Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (39 page)

Karla suddenly confessed that Paul was also responsible for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two young teenage girls and the accidental death of her own younger sister, Tammy, while raping her on Christmas night in her parents’ basement rec room. Karla had provided the veterinary drugs that had knocked her sister out. As the two videotaped the assault, they took turns molesting and raping the girl, who then in her unconscious state choked on her vomit and died.

As the details of the rapes and murders began to emerge, Karla claimed “battered-wife syndrome,” saying that she had been forced to participate in these crimes. She agreed to testify against her husband in exchange for a lighter sentence. No sooner had the prosecution signed and sealed the deal with Karla, than the videotapes surfaced showing Karla lustfully participating in the torture and rapes of the victims. One fifteen-year-old victim, Kristen French, was seen being repeatedly raped, sodomized, and tortured over a three-day period, sometimes by Bernardo alone, sometimes by both of them. But it was too late to undo the deal the prosecution team had made.

During the trial Bernardo claimed that it was Karla who actually murdered the girls because she was jealous of the attention he was lavishing on the captives. Karla was certainly aware of and entirely indifferent to the victims. As Bernardo beat, raped, sodomized, and tormented fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy in their bedroom, Karla took little breaks downstairs in the living room reading the Bret Easton Ellis novel
American Psycho
until Paul called her to come up and hold the video camera. When asked in court how she could possibly read while a girl was being tortured and raped upstairs, Karla incredulously replied that she was quite capable of doing two things at same time.

It was revealed at the trial that Karla shaved the hair from the head of one of the dead girls rather than throw away a carpet that might have picked up hair traces from the victim (to the great confusion of profilers, who interpreted the hair shaving as a “signature”). Marks of what appeared to be her knee imprints were found on one victim’s back. The videotapes did not show the actual murders, however. In the end, the jury chose to believe that Bernardo was most likely the killer: He had committed a series of very violent rapes and dismembered one of the dead victims.

Karla Homolka, who has been happily taking university courses while in prison, is due to be released very shortly, having nearly finished her entire fourteen-year term, while Bernardo is serving a life sentence.

 Carol Bundy and Douglas Clark—“The Sunset Boulevard Killers”

In 1980 in Los Angeles, Douglas Clark and Carol Bundy were involved in the murders of at least six young women who were either hitchhiking or working as prostitutes in the Sunset Boulevard area. Clark enjoyed carefully shooting his victims in the head when they were performing oral sex on him. He then had sex with their cadavers. Carol accompanied Clark on at least one of the murders, sitting in the backseat of the car and watching as Clark murdered the victim in the front. On another occasion Clark brought home a severed female head and asked Carol to set the victim’s hair and apply some makeup; he then had sex with the head in the shower. Eventually Carol killed a male victim and severed his head in a futile attempt to impress Clark, whose interest in her was waning.

 Charlene and Gerald Gallego

The bisexual Charlene Gallego tested in prison at an IQ of 160. She was a talented violin player and college graduate from a wealthy California family. One evening while buying drugs at a club, she met Gerald Gallego. He had a lengthy record of sex offenses beginning at the tender age of thirteen, when he raped a seven-year-old girl. Moreover, he had a criminal pedigree going back to his father, who had killed two law enforcement officers and was the first person executed in Mississippi State’s gas chamber when Gerald was nine years old. Charlene was instantly attracted to Gerald Gallego’s “outlaw” persona and married him.

Once again, she was probably a high-dominance woman who needed a high-dominance man—Gerald was perfect. He fantasized along with Charlene about keeping virginal young sex slaves at a remote country house. On his daughter’s (from another marriage) fourteenth birthday, he sodomized her and raped her friend as Charlene watched.

Things went wrong when one night both of them seduced a sixteen-year-old go-go dancer. The three-way sex was fine, but the next day after coming back from work, Gallego found Charlene and the dancer having sex together. He became enraged, threw the girl out, and stopped having sex with Charlene. Charlene then suggested that they kidnap, rape, and murder young girls.

Killing between September 1978 and November 1980, they often kidnapped girls from Sacramento shopping malls. They also killed in Nevada and Oregon, often beating in the heads of their victims with a tire iron or shooting them with a .25-caliber pistol. They buried one victim alive, a pregnant woman. In three instances, they kidnapped two women at a time. Gerald shared the victims with Charlene, who liked to bite one girl as another performed oral sex on Charlene. She bit the nipple off one of the victims.

At one point, Charlene got into a gunfight with Gerald when he started raping their two young teenage captives in the back “without waiting for her” while she was driving the van. The couple shot at each other until Charlene grazed Gerald’s arm.

Charlene was seven months pregnant in 1980 when their car was identified during their kidnapping and murder of a high school couple during a prom night. When police showed up at their door, the couple were such unlikely suspects that police left even though the suspected car was parked in their driveway. When police returned several hours later, the Gallegos had already fled.

They were eventually apprehended and Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death, while Charlene Gallego, in a pattern that should be familiar to the reader by now, received a sixteen-year sentence, testifying against Gerald.

While in prison she continued her education, studying a range of subjects from psychology to business to Icelandic literature. “She’s a pretty intellectual woman,” said Nevada District Judge Richard Wagner, who was the lead prosecutor in Gallego’s Nevada trial. “She has a phenomenal mind, which made her a tremendous witness. . . . She had almost a photographic memory about the victims, down to their shoes and clothes.”

On July 17, 1997, Charlene was set free and reverted to her family name of Williams. In an interview she claimed that she was as much a victim of Gallego as the other girls: “There were victims who died and there were victims who lived. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”

Charlene said of Gerald Gallego, “He portrayed to my parents that he was a super family guy. But soon it was like being in the middle of a mud puddle. You can’t see your way out because he eliminated things in my life piece by piece, person by person, until all I had around me were members of his family, and they’re all like him, every one of them. . . . Prison was freedom compared to being with him.”

Gerald Gallego recently died of cancer in the midst of his attempts to get a new trial. On November 20, 1999, a Nevada farmer uncovered a shallow grave containing the bodies of fourteen-year-old Brenda Judd and thirteen-year-old Sandra Colley, missing since 1979, two of the ten known victims of Charlene and Gerald.

There are remarkably frequent cases of women, some of them well educated and with “normal” family backgrounds, emerging as willing accomplices in sadistic rapes and murders of children, men, and women. Other noted sexual killer couples include and Fred and Rosemary West in England, who sexually murdered at least ten women and young girls, including their daughter, between 1971 and 1987; Debra Denise Brown and Alton Coleman, who bludgeoned, shot, tortured, and raped eight victims age seven and up in Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan in 1988; and Judith and Alvin Neelley, who called themselves “The Night Rider and Lady Sundance” and robbed, raped, and murdered fifteen women in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia in 1980–1982.

 Aileen Wuornos—The Single Female Sexual Serial Killer Who Wasn’t

There seem to be virtually no records of single female sexual serial killers operating in the way male serial killers described in this book do. Even the case of Aileen Wuornos, often cited as an example of a male-type female serial killer, seems to lack the sexual pathology of a male sexual killer. Wuornos was a thirty-five-year-old Florida roadside prostitute who was convicted for shooting six men. Although she robbed her dead victims, her motive appears to have been revenge or rage induced as a result of a lifetime of real and perceived abuse.

Throughout the period of the murders, numerous other lesser charges were laid against her under different aliases for threatening people with a weapon, assault, vandalism of her apartment, and other minor offenses. She constantly traveled with a loaded handgun. In one town she was charged with making threatening calls to a supermarket chain over a lottery ticket dispute, and in another with assaulting a bus driver over a fare dispute. Addicted to cocaine and possibly crystal meth, she was wired up into a highly aggressive state of rage.

Her victims were elderly male motorists. Either they mistook her for a woman needing assistance or a hitchhiker, or they picked up Wuornos for sex. Their bodies were found dumped in remote areas, often shot several times in the back and the head, and their pockets turned inside out or their clothes stolen in their entirety. Their vehicles were found elsewhere, with property removed from them. There was no evidence, however, of torture or mutilation of the victims.

At her trial Wuornos claimed that she shot these victims in self-defense when they attempted to rape and assault her during her encounters with them. Indeed, it turned out that her first victim, Richard Mallory, had served ten years for a violent rape. The other five victims, however, had no records of sexual assaults. The likely scenario is that Wuornos shot Mallory in self-defense and found herself afterward in a raging addiction to kill more. Perhaps some real or imagined slight during her encounter with her elderly victims triggered her murderous acts. Perhaps they reminded her of her grandfather, who abused her and who she thought was actually her father until age thirteen. Wuornos was raped at age fourteen and gave birth to a son, who was given up for adoption. From age fifteen she led a life of prostitution and drug addiction and claimed she was raped five more times before age eighteen.

During her trial Wuornos became a cause for some factions of the feminist movement, who believed that her crimes were a response to systemic abuse at the hands of men. Whether or not Wuornos is to be believed—and certainly her claims are plausible—her childhood and adolescent history is comparable to that of many male serial killers who did not get a break from the justice system. Neither did Wuornos: She was executed in Florida on October 9, 2002.

Wuornos is often presented as a sexual killer because the offenses took place in the context of her prostitution. But it is highly debatable whether her killings gave Wuornos any sexual gratification in the way male sexual serial killers derive theirs.