Court hearings this week on two of Nevada’s most notorious crimes

Monday, Sept. 20, 1999 | 9:26 a.m.

A resentencing hearing began in Lander District Court in Lovelock for Gerald Gallego, a convicted sex-slave killer whose death sentence was overturned in a case dating to 1980.

Jury selection began in Washoe District Court in Reno for Siaosi Vanisi, accused of the 1998 hatchet murder of University of Nevada, Reno campus police officer George Sullivan.

Both cases are among the Top Ten "Crimes of the Century" selected by a panel of journalists and law officers for the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The list is topped by Prescilla Ford's Thanksgiving Day massacre on the streets of Reno in 1980. Ford drove her Lincoln Continental down a crowded Virginia Street sidewalk, killing seven and injuring 23.

At age 70, Ford remains the only woman on death row in Nevada.

Second on the newspaper's list, Gallego has been sentenced to death once, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the sentence when prosecutors missed an appeal deadline.

Gallego and his wife, Charlene Williams, preyed on young girls in three states. Police say they kidnapped, raped and killed as many as 10 people. A Lander County jury will decide whether to reinstate the death penalty.

Vanisi is accused of killing Sgt. Sullivan as he sat in his squad car on the UNR campus in January 1998. He earlier went before a jury but a judge ordered a mistrial after a word appeared wrong in a court transcript.

The rest of the Top Ten includes the last known U.S. stagecoach robbery, which occurred in Jarbidge in 1916, and the 1911 Indian massacre at Little High Rock. In the latter, a posse of ranchers in Elko County slayed the men women and children of a band of wandering Bannock Indians suspected of killing four Basque sheepherders.

Others on the list were: Thomas Bean's murder of Olympic skier Sonja McCaskie in 1963, the Harvey's casino bombing at Lake Tahoe in 1980, the slaying of UNR sophomore Michelle Mitchell in 1976, the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 and the murder trial of unionists Morrie Preston and Joseph Smith in 1907.

Preston, who shot a Goldfield restaurant owner in self defense, and Smith were organizers of the International Workers of the World.

In 1987, both men received the first posthumous pardons granted in Nevada.