The Sweetheart Murders

A Birthday Gift May Yield Clues About A Brutal Double Murder

(CBS)  There were signs that Sabrina had been sexually assaulted. “The only obvious motive that we could even think of was probably a sexual assault on Sabrina Gonsalves. And then again, also, there are people who simply kill cause they like to kill,” Biondi says.

Biondi tagged the victims’ clothing to be tested for bodily fluids, along with another item: a blanket found in the van, that was a birthday present for Andrea.

Biondi believes the killer was lying in wait as Sabrina and John left her apartment on their way to Andrea’s birthday party. The pair, Biondi says, may have been abducted right outside the complex, as there was almost no one around and it was very foggy that night.

The murders of John and Sabrina generated hundreds of calls to the police, who released a composite sketch, hoping they would find the killer before he struck again.

With her sister’s killer still on the loose, police told Andrea she had a special reason to be afraid. “They said, ‘You live in the same apartment. And so, it's possible that you were targeted instead of her.’ I cannot express how horrifying it would be to me that it would’ve been my fault, that I would've rather died than have her die at any time,” Andrea says.

Sabrina’s mother Kim was also struggling to comprehend the devastating loss. She decided that she needed to visit the site where the bodies were found.

“It’s horrifying. Your whole job as a parent is to protect your kids anyway. And when you can't protect ’em you feel, you feel horrible,” she says.

As the weeks turned into months, police worked the hundreds of leads they received. “There were a lot of calls, a lot of leads,” Biondi remembers. “We thought we would end up with some viable information because of the amount of calls we were receiving on the case.”

Biondi was hopeful the crime scene would yield some clues as well. “Inside the van there were literally hundreds of unidentified latent fingerprints. We were hoping that they might come up with somebody very interesting. But as it was, we did not,” he explains.

One by one, each lead eventually went nowhere and police were at a loss.

Six years passed, and it seemed like the case might never be solved. But finally, a tip led police to take another look at a similar double murder that had happened around the same time.

“John and Sabrina were killed a month after we had another college couple killed here in Sacramento County,” Biondi tells Roberts.

There were many parallels between the two cases: both involved attractive college couples who were abducted from a public place, killed execution-style, and then dumped around the Sacramento area.

Police did make an arrest in the other case – the suspected killer was Gerald Gallego. But as it turns out, on the night John and Sabrina were killed, Gallego had the perfect alibi: he was already in jail.

Still, police were sure that there was a connection between the murders, and they ultimately arrived at an unusual theory: they believed John and Sabrina’s murder was a copycat crime, staged to clear Gerald Gallego and to suggest that the real killer was still on the loose.

Police believed the man who carried out the killings was David Hunt, Gallego’s brother. Hunt had a long list of felony convictions, including a kidnapping. “David Hunt would not be beyond committing a copycat murder to take the heat off of his brother,” Biondi says.

Police thought Hunt had received help from his wife Suellen, and also from his frequent partner in crime, Richard Thompson. The three became known in the press as the “Hunt Group.” And so, in November 1989, nearly nine years after Sabrina and John were murdered, the Hunt Group was arrested.