Gerald And Charlene Gallego, The ‘Sex Slave Killers’
Public DomainGerald and Charlene Gallego in their 1980 booking photos.
In just a two-year period, from 1978 to 1980, Sacramento serial killer couple Gerald and Charlene Gallego murdered at least 10 young people, often killing two victims at a time. Their usual method was to cruise area malls looking for teenage girls, whom Charlene would lure into their van with promises of free marijuana.
Once the girls got into the van, they were confronted with an armed Gerald, who forced them into the cargo area and tied them up for a ride out to the countryside. The victims were invariably raped, beaten, and murdered, and their bodies were dumped in scattered locations.
Their last victims were 22-year-old Craig Miller and his fiancée, 21-year-old Mary Elizabeth Sowers, whom they kidnapped at gunpoint from a mall parking lot on Nov. 1, 1980. Gerald forced the young couple into his van in plain sight of their friend, who managed to catch the Gallegos’ license plate number and alerted the police.
Gerald shot Miller right away, but he and Charlene took Sowers to their apartment, where they raped and tortured her for several hours. Eventually, they drove her out of town and shot her three times.
Public DomainMary Elizabeth Sowers and Craig Miller, two victims of the Gallegos.
Gerald and Charlene fled to Reno, Nevada, but they were tracked down and arrested on Nov. 17. They both denied any wrongdoing at first, but Charlene soon struck a deal to testify against Gerald. In 1984, Gerald was handed the death penalty, but his sentence was later commuted to life in prison. He died behind bars from colorectal cancer in 2002.
Charlene served 16 years in prison, maintaining all the while that she was practically an innocent bystander who couldn’t have done anything to stop Gerald. She was released in 1997 and returned to Sacramento to live under an assumed name.
Ray And Faye Copeland, The Elderly Serial Killer Couple
YouTubeRay Copeland killed at least five farmhands in the 1980s — and Faye made a quilt out of their clothes.
At the time of their sentencing in the early 1990s, Ray and Faye Copeland were the oldest couple ever sent to death row. At 76 and 69, the two were convicted of committing five murders on their Missouri farm in the late 1980s.
Unlike the other serial killer couples on this list, there doesn’t seem to have been a pathological element to their crimes. Instead, the Copelands appeared to have been motivated by old-fashioned greed.
Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma in 1914. Like many other men his age, he drifted around looking for work during the Great Depression. Unlike many other men, he also dabbled in check fraud and livestock theft.
He met and married Faye in 1940, and they had several children. But becoming a family man didn’t bring an end to Ray’s life of crime. Instead, he started buying cattle at market with bad checks and resold them for cash as quickly as possible. He was thrown in jail for this crime several times — but then he had an idea.
Ray and Faye started hiring drifters to carry out their dirty work for them. Ray would send the men to market with the fraudulent checks, sell the cattle, and then shoot the farmhands to cover his tracks. He then buried them on the property, while Faye made a quilt from their clothing scraps.
As reported by the New York Daily News in 2003, the Copelands may have gotten away with their crimes if it weren’t for Jack McCormick, who was hired to work on the farm in 1989. He came across a human skull while digging in the barn one day, quickly left town, and notified the police about what he’d found.
Investigators raided the property, digging up the land with heavy machinery and uncovering five bodies. Both Ray and Faye were sentenced to death, becoming the oldest couple on death row in American history.
“I was raised to love my husband and support him no matter what,” Faye later said from prison. “The man is the head of the family. The Bible says it should be that way.”
Ray died of natural causes while incarcerated in 1993. Six years later, Faye’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. She was paroled in 2002 after suffering a stroke, and she died in a nursing home a few months later.
