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WHAT BECAME OF HENRY WALLACE?

Author: DAVE MONIZ, Staff Writer

Dateline: BARNWELL

Marsha Brown hardly noticed when a message from the Charlotte police flashed across her screen at the Barnwell County Sheriff's Department last Sunday. It was a crime bulletin about a man accused of serial murders in Charlotte. The name at the end of the message caught her eye. Henry Wallace, it read. Brown, a Sheriff's Department dispatcher, thought, "This can't be true." The Henry Wallace she knew, a close friend for years, was as gentle as a lamb. She hurriedly picked up the telephone and dialed Wallace's cousin, asking for Henry's birth date. When his cousin told her, Nov. 4, 1965, same as on the computer, Brown sat silent. The news spread quickly across Barnwell. The 28-year-old man many people knew as the charming second-born of Lottie Wallace had been accused of strangling 10 women in Charlotte. In North Carolina, the emerging picture of Henry Wallace was far different from the one Brown had in her head. Police and family members of the women he had confessed to killing saw a monster, a bug-eyed crack addict who befriended young women, then choked the breath out of them with his broad shoulders and strong hands. It wasn't the Henry Wallace that Brown and hundreds of others in Barnwell had grown up with, seen in his high school cheerleading sweater or heard on the radio as the popular DJ "The Night Rider." It wasn't the Henry Wallace who had sent his third-grade teacher a Mother's Day card when he was thousands of miles away on a Navy ship. Said the mother of a close friend from high school, pained by the news of Wallace's arrest: "We got boogers walking down the street you would expect this of. But not Henry. I would have trusted him with my daughter anywhere."
The boy next door Henry Wallace grew up like most kids in Barnwell. The second child of a tireless textile employee, he played youth sports and enjoyed the cozy, small- town ways of a friendly place. His mother, known to many in the town of 6,000 as Lottie Mae, told friends she wanted to make a better life for her two children. By the time he got to high school, Wallace was one of the most popular kids on campus. As a senior, he was a member of the student council and had even joined the cheerleading squad as its only boy. His senior year, Wallace was elected captain and in school pictures he looks doe-eyed and innocent, which is pretty much the way classmates remember him. Few at Barnwell High want to talk about Wallace now, but Principal Phil Flynn said he was a good student who worked hard to become part of the student body and was admired by classmates. Brown described his popularity this way: "You remember how people look at the captain of the football team? That's what he was like," she said. Marbea Nix, a 1982 graduate of Barnwell High School, had known him since first grade. She remembers him the way most people in Barnwell who knew him do -- friendly, cheerful, bright and exceptionally well-mannered. She thought it a little strange that he was the only boy cheerleader at the school, a perennial powerhouse in football and baseball. "It was kind of odd," Nix said of his cheerleading, but few gave it a second thought in 1983, when the energetic Wallace earned his diploma. One of the first people he impressed was Bobby Nichols, sales manager and afternoon air personality at WBAW-FM in Barnwell. Wallace had started working at the station his senior year in high school, after impressing Nichols one day. "He walked in here and said, 'I'm Henry Wallace. I love your show, and I would like to work for you.' " Nichols was so impressed by Wallace that he would let him borrow his car to run errands. Wallace had a way of making whatever he was talking about sound interesting, and he was great at mimicking singers, especially rap artists. Nichols eventually hired him as a weekend disc jockey in 1988, when Wallace returned to Barnwell after four years in the Navy. "Henry was the boy next door," Nichols said.
The first clues Nichols and others in Barnwell thought the Navy would be good for Wallace. When he came back in 1988, Wallace was stocky and self-assured, pretty much the same guy who had women falling all over him when he left. Few knew, however, that in the service he had been arrested in January 1988 in Bremerton, Wash., charged with trying to steal a VCR, TV and microwave. Shortly after Wallace returned to Barnwell, he began leaving clues, not obvious at first, that something was wrong. Nichols said the station had to ask Nichols to leave in 1989 when tapes and other equipment began turning up missing. He and station manager Drew Wilder suspected Wallace had taken them, but couldn't prove it. Both Nichols and Wilder remember Wallace didn't seem the least bit upset when they confronted him about the tapes and let him go. Wallace found other jobs easily, winning employers over with his clean-cut looks and gentle smile. Nichols remembers how Henry just walked into Sandoz Chemical Co. in Barnwell County and got a job at the popular plant, which regularly turned away hundreds of applicants. "He was smooth," Nichols said. "Charming." After Wallace became the prime suspect in a February 1991 burglary at Barnwell High School, he convinced Nichols that he was not the one who had broken into the gymnasium and taken a $1,100 camcorder. Wallace was eventually convicted of the crime, after he tried to sell some items stolen from the school to a Barnwell pawnshop. Nichols had always thought Wallace was destined to do very good things with his life. But after he heard about the pawnshop and the arrest, he "lost faith in Henry's smartness."
Trading on reputation Marsha Brown didn't think much about the burglary charges. She and Wallace had been as close as brother and sister after high school, and despite his scrapes with the law he seemed to be the same friendly guy. One thing about him did strike others as unusual. Wallace, who had once ballooned to 251 pounds on his 6-foot, 1-inch frame, seemed to gain and lose weight in furious cycles after he came back from the Navy. The break-in, however, was part of an emerging pattern Wallace carefully guarded from his friends, and even from his mother. In March 1990, about a year before the burglary at Barnwell High School, a good friend of Brown's, 18-year-old Tashanda Bethea, disappeared. On April 1, two weeks after she was reported missing, her body was found at Anderson's Pond, a scenic spot a few miles northwest of Barnwell. What many people in Barnwell didn't know at the time was that Wallace was the prime suspect. The Barnwell County Sheriff's Department interrogated Wallace in Allendale, where he was being held in connection with the attempted rape of another Barnwell woman, 16-year-old Eartha Brown. Wallace had picked up Brown, an acquaintance from childhood, for a date one night in March 1990 and took her to an Allendale motel, where he told her he was going to steal some TVs, she said. Once inside the motel, Brown said, Wallace grabbed her and tried to rip her clothes off. When she resisted, he put a pistol to her head and said he was going to kill her, "just like he did Shan," as Tashanda Bethea was known to her friends. When Brown screamed, he left the motel and drove her home. Eartha Brown said earlier this week that she was so scared of Wallace she never mentioned to anyone else what he had said about killing Bethea. Wallace spent only eight days in an Allendale jail on the attempted rape charge. He entered a pretrial intervention program for nonviolent offenders, which he never completed. After Wallace was released, Eartha Brown said, he began driving by a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where she worked and would glare at her. She said Lottie Wallace visited her, too, and "cussed her out" for accusing her son of rape. Brown said prosecutors never told her or her mother that Wallace would enter the nonviolent offenders program instead of going to prison. Unlike many others in Barnwell, Brown said she is not surprised that Wallace has admitted killing 11 women. One of the few others who was not surprised is Barnwell County Sheriff Joey Zorn, who believed four years ago that Wallace had killed Bethea. But even after an intense interrogation, he said, Wallace would not crack. There were no witnesses who could place her in his car the night she was killed, and there was no physical evidence. During an interview with Wallace in Charlotte this week, Zorn said, he learned how clever Wallace had been. After choking Bethea and slashing her wrists and throat, Wallace told the sheriff, he washed the inside and outside of his car so completely that SLED investigators who examined his car could find no trace of Bethea.
Con man rides system Wallace was not done skating past the criminal justice system in South Carolina after eluding arrest in the Bethea case and escaping jail for trying to rape Brown in 1990. After serving 3 1/2 months in an Allendale prison on separate breaking- and-entering charges in Barnwell and Allendale in 1991, he moved to Rock Hill to live with his sister, Yvonne. On Feb. 25, 1992, a few months after he moved to Charlotte, he was charged with raping and kidnapping 17-year-old Keeber Lewis at gunpoint in York County. Despite his growing criminal record, Wallace was released on his own recognizance, and York County officials somehow lost track of him. In May 1992, Charlotte police discovered the body of Sharon Lovette Nance, the first of 10 women Wallace has admitted strangling. By the time Debra Ann Slaughter was choked to death on March 12 of this year, Wallace had already been arrested five times for burglary, grand larceny, attempted rape and shoplifting, had violated parole and had tested positive for cocaine. But he had spent little more than three months in jail. As relatives of the victims and others point fingers at various law enforcement agencies, some in Barnwell see a different side of the story. Nichols said he believes that Wallace was such a skillful con man that he was able to trade on his reputation for years, even after it became apparent that he was troubled and violent. He was kind of like Raskolnikov, the main character in the novel "Crime and Punishment." He didn't look or act like a criminal. Many in town knew his sister as an honor student who studied hard and went to college. And his mother was a kind of blue-collar heroine. Even after Wallace got in trouble with the law, he continued to work as a disc jockey at youth clubs in Barnwell County, and women still found his bubbly personality attractive. "He was nice and polite and he was getting away with small stuff," Nichols said, theorizing that Wallace gained confidence after it was clear he could convince people he was not a bad person. "You could look him in the eye and you would say, 'Yeah, I believe you.' If they put him to a lie detector test, he would pass it," Nichols said. Marsha Brown, his longtime friend, got only one tiny clue that something was different about him in recent months. It came this past December, when he was back from Charlotte visiting at Christmas. She spotted him in Wal-Mart. "He hadn't stopped by or called me, and that was the first time that had ever happened," Brown said. "I said to him playfully, 'Leave me alone.' " Caption:
1. Marsha Brown holds a photo of Tashanda Bethea, who disappeared in March 1990. What many people didn't know at the time was that her friend Henry Wallace was the prime suspect. 2. Bethea's body was found in Anderson's Pond spillway, outside Barnwell, in April 1990. Photos by Pam Royal / The State