they were desperately concerned about their daughter’s safety. Of course it wouldn’t have occurred to them that she could be in any way implicated – not their little blonde princess.

They told police that Feil was an alias.

‘The real name of the man you’re looking for,’ confided Chuck Williams, ‘is Gerald Armand Gallego.’

This was the clue police had been looking for. Now, more than two years after the Gallegos first started kidnapping and murdering, things started to fall into place. A gun used by Gerald
to shoot holes in the ceiling of a bar he’d once worked at was identified as the weapon that had killed Craig and Mary Beth.

Gerald and Charlene were on the run, but they wouldn’t get far. On 17 November 1980, they approached the Western Union post office in Omaha, Nebraska, where Charlene had asked her parents to wire her some money. Gerry waited outside while she walked into the building alone to pick up the funds.

The police were waiting.

The Gallegos were charged with the murder of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sower. For eighteen long months as police painstakingly collected evidence, they battled a wall of silence and denials from the couple.

‘Your marriage to Gerry wasn’t even legal,’ they told Charlene, after discovering that he’d never bothered to divorce at least one of his previous wives. ‘You can stand up against him in court.’

But she refused to listen.

Charlene had her baby – a boy – while in custody awaiting trial. It wasn’t at all how she’d envisaged the birth of her first child. Her body ached for her son long after he was taken, screaming, from her to live with her parents.

She longed for Gerry but at the same time a part of her hated and blamed him. He was supposed to be her man, to look after her. Wouldn’t someone who really loved her stand up and take the blame for everything? Surely he would do anything to see her released, unable to bear to think of her rotting away in a prison cell?

At the beginning of March 1982, Charlene had a change of heart.

‘Craig and Mary Beth weren’t the first,’ she told stunned detectives.

Charlene Gallego agreed to stand up in a court of law and tell the whole truth about what had happened, but she wanted something in return. The girl who’d so impressed her teachers at school with her intellect knew that her only hope of being able to walk out of prison alive and still with some good years ahead of her was to negotiate a plea bargain. The police wanted Gerald; she wanted a second chance at life. In the end, she was offered a sentence of sixteen years in return for telling everything she knew about Gerald Gallego.

And she knew plenty.

On 23 June 1983, Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death by a Californian court for the murders of Craig Miller and Mary Beth Sowers. A second trial in Nevada in May 1984 found him guilty of murdering Stacy Redican and Karen Twiggs. Again, he was sentenced to death.

He continued to protest his innocence despite all the evidence against him. The deaths had been in self defence, he claimed. He’d only meant to rob them.

Despite the two death sentences, Gerald Gallego’s end, when it came, was from natural causes. On 17 July 2002, a hospital prison in Nevada announced that he’d passed away from rectal cancer.

Charlene Williams, the woman who’d called herself his wife,
who’d accompanied him on all his ill-fated kidnapping expeditions and eventually turned against him so crushingly at the end, walked away from prison a free woman in July 1997. She was not yet 40 years old.