Chapter 2
Wheels in Motion
In the darkness of the now deserted cul-de-sac, Juanita Rodriguez heard the sounds of the freeway in the distance. She stumbled toward the noise, still afraid that the pair might return. Shaken and disheveled, she made her way to the margin of Interstate 80 and waved frantically for the vehicles to stop and help her. Even though it was after midnight, a car full of young people finally pulled over on this forested, desolate part of the road. In halting English she made them understand that she needed to get to a phone. They drove her to a phone booth close to the county seat of Auburn, and Rodriguez contacted the Placer County Sheriff’s Department.
Two deputy sheriff officers, Don Murchison and Jeff Adams, responded to her phone call and picked up the distraught young woman at the phone booth. Even though she was clearly shaken and her English was not the best, she made them understand that she was from Reno and that she had been kidnapped, raped and abandoned in the forest. Wanting to get as many details correct as possible and look for evidence, the Placer County officers immediately took Rodriguez back to the cul-de-sac where she had been dropped off. They asked her to recount as best she could everything that had happened and searched for clues at the isolated spot. But there was scant evidence left at the scene of what had transpired there—only a comb that may or may not have been dropped by the perpetrators and nothing else of value.
Juanita Rodriguez was transported to the hospital at Auburn where Nurse Vickie Sewell examined her and used a sexual assault kit, standard procedure in these kinds of situations, to obtain evidence. Nurse Sewell knew that every step she now took would be important later if the suspects were ever caught and the case did come to trial. With great care and precise methodology, she obtained an array of swabs and other material for her sexual assault kit. From Juanita Rodriguez she gathered a saliva reference sample, fingernail scrapings and head hair samples. She also obtained control swabs from Rodriguez’s thighs, forehead, neck, cheek and mouth. Then she did a pubic hair brushing.
The whole process of gathering sexual assault evidence was very time consuming and exacting, but Nurse Vickie Sewell was lucky in one regard—Juanita Rodriguez had been brought to the hospital soon after her rape. The longer the span of time between a rape and the medical exam, the more time the seminal fluid of the attacker had a chance to break down under enzyme activity and pH factors.
After taking the vaginal swab, Nurse Sewell air-dried it under a fan to keep microorganisms from growing and degrading the evidence. She then collected Rodriguez’s clothes, especially panties, which were a good potential source of seminal fluid and a possible retainer of the attacker’s pubic hairs. The head and pubic hairs from Juanita Rodriguez were extremely important just in case the assailant was soon caught and her hairs might be discovered on him or his clothing.
Vickie Sewell understood that any minute bit of evidence she garnered might be extremely useful later on at a criminal justice DNA lab. Even more than fingerprints, DNA testing in this case might be the difference between a conviction and an acquittal if things ever got that far.
Juanita Rodriguez’s night of dredging up the horror of her ordeal was far from over. She was next met by Placer County Sheriff’s detective Desiree Carrington, who had her recount the details of the attack once again while the details were still fresh in her mind. Even though it was the early hours of the morning, Juanita struggled through the litany of her terror-filled ride. She made it quite clear that she had escaped with her life by the narrowest of margins. Detective Carrington was considerate of Rodriguez’s situation, knowing how traumatic a rape experience can be, but she was also very thorough. A restrained sense of modesty would be no help in catching this violent man and woman pair.
Detective Desiree Carrington was one of a growing number of females working in a field dominated by male detectives. She knew at the outset it would not be easy, especially in a rural area where the Western macho myth died hard. But she began earning her badge and the respect of fellow officers when she was the spark plug behind the cracking of a major theft ring, in July 1996.
It started out innocently enough. An eighty-seven-year-old Placer County woman complained of having some checks from her checking account turn up missing. Not much was thought of it until the woman’s checking and savings accounts began to be drained of money. Detective Carrington followed a long and twisting path to a thirty-six-year-old man with the improbably larcenous name of Jeffrey Gordon DuFault. He was being held in a Yuba City jail, about fifty miles away in a different county, for passing bad checks. But by the time she got there to question DuFault, he had already been released on his own recognizance and simply disappeared.
Not one to give up so easily, Carrington kept following a new and ever-widening trail of bogus checks and stolen identifications that spanned four counties. There was nothing to link them directly to DuFault, but by now she was pretty sure she knew her man and his mode of operation. As the summer of 1996 progressed, it became apparent that over eighty individuals and thirty businesses were being defrauded mainly by thefts of checks and credit cards from mailboxes and PO boxes. The very sophistication of the larceny became evident when it was learned that DuFault was obtaining blank interim driver’s license cards and documents from the Department of Motor Vehicles, then creating fraudulent identification cards and documents using the personal information of real people whose checks had been stolen. By this means he could open accounts and obtain credit cards. He had a scam going that was starting to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But DuFault overstepped his bounds when he used a counterfeit Sacramento Municipal Utility District identification card. Tracing him to a house in Roseville, near Sacramento, Detective Carrington and a team of officers raided Jeffrey DuFault’s home on October 15, 1996, and arrested him and four others in the fraud and stolen property ring. The house was literally stacked to the ceiling with stolen goods: furniture, television sets, VCRs, kitchen appliances, stereo equipment, computers, bicycles, car parts and art objects. It took three large moving vans to haul all the stuff away for evidence.
Detective Desiree Carrington realized she was going to need all the same patience and persistence that she had used on the DuFault case to unravel who the perpetrators were in the abduction and rape of Juanita Rodriguez. But she also realized that time might be a luxury in this case. If the man and woman in the minivan had tried it once, they were apt to try it again. The chilling thought entered her mind and every one else’s in the Placer County Sheriff’s Department: “Uh-oh, here we go again. We have another Gallego-type case on our hands.”
Back in 1978, Sacramento resident Gerald Armand Gallego and his wife, Charlene, used a van for the abduction, rape and ultimately murder of teenage girls. Their first depredation began on September 11, 1978, when Charlene cruised Country Club Plaza mall in Sacramento; she was looking for likely “love slaves” for her husband, Gerald. She hit upon sixteen-year-old Kippi Vaught and seventeen-year-old Rhonda Scheffler. With promises of marijuana she coaxed the girls back to the van parked strategically in a nearby deserted parking lot. As soon as the sliding side door slid open, the girls found themselves looking down the barrel of Gerald Gallego’s .25-caliber automatic pistol that he held firmly in his hand. He sternly told them to keep quiet and they wouldn’t get hurt. Without a struggle they complied. Within minutes the van was motoring out of town, Charlene at the wheel, and Gerald ordering the girls to remain silent. Charlene drove through Auburn on I-80 to a secluded area in the mountains near Clipper Gap—the very area where Juanita Rodriguez had been let go. Gallego pulled the girls out of the van at gunpoint and marched them into the dense forest. For hours he raped them. Later that night he dispatched Kippi and Rhonda with gunshots to the back of the head.
No one knew more about the man and woman kidnap and murder team of Gerald and Charlene Gallego than Desiree Carrington’s partner, Placer County detective Bill Summers. He had found the body of their last victim, Sacramento college student Mary Beth Sowers, dumped in rural Placer County, in 1980.
Mary Beth and her date, Craig Miller, had been attending the Founder’s Day Dance at their college when they were suddenly confronted by a gun-wielding Gerald Gallego and his wife, Charlene. Forced into Gallego’s vehicle, the couple was driven into the rural hills of El Dorado County, onto Bass Lake Road. Once they were beyond all the houses and farms, Gerald made Craig Miller exit the car, minus his shoes, and they walked only a short distance up the road. Then in the glare of the headlights, Gerald Gallego summarily shot Craig Miller three times right in front of his girlfriend, until he was dead.
Hysterical Mary Beth Sowers couldn’t have had too many illusions of what was going to become of her at this point. She was driven back to the Gallegos’ apartment, where Charlene immediately flopped down on the couch, while Gerald dragged the unfortunate young woman into the bedroom. Through the thin bedroom door Charlene could hear the unmistakable sounds of forced sex for the next few hours.
It wasn’t until the early-morning hours of the next day when Mary Beth Sowers was forced back into their vehicle and driven up into Placer County, near Roseville, where Detective Desiree Carrington would one day bust the DuFault fraud ring. She was marched down into a small gully out of sight of the road, and just as the sun was coming up, Charlene Gallego heard the sounds, pop pop pop, emanate from the gully. Gerald Gallego had just dispatched his last victim.
A week later two teenage boys, who were out target shooting, discovered the body of Mary Beth Sowers. Placer County Sheriff’s detective Bill Summers was summoned to the scene and he never forgot the sight. The dew-soaked body of the college coed was still wrapped in the blue silk evening gown she had been wearing to the dance. She had been shot in the head three times.
Detective Summers, along with other local agents, soon began putting the pieces together about all the rapes and murders that the Gallego couple had committed. On the run, Gerald and Charlene Gallego were caught in Utah, after leaving a trail of nine dead victims scattered around the Sacramento area. Charlene would get life imprisonment. Gerald would end up on death row.
About the Juanita Rodriguez kidnapping and rape, Detective Summers said to Contra Costa Times reporter David Holbrook, “This new crime made us all remember the day we found Mary Beth. It was the same description, a male-female team using a van to lure in their victims.”
Juanita Rodriguez was returned to Reno on October 1, 1997, after an intensive interview with Detectives Desiree Carrington and Bill Summers, but her relationship with law enforcement authorities was far from over. The FBI now became involved in her kidnapping, or as they put it, in federal legalese, “The Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping in Interstate Transportation.” The case came into the hands of Special Agent Lynn J. Ferrin, a Reno agent who had seen more than his share of these types of crimes. In his early fifties, with a trim dark mustache and sandy-colored hair, he definitely looked younger than his years. Robust, but not portly, he stayed in shape by a regimen of exercise. Only the glasses he wore while reading papers attested to his more studious side.
He got right on the Rodriguez case by conducting a long interview with her and sending out an FBI team to canvass the area around Washington and Sixth Streets in Reno where the abduction had occurred. Among the agents were Bruce Wick and Mike West. They talked to people throughout the neighborhood who might have noticed anything peculiar on the day and night of September twenty-ninth. A few interesting tips came from the Midtown Motel and the St. Vincent de Paul kitchen nearby, and they duly noted them down.
Special Agent Lynn Ferrin was very well trained in how to handle these types of investigations. He had spent his entire adult life in law enforcement, starting as a deputy in the Davis County Sheriff’s Office in Utah and then the North Salt Lake City Police Department. Transferring to the FBI, he’d spent the last twenty-four years moving around the West with the Agency. By 1997 he’d settled down in the Reno Residential office under the command of Agent Jerry Hill, on Kietzke Lane on the south side of town. With its spectacular views of the eastern rampart of the Sierra Nevadas, the new office complex surely beat some of the offices he had been stationed at in the past.
Agent Ferrin realized that solving the Rodriguez case wasn’t going to be easy. He’d learned from Juanita that the man and woman had a lot of personal items in the van, including sleeping bags, as if they had been staying in it. If the pair had no fixed address, they could be anywhere by now. But his specialized training in the investigation of violent crimes, especially Title 18 criminal offenses, which covered kidnapping and sexual assault, had taught him that apprehension often turned on small factors that could be overlooked if not thoroughly investigated. Agent Ferrin was determined to leave no stone unturned in this case. He, too, had heard of the Gerald and Charlene Gallego depredations, and he wanted no repeat in his jurisdiction.
Across town other wheels of justice were in motion as well. From Juanita Rodriguez’s verbal description, Officer Wong of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department was able to put together a composite drawing of the male assailant using computer imaging. This new high-tech technique was light years ahead of the old artist renderings. Able to program in over a thousand different shades of coloring and texture, it was a terrific boon to the justice system. It could detail eye shapes and colors, bone structuring and facial peculiarities, all with a high degree of sophistication.
Using Rodriguez’s description, Officer Wong produced the mock-up of a heavyset man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper brown hair that was receding in front. He possessed a round face with a large mustache and puffy eyelids. Juanita hadn’t seen the woman driver well enough to give a good description of her, other than she had dark hair and wore glasses some of the time.
Within the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office crime lab complex, another individual began working on the Juanita Rodriguez abduction and rape as well. Criminalist Renee Romero obtained the rape kit that Nurse Vickie Sewell had used on Juanita. With her blond shoulder-length hair and striking features, Romero could easily have passed for a model in a glamour magazine rather than a criminalist in the Sheriff’s Department. But along with her good looks she also possessed a keen intellect attuned to small important details. She had studied forensic sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, and published a thesis on DNA typing.
As Renee Romero took the swabs that Nurse Sewell had procured, she used only a minute sample from each to analyze the semen contained therein by a method known as PCR testing. PCR testing was faster than the more exact RFLP method and it could use smaller initial samples. It could also be amplified and copied better than RFLP, much like xeroxing a copy of an original document. Not only could Romero use what she found, she could send the samples to other labs for verification as well as to double-check her findings.
When Renee Romero ran her DNA tests, she came up with one very interesting observation: the semen sample contained no sperm. It was a significant fact. It meant that the attacker had produced no sperm either because of natural causes or he had had a vasectomy.
The Placer County Sheriff’s Department, Washoe County Sheriff’s Department and FBI were beginning to put together a sketchy outline of a man and woman who had used a van for abduction and rape. But before they had progressed very far, the couple struck again.