Henry Louis Wallace

What the record shows

Henry Louis Wallace is an American serial killer who was convicted in January 1997 of murdering nine young women in Charlotte, North Carolina, between June 1992 and March 1994. A Mecklenburg County jury returned nine first-degree murder verdicts on January 7, 1997, and he received nine death sentences on January 29. After his arrest in March 1994 he also confessed to two killings that were never tried: one in Charlotte in 1992 and one in his hometown of Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1990. The North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the convictions and sentences in 2000, and as of the most recent reporting he remains on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh.

Wallace was born in Barnwell, South Carolina, in November 1965, according to the Wikipedia article. He served in the U.S. Navy in the late 1980s; the Seattle Times reported in 1994 that he had been a weapons technician assigned to the USS Nimitz when he was arrested for a burglary in Bremerton, Washington,. He settled in Charlotte around 1991. The North Carolina Supreme Court noted that he held a number of jobs with management responsibilities during the period of the crimes, and Fox News reported that the nickname the Taco Bell Strangler came from his work as a manager at a Charlotte Taco Bell, where he met several of the women he later killed.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the first killing was that of Tashanda Bethea, 18, a Barnwell high school student who disappeared on March 8, 1990; her body was found in a pond on April 1. Wallace was questioned but never charged. In Charlotte, Sharon Nance, 33, was killed in May 1992. The nine victims named in the murder convictions were Caroline Love, 20, in June 1992; Shawna Hawk, 20, on February 19, 1993; Audrey Spain, 24, in June 1993; Valencia Jumper, 21, in August 1993, whose apartment was set on fire; Michelle Stinson, 20, in September 1993; Vanessa Mack, 25, found on February 20, 1994; Betty Baucom, 24, and Brandi Henderson, 18, who lived in the same east Charlotte apartment complex and were killed in March 1994; and Deborah Slaughter, 35, found on March 12, 1994. Most were strangled in their own homes, and according to the Seattle Times police said he knew the women, several through work. Henderson's infant son was choked during the attack on her and survived.

Charlotte police were slow to connect the deaths. Retired homicide detective Garry McFadden told Fox News in 2018 that investigators treated the killings as separate homicides and did not recognize a serial killer until a couple of days before the arrest and that police were slow to recognize that lower-income Black women were being targeted. Wallace had been arrested for shoplifting on February 4, 1994, without being linked to the murders. According to the court's account, detectives drew up lists of people who had been let into the victims' apartments, and Wallace's name appeared. On March 11 a palm print from Baucom's car was matched to him, and on the evening of March 12 he was arrested at a friend's apartment on an outstanding misdemeanor larceny warrant.

Over the following hours Wallace gave recorded confessions. The court opinion says he admitted all nine murders later tried, along with related rapes, sexual offenses and robberies, and also admitted killing Bethea in South Carolina and Nance in North Carolina. The Seattle Times reported on March 14 that he had been charged with ten counts of murder, including Nance's, and that he had told investigators where to find the remains of Caroline Love, who had been missing since June 1992.

After more than two years of pretrial litigation, jury selection began on September 30, 1996, on nine murder charges; the Bethea and Nance killings were not part of the trial. Defense experts argued that his mental illness and childhood abuse mitigated against a death sentence, and the state cross-examined them about the two uncharged killings. Besides the murder verdicts, the jury convicted him of multiple counts of rape, sexual offense and robbery, and he received consecutive prison terms on those counts.

On May 5, 2000, in State v. Wallace, the North Carolina Supreme Court found no prejudicial error and held that the nine death sentences were not disproportionate, observing that the number of victims and serial nature of the crimes set the case apart from any other in the state's history. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2001, and a Superior Court judge rejected a further challenge in 2005, according to the Wikipedia article. Wallace was not among the 15 death row prisoners whose sentences Governor Roy Cooper commuted on December 31, 2024, according to WTVD. The Charlotte Observer reported in 2023 that he had been on death row for more than 26 years.