Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (8 page)

Martha Johnson largely disappears from the public record after her sentencing, only occasionally
mentioned
in articles about child killers. She cannot have any more offspring - and didn’t ever harm a stranger’s child - so presumably won’t be a danger to anyone if she is ever released. The public still largely refuses to believe that some women kill their children though there have been many such high profile cases over the years, such as Alice Crimmins, Susan Smith, Waneta Hoyt, Marybeth Tinning, Diane Downs and Paula Simms.

5 Slave to love

The confused priorities of Charlene Gallego

Charlene Adelle Williams was born near Sacramento, California, in October 1956. Her father, Charles (known as Chuck) had started off as a butcher and worked his way up to being the vice president of a supermarket chain. He was a respected entrepreneur who had to wine and dine clients as part of his job. His wife, Mercedes, acted as his hostess and the pair of them
regularly
travelled as part of their business life.

Sometimes little Charlene would travel with them and at other times she’d stay with her maternal
grandparents
whom she loved dearly. She’d wear the
beautiful
floaty dresses with ribbons that her doting father bought her. She’d dance and sing and be his fairytale ideal of a little girl.

Her early school reports suggest that she was a shy, quiet child who had a good attendance record. Some classmates described her as mousy. She wore braces and had her hair braided in that least flattering of styles, pigtails, so didn’t feel very good about herself. Like many only children who spend too much time exclusively in adult company, she probably found it hard to relax with people of her own age.

Charlene’s father thought that young women shouldn’t
swear or be unladylike. He believed that good manners were important. Little Charlene more than lived up to his expectations - she was good at every one of her school subjects and was a regular attendee at her local church.

Mercedes was a small slim woman and Charlene was equally tiny. But despite her frail appearance her mother had a very brisk and no-nonsense approach to life.

Charlene remained shy until she reached fourth grade and found that she had a talent for playing the violin. It was a passion that would stay with her. She excelled in the school orchestra and also found the confidence to get involved behind the scenes in various drama club activities. Chuck was proud of Charlene’s musical skills and bought her a very expensive violin. Soon it rarely left her side. Later she’d talk of becoming a professional musician, but her mother didn’t think this was a suitable career for her daughter so Charlene started to think about following her father into the supermarket business instead.

Then Mercedes was involved in a car accident and badly hurt her back. After that, she didn’t want to travel very often. The schoolgirl Charlene, dressed like a princess as usual, took over the hostessing tasks. She’d travel in light planes and in boats with her father to meet his clients, most of whom would praise this intelligent and well spoken young girl. In return she was
given lots of presents - especially dresses, which she adored. Charlene began to find that she could make friends with men and alienate women - but this suited her as she had always been a Daddy’s girl. She was to remain her wealthy parents only child.

But there was clearly trouble in paradise for by
puberty
Charlene had started experimenting with drugs. By fourteen she was drinking heavily, getting by on a potent mix of Qualudes and gin. Her school kept wanting to expel her but her father intervened in her favour again and again. As her IQ was so exceptional, in the top one percent of the population, the school let her remain.

By now alternately quiet then boastful, she found it difficult to make or keep female friends. She also became very promiscuous but her parents were in denial that anything was wrong.

Charlene went to college but quickly tired of it. Still a teenager, she now decided to become a full time wife, perhaps emulating her mother. She promptly married a rich but equally lost young man and set up home with him. Unfortunately, he was a heroin addict who said that Charlene was obsessed by the idea of lesbian sex and wanted him to hire a whore that they could share in bed.

Charlene’s first husband also found that she quickly let her appearance go to hell - hardly surprising given the amount of cocaine and marijuana that she was taking. He hated the fact that Chuck and Mercedes Williams intervened in their relationship a great deal.

The marriage soon failed and Charlene just as quickly remarried - this time choosing a soldier - in what she’d later call a desperate search for emotional security. But husband number two also quickly tired of his new wife, for if he refused her anything she’d call her parents over and ask them for whatever she desired. If they demurred she’d sometimes have an asthma attack and completely collapse until they gave in to her. The Williams believed she had asthma but her third husband, Gerald Gallego, would later suggest it was faked.

At just five feet tall, of a very slight built, and with blonde hair and blue eyes, Charlene looked younger than her years and very innocent - but by twenty-one she’d been divorced twice and had a string of
unsatisfactory
relationships. One of her more enjoyable affairs was with a married man and when he ended it she attempted to kill herself.

Her working life went equally awry. She worked in various meat companies but she was so overdressed
and so flirtatious with the male staff that she quickly made enemies of the females. She had planned to
follow
her father up the corporate ladder but was increasingly sidetracked, taking long intimate lunches with the male employees. Charlene continued to drink heavily and could handle neat vodka and the inevitable depression that followed. She continued to date and discard various men.

Her father still doted on her, so when she moved into a nice apartment he bought lots of furniture for it. He also bought her a van.

Psychologists would later suggest that Charlene’s father was too dominant a force in her life - and that she would spend her teenage years looking for a man who was equally forceful. She found him in Gerald Gallego who she met on a blind date. It was the autumn of 1977 and she was a thin and almost waiflike twenty-one. He was ten years older, a well built man with dark probing eyes and heavy dark hair. He’d been violent in most of his relationships and had done time for a string of offences, including car theft and armed robbery.

Gerald’s own background had been a brutal one. His mother and her numerous boyfriends had beaten him during his formative years - and when his mother
became a working girl Gerald was abused by some of her clients. He was often left hungry and dirty and was always pleading to be held and hugged. When he was nine his natural father, who had played no part in his life, was executed for killing two policemen - something Gerald wouldn’t find out until he was fully grown.

Like Charlene, Gerald had failed as a lover and as a spouse - by the age of thirty-two he’d left numerous women when they ran out of money and possessions. He’d been married, albeit often bigamously, seven times. He had also started sexually abusing his daughter from one marriage when she was aged eight. (Some sources say she was aged six. Statistically, seven is the most common age for incest to begin.)

Gerald liked rough sex and Charlene responded to this. At first their sex life was so good that they simply couldn’t get enough of each other. Some crime texts suggest that she was masochistic but it’s more likely that she was sexually
submissive.
True masochism - in which pain is enjoyed for its own sake - is very rare. Indeed, she would later say in court that she hated the painful experience of being sodomised, an act which Gerald particularly enjoyed.

Sexual submission relies strongly on conversational powerplay. The submissive often indicates to the
dominant
party what he or she enjoys, so in a way it’s the submissive that’s in charge, the common term for this being ‘topping from below.’

Sexually submissive people are often very strong characters in their day to day lives - as, in many ways, Charlene was. She was running rings around everyone at work but, like many women, wanted a man in her bed who could take charge. Gerald Gallego, who hated women deep down, originally rose to the challenge. He appeared streetwise and very masterful.

Within a week of meeting, the new couple had rented a house and moved in together. Gerald soon moved beyond the flowers and chocolates stage of the relationship and Charlene accepted that he was more interested in his own sexual satisfaction than he was in hers. Like most serial killers who use sex to hurt and humiliate their partners, his preference was for anal sex then oral sex, with vaginal sex a very poor third. But she was fascinated by his machismo and was soon sharing in his illicit fantasies.

When they had been cohabitating for a few months Gerald brought home a sixteen-year-old dancer and they had a threesome together, but he made sure that the two women only touched him and not each other. The next day he returned early from work to find Charlene having sex with the girl. Enraged, he threw the dancer out of the, thankfully, open window and hit Charlene. He then withheld sex from her, saying that he had become impotent. In reality, it seems, he no longer found her attractive because she’d shown she wasn’t fully dependent on him for sexual kicks. Inadequate
men like Gallego tend to choose very needy or very young girls who they can overwhelmingly dominate and impress.

Gerald now sodomised his fourteen-year-old daughter and raped her friend - prior to this he had only had vaginal sex with the confused teenager. He did so with Charlene’s knowledge. It’s unclear if Charlene was in the room with them or just in the same apartment, but she evidently didn’t find anything immoral in Gerald’s paedophiliac act. The fact that she condoned the incest - and would later help him flee from the authorities when they were ready to charge him with it - suggests she had the lack of conscience found in the sociopath.

For the next few months Charlene worked at various jobs and Gerald, who was uneducated, worked in a bar. He made many tips because he was so attractive to women. Charlene suspected he was sleeping with many of his customers, as by now he was sexually disinterested in her.

When the couple had been together for a year, he said that he needed a pair of love slaves to turn him on, and asked her to procure them. Some sources suggest that she agreed because she saw the man’s word as law, that she wanted only to please him. But no one is completely self-effacing so it’s more likely that she wanted to satisfy her own strong lesbian desires and totally control a helplessly tied-up girl. Whatever her
motivation, she agreed to lure teenage virgins to their certain deaths.

On 11th September 1978 she approached two teenage girls in a Sacramento shopping mall, suggesting they come with her to her Oldsmobile van to smoke some marijuana. Gerald, of course, was crouching in the back.

Sixteen-year-old Kippi Vaught and
seventeen-year-old
Rhonda Scheffler happily accompanied Charlene to the vehicle where Gerald immediately locked them in and brandished his pistol. He told the girls that they were being kidnapped as he wanted to terrify them - their fear turned him and Charlene on. Charlene then taped their mouths, ankles and wrists, took the gun and kept it trained on the girls whilst he drove to a deserted area. They arrived late in the afternoon and Gerald and Charlene undressed and told the victims to do the same.

For the next six hours, the couple assaulted the helpless teenagers. Gerald sodomised them both and made them fellate him. He only had vaginal sex with one girl as the other was menstruating. The bite marks on one girl’s breasts were very different to the bite marks on her friend’s breasts, suggesting that Gerald bit one girl and Charlene bit the other. She would later tell
a cellmate how ecstatic she felt during this cruel kidnap-rape. That’s author Eric van Hoffmann’s view of how the killings took place - but it has to be said that Ray Biondi’s take on the subject is very different. He believes that Charlene had no sexual contact with the victims after she abducted them. This is very unlikely given what we know of Team Killers - the female half of every other killing couple in this book played an active part in at least one of the sexual assaults.

Gerald then told Charlene to drive around whilst he went off into the woods with his victims, carrying a sleeping bag. It’s likely that he wanted to perform
further
abuses on the pair without having his girlfriend watching. The girls were clearly distressed when he eventually returned with them.

She now took the wheel and drove the girls on a fifteen mile journey to what would become their execution ground. She stayed in the van whilst her lover cracked their skulls with a jack handle then shot them, leaving them where they dropped. Kippi Vaught had only received a minor head wound but Gallego saw her moving and shot her again.