A Venom in the Blood Author:Eric vanHoffmann From inside dust jacket cover: "Here is the chilling story of the only recorded case of a husband-and-wife serial killer team, told by an ex-law enforcement officer with insider's access to all the personalities and documents crucial to the case. — In the scorching heat of late summer, 1978, Gerald Armond Gallego, with his common-law wife Charlen... more »e Williams Gallego in tow, launched a series of brutal kidnap-rape-murders that would terrorize the California countryside and claim at least ten young lives within the space of less than three years. Told partly from the point of view of the Gallegos, this is the story of how a barren and lawless childhood led to a life of crime that ended in a long climactic nightmare of sex, drugs, kidnapping, assault and murder to rank with the stories of such as Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and other infamous serial killers.
On September 13, 1978, two Mexican migrant workers crossed a drainage ditch in the rich open farmland southeast of Sacramento, California to examine what appeared to be a bundle of old clothes. They discovered the partially clothed body of a young woman who had been beaten, sexually bused and shot in the back of the head. The body of another similarly brutalized young woman lay nearby. And so began the trail that eventually led to the capture and conviction of Gerald Gallego, who, as of this printing, awaits execution on death row in Carson City, Nevada.
Basing his research on known details of the case, including Charlene Williams Gallego's blow-by-blow confession, and on more than thirty exclusive interviews with Gallego's mother, Lorraine Davies, who herself died recently under suspicious and violent circumstances some feel are closely connected to the case, vanHoffmann pieces together, with incisive psychological insight, a shocking scenario of pure evil in Gallego's obsession with a fatal mix of sex and violence. What prompted the petite, attractive Charlene, whose IQ was estimated at 160, to lure these young women into the back of Gerald's van where she and Gerald, who was married seven times (polygamously) and who carried on an incestuous relationship with his daughter from the age of ten, engaged in a routine of drug-induced orgies, sodomy, rape and murder?"« less