Original subtitles

[tense music]

It was like, you know, the switch was flipped

and I was choking her

[tense music continues]

- [Reporter] Murder after murder after murder.

Police never suspected that all the women were

killed by the same man.

[dramatic music]

- Serial killers have an ability to be very charismatic,

and Henry Louis Wallace was very good at what he did

because he'd be your friend.

- You don't expect to lose your life

at the hands of someone that you trust.

[tense music]

- Even after the first murder,

there was a need to go out and keep doing it

over and over again because bad Henry doesn't go away.

[tense music]

- There's the good Henry and the bad Henry,

and

So, I felt invincible.

[tense music continues]

[tense music]

- In the late '80s, beginning '90s,

Charlotte was a small city growing very fast.

You have your neighborhoods that are thriving,

but you go two streets over

and that community is in very bad shape.

[siren blaring] [tense music continues]

Crime was rampant. Robberies were rampant.

Crack had just hit.

- [Officer] All the way. Stay down, stay down.

- The murders went up to the hundreds.

- They had a limited number of homicide detectives

and record homicide rates.

As a police reporter, I found myself run into a homicide

probably at least once a week.

[tense music]

- Rozzelles Ferry Road,

six or seven miles from the center of the city.

It's an industrial area.

Usually there's only trucks traveling that area.

The Charlotte road workers were mowing

the side of the road and they discovered skeletal remains.

[dramatic music]

Not a lotta clothes and not a lot of tissue.

And what we do, we call it a grid search.

You search all around the body for any potential evidence.

But few pieces of evidence were collected.

They determined that it would be a homicide

because of the injuries they saw

in the skull area of the victim.

[soft ominous music]

Autopsy determined that the victim died

from blunt force trauma.

It tells you that it was a fight and it was aggressive.

Through dental records, the victim was identified

as a black female by the name of Sharon Nance.

We start going through the file,

and so I said, "I know this person."

Sharon Nance was a mom, a very vibrant woman,

and she was just providing for her family.

And she was well-known as a lady of the evening.

Sharon was doing something that I did not approve of,

but me and Sharon became friends.

During my freshman year in college,

I would often see this young lady around the bus station,

and we talked every time I got on the bus.

It became a joke because I was a college kid

that turned cop, and she would always say, "You're my cop."

[soft tense music]

- Tragically, Sharon left behind a young son.

The last time her family saw her, she was going out dancing.

- It had been a week since she'd left home and was missing.

Her family had filed a police report.

- Once you get the timeline established,

you see if you have anyone that remembers seeing her there.

Did she get into a fight?

Is it somebody that she knows?

What really is going on?

[suspenseful music]

[soft twinkling music]

[thunder rumbles]

[thunder rumbles]

[soft ominous music]

- Henry Wallace was born to a single mother.

Henry's father essentially leaves her

because she becomes pregnant.

From then on, there was a kind of a constant resentment

of Henry, that he was essentially

the cause of this abandonment.

The arguments, the fights, that's what I was used to.

- Henry was never shown love from his mother.

He was beaten and he was always trying to win her love,

but he was always being rejected.

There was a whole bunch of older guys

and there was a girl and she was probably about 16.

They took her into the woods

and I followed them into the woods.

It was like five or six guys

And I got turned on by it.

[disjointed eerie music]

- It's almost impossible to believe that this particular

experience didn't leave a mark in terms of the fantasies

he would go on to develop about domination,

violence towards women over time.

[disjointed eerie music continues]

- In Sharon's case, detectives determine that her aunt

was the last person to see her alive.

And during that conversation,

Sharon had actually told her that she was going out

with some friends that evening,

and Sharon had not been seen since.

[tense music]

- Rozzelles Ferry Road was in an area of town

where there was always lots of crime.

People especially involved in those areas

don't tend to cooperate with the police.

Homicide detectives did their due diligence

and talked to people that they knew and her family members.

They were not able to find a suspect at that time.

[soft ominous music]

After Sharon Nance's body is found,

police are alerted that Caroline Love is missing.

- It was one of these calls that,

"Hey, can you go out and talk to this family

because this young lady's been missing?"

- Caroline Love was 20 years old,

just starting out on her own,

going to school and working in fast food restaurants

to make ends meet.

And she just disappeared.

Her family checks, and nothing's amiss in her apartment,

but she's left things behind that if she'd run off

she would've taken with her, and she's just gone.

[tense music]

- He was one of the person that we questioned

because he was the last person to see her alive.

"Did you get into a fight? Did you have an argument?

Can you tell me more?"

[tense music]

When I saw him, he wouldn't look me into my eyes,

and he didn't come to the funeral.

Why he didn't come to the funeral?

That created some suspicion,

so we have to take that lead and investigate it.

[tense music]

- Caroline Love, a young woman who worked

in the fast food restaurants around Eastland Mall,

just disappeared.

- Her cousin was considered suspect.

He was the last person known to have seen her alive,

and he said he gave her a ride home.

- His vehicle was searched,

but we didn't have anything that could link him

to any foul play because we didn't have

a crime or a crime scene.

All we have is a missing person.

[tense music]

- We've had a break without any activity

when Shawna Hawk, another young woman, is found murdered.

- She was just a college student going through life,

making her way.

The family came home and found Shawna

inside of a bathtub filled with water.

Could she have drowned?

Could she have taken some pills?

We had no idea.

Autopsy later determined that she was strangled.

So, then we knew that we had a homicide.

We didn't have any forced entry to the house,

and the house was really not disturbed

like it was a burglary.

It was what we called a neat crime scene.

They were very comfortable being in the home.

And so, is it somebody that she knew?

[disjointed tense music]

[soft ominous music]

- Henry Wallace at age 16 was a pretty popular,

charming young man who was a cheerleader at school.

- Henry would be just mimicking what he saw

and trying to be normal because he always felt different.

- People at school are seeing a likable young man,

but in private he suddenly shows the bad

or dark side of himself.

- There are a lot more people that wanna mix

sexual pleasure and violence,

but they don't do it because of the taboo.

But if you have enough of that kind of pornography,

there are some who look for someone

to replace their fantasies.

They need a real person and an event to satisfy

this mixture of sexual pleasure and violence.

and I remember one morning she was going to school.

I saw her walking and I left and I picked her up

and I took her to this wooded area near the school.

I asked her to have sex with me first and she said no.

I started touching her on her legs and thighs and stuff,

but she was still saying no.

That's when I tried to force myself on her,

but no rape occurred.

- Henry Wallace is coming to master the art

of having parts of himself that are tucked away somewhere

while harboring terrible unresolved feelings

that date back to when he was a child,

feelings of emasculation and self-loathing

that are being processed

through increasingly violent fantasies.

[tense music]

- How many victimized black women do we have?

We have several, and we have no leads on any of them.

- We investigated all these cases

on top of the hundred murders that we were working.

- Police started seeing more dead Black women.

Audrey Spain, Valencia Jumper,

and a month later, Michelle Stinson,

all found dead in their apartments.

- [Reporter] Murder after murder after murder.

- Police now have three more young women dead

associated with violence and with strangulation.

- These women had a reputation of being a good person,

a responsible person.

There was nothing that would indicate

that they would fall into bad company

or end up doing anything that would cause their demise.

[tense music]

- We've had a break from September to February

without any activity, but this escalated fairly quickly

with another young woman found murdered in her apartment,

and her baby was there with her.

- The grandmother had come to her apartment.

She finds that the door is ajar.

She goes in, she finds the four-month-old unattended

and Vanessa Mack on the bed, and she calls the police.

She allowed whoever attacked her into the home,

and all of a sudden people were really afraid.

[tense music]

There was someone killing young Black women,

but they had no suspects.

All of a sudden a sense of imminent danger was there

for young African American women like me.

- We would see the use of strangulation.

Very, very unusual to find those in murder cases.

We also have these really neat crime scenes.

Everything's wiped down.

Everything's put back.

There's no sign that there's a break in.

- We didn't have any evidence, any leads,

and we were worried that we would have

more and more cases.

Emotionally, we were up and down.

This person was capitalizing on us

as detectives being overworked.

[tense music]

- Again, very similar scene.

Vanessa Mack, she is raped, strangled,

but in this case, her baby was there with her.

The baby is fine, but this was horrifying.

[tense music]

The detectives track that, and there's been use on her card,

so he pulled up the ATM video.

You can't really see the face very well, but you can see

this gold Christian cross earring very clearly.

- The number one question on their mind is who and why?

[tense music]

- At age 22, we see Henry in the Navy

with excellent reviews.

In a sense, he's escaped the horrific childhood

that he had come from, but we have somebody who

by day is this high-functioning member of the Navy,

but then by night, when at a port is starting to engage

in rough sex with sex workers.

- A lotta rough sex.

Most of the time it was intentionally

with women smaller than me.

- He has now gotten a taste for domination and control,

needing more and more and more to achieve that feeling.

A couple of us guys went down to the room.

She wouldn't let anybody in,

but she knew me, so she let me in.

I took the rings from her and I made her get undressed

- I think that this stage in his life in many ways

sets the stage for the next chapter,

giving the total vent to the so-called bad Henry.

- Like a lot of people who commit sexual violence,

men like this will describe themselves

as being fragmented into a good self and a bad self

where one part of the self is healthy,

while the other part of the self is harboring

all of this terrible unresolved anger and frustration

and misogyny and other feelings of emasculation

that long to be righted or acted out.

So, I felt invincible.

[tense music]

- We had an unusual

amount of Black females

becoming missing and also murdered.

They did not receive the media attention

that other cases got during that time.

- These were people who were doing

what you and I do on a daily basis.

You make friends, you go to work,

you take care of your kids, and you don't expect

that one of those friends could end up murdered.

[soft ominous music]

Her boyfriend comes home and finds Brandi

dead from strangulation.

The boyfriend finds the 10-month-old son in his crib

and he's got a towel tied around his throat,

[soft ominous music continues]

choking, trying to get air.

The police have another woman

in their apartment strangled

by an object from their apartment.

No signs of forced entry, no fingerprints.

[tense music]

- In the same apartment complex

where they found Brandi Henderson, the very next day,

they find a woman named Betty Baucum dead.

- And her death is ruled also ligature strangulation.

We found two within one day.

It was a horrible nightmare.

With Betty Baucum, her car was missing.

- So we're looking for Betty Jean Baucum's car,

and eventually we found it in a vacant parking lot.

We take it downtown and process the car.

- The perpetrator has always wiped everything down,

but this time he leaves a palm print

on the trunk of her car.

[tense music]

Here's this killing spree all occurring

with a very narrow geographic footprint.

There's no forensic evidence to take,

but he leaves a palm print on the trunk of Betty's car.

- We ran those fingerprints and they came back

to Henry Louis Wallace.

He's just the average thief committing small petty crimes.

- They pull up one of his photographs

and he is wearing a cross earring.

The detective goes, "Wait a minute,"

and goes back to the ATM video from Vanessa Mack's ATM card.

And they're like, whoa.

- The police are able to notice this signature earring

in Henry Louis Wallace's photo.

- For the first time, they have his name,

and they have evidence that it was him.

- We don't have this violent person

that committed rapes and robberies.

So, who is Henry Louis Wallace?

[ominous music]

[soft tense music]

- While he was a member of the Navy,

Henry ended up marrying his high school sweetheart,

and she and her daughter were given benefits

that come along with the armed services.

- He gets to be the dad he didn't have.

We start to see a downward spiral

that seems to begin with getting caught

committing some burglaries while in the Navy.

He is permitted to be honorably discharged.

This requires him to go home to his wife,

and there's some trouble in paradise in the sense that

this desire for rough aggressive sexual activity

is starting to spill over into the lovemaking

between him and his wife.

- She told me that when we had sex,

that it reminded her of when she was raped.

- She ended the sexual relationship

because she didn't like his style of lovemaking.

- My wife didn't wanna be with me anymore.

And I was very hurt.

- Men who've had mothers that have been cruel to them,

what can happen is in a development

of a kind of a terrible,

cynical attitude toward women in general.

So, after the marriage breaks apart,

he feels duped that he actually fell for the idea

that some relationships can be real.

[dramatic music]

- The rapes of the prostitutes

started occurring very shortly after we broke up.

I grew to hate her very much.

- He thought he could bank on his wife

to undo all the terrible feelings of rejection,

emasculation from his mother.

She becomes a focus of all of his rage.

- People deal with crisis in life in different ways.

I absorbed the pain from the breakup of the marriage,

the pain from my childhood, all that stuff was absorbed,

but never let out in any way.

[ominous music]

[soft tense music]

- After linking the palm print on the trunk

of Betty Baucum's car to Henry Louis Wallace,

they put out an APB.

- This was a huge turning point.

Now that they could work back,

they saw Henry Louis Wallace everywhere they looked.

[dramatic music]

Somebody's roommate dated him,

somebody else's sister or friend or the victim themselves

worked with him at a fast food restaurant.

[cash register beeping]

- This was clearly someone who was known

either as a coworker or as a neighbor or friend

who is going to steal from you,

rape you, and then strangle you to death.

[tense music]

- [Reporter] A single brutal killing is enough

to shock a neighborhood,

but when it happens again and again and again,

an entire city can be traumatized.

- Here's this killing spree,

and Henry Wallace is the number one suspect.

- So, is this our serial killer?

In the '90s, most serial killers were white males

living with their mothers, middle aged,

and he fit none of the FBI profile.

- According to investigators,

the killer is out there somewhere

and they feel certain he could strike again.

- We get the arrest warrant,

we go out to the residence in the area that he frequents,

but Henry is running from the law

and people are still dying.

[tense music continues]

Debra Slaughter was found strangled and stabbed

inside of her home.

- This was horrifying.

Three people basically in two days,

Brandi Henderson, Betty Baucum,

and Debra Ann Slaughter.

- Tonight, police aren't taking any chances at all.

They're setting up perimeters

all around the Lake Apartments,

checking license plates as people come in and go out.

- A couple of friends had started

to put two and two together.

One of Henry Wallace's friends turned him in

and they found him hiding.

Well, he was arrested.

He was disheveled.

He just really looked like he had lost his mind.

Henry Louis Wallace was like the first time

that the Black community came to grips with the fact

that this is a Black man who is a serial killer,

because that was really something

that we didn't feel happened in the Black community.

- We got him down to the station

and began our marathon interview with him.

- [Officer] Mr. Wallace, you've been advised of your rights.

- He wasn't vulgar, didn't talk loud,

didn't use any profanity, very polite,

and he was seen to be a very honest guy.

[tense music]

- Henry asked for a sheet of paper,

and then he wrote a list of names

and a question mark.

And he basically turned it around and says,

"These are the people that I'm responsible for."

[tense music]

And so now we're trying to determine

what did this list mean?

Is this list valid?

We started comparing the list with our homicide board.

That's when I realized Carolina Love is not

on our homicide board because she is a missing person.

And so now we're trying to determine

what's the question mark?

And he said he remembered dumping the body

on Rozzelles Ferry Road and we only had one body

dumped into that site, Sharon Nance.

We believed that he just didn't start in Charlotte.

Charlotte was his second hunting ground.

Henry Louis Wallace also confessed to Shonda Bethay

in Barnwell, South Carolina,

and the murder of Miss Bethay

was Henry Louis Wallace' first murder.

[soft ominous music]

- Just before the transition into murder,

Henry has become involved with a young female.

- Tashonda Bethea.

She was 18, so I was 25.

It was a nonverbal agreement that we were seeing each other.

There was a lot of kissing and touching,

And now I'm thinking, well, she just used me.

- Uh huh. Now I'm getting angry,

- Uh huh. and I gotta find

someplace to put this anger.

I just got on the street,

and all of a sudden I saw her walking by herself

and I picked her up, and it was like I felt that rush.

And I took her out of the city limits

and I turned off into this wooded area,

and I got out and went into the trunk of the car

and got the .357 - Uh huh.

and opened her door

and told her to get out. - Mm hmm.

- Uh huh.

and I told her to get undressed.

She got undressed

and I laid her on the hood of the car

- You have somebody who is filled with fury,

misogynistic anger, feelings of disappointment

and abandonment, and he's with somebody

that he can play out all of that rage

because something takes him over.

- I grabbed her by her neck.

I could hear her gasping for air.

And I knew that it was gonna happen,

but I couldn't prevent it from happening.

That's when the switch was flipped

and I just started choking

and just choking and choking and choking.

And I couldn't stop.

[soft ominous music]

[ominous music]

Tashonda Bethea.

I felt she used me and I could feel the anger and the rage.

And I told her to get dressed,

and she turned around to pick up her pants

and her panties off the ground.

That's when I put the choke hold on and she passed out.

I put her into back seat of the car.

We drove further outta town where they had

this little pond called Anderson's Pond.

I had a utility knife and I cut her throat

and I cut her wrists.

She was gasping for air.

I rolled her over into the pond.

She sunk right away.

I could hear the bubbles, she was trying to breathe.

[soft tinkling music]

- In this first murder, we see the culmination

of a very long, decades old resentment,

feelings of rejection and emasculation from his mother.

Tashonda becomes a focus of all of his rage

because she seems to him to be what happens

when you foolishly trust and then are burned.

This is someone who used serial sexual homicide

as an expression of control and domination and power

to right some wrong that they feel they have experienced.

The trouble, of course, is that even after the first murder,

bad Henry [chuckles] doesn't go away.

So, there is a need to go out and keep doing it

over and over again with different women.

[ominous music]

- He was very good at what he did

because he'd be your friend.

Serial killers generally have an ability

to be very charming and very charismatic,

and Henry Louis Wallace is no different.

- The confession of Henry Louis Wallace

lasted maybe two days.

To get somebody into the box and really get a confession

is the ultimate joy that you could ever have

[dramatic music]

because you're gonna bring the family closure.

He told us things that we did not know.

He wanted to point out that he was a very smart guy.

How he covered the evidence,

he made his victims shower and redress,

and that deletes a lot of the evidence away from the body.

He put the items that he wasn't sure

that he touched or wiped in an oven and turned it on warm

because it evaporated the fingerprints.

All of this is how he manipulated the crime scene,

took us off of his tracks of catching him.

- A lot of experts weighed in

about what might have created this,

but the jurors didn't care.

Lots of people have backgrounds where mama's whooped 'em.

Lots of kids have unfortunate first sexual experiences,

but they don't make choices

that lead to harming other people.

- When Henry Wallace says that there's bad Henry

and good Henry and now bad Henry is given total control,

it's what most people mean when they talk about the impulses

being let out to play, but ultimately,

he is in control of himself.

- I really believe that serial murderers are made,

they're not born.

Childhood trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse,

extreme poverty, malnourishment,

all of those things, they will impact a child.

And that's the story of Henry Louis Wallace.

[ominous music]

- Henry Louis Wallace knew each of his victims.

All of his victims would consider him

a good associate or even a friend.

I remember talking to Carolina Love's family,

and Henry was sitting there listening to us

talk to the family, and it is said that he may have

even attended the funerals of couple of the victims.

You're killing your friends, and it absolutely makes me mad.

- That was the scariest part,

that idea that the devil could live amongst you.

The devil could be someone right here in the room with you.