When people find out I have a true crime podcast, it often sparks discussions of related cold cases and serial killers. I’m asked, “have you written about this, or done a podcast about that?” Most of the time, I’m familiar with the topics, and have usually covered them, but I know not everyone has listened to 100 plus episodes of this podcast. And even if they have, I started the show four years ago and a lot of content and crime has been covered. Because of that, I wanted to pull together pieces of several scripts I’ve produced and focus solely on sharing information about four notorious serial killers with you.
Terry Alvin Hyatt
First I want to talk about Terry Alvin Hyatt. I discussed Hyatt in Episode 26, “Missing Moms in North Carolina.” It took many years for Hyatt’s crimes to catch up with. Him—the first once occurred in the late 1970s. The following homicide victims were eventually linked to Hyatt.
Harriet Delaney Simmons was a 40-year-old mother of seven when she went missing on April 15, 1979. She left her job on Capital Boulevard in Raleigh with plans to drive straight through the night to visit with friends in Nashville, Tennessee. She never arrived at her destination. Her kids knew something had to be wrong, because she would have called home if she had run into any problems during the drive. About a week later, investigators found Harriet’s abandoned car at a rest stop along I-40 in Iredell County, which would have been about four hours from her home in Raleigh. Her suitcase was still in the car along with a thermos of food that belonged to Harriet. A year later, skeletal remains with the markings of stab wounds were found in the Pisgah National Forest outside of Asheville. They were eventually identified as belonging to Harriet Simmons.
The First Known Victim
In August of 1979, 21-year-old Betty Sue McConnell left her job at a restaurant on Tunnel Road in Asheville and told her mother she planned to meet friends at a local bowling alley. Instead, several hours later, a couple that lived close to the French Broad River heard screams and saw a soaking wet Betty Sue stumble towards them. She managed to tell them she’d been stabbed and thrown into the river. She later died from her injuries, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter.
Initially, investigators had no leads on who could have murdered these two women, nor did they pinpoint there could have been a connection. It wasn’t until a man named Jerry Harmon told investigators in Asheville in 1999 that he’d been with a friend named Terry Hyatt the night Betty Sue McConnell was killed, and that he couldn’t keep the secret bottled up any longer.
During the murder trial of Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell, more details came to light. According to an article I found in the Asheville Citizen-Times, a friend of Hyatt’s named Lester Dean Helms told police he was with Hyatt when they abducted a woman from a rest area off I-40, sexually assaulted her and then robbed her. He claimed he did not know if Hyatt had murdered Harriet, he had only seen her walk into a wooded area and return with blood on his shirt. The article didn’t mention the location of where this final sighting of Harriet was.
Victim in Charlotte is Discovered
A jury convicted Hyatt of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell in Jan of 2000 and he is now on death row. But the story of the pain that Terry Hyatt brought to North Carolina families did not end there, as there are more layers to the story. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department established their first cold case squad in 2003. One of the cases they looked at first was the 1987 murder of a 19-year-old young woman named Jerri Ann Jones. Jones, He who was working as a cashier at a Harris Teeter grocery store in Charlotte, disappeared while waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up from work on July 8, 1987. Two days later, police found her nude body about a mile away from her place of employment. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed, but the case quickly went cold. When the cold case unit started examining the evidence in Jerri’s case, they discovered a cigarette butt near the body along with semen on Jerri’s body. The DNA evidence matched Terry Hyatt, and he ended up confessing to her murder in 2005. He pled guilty and received a life sentence in exchange for his confession.
There is another woman, Carolyn Brigman, who also had a run in with Hyatt but survived the ordeal. Prosecutors called her to testify in Hyatt’s murder trial for Harriet Simmons and Betty Sue McConnell. Carolyn was a 40-year-old mother of five who worked the late shift at a doughnut shop on Patton Avenue in Asheville. One night in October of 1979, she finished her shift at 2 a.m. only to find her car wouldn’t start. Because she lived in an apartment complex not too far away, she decided to make the walk home. Hyatt appeared at that moment and forced her to get in his truck, threatening her with a knife.
As he drove her past a nearby river, she tried to distract him by commenting how pretty it was. His reply? “I’ve put a lot of bodies there.” He parked and asked her to get undressed. She told him that she didn’t want to do that, that he was a nice young man, and she was an older woman with children.” For reasons unknown to Carolyn, he set the knife he was holding down and said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to give you back your life.” He dropped her back off where he had found her and threatened that if she ever told anyone what had happened, he “would find her, cut her up into little pieces and throw her in the river.” Carolyn Brigman didn’t let Hyatt’s threats intimidate her though; she reported him to the police and he pled guilty to armed robbery and kidnapping. At the time, investigators had no idea he had already murdered the two women in the months prior.
Terry Hyatt remains on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh. He is 67 years old.
John Wayne Boyer
Up next is John Wayne Boyer, who I first wrote about in Episode 39. It took law enforcement several years to fully comprehend the amount of crimes he had participated in, because he frequently traveled across state lines. It was the murder of a woman named Scarlett Wood, who initially remained unidentified after her death, that first led investigators to Boyer.
Scarlett Wood Disappears
The television show “Forensic Files” featured Scarlett Wood’s story on Season 13, Episode 6 titled “About Face.” The documentary shared how UNC-Wilmington professor Dr. Midori Albert, a forensic anthropologist, and a team of student volunteers collected the bones found on the property in Wilmington in 2004. They were able to estimate the victim was female and measured about five feet four inches tall. Bones told the story of a violent death. The woman had a broken nose, broken ribs, and had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen. There was no clothing found with the victim. Investigators theorized the killer was local, because the area the remains were found in were off the beaten path.
The tenant who discovered the remains had only been living in the rental home where the remains were found a short time, so he was ruled out as a suspect. Investigators worked to identify who the victim was. They looked over missing persons records to see who had been reported missing during the time frame the murder must have occurred. Scarlett Wood’s name came up, and they discovered she’d been heading to a party at a local motel the night she went missing in 2003.
Unfortunately, the only dental records Scarlett had were more than 10 years old, and the bones discovered were too dried out to extract DNA. Stumped, they consulted with Dr. Albert at UNC-Wilmington once again. She knew there was procedure called skull photo video superimposition, where you take a photograph of a person and blend it over the photo of a skull in order to blend the two images together. This helps pinpoint any similarities between the two images. But the university didn’t have the technology needed to perform the procedure and at the time, it would have cost more than $30,000 to obtain it. Dr. Midori turned to her husband, Shane Baptista, who served as a computing consultant at the university, to see if he had any ideas of how to mimic the skull photo video superimposition.
Technology Helps Identify Victim’s Remains
Baptista found a free program called GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a program similar to Adobe Photoshop. He took a photo of Scarlett and superimposed it over an image of the skull of the unidentified murder victim. They had a match. A test of DNA found inside the pulp of one of Scarlett’s teeth helped seal the identification.
The police interviewed the tenants who would have been living at the rental property during the time Scarlett was murdered and cleared them in the investigation, as they didn’t seem to have any ties to her. No physical evidence of a crime was found inside the home. Investigators next talked to a few friends of Scarlett’s, learning she had stayed behind after the motel party to hang out with a man named John Wayne Boyer, who was 46 at the time. Boyer was a long haul truck driver who told them Scarlett had decided to walk home after the party. They were a little doubtful at first, because the night had been a frigid 17 degrees and Scarlett’s friends said she had no more than a light jacket with her. But Scarlett and Boyer knew each other because she had babysat his girlfriend’s kids in the past, and they had no physical evidence Boyer had been involved in a crime. A search of the hotel room turned up no leads, but it had been repainted and redecorated after Scarlett went missing.
A search of Boyer’s van that he owned at the time Scarlett was murdered turned up no blood evidence. He also had no criminal record that anyone knew of at that point. But police kept interrogating him and he finally confessed, admitting to assaulting Scarlett after a sexual encounter in the motel room. He tried to say she accidentally hit her head on a piece of furniture inside the room, and he left her body in the woods. But Dr. Midori said the evidence left behind on Scarlett’s remains showed a more violent attack and stabbing must have occurred. John Wayne Boyer pleaded guilty to second degree murder in 2007 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Lesley Eugene Warren
Next I’d like to talk about Lesley Eugene Warren. I first discussed this killer in Episode 78.
He was incredibly young and he had the face to match. But underneath his youthful demeanor lay the heart of a killer. Women were inherently drawn to him and trusted him.
Although two of Lesley Eugene Warren’s crimes took place in my home state of North Carolina, including places I lived, I somehow had never heard of the man until several years ago. While Lesley was eventually captured and incarcerated here in North Carolina, he is known to have had victims in multiple states.
Here’s some backstory on Lesley Eugene Warren.
A Childhood Full of Discord
He was born in Candler, North Carolina and based on information that came out in his criminal trials, grew up in an abusive household. While in 8th grade, he broke into a cousin’s home and was sent to the local Juvenile Evaluation Center. A year later, counselors sent him to Broughton Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Morganton, because they feared he would attempt suicide. Lesley began to show signs of being troubled as a young child, after his parents divorced. He spent 33 days enrolled at Enka High School in 1983. But he only attended only 10 of those days before school officials withdrew him. While at Enka High School, a few weeks before his 16th birthday, he tied up a neighbor in her home and held her at gunpoint. A friend happened to stop by and helped rescue the woman. This incident sent Warren back to the Juvenile Evaluation Center. He first met a young woman named Jayme Hurley there. She had a psychology degree from UNC-Asheville. According to her co-workers, she enjoyed her job and connecting with the teens there, including cooking holiday dinners for them. She thought Lesley was a bright young man, even if he was a loner. He liked to read, and they would discuss books. Jayme later left the job after experiencing burnout, but she stayed in touch with Lesley on a platonic basis. She even gave him her telephone number.
Military Service and a Move to New York
He eventually earned his GED and enlisted in the United States Army when he was 18. He married a woman he had met in South Carolina and was stationed in Fort Drum, New York in 1987. Through a fellow soldier, he became acquainted with a 20-year-old young woman named Patsy Vineyard. Her husband reported her missing on May 21, 1987 after he returned home from being out of town and couldn’t find her. Patsy’s body was later found in Lake Ontario near her home in Sackett’s Harbor, N.Y. She had been strangled to death. Lesley was one of 150 soldiers who were questioned in her disappearance, but was not charged at the time of her death.
He was dishonorably discharged from the Army after receiving convictions for larceny and unauthorized absences, returning back to North Carolina and becoming a truck driver.
Woman Connected to Warren Disappears
The woman Lesley had met at the Juvenile Evaluation Center, Jayme Denise Hurley, was 39 years old when she went missing from her home in Asheville, N.C. on May 25, 1990. A friend of Jayme’s knew Lesley had been at Jayme’s home the day before she went missing and grew concerned when she couldn’t reach her friend. Lesley had reached out to Jayme and said he needed her help, and she invited him over.
Investigators tracked down Lesley a few days later to question him about Jayme Hurley. He let them search his white van at the police department, and they found a purse belonging to Jayme inside. Lesley told police he thought he needed to retain a lawyer, and they talked amongst themselves and decided Jayme might still be alive. However, despite Lesley asking for an attorney, they continued questioning him. During the course of that interrogation, he told police that Jayme had died from a cocaine overdose, and he had put her body into the French Broad River. According to Jayme’s friends and family, she was not known to use cocaine. The police arrested Lesley for failure to produce a title for a motor vehicle and misdemeanor larceny of Jayme Hurley’s purse. The district attorney was not ready to file additional charges related to Jayme’s disappearance at that point, so Lesley was released on a $25,000 secured bond.
He returned to the police department on June 7, 1990, to try and get his van back. Investigators asked him to give blood, hair, and urine samples, which he agreed to. They asked if he could return the next day to tell them more about Jayme’s alleged overdose, and he agreed to. However, instead, his mother and his lawyer’s private investigator left messages for the police stating that his attorney needed to be present for any future interviews. Ted Lambert, who was then a detective with the Asheville Police Department, had been conducting informational interviews with people who knew Lesley from South Carolina. That’s when he learned Lesley had been a suspect in yet another woman’s murder.
Velma Gray Found Dead in South Carolina
In August 1989, the body of 42-year-old Velma Faye Gray from Travelers Rest, S.C. was found by fishermen in Lake Bowen not far from her home. Her hands were tied behind her back. She had died of asphyxiation. It appeared she had wrecked her car earlier that evening before she went missing. Velma was a singer in a band called Reflections, and had been returning home from a gig in Asheville so she could help her son get ready for college. Her car was later found in a remote section of Greenville County. The left side of the vehicle had sustained damage, the passenger window was down, the gas tank lid was open, and the license tag was missing.
Police initially arrested a young man for stealing Velma’s car, a Mazda RX-7, and moving it from to the secondary location after finding it abandoned. They later determined Velma was already gone from the scene when the car was stolen. In an article that ran in The Greenville News on December 15, 1989, the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office announced Velma’s family was offering a reward of $3,000 for anyone who knew of a truck driver that was at the scene when Velma wrecked her car off the White Horse Road Extension. Witnesses said they saw a tractor trailer parked near Velma’s car early on August 27. Police wondered if someone had stopped to offer the woman help. They wanted to see if this truck driver had any additional information. They later questioned Lesley Eugene Warren when they learned he was a truck driver who might have been in the area, and he said he had not stopped that night in South Carolina.
In July of 1990, after being questioned in Jayme Hurley’s disappearance, and while out on bond, Lesley traveled to High Point, North Carolina. According to a news article that ran later that month, a young woman named Teri Quinby, who worked part-time as a bartender at a local hotel, met Lesley and took him as her guest to a company picnic. She introduced him to a co-worker, Katherine Johnson, a 21-year-old college student at the University of North Carolina, and the two hit it off. The group went to a local Applebee’s after the picnic and Lesley bragged to Teri’s brother that he planned to make a move on Katherine later that evening. He and Katherine later left the restaurant so he could give the young woman a ride on his motorcycle.
While Investigators Suspect Warren, He Murders One More Woman
Around 11:30 p.m., Warren returned to pick up Katherine’s car. Katherine was not with him, and he told Teri that she was at a local motel where they would be spending the night. The next day, he returned alone to Teri Quinby’s house and asked her if he could stay there while he looked for a new place. He said Katherine had returned to Chapel Hill. .When he was arrested, he had a set of keys on him that belonged to Katherine Johnson. After he was detained by the officers with the Asheville Police Department, he confessed to being responsible for the murder of Katherine Johnson. He revealed the two had been intimate on the night they met, and then he had strangled her with her bra and left her body in the trunk of her car in the Radisson Hotel Parking Deck. Then, he buried her in a shallow grave off Highway 151 in Western Buncombe County. Katherine’s family had been out of town and didn’t even known the young woman was missing when investigators discovered her body.
Warren was eventually tied to the deaths of Patsy Vineyard from New York and Velma Gray from South Carolina. After Lesley was arrested in High Point, Teri Quinby told local media outlets that “What freaks me out is that I could have been next. I mean they say he knew all those girls, too. It’s so hard to believe. He was so normal.”
It’s hard to know why Warren committed these murders. Most of the time his victims were women he knew personally, except for Velma Gray, which seemed to be a crime of opportunity. But why did he murder some women and remain in relationships with others. What was his thought process?
At the time of his arrest, Lesley Eugene Warren had a wife he was separated from and a child in South Carolina. He was not tried for Patsy Vineyard’s murder. He received a life sentence for killing Velma Gray from South Carolina, and was sentenced to death in North Carolina for the murders of Jayme Denise Hurley and Katherine Johnson. Lesley Eugene Warren is currently on death row. He is suspected of murdering other women as well.
Henry Louis Wallace
The next serial killer I want to talk about, Henry Louis Wallace, is probably the most prolific here in North Carolina. I shared the story of his crime spree in Episode 89.
In the early 1990s, a string of rapes and murders occurred in East Charlotte. Because the killer used different methods and cleaned up crime scenes, investigators had no idea the murders were connected until he escalated and got sloppy, stealing items from the victims, and leaving evidence behind. Community members became convinced the murders went unsolved because they involved working class Black women, many of whom were young mothers. But when the suspect was arrested, friends and family were devastated to learn it was a person they had known and trusted all along, someone who blended into their community and took advantage of the kindness of others.
What was Charlotte like in the 1990s? It was experiencing a surge of growth in the job market, with 14,000 new jobs created in 1994, while also earning recognition as the third largest banking center in the United States. But alongside economic growth, in 1993, Charlotte Mecklenburg experienced more than 9,000 instances of violent crime, with 87 murders, 350 rapes, 2, 713 robberies, and 5,952 assaults, according to a comprehensive report on this case written by Joseph Geringer.
But despite the industry growth in Charlotte at the time, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was not equipped or prepared for the onslaught of vicious crimes brought on by a serial killer. In the mid-1990s, the department only had seven full-time investigators employed. That number has more than tripled since then. The crimes of Henry Louis Wallace varied in modus operandi, with him often cleaning up the murder scenes, and because different investigators were assigned to each one, the cases went unlinked for some time. The other thing that baffled investigators is that the crimes did not seem random, for example, in the cases of the women murdered in their homes and with their children present, there were no signs of forced entry. It seems the victims knew who their murderer was and even trusted him. So did their families—in one case, Wallace consoled the mother of one of his victims and attended the funerals of others.
The department did eventually seek help from the F.B.I. in early 1994. But when Henry Louis Wallace was arrested, he did not match the profile of the serial killer the F.B.I. was looking for, because they believed most serial killers were white men who killed strangers. Wallace was a Black man who was connected to each of the victims, in fact, many of them had dated him or called him a friend.
It was after Betty Baucom’s murder in March of 1994 that police felt like the killer had gotten sloppy and made a series of errors that would help lead to his identity. He had stolen Baucom’s television and VCR, so they dispatched officers to check at local pawn shops for the items. Her aqua-colored Nissan Pulsar was also missing, so put out an alert to look for the car. Less than 24 hours later, Brandi Henderson’s boyfriend Verness Woods, had found her body and their infant, who was still alive in the apartment. It was clear that Charlotte had a killer on its hands that was escalating in behavior.
A Connection Made
When Sergeant Gary McFadden, who is now the Sheriff of Mecklenburg County, met with the squad early the next morning to assess the details of the crimes and compare notes, they discovered that Betty Baucom and Brandi Henderson did not appear to know one another, despite living in the same complex. However, when they interviewed the friends and family of all the victims they knew about up to that point and looked through the lists of acquaintances for the women, one name appeared frequently . . . 28-year-old Henry Wallace.
They began to realize Shawna Hawk and Audrey Spain had both worked at Taco Bell under Wallace. Michelle Stinson had visited the Taco Bell and talked with Wallace while she ate. Valencia Jumper was friends with Wallace’s sister Yvonne. Vanessa Mack had dated Wallace. Betty Baucom was a friend of Wallace’s girlfriend, Sadie McKnight. Brandi Henderson’s boyfriend, Verness Woods, was friends with Wallace. Woods mentioned Wallace had often visited Brandi in their apartment while he was on the night shift. And Caroline Love, who had been missing since 1992, had been the roommate of Wallace’s girlfriend, Sadie McKnight.
Police questioned McKnight about her boyfriend’s possible involvement with the murders. She was surprised at first, but then remembered he had been giving her gifts of jewelry like bracelets, rings, and necklaces during the time period of the murders. These pieces had belonged to the victims. Then, Baucom’s Nissan Pulsar was found abandoned. When it was dusted for fingerprints, ones located on the lid of the trunk matched Henry Louis Wallace. He had finally gotten sloppy and left evidence behind that could implicate him.
Wallace Confesses To His Crimes
Once confronted with the evidence, it didn’t take Wallace long to confess. He said that most of his crimes were sexually motivated, but he did steal from the victims to help support his meth habit. It during his confession that the police realized Caroline Love wasn’t actually missing, she was dead. He said he’d taken the key to the apartment from his girlfriend Sadie McNight, who was Caroline’s roommate. He waited until McNight wouldn’t be home and hid in the apartment bathroom until Caroline came home from work. He surprised her, propositioning her for sex, and when she refused, he put her in a choke hold and sexually assaulted her. When she fought back, he strangled her with the cord of a curling iron that was near the bed. He then wrapped her in a bedsheet, put her in a large plastic bag, and took her body to a construction area near Stevenson Road in Charlotte.
Shawna Hawk’s murder was different. He had stopped by her house to chat with her after she got home from school. But when she teased him about an argument he’d had with his girlfriend, he said he snapped and put a choke hold on her until she passed out. Then he placed her body in the full bathtub to cover up any evidence, before stealing money out of her purse.
He visited Audrey Spain with the plan to rob her, and because they were friends, she let him in. They smoked a joint together and then pinned her to the floor, asking her how much money was in the apartment. He then raped and murdered her, leaving her apartment with a gas card and Visa card he had stolen out of her purse.
With Valencia Jumper, who police had first suspected died in a house fire, Wallace stopped by her apartment, saying he needed to talk after an argument with his girlfriend, Sadie McNight. Once there, he sexually assaulted her and choked her when she turned her back to him. He then went into the kitchen, put a can of Pork and Beans in a on the stove, turning the burner on high. He took the batteries out of the smoke detector and poured alcohol on Valencia’s body before lighting a match.
He dropped in on Michelle Stinson with the sole purpose of sexually assaulting her. After asking for a glass of water, he attacked her from behind, choking her, and then stabbed her with a knife from her kitchen when she continued to make noise. He visited Vanessa Mack because he knew she had a good job, money in her bank, and a debit card he could use. After demanding she hand those things over to him, he raped her in the bedroom, leaving her infant daughter asleep on the couch in the living room. When Mack said she needed to put her daughter to bed, he strangled her to death, leaving the child unharmed after he left the apartment. Mack also had another daughter who was staying with her grandmother that night.
When Wallace visited Betty Baucom at her home, he knew she was a manager at Bojangles and had access to the alarm and safe. Instead of asking her for those things, he sexually assaulted her first and then grew angry when she fought back, strangling her. He then stole jewelry, her television and VCR, and her car. He went straight from Baucom’s apartment to the one where he knew Brandi Henderson would be alone with her infant. He told her he needed to drop something off for her boyfriend, Verness Woods, and she believed him. Once inside, he asked her for money, growing angry when she only had $15. He overpowered and raped her before strangling her. He had intended to steal Brandi’s television, but her infant son started crying, and Wallace was afraid neighbors would come check on the noise. He tried to quiet the baby with a pacifier, and when that didn’t work, he took a towel and tied it around the boy’s neck, just enough, he said, to make it hard for the baby to breathe. Then he left the apartment.
When he went to visit his final victim, Debra Slaughter, he told her he wanted them to go in together to buy drugs. She said she didn’t have money for that, and he grew enraged, raping her while holding a towel to her throat. She told him she had been suspicious that he was the person strangling all the women on their side of town, breaking free from his grasp. As she was attempting to run from him, while grabbing a small dagger out of her purse, he took it from her and stabbed her with it before she could escape.
A Surprise Victim Revealed
During his confessions, Wallace admitted to murdering Tashanda Bethea in South Carolina, leaving her body in the pond afterward. He also confessed to murdering a prostitute he had sex with in 1992. He tried refuse to pay her, and she grew angry and combative. He said he beat her to death in self defense before leaving her body off Old Mount Holly Road. That victim was Sharon Nance. He bragged about using a move called the “Boston choke hold” to overpower the victims. He said that after raping them, he would give them the impression that they would be safe, and then surprise them with the move. He said that with some of the victims, he turned down the thermostats in their homes to slow down decomposition and confuse investigators about the time of deaths.
Wallace said the ghosts of his victims sometimes spoke to him in his dreams.
At one point during his confession, Wallace said, “There’s the good Henry, and then there’s the bad Henry. And as the years progressed, the bad Henry took over.”
Wallace Had a Long History of Crime Before the Murders
What a lot of Wallace’s friends and acquaintances didn’t know was that he had a criminal history dating back to 1988. He was arrested for burglary in Bremerton, Washington, while he was serving in the Navy. He pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and received 38 days in jail and 24 months parole in Washington. In April 1990, after he had moved back to his hometown of Barnwell, South Carolina, he was questioned about the disappearance of Tashanda Bethea when she first went missing. After Bethea’s body was found, he was charged with the attempted rape of a 16-year-old girl and entered a program normally reserved for first-time, non-violent offenders.
In February of 1991, he was charged with larceny and third-degree burglary after breaking into Barnwell High School and stealing CDs from a radio station where he worked. He served four months in a South Carolina state prison and then released on probation for three years. Despite violations, his probation was never revoked. In February 1992, he was charged with the kidnap and rape of a 17-year-old girl. An article that ran in the March 17, 1994 issue of The Charlotte Observer stated that Wallace’s probation officer in Charlotte reported that he had failed to check in regularly. They alerted the South Carolina probation officials, who said they hadn’t received any reports that Wallace was breaking the rules, so he remained free to continue his killing spree.
That same article, written by staff writers Henry Eichel and Eric Frazier, noted that while some Charlotte residents were critical of the police department and their investigation into the other murders, others defended them. Debora Childers, the mother of Brandi Henderson, said, “I want Charlotte to understand, I’ve lost my daughter just like the rest of these mothers have, but we have to quit fighting about this. Our officers in Charlotte may not have been perfect, but they stuck together and got this man and that’s more than any of these other towns did.”
Henry Wallace’s murder trial began in September of 1996 and lasted nearly four months.
During the trial, his attorney was Public Defender Isabel Scott Day. Day hired a social worker from New York named Carmeta Albarus to provide an inside look at how his childhood might have helped mold him into a man who became prone to violence and murder. For more than five hours, she testified to the jury that Wallace had grown up never knowing his father, was beaten and psychologically abused by his mother Lottie Mae, and then emasculated by his wife who asked him to support a child that he did not father. During her testimony, Albarus testified that Lottie Mae Wallace beat her son with extension cords, garden hoses, and toys. The house he grew up in did not have electricity or indoor plumbing and he was forced to empty the chamber pot they used the bathroom in every morning. He had bowel accidents until he was 12 or 13, and he began molesting neighborhood girls around that age. Lottie Mae worked long hours, leaving her two children to parent themselves a lot of the time. She would make Wallace and his sister Yvonne whip each other with switches they brought in from outside.
When Wallace got to high school, he wanted to try out for the football team, but his mother wouldn’t let him. Instead, he tried out for the cheerleading squad. Instead of being ridiculed, his classmates admired his creativity and skill, and he got along well with the other female cheerleaders on the squad. He tried going to two different colleges after graduation, but quickly lost interest in academics. He enjoyed working a job as a DJ for a local radio station, but he was fired for stealing CDs from his employer.
He joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1984, staying in for eight years. While he was a sailor, Wallace married his high school girlfriend, Maretta Brown, in 1987. She had a child with another man before they were married, and Maretta asked that he raise the little girl as his own. Wallace told the social worker that he’d wanted more children, but Maretta had refused, and didn’t want to have sex with him once they were married, either. He was asked to leave the Naval Reserves after he got charged with breaking and entering. Because he’d had a spotless record as a sailor, the Navy allowed him to leave with an Honorable Discharge. Maretta left him not long after. He dated other women after that and had a daughter with one of them who was born in September 1993. While he’d dabbled in drugs when he was younger, he said it was during this period that the drug use spiraled out of control. He had trouble holding down jobs and worked as a cook or crew member at places in East Charlotte like Captain D’s, Taco Bell, and the Golden Corral.
Wallace’s attorney also brought in two expert witnesses to testify on the subject of serial killings. One, Colonel Robert K. Ressler from the FBI’s Behavior Science unit testified he believed Wallace’s actions during the murders showed both organizational and disorganizational characteristics, pointing to possible psychological instability. A specialist in psychosocial development, Dr. Ann Burgess, said Wallace seemed unable to separate reality from fantasy. The jury found him guilty of nine counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. He immediately appealed his sentence, but in 2000, the North Carolina Supreme Court denied it.
In the years after the murders, Charlotte residents wondered how police did not connect the tie in between some of the victims and the Taco Bell and Bojangles restaurants. Charlotte Observer staff writer published an article in March of 1994 titled “Restaurant’s link to crimes went unnoticed.” A shift leader at the Bojangles on Central Avenue pointed out that employees at the restaurant rarely stayed longer than a few months due to it being an entry-level job. Wallace’s girlfriend and four of the victims had all worked at the Bojangles. But they went missing or died over a 21-month period. Carolina Love went missing in June of 1992. Shawna Hawk was murdered in February of 1993. Betty Baucom and Debra Slaughter were killed in March of 1994. The shift leader did remember seeing Henry Wallace when he would come into the restaurant with his girlfriend Sadie to pick up her checks. Wallace had worked as a manager at a nearby Taco Bell, where he met some of the other victims when they were customers or visiting friends.
If you think about it, Henry Wallace, who stood six feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds at the time of his arrest, seemed to endear himself to strong Black women who were also savvy, independent, and educated. Many of them were seeking higher education and or raising children. Perhaps he saw something of his own mother, Lottie Mae, in them, and this enraged him. Unfortunately, by murdering so many women who were mothers of small children, he left behind a trail of what was to become generational trauma in his wake. While he had been a child from a broken home who grew up feeling lonely and isolated, many of the children of his victims did so as well.
Henry Louis Wallace still sits on Death Row here in North Carolina. In 1998 he married prison nurse Rebecca Torrijas. He is now 59 years old.
