LOVELOCK, Nev. -- Sobbing quietly, Charlene Gallego told jurors how she helped her common-law-husband lure teenage girls into their van during a bloody search for the 'perfect sex slave,' then waited while he murdered them.
She testified Tuesday in the murder trial of Gerald Gallego, saying she stayed with him after he kidnapped, raped and murdered several girls because she 'didn't want to be alone.'
Gallego has already been convicted of two murders in California and sentenced to death. But prosecutors in Nevada are trying him for two more murders.
Ms. Gallego admitted Tuesday that she lured Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs into the van at a shopping center in Sacramento, Calif., in 1980, then watched while Gallego raped them.
She said she drove the van to Limmerick Canyon, a few miles from Lovelock, where Gallego took he girls one at a time into the desert and beat them to death.
Driving back to Sacramento the next morning, Gallego threw a bloody hammer out the window and stopped in Lovelock for breakfast.
'I've been dying to ask this question,' said state Public Defender Tom Perkins, after noting that there were two guns in the van and she knew how to use them. 'When Gerald came back to the van (after killing the girls), why didn't you shoot him?'
She cried as she explained, 'Gerald was security. 'I didn't want to be alone. I was still trying to please him.'
When she was unable to continue testifying, Judge Llewellyn Young recessed the trial until today.
