Serial killer Gallego sentenced to death again

Tuesday, Nov. 16, 1999 | 1:37 a.m.

Judge John McGroarty issued the sentence in Pershing County District Court and set the execution for the week of Jan. 17.

However, the execution will be automatically stayed because all death penalties are automatically appealed in Nevada.

"I'm glad we are to this point anyway," Pershing County District Attorney Belinda Quilici said after sentencing on Tuesday.

It marks the second time Gallego has been ordered to be executed. The resentencing was necessary after the Nevada Attorney General's office missed a deadline in response to an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over jury instructions in the original sentencing.

The new jury deliberated for about an hour in September before they decided the serial killer deserves to die for kidnapping and beating two young women to death.

Gallego, 53, Sacramento, argued he did not deserve the death penalty because he was brain-damaged and had been beaten as a child for wetting his bed.

He was convicted of the April 1980 kidnap-murders of Stacey Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs. There bodies were found in shallow graves in the Nevada desert three months after they disappeared from a mall in Citrus Heights, California.

He also was convicted of two killings Sacramento-area killings in 1980 of Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Elizabeth Sowers, 21. Authorities suspect him of killing a total of 10 people.

During Gallego's previous trial, his common-law wife, Charlene Williams, testified that he kidnapped the girls as part of a serial odyssey of slayings as he searched for the perfect "sex slave."