True Crime On This Day September 11th

Last Updated on September 16, 2022 by Ben Oakley

September 11th

On September 11th, in true crime, there was a serial killing couple, murders, a house invasion, and two bodies on one day.

1978

Two teenagers were abducted by Gerald Armond Gallego and Charlene Adell Gallego who became known as The Love Slave Killers.

Between 1978 and 1980, the Gallego’s hunted young girls and turned them into sex slaves before brutally murdering them. They would go on to kill ten people before their arrest in 1980.

1979

In St. Joseph, Missouri, 19-year-old nurse Micki Jo West disappeared from the St. Joseph Missouri State Hospital where she worked. She had been walking to her usual bus stop to go home but vanished somewhere along the way.

Her disappearance remained a mystery until 1991 when former police officer Marvin Lee Irvin confessed to her murder. He claimed to have stabbed and shot her to death before burying her in a remote location.

Irvin was later convicted of two murders and led police to two bodies in a cornfield, but West’s body was never discovered. Her remains have never been found.

1980

In Dallas County, Texas, Fletcher Thomas Mann, along with accomplice, Martin Verbrugge, broke into an apartment and killed two people.

Mann, who was an admirer of Charles Manson, raped, stabbed, and strangled 22-year-old Barbara Hoppe. He also shot dead her partner, 22-year-old Christopher Lee Bates.

They were both caught shortly after. Verbrugge was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life. Mann was convicted of double murder and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in Texas on June 1^st 1995.

1981

In Orange County, California, on September 11th, Ginger Fleischli was stabbed five times in the head by her former lover, David Leitch, and his new roommate, Thomas Thompson.

The next day, her body was found in a shallow grave and both Leitch and Thompson were arrested. Fleischli had gone home with Thompson after a night out, where he raped her before he and Leitch killed her.

Leitch was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Thompson was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection on July 14^th 1998.

1982

In El Mirage, Maricopa County, Arizona, the skeletal remains of an unidentified white or Hispanic male in his twenties were discovered. They had been unearthed by construction workers digging a site in an empty lot. The remains had no identifying features.

Around the same time just 250 miles away, in Baker, San Bernardino County, California, the skeletal remains of an unidentified white adult female were discovered. She had been found in open desert and had died just weeks earlier.

No connection between the bodies has ever been made. Their identities remain a mystery and the cases remains unsolved.

1983

In Cambridgeshire, England, the fully clothed body of 36-year-old solicitor Janice Carole Weston was found in a ditch. She had been discovered by a cyclist, close to the northbound carriageway of the A1 road.

Weston was last seen leaving her work a day earlier from the offices of law firm Charles Russell and Co. She had been beaten to death with repeated blows to the head. Her silver Alfa Romeo car was later found abandoned near Regent’s Park, London.

A large investigation at the time turned up no suspects and her case went cold. Despite appeals for new information as recently as 2018, Weston’s murder remains unsolved.