All His Father's Sins: Inside the Gerald Gallego Sex-Slave Murders [Hardcover]

Walter Hecox (Author), Ray Biondi (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Prima Lifestyles (October 30, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0914629344
• ISBN-13: 978-0914629344
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #434,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent,accurate, stunning insights, January 23, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Oregon, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: All His Father's Sins: Inside the Gerald Gallego Sex-Slave Murders (Hardcover)

This book is an excellent telling of a notorious crime series occuring in the Sacramento area. I was a Sacramento County Deputy Sheriff during this time, working in the jail. The killers, Gerald Gallego and his girlfriend Charlene, were in my custody. Biondi paints a most accurate picture of the two, plus he adds all the inside details of their twisted minds and personalities, their crimes and the course of the investigation. I read the book for the "I was there" reason, but I highly recommend it for any detective story fan, as well as anyone curious about the horrors of this type occuring so often around us.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Bit Too Sympathetic Toward Charlene, November 12, 2009

By 

Kim Cantrell "Soap Box Bandit" (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All His Father's Sins: Inside the Gerald Gallego Sex-Slave Murders (Hardcover)

Gerald Gallego' was a sexual deviant with urges that led to the murder of nine women and one young man.

The brutal crimes of Gallego committed along with his sixth wife, Charlene, are horrendous and earned him the title of California's most gruesome serial killer.

But that was in 1988, the year All His Father's Sins was published; and, unfortunately there have been much worse serial killer's to roam the coastal state since that time.

Written by Sacramento County Sheriff's Department Lieutenant Ray Biondi, along with Walt Hecox, gives an insiders view into the working of this set of depraved serial killers.

While I found the book to very well written with a style that engrosses the reader from beginning to end, I can't help but to show some bias in this review as it seems Lieutenant Biondi was somewhat sympathetic to Charlene Williams Gallego - with which completely, 100% disagree.

Although I hope my interpretation is incorrect, I strongly suspect that Lieutenant Biondi believed Charlene was an abused woman who was drawn into a relationship that she was unsure how leave.

I, on the other hand, believe that she made a mockery of every woman who truly has suffered abuse. In Charlene's version of events, there are, in my opinion, just too many indicators that she was a willing participant.

Lastly, I was disappointed that there was not more details provided into the background of Gerald. At the completion of this book I was left to conduct research of my own it his father's own execution for murder and the intricate details of his crime-riddled childhood.

Despite such, All His Father's Sins is an interesting, retro-read about a crime solved in the early 1980s - a time long before DNA and ViCAP aided law enforcement in identifying a killer.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The legacy of the Gallego killings, August 8, 2007

By 

virginia mccullough "sunol journalist" (Sunol, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All His Father's Sins: Inside the Gerald Gallego Sex-Slave Murders (Hardcover)

A well done book detailing the horrific killings that began in the late summer of 1978 and extending through December 22, 1980. Ten killings committed in a little over two years. Well-thought-out brutal, bloody murders, each one calculated to extract the greatest amount of emotional and physical torture before allowing death.

The combination of the tiny, intelligent, beautiful, blond only-child beguiling and sociable and the thick, homely, uneducated man with the vacant eyes produced the perfect storm for terror.

The questions that remain are many. Among those: Did Gerald Gallego and the Zodiac know each other and share victims?