African American Serial Killers Part 4

In the late eighties early nineties, the Crack Era had police departments involved in bringing hustlers “to justice.” In fact, the War on Drugs, or battle from an inanimate object, sapped the resources of other departments dedicated to solving actual crimes.

Henry Louis Wallace raped and murdered at least nine women by confirmation. He is purported as the United States first black serial killer. This is what is most distressing. It is not the fact he’s the first but that he would probably have been stopped or apprehended much sooner and if the focus had been the real criminals out there in Charlotte, North Carolina and other locales around the nation.

Known as the Taco Bell Strangler, stemming from his role as a manager at the fast food restaurant. He would go on to brutalize women in Charlotte. In at least one case, he filed a missing person’s report with the knowledge that he committed the crime of disposing of her body.

The case is a textbook one, again. Hee strangled most of his victims which made it even more difficult for law enforcement to properly find evidence. In one other case, investigators found a fingerprint around the crime scene that linked back to Wallace.

As he sits on death row since 1997, he has married and expressed that he had been coerced into confessing.

As a violation of his constitutional rights, he has claimed again and again that he had been forced to speak against himself. The judge, nevertheless, has denied Wallace the possibility of being released from prison.

But the aforementioned section about the drug cases outweighing true crimes, that should make anyone’s blood boil.

In the time that Wallace had become a rapist and strangler, the dealers on the street had been brought into custody for selling a product that a buyer wanted. Where is the harm? Where is the alarm? Why didn’t the police focus on the fact that Wallace was a threat and the pusher on the corner presented no real danger if he or she manufactured, produced, and distributed narcotics?

No, the country at that time and still to an extent to day remains up in arms about drug cases but rape and murder crimes seem to get a roll-of-the-eyes and a sigh.

Wallace will be rotting away in a cage. That is the reality. Until the day he receives the needle, he will be thought of as not an achiever but a loser who could have become a rational, selfish individual. Instead, sadly, he clung to the lowest rungs of humanity and became an animal on two legs.

Charlotte, North Carolina will never forget Wallace’s wicked acts. There will forever be a wound to the metropolis after all these decades.

As the crack cocaine epidemic has subsided and the rise of fentanyl has expanded, what other police departments are more concerned with drugs rather than homicides?

With law enforcement able to take in Wallace, that at least remained a credit to their ability to cut off the number of bodies found in wooded areas, predominantly. The lives claimed by Wallace have been acknowledged and shown to be worthy of life. Some of then may have been prostitutes or drug dealers, but those are only crimes in the books, not infractions at all in morality.

The opportunities Wallace had to be a human being overwhelmed. He served time in the Navy and the branch discharged him honorably. His roles as managers and other leadership roles provided him with choices for advancement monetarily and spiritually, which link inexplicably.

What Wallace had not counted on was evidence. A fingerprint tied to a body ensured his fate. There existed other DNA information connected to other victims, the trial resulted in a plea to have Wallace spend the rest of his life behind bars. The defense argued that he had been abused by his mother as a child (more text book). Instead, the jury provided a guilty verdict and the judge passed down the death penalty.

For being one of the worst ogres of all time, Wallace should be studied so that his nightmarish actions may never be repeated.