Three days after Caroline Love failed to come home from her shift at the Bojangles' on Central Avenue in June 1992, her sister Kathy went to the police in Charlotte to report her missing. She took two people with her. One was Love's roommate, Sadie McKnight. The other was McKnight's boyfriend, Henry Louis Wallace, who had made himself a copy of McKnight's key, let himself into the apartment on the night of June 15, strangled Love in a choke hold, raped her while she was semiconscious, and carried her body down the stairs in an orange trash bag to the woods off Statesville Road. He came back the next day to move her into a shallow ravine because he was afraid the bag could be seen from the road. He also took the roll of quarters she had bought at work for her laundry. The missing-person investigation never found her. Wallace led detectives to her bones on March 13, 1994, a few hours after he confessed.
He was born in Barnwell, South Carolina, on November 4, 1965, served in the Navy, and moved to Charlotte in November 1991, where he worked in fast-food restaurants in the east of the city and rose to manager of a Taco Bell. Before he left Barnwell, by his own later confession, he had killed an eighteen-year-old high school student there, Tashanda Bethea, whose body was found in a lake in the spring of 1990; he was questioned at the time and never charged. In May 1992 he beat to death Sharon Nance, 33, a woman he had picked up in Charlotte, and left her by the railroad tracks. Neither of those killings was among the nine he was tried for.
The nine were women he knew. Shawna Hawk, 20, a paralegal student, worked for him at the Taco Bell on Sharon Amity Road; on February 19, 1993, her boyfriend found her submerged in the bathtub of the house she shared with her mother, Sylvia Denise Sumpter, who later founded Mothers of Murdered Offspring. Wallace, her manager, came to the wake. Audrey Spain, 24, also worked at a Taco Bell; she was found on her bed on June 25, 1993, with a T-shirt and bra knotted around her neck, and Wallace had gone back afterward to make calls from her phone so it would seem she was alive later than she was. Valencia Jumper, 21, a political science senior at Johnson C. Smith University who worked at Food Lion and at Hecht's, was a friend of Wallace's sister and, he said, like a little sister to him; on August 10, 1993, he strangled her with a towel, poured rum over her body, put a pot of beans on the stove, pulled the battery from the smoke detector and set the room alight. Her death was first recorded as thermal burns. Michelle Stinson, 20, was stabbed and strangled on her kitchen floor on September 15, 1993, while her two small sons were in the apartment; the older boy woke while Wallace was there, and Wallace told him to go back to bed.
By the spring of 1994 the killings were coming days apart. Vanessa Little Mack, 25, worked at Carolinas Medical Center and lived with her four-month-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment on Greenland Avenue, off Wilkinson Boulevard. Her older girl, six, already lived with Barbara Rippy, the child's grandmother, who came by every Sunday at six in the morning to collect the baby so that Mack could go to work. On February 20 Rippy found the back door ajar and the infant alone on the couch. "I knew something was wrong because that girl was very nervous and always kept her doors locked," she told a reporter that day. In the bedroom she could see only Mack's feet, gray and cold to the touch. The first officer found a towel around her neck, though police said that morning they could not yet tell how she had died, and both girls went home with Rippy. Wallace had taken Mack's bank card and was photographed trying it at teller machines with the wrong PIN. On March 8, by the prosecution's account, he went to kill Brandi Henderson, 18, found her boyfriend home, walked to another apartment in the same complex and killed Betty Jean Baucom, 24, an assistant manager at the Central Avenue Bojangles', after making her give him the codes to the restaurant's safe. That night he came back for Henderson. She was on the phone with her cousin, George Burrell, when he arrived, and she told Burrell she would let the visitor in, which he took to mean she trusted whoever it was. Wallace raped her with her ten-month-old son lying on her chest, strangled her, and tied cloth around the baby's neck to stop him crying, a towel in some accounts and a pair of shorts in what investigators later told ABC News. The boy's father, Verness Lamar Woods, found them at midnight and got it off; the child, Tyrece Woods, survived. Debra Slaughter, 35, was strangled and stabbed thirty-eight times in her apartment and found by her mother on March 12.
All the victims were young Black women, nearly all of them friends, co-workers or neighbors of Wallace or of the women around him, most killed in their own homes with no forced entry, and for nearly two years the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police did not connect them. The link was made only after Henderson: investigators noticed the similarities with the Mack case, found Baucom in the same complex, met on March 10 to review strangulations, and asked families and friends for the names of men the women would have let in. Wallace's was on the list, and when the detective ran the names for criminal histories, his was the one that came back with a record, the prosecutor Marsha Goodenow later said. In his old mug shot he wore a distinctive hoop earring, the same earring a bank camera had caught on the man trying Vanessa Mack's card. On March 11 a palm print lifted from Baucom's recovered car matched his. At about five on the afternoon of March 12 he was arrested at a friend's apartment on an outstanding misdemeanor larceny warrant. Detectives talked with him about sports and the Navy for three hours before reading him his rights. At five in the morning Investigator Tony Rice, whom he knew, asked whether he could pray with him. Wallace cried through the prayer, then wrote out a list of the women he had killed, and gave a recorded confession to each.
The families' argument ever since, and the reason the case still matters in Charlotte, is that ten murders of young Black women within a few miles did not get the attention the same toll would have brought elsewhere in the city; the department's handling became the subject of internal review and lasting criticism. "There was not a level of caring," Dee Sumpter said in 2022. "This is where the racial disparity comes in." Garry McFadden, one of the homicide detectives, answered that the unit had been overwhelmed, with six detectives carrying the cases of a city whose murder rate was climbing fast. The department said the victims' race had been irrelevant to the attention their cases received, and that afterward it added homicide staff and began regular mandatory meetings to look for related cases.
He was indicted on April 4, 1994, and tried capitally in Mecklenburg County from September 1996. His lawyers asked to move the trial, citing the coverage and telephone surveys of the jury pool, and the judge refused. The defense, led by the public defender Isabel Day, called the FBI profiler Robert Ressler and Dr. Ann Burgess to argue mental illness; Ressler placed the crimes in a mixed category, partly organized and partly disorganized, and on cross-examination the state drew out the organized side; the psychologist Faye Sultan testified at sentencing to abuse by his mother from birth. The state called McKnight, who had lived with him for two years and seen nothing unusual. On January 7, 1997, the jury convicted him of nine counts of first-degree murder along with eight first-degree rapes, a second-degree rape, four sexual offenses, five armed robberies and the assault on Henderson's son, and on January 29 he received nine death sentences. He told the families that none of the women had in any way deserved what they got. The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed on May 5, 2000, in an opinion by Justice Wainwright that found no error. The trial court had found that during the night he asked to see his girlfriend and to hold his daughter, that the officers said they would try to reach both women but could not make them come, and that the officers did not treat the request as a condition of his talking; the appeal court accepted those findings and rejected his claim that the confession had been improperly obtained. In June 1998 he married in a ceremony at Central Prison in Raleigh; the bride is described in different accounts as a former prison nurse and as a housekeeper.
As of 2024 he remained on death row there, with a claim pending under the state's Racial Justice Act. North Carolina has carried out no execution since 2006, and some of the families have not outlived the wait. Lovie Slaughter, Debra Slaughter's mother, died in July 2024; her family, which supported the death sentence, had said it had found forgiveness for him all the same.