Companion of sex-slave killer to be freed

      CARSON CITY -- Charlene Williams, whose testimony put her former common-law husband, convicted sex-slave killer Gerald Gallego, on death row, is scheduled to be released from prison Thursday.
      Williams, who testified Gallego used her as bait to gain the confidence of his victims -- and who also admitted to being an accomplice in 10 killings -- will be released from the Nevada Women's Correctional Center.
      Williams, 40, will have served 16 years and eight months for her role in the 1980 murders of two teen-age girls. Good-behavior credits made her eligible or parole in 1991, but she agreed to additional time to complete the full term -- and to avoid new murder and kidnapping charges in California.
      Prison spokesman Glen Whorton said he doesn't know what Williams plans to do.
      "She's just being discharged," he said, adding that since Williams has completed her full sentence, there's no requirement to disclose those plans -- although she must register as an ex-felon wherever she decides to live.
      "She made a good adjustment to prison, she's not a management problem," he said when asked how Williams handled her time behind bars.
      Gallego, 51, now at Nevada's Ely State Prison, has said Williams made up most of her testimony about him to satisfy prosecutors, who let her off with a second-degree murder plea.
      Williams told jurors lurid stories about luring victims into the couple's van by offering them drugs or promises of jobs, and then driving around while Gallego raped, tortured and murdered them.
      Gallego was sentenced to die by injection in 1984 after being found guilty of the April 1980 hammer slayings of Stacy Redican and Karen Chipman Twiggs, who disappeared from a Citrus Heights, Calif., mall. Their battered, decomposed bodies were found in shallow graves in a desert canyon near Lovelock, about 100 miles northeast of Reno.
      According to Williams' testimony at Gallego's trial in Lovelock, the two 17-year-old girls were two of 10 victims Gallego kidnapped and killed during a search for "the perfect sex slave" between September 1978 and November 1980. She said the crimes occurred in Nevada, California and Oregon.
      Before being tried in Nevada, Gallego also was convicted by a Contra Costa, Calif., jury of slaying college sweethearts Craig Miller, 22, and Mary Beth Sowers, 21. Williams also was a key witness in that trial, which resulted in another death sentence for Gallego.
      In appeals filed since his convictions, he claimed that he's innocent and suggested Williams may have killed Redican and Twiggs during a business trip to Nevada.
      In one federal court petition, later dismissed, he described Williams as "a very cunning, brilliant, manipulative type of person," adding she was a violent lesbian who could have easily lured the girls into a car on the promise of a drug party and later killed them.
      Richard Cornell, a lawyer for Gallego, emphasized the importance of Williams' testimony: "Let's face it, without Charlene's testimony, Gerald wasn't guilty of anything as pernicious as spitting on the sidewalk," he wrote in a petition filed on behalf of Gallego.
      Although Gallego has never been formally tried for the other six homicides, Williams testified that he committed the rape-murders of Kippi Vaught, 16, and Rhonda Scheffler, 17, in September 1978 in Sacramento; Sandra Colley, 13, and Brenda Judd, 14,, who disappeared from the Washoe County Fairgrounds in Reno in June 1979; Linda Aguilar, 21, in June 1980 in Gold Beach, Ore.; and Virginia Mochel, 34, in July 1980 in Yolo County, Calif.