LOVELOCK, Nev. -- 'Sex slave' killer Gerald Gallego, the son of a murderer who was executed in Mississippi in 1955, Tuesday was sentenced to die for the kidnap-murders of two teenage California girls.
A panel of six men and six women deliberated only 2 1/2 hours Monday night and Tuesday morning before returning the death sentence. They also ordered he serve two life terms without possible parole for the kidnappings.
Gallego showed no reaction when the verdict was read.
The sentence will be automatically appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, a process that could take up to two years. If he loses, he would die by lethal injection.
Gallego, 37, was convicted last week of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of kidnapping for abducting Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, both 17, from a Sacramento, Calif., shopping center in April 1980.
District Judge Llewellyn Young set formal imposition of the sentences for June 25, after which Gallego will be returned to California where he is appealing the death sentence ordered in that state for the murders of a college student and her boyfriend.
His father, Gerald Sr., was put to death in Mississippi's gas chamber in 1955. He had been jailed after killing Ocean Springs, Miss., town marshal Ernest Beaugez. Then, while in prison, he threw cleaning acid in the eyes of jailer J.C. Landrum and beat him to death with a pipe.
Gerald Gallego Jr. was nine when his father died. Four years later he was sent to a California youth correctional facility for committing 'a lewd and lascivious act' on a 6-year-old girl.
The penalty hearing Monday came at the end of a four-week trial, which was partly financed by citizens from across the nation -- many who wanted Gallego get the death penalty in Nevada.
More than $26,000 was donated to the small Lovelock community, located near where the bodies were buried, to pay the estimated $60,000 cost of the trial.
District Attorney Richard Wagner urged the death penalty, saying Gallego 'took human beings and used them in sexual perversion and then discarded them like garbage.'
State public defender Thomas Perkins asked for a life term because he said that would mean Gallego would return to California to face a death sentence there for the murders of two other people.
'This man is pathetic,' Perkins said. 'I ask you to banish him. You can send him back to death row in California.'
Gallego, sentenced to death in California for killing a college student and her boyfriend, was extradited to Nevada by authorities who felt there was a better chance he would be put to death in Nevada.
Gallego's common-law wife Charlene, who has received a 16-year term for her part in the killings, said he wanted to satisfy his fantasties for young sex slaves.
She testified she helped lure the victims into a van which was driven to a remote place where Gallego raped the two girls. He then beat them to death and buried their bodies in the Nevada desert, she said.
The only witness at the penalty hearing Monday was Dr. Joan Cartwright of Sacramento, who testified Gallego has brain damage that affects his judgment and self-control.
Perkins said Gallego was 'not a poor boy. He's not insane. But he doesn't have the same brain functions that we do.' He said the death penalty would 'free him from the misery he is suffering now.'
