The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  The couple had left in a hurry, and so were unprepared for a long flight. Two weeks later, Charlene contacted her parents and asked them to wire five hundred dollars. When she went to collect it at a Western Union office in Omaha, Nebraska, police were waiting for her. Her ‘husband’ was also taken into custody. Five days later, on 22 November 1980, the body of Beth Sowers was found in a field in Placer County. Her evening gown was badly torn, and she had been shot three times in the back of the head. Medical examination revealed that she had been raped.

  By the time Gerald Gallego was in custody, the Sacramento police had learned a great deal about him, and it suggested that he was a multiple sex killer. Heredity may have played some part in his makeup – his father had been executed for three murders in 1955, at the age of twenty-eight. Gerald was unaware of this when he had his first encounters with the law, at the age of ten. When he was thirteen, he was sentenced to a period in a youth penal facility for having sexual relations with a seven-year-old girl. He married at the age of eighteen, and his first wife bore him a daughter, Sally Jo. By the time he was thirty-two he had been married seven times. He had also been committing incest with his daughter since she was eight. Then, when she was fourteen, he sodomised her and raped her girlfriend. The teenagers went to the Butte County police, and Gallego was forced to flee.

  By this time – 1978 – Gallego had already known Charlene for a year. A quiet, shy girl, she was the only daughter of a wealthy Sacramento businessman, and had led a pampered existence. At college she had become acquainted with drugs and sex and, by the time she was twenty-one, she had been married and divorced twice. She had met Gerald Gallego on a blind date, and was fascinated by his air of macho brutality, and his need for violence during sex. They lived together for a while, then married in 1978. (In fact they were not legally married, since Gallego had omitted to get a divorce from a previous wife.) Charlene was not only aware of his criminal record, but of his intense fantasy life. Gallego confided that his greatest desire was for the ‘perfect sex slave’ – preferably a teenage virgin – whom he could hold captive and order to fulfil his demands, which included oral sex and sodomy. As Charlene later confessed, she had agreed to help him in his quest.

  On 11 September 1978 they had driven to a shopping mall in Sacramento, and Charlene had accosted two young girls, Rhonda Scheffler, seventeen, and her sixteen-year-old friend Kippi Vaught. She lured them back to the Oldsmobile with the suggestion that they might like to smoke some marijuana. Once there, they were forced into the back of the van – which had been fitted with a mattress – and Gallego was able to put into operation his fantasy of rape, while Charlene sat in the front of the van. The girls were then driven to a site fifteen miles east of Sacramento, where both were ‘executed’ with three bullets in the head, and their bodies dumped.

  Gerald and Charlene Gallego soon became highly efficient killers. The next victims, nine months later, were a fourteen-and a fifteen-year-old girl, Kaye Colley and Brenda Judd, picked up at the annual county fair in Reno on 24 June 1979; their bodies have never been found, although according to Charlene Gallego they are in a shallow grave near Lovelock, Nevada.

  Ten months later, on 24 April 1980, two seventeen-year-olds, Stacy Ann Redican and Karen Chipman-Twiggs, were abducted from a Sacramento shopping mall; their decomposed bodies were found near Lovelock, Nevada, in July 1980. They had been killed by hammer blows to the skull.

  Linda Teresa Aguilar was five months pregnant when she disappeared somewhere between Port Orford, Oregon, and nearby Gold Beach on 6 June 1980, less than three months after the two previous victims had vanished. Her body was found three weeks later in a grave nine miles south of Gold Beach; she was bound with a nylon rope, and beaten with a blunt instrument; sand in her windpipe revealed that she had been buried alive.

  Five weeks later, on 17 July 1980, a thirty-four-year-old Sacramento waitress, Virginia Mochel, vanished after she walked out of the tavern where she worked. Police learned that she had been talking to a married couple in the tavern: a man who was drunk and boisterous, and a pretty but subdued girl. Her naked body was discovered in October near Sacramento, the hands tied behind her with fishing line.

  It was in the following month that Gerald and Charlene Gallego waited in the car park outside the Carousel restaurant in Sacramento, and Gallego saw a pretty girl in evening dress whom he decided he wanted to possess. Beth Sowers was with her fiance, Craig Miller, but that made no difference. Charlene forced them into the van at gunpoint, Miller was despatched a few miles away, then Beth Sowers was taken back to Gallego’s apartment and dragged into the bedroom. In the next room, Charlene Gallego listened to her cries and pleas as she was made to cater to Gallego’s perverted sexual demands. Then the crying girl was dragged out of the bedroom and thrown back into the van, to be taken to her place of execution. After that, Charlene dropped Gallego off at his flat, and went back to the home of her parents, where she lived. The next morning the police arrived – the prompt action of the student who had taken her registration number had finally put an end to the killing spree.

  Gallego proved to be a difficult prisoner; he had always had a reputation for aggression, and during his previous jail term had told a prison counsellor: ‘The only thing that interests me is killing God.’ Now, at the arraignment, he leapt to his feet and screamed at reporters: ‘Get the hell out of here! We’re not funny people. We’re not animals.’ He fought violently, overturning tables and chairs, before he was subdued.

  Charlene Gallego was at first unco-operative, but was eventually persuaded to enter into plea-bargaining in exchange for testifying against her ‘husband’. Her story made it clear that she had also been Gallego’s ‘sex slave’; she explained that she needed the emotional security he provided. This is why she felt she had to comply with his demand for help in kidnapping more ‘sex slaves’. Her husband, she said, had pursued his aim of the ‘perfect love slave’ obsessively, even rating his victims on their performances.

  On 21 June 1983 Gallego was sentenced to die by lethal injection. In accordance with her plea bargain, Charlene Gallego received sixteen years in jail.

  Before the 1960s, cases of ‘duo’ sex murder in which one of the participants was a woman were unknown. The reason is obvious; more than any other criminal, the sex criminal tends to work alone and to take no-one else into his confidence. A 1980 FBI report on lust killers states: ‘The disorganised asocial lust murderer exhibits primary characteristics of social aversion. This individual prefers his own company to that of others and would be typified as a loner.’ This applies to most sex killers from Jack the Ripper to Heinrich Pommerencke. Such men may even be married – like the Düsseldorf murderer Peter Kürten or the Boston Strangler – but their wives seldom suspect that their husbands are sex killers. The very idea of a wife helping her husband to rape another woman seems absurd. So why is it that such cases began to appear in the 1960s, and that their number has continued to increase? It can hardly be unrelated to the fact that the 1960s also saw the emergence of the ‘self-esteem’ killer. In fact, as the Gallego case makes clear, ‘duo’ sex crimes are crimes of self-esteem. As agent Robert Hazelwood observed: ‘Sexual assault services non-sexual needs – power needs.’ This is not invariably true – or at least, it used not to be true. Robert Poulin’s craving for a woman was simply a desire to lose his virginity, to ‘fuck some girl’; the same is true of Heinrich Pommerencke. They were like starving men who steal food. The archetypal sex criminal was described by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities (1930-43). Moosbrugger is arresting for stabbing a prostitute to death. Musil writes:

  ‘As a boy, Moosbrugger had been a poverty-stricken wretch, a shepherd-lad in a hamlet so small that it did not even have a village street; and he was so poor that he never spoke to a girl. Girls were something that he could only look at . . . Now one must imagine just what that means. Something that one craves for, just as naturally as one craves for bread or water, is only there to
be looked at. After a time one’s desire for it becomes unnatural. It climbs over a stile, becoming visible right up to the knees . . .’

  This describes the typical sex criminal of the first half of the twentieth century; he craves sex as he craves bread and water. (It shows keen insight on Musil’s part to make Moosbrugger a travelling journeyman; it has already been observed in an earlier chapter that a large number of sex killers have been tramps and vagrants.) As the last remnants of Victorianism gradually melt away, ‘it’ ceases to be visible only up to the knees; it wanders around on beaches in bikinis; underwear advertisements show it in a state of undress that hints at bedrooms; magazines like Playboy show it naked in seductive poses. This is why the desire of a Moosbrugger – or Pommerencke or Poulin – finally becomes ‘unnatural’.

  The new type of sex killer who began to appear in the 1960s was not driven by mere desire, but by self-assertion. In 1973, the police of Veracruz, Mexico, finally caught a sex murderer who had been preying on courting couples since 1968. He was thirty-one year old José Solano Marcelino, and he had made a habit of shooting the man, then raping the girl. ‘When I had the luck to find only one car, I’d sneak up on the pair inside. I was always armed with a gun, and my face was masked by one of my wife’s stockings . . . When I pointed the gun at them I could see, and enjoyed, the fear of death in their eyes. I liked it so much to see the male squirm, and the woman frightened and crying, that I’d make my threats last for a long time. When I could see that the panic was driving the couple to the brink of madness, I’d shoot the man. Then I’d take the woman. If she tried to give me trouble by fighting or screaming, I’d bang her over the head with the gun and tie her up. I never wanted to have sex with an unconscious woman, and so when they fainted, I waited before I had a session with them.’ Asked why he killed the men he explained: ‘I guess I sacrificed them because I got a kick out of it, like I did out of tormenting them before I put them out of their misery. And then later it gave an added tang to sexing their women.’

  Marcelino had been arrested on suspicion of being the lover’s lane rapist in March 1969, but an emotional appeal from his lawyer, who described him as a loving husband who adored his children, had led to his release. While the police continued to keep him under surveillance, he ceased the attacks. In 1970, he began again, until he had killed or seriously wounded more than a dozen men. The women were raped repeatedly, then tortured. ‘I’d prick them here and there with my knife, and squeeze and pinch to make them quiver with fear. It made me feel good to see the women suffer, and the fear and horror in their eyes fed something in me that was sometimes even more pleasurable than having sex with them.’

  Finally, he crept up on a couple who were picnicking, and hit the man – Gregorio Sanchez Luna – with a stone, then shot him dead. After that he made the girl, Maria Josefina Martinez, strip and drag the body into the bushes. Then, from five in the afternoon until three the following morning, he raped her and played ‘torture games’. Finally, sated, he drove off. After he had left, she made her way to the highway and contacted the police. Since Marcelino had failed to wear his stocking mask – for the first time – she was able to give the police an accurate description, which they instantly recognised as the man they had held four years earlier. He was arrested in a dawn raid, and immediately identified by his victim. Sentenced to forty years in jail, the rapist remarked: ‘Well, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. But I did have one hell of a time for five years.’

  Gerald Gallego’s attitude towards women was also sadistic and manipulative. They were there for his pleasure and his use. Most women quickly came to recognise this lack of give and take, and declined to co-operate – hence Gallego’s seven marriages in fourteen years. But Charlene Gallego was masochistic and eager to be manipulated. Her only desire was to serve her master; it was a kind of religious conversion. If Gallego’s condition for continuing the relationship was that she should help other women to their deaths. It only proved that her husband was thrillingly unlike other men. Gallego’s pleasure lay in dominating, hers in being dominated.

  The importance of ‘dominance’ – the ‘pecking order’ – in animal behaviour has been recognised only in fairly recent times. It was first noticed in flocks of domestic fowl – in which dominant individuals tend to peck subordinate ones. Only then was it slowly recognised that all animals, including human beings, have a ‘pecking order’, a kind of chain in which everyone is more dominant or subordinate than someone else. In groups such as lions, gorillas or rats, dominance is usually established by aggressive encounters, but once one of the animals has won the fight, all aggression usually evaporates, and the loser shows submissive behaviour from then on. The other challengers seem to acquire a sense of social responsibility, and he (or she) passes beyond the range of quarrels. The same phenomenon can often be seen in politicians who have been promoted to prime minister or president; a very mediocre party hack often develops genuine leadership qualities. This helps to explain that fundamental human craving for power, and why those who have acquired power cling to it so tightly. Supreme power places one above the ‘rat-race’.

  One of the most exciting observations about ‘dominance’ was made during the Korean war. Attempting to understand why there had been so few escapes of American prisoners, observers discovered that the Chinese had made use of an interesting technique. They had watched the prisoners carefully to establish which of them were ‘dominant’; then they had taken these dominant prisoners, and placed them under heavy guard. As soon as the ‘leaders’ had been removed, the other prisoners became more or less inert, and could be left almost without guards.

  The most interesting observation was that the number of ‘dominant’ prisoners was always the same: one in twenty, or five per cent. In fact, the explorer Stanley had known about this ‘dominant five per cent’ at the turn of the century. Bernard Shaw once asked him how many people in his party could take over the leadership if Stanley himself was ill; Stanley replied: ‘One in twenty.’ Shaw asked if that was exact or approximate; Stanley replied: ‘Exact.’

  Observations of zoologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen indicated that this applies to all animal species: five per cent are ‘dominant’. A psychologist named John Calhoun made an equally interesting observation: that when rats are overcrowded, the dominant five per cent becomes a criminal five per cent. Overcrowded rats express their dominance in behaviour in completely uncharacteristic of rats in natural conditions: for example, in rape and cannibalism. Some animals – like Sika deer – simply die of stress when overcrowded. Human beings seem to have a far higher resistance to stress than any other animal; they tend to react to overcrowding – like the rats – by developing criminal behaviour. It is significant that no serial killer has so far emerged from a socially privileged background; the majority were brought up in overcrowded slums. The zoologist Desmond Morris remarked that cities are ‘human zoos’, and added: ‘Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder. Among city dwellers . . . all these things occur.’ The conclusion to be drawn may be that the ‘crime explosion’ will continue until such time as the population explosion has been brought under control.

  Overcrowded slums have always existed, and, of course, crime has always existed in overcrowded slums. Why should they produce sadistic sex killers in the second half of the twentieth century? The answer to this question has already emerged in earlier chapters. In societies with a high level of poverty, theft is the commonest form of crime. In more ‘successful’ societies, sex crime makes its appearance, as overcrowding in slums produces the ‘criminal rat’ syndrome, with the dominant five per cent expressing their dominance through rape. In ‘affluent societies’, where a higher level of education means that all levels of society begin to glimpse the possibility of wealth and achievement, the craving for ‘
upward mobility’ becomes as urgent as the craving for sexual fulfilment, and ‘self-esteem’ crime makes its appearance. (It may or may not be significant that self-esteem murder made its appearance at a time when the pop star had become a well-established phenomenon, so that every underprivileged teenager could begin to glimpse the possibility of wealth and fame.) In the second half of the eighteenth century, thinkers like Rousseau and Tom Paine stated the fundamental principle that all men have a right to freedom; in the second half of the twentieth century, there is a powerful unstated assumption that all men have a right to fame and celebrity.

  Abraham Maslow – who was the first to describe the ‘hierarchy of needs’ – also made an important observation about ‘dominance’. He had become curious about the subject after observing the behaviour of monkeys in the Bronx zoo. They seemed to engage in almost constant sex – something that has been observed among many animals in captivity; but what puzzled Maslow was that the sex often seemed ‘abnormal’ – males would mount other males, and sometimes females would even mount males. It slowly dawned on him that this was because sex was a form of ‘dominance behaviour’; what was happening was that the more dominant animals were asserting themselves by mounting the less dominant animals. (Robert Ardrey has pointed out that under natural conditions ‘sex is a sideshow in the world of animals’; it only assumes exaggerated importance in captivity – another observation that may help to explain the rise in sex crime.)

  Maslow also observed that if a new monkey is added to a group of monkeys, the newcomer would often get beaten up, the attack often being led by a previously non-dominant monkey. He noted that the previously non-dominant monkey would often behave with extreme ferocity, as if making up for its previously inferior status. Here again we glimpse a parallel with the sadistic behaviour of many ‘self-esteem’ criminals.