Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  After the murder, Carol put her intellect behind Doug’s killing. She suggested that he carry with him a “kill bag”—a paper sack containing a knife, paper towels, rubber kitchen gloves, and liquid cleanser. He should clean up the car immediately after each murder. She also suggested that he make each killing progressively more gruesome, so that it appeared to the police as if a psychopath was committing the crimes as opposed to somebody “sane” like Clark. Riding in the car with Doug as he trolled for victims, she tagged them as either “bitches, botches, or butches.”

  To confuse the police, Carol called a rape crisis line and said that her black boyfriend had killed the girls. She also tried to get a black nurse at the hospital where she worked to give her one of her pubic hairs. Doug was going to plant it at the scene of the next murder. The nurse was offended and refused.

  Doug Clark was killing at a rapidly accelerating rate. On June 22, he went out again—alone this time. He spotted three prostitutes—two white girls and one black girl in the Sunset area. By then the girls were alert to the killings and only the black girl would agree to enter Clark’s car alone. Clark turned her down. Like the typical serial killer, he was only interested in killing within his own race. Clark drove around some more, but could find no victims. He was on his way home, when he spotted one of the white prostitutes walking alone now, a young woman with frosted blonde hair. This time he convinced her to enter his car. As she performed fellatio on him, he shot her through the back of her head. He drove behind a closed restaurant—it was Sunday night. After dragging her body out of his car, he cut and sawed the girl’s head off in the parking lot. He put the head into a plastic bag that Carol had so thoughtfully outfitted him with and tossed it into the back of the car—a station wagon. He drove off, leaving the headless corpse behind the restaurant.

  Doug then began to worry that the other two prostitutes might identify him. He returned to the Sunset area and began to look for them. He found the black girl and lured her into the car. He quickly shot her dead, stripped her of her jewelry and money, and rolled her body out into the street. Her murder is an example up how a serial killer’s every homicide has its own method and madness to it. Clark murdered the black woman only because he felt he needed to eliminate her as a witness. Otherwise, however, she was completely outside his killing profile. Clark then went looking for the third girl, but could not find her.

  He went home with the blonde girl’s head in the plastic sack, but despite Carol urging him to show it to her, he refused, saying it was “too gross.” Carol argued that she was a nurse and was used to working with corpses, it would not freak her out, but Doug refused just the same.

  The next morning, Carol found the head sitting on the counter by the kitchen sink, its frosted blonde hair all damp and soggy and the mouth gaping open. Doug told her that he had taken the head into the shower with him and had copulated with it. He stuck the head in the freezer.

  After two days, Doug decided they needed to get rid of the head. Carol went out and bought an elaborate but common wooden chest made in Mexico. At Doug’s request, she combed and fashioned the hair with a blow dryer and applied makeup. Then Doug decided that Carol might have left her fingerprints on the head, so he ordered her to scrub it clean in the kitchen sink. Placing the head in the chest, they drove around until Carol tossed it out of the car into an alley. It was found later that night by somebody parking their car.

  Doug was angry that she had not picked a better place to throw the chest. “How am I going to turn you into a murderer if you are clumsy and not observant,” he snarled at her.

  Doug Clark continued to humiliate and deride Carol. She must have believed that her participation in the murders would bring her closer to Doug. As carefully as she packed his lunch for work, she would also pack his “kill bag” when he went out at night to “take care of business.” But her slavish attention to Clark’s crimes only reinforced the sense of control he felt he had over her, and led him to be more distant and abusive.

  The police had linked all the crimes by the .25-caliber bullet used to kill the victims. They accumulated lists of people who had recently purchased .25-caliber handguns, and of course, upon coming to Carol’s gun registration, they gave it a low investigative priority—the suspect was not going to be a woman, the police surmised.

  Clark was by then talking about killing a hundred women. Police suspect he killed, in addition to the five women described above, anywhere from another two to five more women that summer of 1980. He was eventually charged with six homicides, but several more bodies of young women with .25-caliber head wounds had been found. The bullets, however, had been fragmented and could not be conclusively proven to have come from the weapons he used. Carol, in the meantime, was feeling sexually rejected. She noticed that after every murder, Clark was unapproachable for sex. It was not that he seemed satisfied—he was edgy and in a state of euphoria, but he was withdrawn. He was even more critical and derisive of her. He never beat her, but in Carol’s twisted psychology, a beating would have probably indicated to her he still cared. Carol was getting desperate.

  “The Honest Truth Is, It’s Fun to Kill People…”

  On August 4, to prove her worth as Doug’s mate, Carol decided to commit a murder all on her own. She looked up Jack Murray, the man who had been her lover before Clark and who had cleared out a major portion of her bank account. She convinced him that she wanted to have sex with him in his van. Once inside the van, she shot him in the head. Like a good nurse, Carol checked his pulse and found it to be still strong. She shot him again in the opposite side of his head. She then stabbed him six times in the back. She says she then slashed his anus and carved a piece of his buttocks away to make it look like a “psycho murder.” As she slashed away at him, she remembers saying, “If you want a piece of ass, here’s a piece of ass.”

  After carefully cleaning away her fingerprints, Carol realized that the two bullets in Jack’s head would link his murder to the others—so she cut his head off and took it home in a plastic bag. Doug then took Carol out driving in the car. He asked her what she wanted to do with the head. Carol replied, “It’s got three holes. We could go to a bowling alley and bowl down the lane.”

  Doug pulled up in front of an industrial garbage bin and told her to throw Jack’s head in the trash. It was never found. Instead of being proud of her, Doug was—to Carol’s disappointment—even more insulting. He told her she was an idiot for taking the head with the slugs in it but leaving behind the spent .25-caliber casing on the floor of the van.

  On Saturday night, after neighbors reported a foul smell coming from a van parked nearby, the police discovered Jack’s body. Since witnesses had seen Jack talking to Carol in the North Hollywood bar he frequented, and everybody there knew Carol was one of his ex-lovers, the police questioned her Sunday afternoon. Carol admitted that she had seen Jack earlier the day he disappeared, but denied knowing anything about his murder. When asked whether she owned a .25-caliber handgun, she said that she had owned two, and had sold both in May. No, she did not remember the name of the man she had sold them to.

  Doug Clark distanced himself even further from Carol, saying to her, “Whatever you do, don’t get me hung for Jack. I didn’t do Jack and I don’t want to take the rap.” After the police left, Carol Bundy was almost hysterical. She called her sons at her ex-mother-in-law’s home in the north. She talked with them for about twenty minutes. She also called Dick Geis, and asked if she could go up to Oregon to stay with him. He told her he did not want to see her. Doug, in the meantime, had gone out with another woman without telling Carol where they went. She felt alone and abandoned that Sunday night.

  It is often some minor thing that finally makes these cases break open. In the case of Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, it was Carol waking on Monday morning and discovering she had run out of Librium, a tranquillizer she took. After driving Doug to work that morning, with him complaining about her the entire drive and calling her “Motor Mouth” for
telling the police too much, Carol arrived at the Valley Center Hospital where she worked as a nurse.

  At Valley Center she was already considered by her fellow workers to be weird and annoying, but satisfactorily competent at her job. That day her fellow nurses noticed that Carol Bundy was in a state of agitation. Late in the morning, Carol cornered another nurse and babbled out to her the entire story of the murders in all their gory detail. As Carol recounted the minute nuances of cutting off Jack’s head but forgetting to pick up the shell casings, the stunned nurse noticed that Carol’s hand kept groping around inside the pocket of her uniform. The nurse became frightened and thought that Carol might have a handgun in her pocket. Finally, Carol finished her story and said she was going home to gather up the evidence of the murders and turn herself in to the police.

  The nurse ran off to call security, and as police descended on the hospital, Carol Bundy calmly went down to the basement, changed her uniform, and oblivious to the panic upstairs, left the hospital unnoticed. Once home, she gathered together the clothes of the victims, some of the bullets, photographs, and other evidence (the handguns were hidden at Jergens where Doug worked) and tried to call the police.

  Remarkably, as Bundy dialed number after number, she either got busy signals or answering machines or was told to call other numbers. She finally located a homicide officer from a district far away from where the crimes occurred, who was only vaguely familiar with the murders. He had not even read about them in the newspaper. Nonetheless, he held her on the line as she related to him everything she knew. When he asked her why she was turning in her lover, she replied, “Oh, for quite a hell of a long time he’s been treating me like shit. It’s been worse and worse and worse. And now I’ve done one on my own. Done one completely on my own and he’s falling apart over it and I’m just plain sick of it.”

  The detective asked her if she felt bad about the murder she had committed. Carol asserted, “The honest truth is, it’s fun to kill people and if I was allowed to run loose I’d probably do it again. I have to say—I know it’s going to sound sick, it’s going to sound psycho, and I really don’t think I’m that psycho—but it’s kind of fun. Like riding a roller coaster.”

  Later Carol wrote to Richard Geis from prison:

  Dick, here is one simple truth. It is very easy to kill. We all have the potential. Only social conditioning from childhood prevents each of us from being murderers…I have been told that murder is the easiest of crimes to get away with. I believe it. If I hadn’t confessed…ah, well. Too late. Too late.

  As soon as Carol Bundy finished talking on the phone, the police arrived. They had been alerted by her confession at the hospital. As Bundy was already a suspect in the Jack Murray killing, she was quickly picked up. Later that day, Doug Clark was arrested coming out of the Jergens factory. The two handguns were found hidden in the factory.

  Doug Clark, after acting as his own defense counsel à la Ted Bundy, was sentenced to death in 1983. He still sits on death row insisting that Carol and Murray committed all the murders and that he was framed.

  Carol pleaded guilty and received two consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life for the murders of the unknown prostitute and Jack Murray. She would have been first eligible for parole in 2012, when she turned 69 years old, but she died in prison at age 61 on December 9, 2003.

  Charlene and Gerald Gallego—the Sex Slave Killers

  No sooner had the Los Angeles police arrested Doug Clark and Carol Bundy in August 1980, when the police in Sacramento, California, got a strange call early in the morning of November 2, 1980. College students were out at a formal dinner that night, following a Founder’s Day dance. As 22-year-old Craig Miller and his date, 21-year-old Mary Beth Sowers, left the restaurant, they were followed by a friend, Andy Beal, who was intending to play a practical joke on them. In the parking lot, before he could pull the joke, he watched as the couple was approached by a young blonde woman. For some strange reason, they accompanied the woman to her car and got into the backseat. Andy Beal then ran to the car and laughing jumped into the driver’s seat. He was surprised to see that sitting in the dark on the passenger side was a sullen man. Looking back at the faces of his friends, he saw that something was wrong. Suddenly the blonde woman leaned in through the driver’s side, slapped his face, and shrieked at him to get out. Shaken, Andy climbed out of the car and watched the woman get in and screech away with his two friends. He had, however, the presence of mind to note down the license plate number of the car.

  When the police ran a check of the license number, they found it registered to Sacramento resident Charlene Gallego, a 24-year-old college graduate, married, from a wealthy and respectable Sacramento family—seven months pregnant. When interviewed, she told the police that she was alone that night and nobody had touched her car—it was parked in the driveway. Not knowing whether any kind of foul play had actually occurred in the parking lot and seeing the pregnant Charlene as not particularly suspicious, the police left. The kid must have been mistaken when he wrote the license plate number, or perhaps he had just had one too many to drink and nothing had happened, the police thought. But within hours, the body of Craig Miller was discovered in a field, shot in the back of the head three times with a .25-caliber pistol.

  Police then ran a check on Charlene’s husband, Gerald Gallego, and discovered an individual with a lengthy record of sex offenses beginning at the tender age of 13, when he had raped a 7-year-old girl. Gallego, in fact, was wanted for sodomizing his 14-year-old daughter and raping her friend. Moreover, he had a criminal pedigree going back to his father—a man who had killed two law-enforcement officers and was the first person executed in Mississippi State’s gas chamber when Gerald was 9 years old.

  The police rushed back to the home of Gerald and Charlene Gallego, but found both them and the car gone. The two had been kidnapping and killing young women, often two victims at a time, since 1978.

  The bisexual Charlene tested in prison at an IQ of 160. She was a talented violin player and college graduate from a wealthy California family. One evening, while buying drugs at a club, she met Gerald Gallego. Charlene was instantly attracted to Gallego’s “outlaw” persona and married him.

  Once again, she was probably a high-dominance woman who needed a high-dominance man—Gerald was perfect. He fantasized along with Charlene about keeping virginal young sex slaves at a remote country house. On his daughter’s (from another marriage) fourteenth birthday, he sodomized her and raped her friend as Charlene watched.

  Things went wrong when one night the both of them seduced a 16-year-old go-go dancer. The three-way sex was fine, but the next day, after coming back from work, Gallego found Charlene and the dancer having sex together. He became enraged, threw the girl out, and stopped having sex with Charlene. Charlene then suggested that they kidnap, rape, and murder young girls.

  Killing between September 1978 and November 1980, they often kidnapped girls from Sacramento shopping malls. They also killed in Nevada and Oregon, often beating in the heads of their victims with a tire iron or shooting them with a .25-caliber pistol. They buried alive one victim, a pregnant woman. In three instances, they kidnapped two women at a time. Gerald shared the victims with Charlene, who liked to bite one girl as another performed oral sex on her. She bit the nipple off one of the victims.

  At one point, Charlene got into a gun fight with Gerald when he started raping their two young teenage captives in the back “without waiting for her” while she was driving the van. The couple shot at each other until Charlene grazed Gerald’s arm.

  The were eventually apprehended, and Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death, while Charlene Gallego, in a familiar pattern, received a sixteen-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Gerald.

  While in prison, she continued her education, studying a range of subjects from psychology to business to Icelandic literature. “She’s a pretty intellectual woman,” said Nevada District Judge Richard Wagner, who was the lea
d prosecutor in Gallego’s Nevada trial. “She has a phenomenal mind, which made her a tremendous witness…She had almost a photographic memory about the victims, down to their shoes and clothes.”

  On July 17, 1997, Charlene was set free and reverted to her family name of Williams. In an interview, she claimed that she was as much a victim of Gallego as the other girls: “There were victims who died and there were victims who lived. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”

  Charlene said of Gerald Gallego, “He portrayed to my parents that he was a super family guy. But soon it was like being in the middle of a mud puddle. You can’t see your way out because he eliminated things in my life piece by piece, person by person, until all I had around me were members of his family, and they’re all like him, every one of them…. Prison was freedom compared to being with him.”

  Gallego recently died of cancer in the midst of his attempts to get a new trial. On November 20, 1999, a Nevada farmer uncovered a shallow grave containing the bodies of 14-year-old Brenda Judd and 13-year-old Sandra Colley, missing since 1979, two of the ten suspected victims of Charlene and Gerald.

  In the psychopathology of male-female serial killer couples, certain distinct patterns are clear. One is that in most of the cases described here, the male partner has a fantasy of holding virginal sex slaves at a remote location—the “Collector” fantasy. The female partner is harder to typify. There seems to be a distinct hatred or anger toward fellow women, mixed with homosexual or bisexual tendencies. The murders were all sexualized by the women, either through direct sexual contact with their victims or through sex with their killer mates.