Chapter 21
The Devil’s Apprentice
By chance, Gerald Armand Gallego happened to have been another Sacramentan. In the summer of 1979, right about the time Michael Ihde was raping his first victim, and Daveggio was getting married to Annette, Gallego became determined to live out his deadly sexual fantasies. In the pursuit of these sick perversions, he had an unlikely accomplice, his girlfriend, soon to become his wife, Charlene Williams.
Charlene was a petite blonde who was twenty years old at the time and looked about fifteen. She was cute, bright and madly in love with Gallego. So in love, in fact, that she was willing to do anything for him, even if it meant luring young girls to be his “love slaves.”
James Daveggio knew all about the Gallegos and the way they picked up girls for Gerald’s sexual torment and rape. Their depredations in Reno, Nevada, particularly caught his eye. They occurred on June 24, 1979. Gerald and Charlene Gallego had gone to the Washoe County Fairgrounds in that city and cruised the carnival area, checking out the young girls in their tight jeans and slinky tops. Then Charlene went into her “work mode.” She moved among the crowd while Gerald went back to his van and waited. Charlene had a knack of mixing with teenage girls, hardly looking more than a teenager herself. She soon convinced fourteen-year-old Brenda Judd and thirteen-year-old Sandra Colley that they could help her pass out flyers around the fairgrounds for money. She had the flyers right back at her van, she said.
Totally unaware of what awaited them, the girls all too willingly followed her, only to experience the same fate as Kippi Vaught and Rhonda Scheffler before them. This time, faced with a loaded .44 in Gerald Gallego’s hand, they didn’t even emit a sound as they were forced into the van. Once it was rolling eastbound on I-80 past the Mustang Ranch, the lure of that place must have aroused Gallego’s “urges.” He had the young girls strip off all their clothing, and as Charlene drove toward Lovelock, he didn’t even bother waiting for an isolated location. He raped them repeatedly as they drove down the interstate.
After he was through with them that evening, Gallego had Charlene drive to an isolated spot in the desert. With the cold moon shining down, he dispatched each girl with a shovel blow to the head. Then with that same shovel he dug their graves and buried them in the wasteland. James Daveggio wasn’t sickened by Gerald Gallego’s exploits. In fact, they excited him. The thought of snatching young girls off the street was intoxicating. If Gerald Gallego could convince Charlene to help him in these matters, why couldn’t he convince Michelle Michaud to do the same?
By the end of summer 1997, Michaud could no longer make big money at hooking because of her drug abuse and deteriorating looks. She was rail-thin from meth use and her cheeks had a gaunt starved look about them. As her main sugar daddy was no longer paying her rent, she applied for (ADC) Aide for Dependent Children and began to receive $538 a month from welfare. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Desperate for money, she and Daveggio pulled her expensive furniture out onto the front lawn and sold it for dimes on the dollar. Still it wasn’t enough.
Marie Ward remembered that yard sale. “It was pathetic to see all her nice furniture pulled out on the lawn and sold for a fraction of what it was worth. When somebody came up and paid her, she immediately gave the money to that guy James. I don’t know what kind of hold he had on her. It must have been the drugs. She had totally changed from the woman I used to know. He absolutely ruined her life.”
Nothing they did seemed to work. They were evicted on August 4 when Michaud could no longer make the rent payments. In disgust, Daveggio moved back in with Lizzy Bingenheimer, along with his two daughters; Michaud took to sleeping in her van or over at her sister Misty’s house, along with her children. The move was a mere inconvenience for Daveggio, but it was devastating to Michelle. Her whole world had been wrapped up in that house so close to her parents and sister.
It brought back echoes of Amy Goldman’s work about serial killers The Time Before the Crime. Therein she wrote: “A pre-crime stressor is an event that happens right before the serial killer begins killing. Often this is a loss of a job, a financial issue, or about to lose his place to live. The offender may not even realize he is actually reacting to events.... The offender may not ever realize the full extent of his motivations or fail to see the issues behind the stress.... whether his disposition is an already aggressive one or his reaction to what you and I might consider ‘a run of bad luck,’ is violent. This person cannot deal with it. He, at this point, becomes a killer.”
In desperation for more money, Daveggio, never one to adhere to loyalty, turned on his motorcycle brothers. On a “poker run” the gang had collected $1,500 and put the proceeds into their safe. Daveggio knew the combination. Sneaking into the office, he took all the money for himself.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how Frog, who had been nearly broke only days before, was now spending cash like it was going out of style. Vowing a good “ass-kicking” on their former motorcycle brother, the Horsemen took off after him. It fell to Daveggio’s loyal patrons Ted and Janet Williams to save his skin. They hid him from the bikers as they searched for their former “brother” in vain. Realizing that he might have quit the area for good, the Horsemen simply took his beloved purple Harley and called things even. Only then did Daveggio come out of hiding—minus one motorcycle, but with his head still intact.
Daveggio thanked his benefactors, the Williamses, in typical fashion. By stealing from them. Totally engrossed in his fantasies to become another Gerald Gallego, he stole some industrial-strength rope from Ted Williams’s garage. It was so strong, in fact, that it could withstand immense pressure beyond the flexibility of normal rope—especially if used on some trussed-up victim.
According to Janet Williams, he also stole Ted’s “come along,” a mechanical device with a handle that could pull rope tauter than any man could by arm strength. These would come in handy someday if he decided to construct a rack for torturing victims, just like a medieval torture rack.
Daveggio’s stay with Bingenheimer only lasted a couple of weeks. He missed Michelle Michaud and he especially missed the threesomes she would arrange. According to Michaud, “In early September, he and Liz split up, and I got a page to come over there. His daughters and himself put all their things in the van.”
At this point Daveggio wanted to visit his mom. She was now living in Manteca, a town about forty miles east of Pleasanton. According to one relative, there was a family get-together that day and James Daveggio and Michelle Michaud arrived all cranked up and extremely agitated. As the other people sat around and talked, Daveggio and Michaud couldn’t sit still for anything. It was obvious to even the most casual observer that they were high on something. Daveggio in particular rambled on and on about some dark and mysterious thing he had done. The relative thought it had to do with either his rape conviction back in the 1980s or something with a motorcycle gang. He had no way of knowing at the time that it might be an event that he was planning. As Daveggio rambled and strode around the house, he showed his pistols off, even in front of the children. There was just no calming him down and it was a relief when he went outside and did something to the interior of the van.
Daveggio and Michaud soon dumped the daughters off at ex-wife Annette’s house and discussed where they might go next. Now living in the van or with friends, they found their possibilities were endless. But first there was one more ignominy to visit on the Williamses, their kind friends and benefactors. According to Janet, while she and husband Ted were out of town, it was to their house that Michelle Michaud drove thirteen-year-old victim Nancy Baker for the drug use and molestation. It was in the Williamses bathroom that Baker later testified Michaud made her disrobe at gunpoint and attempted to make the girl fondle her breasts. When the girl demurred, she dragged the naked girl in front of Daveggio, and they soon cornered her in the bedroom for Daveggio to rape while Michaud pleasured herself. It was also here that Michaud produced the pistol after they were done with the girl and told her, “If you tell, I’ll personally kill you!”
Michelle Michaud at one time had dreamed of taking care of other people’s children as a nanny, and had even enrolled at the California Nanny College in Sacramento. But after her arrest for prostitution, those plans had fallen through. Now instead of caring for people’s children, she had dreams of molesting them. She was going to make others pay for having lost the last anchor of her stability in life—her home. Unlike Charlene Gallego, who had only wanted to please her man by supplying young girls for his depraved pleasure, and balked at joining in, Michelle Michaud was determined to be part of the action.
Despite all her financial troubles, there was one thing that Michaud never even considered selling—her minivan. By some similar dementia, Michaud’s plans to strike back at the world that had treated her so roughly dovetailed with Daveggio’s desire to live out his wild sexual fantasies. The outcome was to turn the harmless Dodge minivan into a mobile torture/murder chamber.
All the anger, all the fantasies, all the hatred, were coming out now. With so many possibilities and destinations to choose from, they faced the van northeast and headed toward Reno, Nevada, home to two of Gerald Gallego’s victims. Daveggio was eager and determined to follow in the footsteps of his “patron saint” of murderous depravity. Reno seemed like a good place to start.