ORANGE : Man Sentenced for Killing Wife, Sister

A 30-year-old Orange man on Friday was ordered to serve time in a mental hospital and then spend 26 years to life in prison for killing his wife and sister in June, 1988.

George Gallagher, a former electronics assembler at Rockwell International Corp., was found guilty by Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald of first-degree murder for stabbing to death his sister, Mary Gallagher, at her home in Yorba Linda.

The judge also found Gallagher not guilty by reason of insanity in the stabbing death of his wife, Barbara, at the Twin Cypress Motel in Orange, where they resided.

Evidence presented during Gallagher’s preliminary hearing indicated that Gallagher stabbed his wife in the head in the presence of the couple’s two children, who were 4 and 5 at the time.

Gallagher, who had been suffering from mental problems, took the children to his sister’s home after the slaying. The children, according to the evidence presented by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Evans, told the sister that their mother was dead.

When his sister confronted him with the information, Gallagher left, then returned later and stabbed her in the heart. In finding Gallagher guilty of first-degree murder for his sister’s death, the judge ruled that he was lucid at the time of that slaying and had planned the stabbing. Evans had contended that Gallagher killed his sister to eliminate her as a possible witness against him in his wife’s murder.

Evidence also indicated that Gallagher had begun suffering mental problems during the year before the slayings.