October 11, 2023 • 27 mins
Henry Louis Wallace terrorized Charlotte, North Carolina, from May 1992 to March 1994. Wallace preyed on lower economic-class Black women between 17 and 35 years old. He knew most of his victims, some through his job at Taco Bell, and gained their trust with his friendly demeanor and gentle nature-concealing a monster fueled by drug abuse and rage against women. A rarity in that he was an African-American serial killer, his murderous rampage spurred controversy throughout the city.
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, sits down with author Ron Chepesiuk to discuss in depth the serial killings of the infamous Taco Bell strangler. They also discuss possible motives, the killers’ drug use, and similarities of each case that were overlooked.
Show Notes:
- [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum.
- [1:38] Sheryl introduces Ron Chepesiuk to the listeners
- [2:12] BAD HENRY: The Murderous Rampage of ‘The Taco Bell Strangler’
- [4:59] “People ask me: ‘What do you need to be a writer?’ I said you got to have perseverance above everything. it's a craft. You may not be able to write like Hemingway, but if you study the craft, you should be able to write well enough to be a qualified professional writer.”
- [5:35] Background of serial killings
- [9:00] Sheryl and Ron give further details about various murders committed and possible motives as to why
- [17:50] Drug use caused the murder streak to become reckless
- [19:09] Similarities of the murders are explained
- [21:24] Question: Well, is it true that the FBI said these murders were not connected?
- [26:03] Question: Can you tell the listeners about the project you’re currently working on?
- [26:15] Paraiso Blanco
- [27:09] “There's a pattern in every crime. Something that gives the police an edge on the criminal's weakness. And we know he has a weakness, or he wouldn't be a criminal.” -H.N
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review! How to Leave an Apple Podcast Review: First, Open the podcast app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. Then, hit the “Search” tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page and search for Zone 7. Select the podcast, scroll down to find the subheading “Ratings & Reviews”. and select “Write a Review.” Next, select the number of stars you’d like to leave. Please choose 5 stars! Using the text box which says “Title,” write a title for your review. Then in the text box, write the review itself. The review can be up to 300 words long, but doesn’t need to be much more than: “Love the show! Thanks!” or Once you’re done select “Send” in the upper right-hand corner.
---
Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidna
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
The Crystal was the first restaurant that I remember ever
seeing young people sitting in booths by themselves without their parents.
My sisters and I could go there and all five
of us eat hamburgers and get a coke for just
a couple of dollars. At that time, I think the
(00:31):
hamburgers were ten cents. One of my favorite things to
do was to sit on the red top barstools and
just spin and spin and spend I loved that time
with just our sisters. Before that, I had never been
to a restaurant without my parents, and most of the
time our grandparents were with us too. It was an
(00:53):
incredible event to me that just the five of us
could go by ourselves. Thought about parents not being there
could actually be putting us in danger, y'all. I don't
often get to talk to somebody that is a full
(01:14):
Bright scholar, and I have never talked to one that
was a two time recipient. I didn't even know that
was possible. I thought if you got the full Bright scholarship,
that was enough to ride your career. I didn't know
you get a second one. So from now on, if
(01:34):
anybody ever asked me if I had a full Bright scholarship.
I'm gonna say no because Ron Chipsick took mine. He
took my turn. But y'all we have Ron Chipsick with us.
He is an author. He's written forty five books. He's
written screenplays, he's written movies. He is a black belt
(01:58):
in taekwondo. He studied right here in Atlanta at Clark
Atlanta University. He is a producer, a journalist, a screenwriter,
an author. He wrote the book Bad Henry, and he
also wrote The Murderous Rampage of the Taco Bell Strangler.
(02:21):
And tonight, it is my pleasure to welcome Ron Chipsick here. Ron,
welcome to Zone seven.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it very much. You cannot
get too full grace. You can't get more than to full.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Grace, can't get more than two.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, yeah, right, I know one guy. I have a
friend that's English professor that got three of them, and
they did away with that about fifteen years ago. So
I'm one, I guess, one of the last ones to
get a two time full Grace scholarship.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
You know, it's one of those things where when you
hear fulbright scholar, I mean that kind of stops you
in your tracks anyway, because now it's like, Okay, I'm
dealing with somebody that you know might be right here
in the education line. But then when you hear too,
and you hear about the two different countries that you
were at, you know, Ireland and Indonesia, and then your
(03:18):
work and then your whole body of work, it is
shocking to me that you did not start writing earlier
in your life.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I didn't really sell anything until I was thirty five
on that, and didn't really start writing, and I published
my first book when I was about forty on that.
So yeah, it was quite amazing. When I was young.
I wanted to be a writer, I really did, but
I didn't see any point in broadcasting it if I
wasn't doing any writing, because I knew enough people that
(03:48):
said they were writers who never owned anything on that,
and I promised myself that I would never be like that.
I said I would commit myself to the craft if
I ever decided to do it. And what happened was
I was on the sabbatical, the first one from my
university where I was teaching in Ireland, and I was
studying at the National University of Ireland and for some reason.
(04:11):
One day I decided I wanted to write. You know,
I just woke up and I wanted to be a writer.
And I said, well, I'm going to write. And there
was this library there chester Chester, Baty Library started by
an American, really famous, and I said, I'm going to
write a profile of that library. I'm going to sell
it to a library magazine because I was trained as
a librarian. And I sat down and I said, well,
(04:34):
how am I going to do this? I remember it
still like it was amazing that I finished the article
and I sent it off and it was published, which
was really a crowd achievement for me. And then I said,
well if I do it once and maybe I could
do it again. And I found out it wasn't that easy.
I was rejected hundreds of times, you know, with magazine
ideas that I sent off to publications asking if they'd
(04:56):
be interested in articles about them. You got to stick
with it. Asked me, what do you need to be
a writer. He said, you gotta have perseverance, love everything
you know. It's a craft. You may not be able
to write like anyway if you study the craft, but
you should be able to write well enough to be
a qualified as a professional writer and to be able
(05:16):
to maybe make a living at it, well.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
You absolutely stuck with it. And that's another reason I'm
so thrilled to have you here, because I want to
talk about Henry Lewis Wallace, aka the Taco Bell Strangler.
Now just for our listeners, he killed eleven women between
March eighth, nineteen ninety and March eight, nineteen ninety four.
(05:44):
He was a Navy veteran. He was known around the
Seattle area. He had committed burglaries. He had been arrested
in nineteen eighty eight prior to the murders for breaking
an entering where he got a couple of years of probation.
Make most of those meetings, but again he was on
law enforces radar. A little an unusual thing about him,
(06:09):
and Ron, if you could talk about this, he had
social graces.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He's really chilling and it really makes you question your
belief in humanity because to have a person like this
walk around. I talked to one of his classmates in
high school and she was shocked to learn that Henry
was a serial killer. You know, she said, there was
no indication in high school. He was very popular, he
(06:35):
was the only cheerleader on the school team. He was
a member of the four h club and student council.
And you know, all these girls trusted him. They really
liked him. You know, they confided to him at about
their boyfriends and other things in their lives. And then
(06:57):
he'd go home to a complete different experience. He grew
up in a shack, I mean, with no indoor plumbing
at all, and he had to carry the excrement out
every day in pales. And he had a really brutal
mother who didn't have much success in life with the
(07:20):
opposite sex, and she took out her frustrations on her children.
And he had a sister too, Levonne, and she would
beat him regularly, and if she was too tired to
beat him, she'd get each of them to beat the
other person. On that. She paraded her son around in
a girl's outfit. In the neighborhood. It was a poor neighborhood.
(07:41):
This is Barnwell, South Carolina, about six thousand people, half
of them black, half white. The neighborhood was kind of tough.
He was sexually abused by some of the older girls
in the neighborhood on that and he really had developed
this intense inner hatred of the opposite sex, you know,
(08:02):
which eventually came out in the various murders that he committed.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Now, when she would make him parade around in girls'
dresses and beat him, did that go up until what age?
Do you know?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
She stayed in his life until is his twenties when
he went away to the military, he came back, he
stayed with her, and she had this real hold over
him on that she really didn't like the fact that
he was interested in the opposite sex. And she would
check on his girlfriends. On that. There was one girlfriend
(08:37):
he had in Charleston, which is a city a couple
hours away from Marnble. She went to Charleston to look
up this girlfriend to tell her to stay away from her.
Henry on that sort of stuff. She, you know, had
a hard life. She worked in a textile factory. Like
I said, she just took her frustrations out on her
(08:59):
children and accumulated. I talked to a couple of psychologists
that interviewed him, you know, and they said that he had,
deep down inside him, this visceral deeply felt hatred of
the opposite sex.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
So March eighth, nineteen ninety He murders an eighteen year
old high school student and dumps her body in a
lake to chand Bethea.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
He had a crush, He had sort of a fascination
with her, you know. He wanted her to go for
a ride with him, and she always refused him and
all that. But one day she decided that she would
go and go with him, and he took her out
to the lake and I put the make on her
and she resisted. She made the mistake of saying that
(09:42):
she was going to tell her parents, and he panicked
and he murdered her. He strangled her and dumped her
body there. And it should have been an easy murder
to solve for the police, incredibly, because they were onto
him right from the beginning. You know, he was on
the last few will to see him. And I interviewed
a couple of the cops that investigated the case, and
(10:05):
they said that they really suspected Henry, but they never
had any evidence. He eventually decided to get out of
Dodge and he left Barnwell. By that time, he was
married and his marriage was falling apart, and he had
broken into a radio station and the high school and
(10:26):
stolen some stuff and was caught, and so he realized
that his stay in Barnwall was was pretty well over.
So he decided to leave, and that's when he left
for my town here, rock Hill. He actually spent about
nine months here in my town and was accused of
attempted rape of this woman. And again he always always
(10:48):
seemed to leave at the right time. But he left
rock Hill and went to Charlotte down the road Charlotte's
about thirty thirty minutes from my town, started to get
jobs in fast food restaurants. That's where the tackle bell
connection came from.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Well before we get to November nineteen ninety one, I
just want to point out for everybody because this always
drives me crazy when I'm looking at a case file
with Shanda Bethea, the police actually questioned him, so they
had a reason to go to him and you know,
question him about her murder. So again, I always tell
(11:28):
people ninety percent of the time when you have a
cold case, that killer's name is going to be in
your case file. I promise you.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
They said they wanted to charge him, but they didn't
have enough evidence to keep him. He was really blessed
in a lot of ways, you know, in Charlotte. He
had said, incompetent police work on that people just couldn't
make the connections. You know, most of the murders that
he committed where in East Charlotte within a five mile radius.
Could you imagine that? No, Yeah, he killed like ten
(11:59):
women and couldn't over a two year period, as these
murders are being committed of these young, black, relatively poor women,
they never made the connection. None of the cops made
the connection. And he had connections with all of the
people that he murdered, he knew them. It was believed
that he was the first serial killer to know all
(12:20):
of his victims, which was very abnormal for But I
found out I had somebody on my radio show told
me about Jerry Marcus and he was a serial killer
before for Wallace, and he knew all of his victims.
He murdered about seven I think a seven women on
that so he wasn't really the first, but he was
one of the first that knew all of the women,
(12:40):
and the police still couldn't make the connection. But it's
a little more complicated than that. The police were really
understaffed at that time. Charlotte was changing, it was becoming
a big commercial center and the population was exploding. We're
having a lot of people coming up from the north
and all that. With that came crime. Right in nineteen
(13:00):
ninety three was the biggest murder rate in the history
of Charlotte's I think some of the one hundred and
twenty nine murders. And at that time you only had
like seven police investigating felonies, right, and so you imagine
each had like twelve thirteen cases, pretty well overwhelmed, and
the city government refused to increase their resources, you know,
(13:21):
technology and all that, so they were behind in technology vanpower,
and Wallace was able to slip through the cracks because
of that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
It's just mind blowing. But you know, then May of
ninety two he kills Sharer Nance. He beat her and
then dumped her near some railroad tracks. So again you've
got one thrown in a lake, one now with railroad tracks,
so maybe law enforcement is not making the connection. And
then June of nineteen ninety two, he rapes and strangles
(13:52):
Caroline Love, twenty years old, at her apartment and then
dumps her body in a wooded area.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, this is interesting. Carolyn Love actually was the roommate
of his girlfriend Sadie Night McKnight.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Oh yeah, this is where it starts to get twisted.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Ron Yeah, yeah, but this may be the only murder
that he committed that had a real sexual component from
the beginning. He admits that he was attracted to her.
He saw her in shorts and he was attracted on that,
So in may I've had a sexual component. But yeah,
he murdered her and actually went with a Caroline's sister
(14:32):
and Sadie McKnight his girlfriend to the police station to
help them file a missing person's report.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Now, I want to be sure everybody heard you. He
goes with the victim's sister and his girlfriend to the
police station to report her missing.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Nobody thought anything of it, even the next murder, you know,
Shaanna Hawk, I mean the mother of Desumpter, who was
a really a remarkable woman, came up to her a
couple of days after them and told her, I'm really sorry,
miss Sumpter about your daughter. You know, I can't imagine
the loss and all that on that and she put
(15:10):
out of her mind. She goes, oh, Henry, Henry's too sweet.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and he was her supervisor at Taco bail and listen,
I want everybody to understand. I know, legally she was
a woman that y'all, she was twenty years old.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
All of these these younger ladies were really good, good people.
They were they were ambitious, you know, they were going
to school. They're working hard. You know, some of them
had two jobs. They have had big ambitions. Unfortunately, knew
Henry Wallace who befriended them and eventually murdered them. Now,
his big problem was drugs. You know, he had a
(15:47):
he had a bad drug habit. He picked it up
in the in the military. He picked up cocaine and
then the crackway was sweeping the United States in the
early nineties and he got hooked on crack. So he
needed money for his crack to support his crack habit,
and he started to murder some of the girls for that.
You know. They were like assistant manager at one of
(16:10):
the fast food places he worked, and he thought that
they would know the combination to the safe and all that,
and he ended up, you know, when he murdered some
of them, he's ended up selling their stuff. He put
in the car and sell it and all that. But
like I said, you know, all of this is going
on within a five mile radius, and a lot of
the girls knew each other, you know, the victims knew
(16:31):
each other, sure, and they worked with each other, and
still there was no connection. The police did not talk
to each other. That was part of their problem. They
did not compare notes on their cases. You know, that's right.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
They were all in apartments, all were working at a
fast food restaurant. Most were in college. And like SHAWNA. Hall,
here's another little tidbit for y'all, he also went to
her funeral. So now you've got to go into the
police department on one victim and now he's at the
funeral of another victim.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
He was very careful. I told you he had about
he had average intelligence. His his IQ was about average.
You know, he covered up his crimes. He knew, he
knew how to how to cover up his crimes, you know,
get rid of the fingerprints, even bade the bodies on
all that. He was very careful about earlier in his
(17:23):
crime speed, about covering up his his his murders. And
he would go home. He would expect something on TV
about some girl being murdered, right that he had murdered,
and he never saw anything on TV. You know, nobody
was paying attention, and so that encouraged him more. And
he might have actually got away with it if he
(17:43):
didn't have that drug habit, because as as the murderers progressed,
he got more careless because of his drug habit. And
then his girlfriend eventually left him, which shook him up.
She kicked him out because of his drug habit, and
he was essentially homeless. He was living with friends and
all that on Crack needed the money. Near the end
(18:03):
of his murder spree, he ended up killing two women
in the same apartment complex, which you know, I mean
here the police was right in front of you, police,
you know. So finally they caught on the made a
few connections and were able to identify him as as
the killer, and they went to arrest him March twelfth,
(18:25):
nineteen ninety four. And he was really strung out by then,
and so when he took him in, he was willing
to talk. And boy did he talk. I saw the transcripts.
The transcripts were amazing. He covered his whole life in
ten hours. Later. His defense team tried to get the
interviews expunged, but they were allowed into as evidence in
(18:50):
the case. Helped contribute to his sentence, which was death.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
I want to tell everybod about a few more victims
so they can see what you're saying as far as
some of the similarities. So June twenty second, Audrey Spain
is murdered. She's also a co worker at Taco Bell.
August tenth, nineteen ninety three, he rapes and strangles Valencia
Jumper twenty one, a college student who is also his
(19:22):
sister's friend. And here he sets her body on fire
and attends her funeral. Then we go to September fourteenth,
nineteen ninety three, Michelle Stintson again in an apartment, a
friend of his from Taco Bell. He rapes her stabs
her in front of her oldest son. Now an interesting thing.
(19:45):
On February the fourth, he's arrested for shoplifting. So they
have arrested him again, so they know about the burglaries.
Now we've got shoplifting, and they're not putting two and
six together. The twentieth, nineteen ninety four, he strangles and
rapes Vanessa little Mack twenty five in her apartment. He
(20:09):
knew her through her sister, who was a coworker at
Taco Bell. Now this is the day that Ron was
talking about. A minute ago. March the eighth, nineteen ninety four,
Wallace robbed, raped, and strangled twenty four year old Betty
Jean Backam. The victim worked with Wallace's girlfriend at Bojangles,
(20:30):
another fast food restaurant. Now this time he took several
valuables and her car and pawn them. On this day,
he goes back to the exact same apartment complex and
strangles a friend of his girlfriend, Brandy June Henderson eighteen,
(20:52):
while she held her baby. Attempted to strangle the baby.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
As well, right and lead. He he was watching the
news where they were talking about the murder with the
cousin of Brandy, isn't amazing, And he was talking about
how bad it was that she was murdered.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Well, you said a minute ago that he was lucky
in a lot of stages of his crimes.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, he was very lucky. Like I said that the
Indian competence helped it too, But he was very lucky.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Well, is it true that the FBI said that these
murders were not connected, it was not a serial killer.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah. There was a real famous FBI profiler, a guy
named Wrestler, that said that you know, he said if
he was if he was trying to be a serial killer,
he's going about it the wrong way. Whatever that meant
on that and so yeah, I mean they didn't attribute
because they were stumped. And so they brought the FBI
ended and they said that, you know, can you help
(21:49):
us And they looked at the case and they said no.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
If you're looking at just bodied disposal sites, I can
see that. When did they connect the fast food restaurants?
When was the taco bell connection made?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Well, they sat down some of the victims eventually and said, look,
he said, who knew your sister or your daughter wherever
they that they that they were victim of. And uh,
the only name that came up was Henry Wallace. You know,
he was connected to to to all of them. And
that's when they started to focus their attention. When when
(22:27):
he murdered Bachham, he had the ATM card, They had
the video, uh the ATM, but they didn't have a
good picture of him. But he had an ear ring
with a cross, and uh later you know, uh they
saw Henry when he brought him in that he had
the same cross. He didn't wipe the trunk of the
car that he had parked after he he killed Bacham
(22:50):
and they got a pomp print off that, and then
they started to check on him and they found out
that he had a criminal passed, you know, he he
was a rested like during that time, we're trying to
steal a thirty eight dollars sweater from Eastland Mall, you know,
which is a big mall there. They decided to bring
him in. By then he was in really bad chap
(23:12):
and he found him in a friend's house hiding and
they run him in and like I said, he was
willing to give everything up, babbed the way.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Well, you know, it's also one of those things you
tend to from TV. Always think this person's going to
be a loaner. They're going to be kind of creepy,
and as soon as you see him, you'll know, oh
my gosh, that's got to be him. He's got to
be the killer. But again, Wallace was friendly. He was
a high school cheerleader. He was a manager at a
(23:39):
fast food restaurant where he smiled and greeted people eight
to ten hours a day. They even called him Uncle Henry.
I mean, this was somebody that was sociable and very
connected to the community. I mean, even his sister and
girlfriend didn't suspect and they both lost more than one
person in this series of events.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
He had everybody full and when he came down, it
was shocking to a lot of people. And the trial
lasted two years. It was the biggest, biggest trial in
North Carolina history, biggest murder trial in North Caroline history.
They took about two years for it to be resolved,
and he was convicted of of murder and rape and
(24:24):
there's a whole bunch of slu of charges sent to death,
although the defense we're trying to get him off, you know,
saying there was no deliberate intent in his motive, so
he couldn't possibly be eligible for the death penalty. The
average weight from the time of sentencing to the time
of getting the chair was about eight years, so he
should have been probably dead by two thousand and five.
(24:47):
And in two thousand and five he had his last
appeal was denied, so all it took was a signature
from the governor, right, and he would have been executed
very quickly afterwards. But then, you know, the mood in
the country changed about the death family. Right in the
nineteen nineties when he was sentenced, more people were in
(25:08):
favor of the death family. But it came out that
a lot of people were being executed were innocent, or
there is questions about their sentencing or whatever, and so
that the tie turned, and so the governor of North
Carolina put a more attorney on the death sentence. So
he's been languishing in Central Prison in Raleigh since nineteen
ninety seven, twenty seven years.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Almost. Well, y'all, here's the takeaway. Victimology. Victimology, victimology. Somebody
should have sat down with these families. And I mean,
in the first three questions, where did she live? Where
did she go to school? Where did she work? I mean,
it's not you don't have to talk long to get
(25:50):
to where did she work? And when Taco Bell comes
up more than once, and then bo Jangles comes up
more than once, the connection is right there.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Ron.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
I shit you being here. I appreciate you talking about this,
and why don't you tell everybody about your project that's
coming up.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I also have a TV series that's come out on vix,
which is the biggest Spanish language streaming service in the world.
The series is called Raso Blanco White Paradise and it's
based on my book Crazy Charlie, and it's a thirty
part series and I've seen the first season. There's gonna
(26:27):
be two seasons. I've seen the first fifteen and I'm
very pleased with it. So that's another project that came out,
and I'm working on a book now about it, Dallas
soil Man, which is going to be interesting. And I
got several other other things in the works. I'm a
screenwriter as well, and I've got several my screenplays of
(26:47):
an option from movies and I'm hoping that some of
them click pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, we're going to be looking for all of them.
And Ron I again cannot thank you enough for being
with us and talking to us about the Taco Bell Strangler.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Well, it's a pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I'm going to end Zone seven the way that
I always do with a quote. There's a pattern in
every chrome, something that gives the police an edge on
the criminal's weakness. And we know he has a weakness,
or he wouldn't be a criminal. Helen Nielsen. I'm Cheryl McCollum,
(27:24):
and this is Zone seven.
The Crystal was the first restaurant that I remember ever
seeing young people sitting in booths by themselves without their parents.
My sisters and I could go there and all five
of us eat hamburgers and get a coke for just
a couple of dollars. At that time, I think the
(00:31):
hamburgers were ten cents. One of my favorite things to
do was to sit on the red top barstools and
just spin and spin and spend I loved that time
with just our sisters. Before that, I had never been
to a restaurant without my parents, and most of the
time our grandparents were with us too. It was an
(00:53):
incredible event to me that just the five of us
could go by ourselves. Thought about parents not being there
could actually be putting us in danger, y'all. I don't
often get to talk to somebody that is a full
(01:14):
Bright scholar, and I have never talked to one that
was a two time recipient. I didn't even know that
was possible. I thought if you got the full Bright scholarship,
that was enough to ride your career. I didn't know
you get a second one. So from now on, if
(01:34):
anybody ever asked me if I had a full Bright scholarship.
I'm gonna say no because Ron Chipsick took mine. He
took my turn. But y'all we have Ron Chipsick with us.
He is an author. He's written forty five books. He's
written screenplays, he's written movies. He is a black belt
(01:58):
in taekwondo. He studied right here in Atlanta at Clark
Atlanta University. He is a producer, a journalist, a screenwriter,
an author. He wrote the book Bad Henry, and he
also wrote The Murderous Rampage of the Taco Bell Strangler.
(02:21):
And tonight, it is my pleasure to welcome Ron Chipsick here. Ron,
welcome to Zone seven.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it very much. You cannot
get too full grace. You can't get more than to full.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Grace, can't get more than two.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, yeah, right, I know one guy. I have a
friend that's English professor that got three of them, and
they did away with that about fifteen years ago. So
I'm one, I guess, one of the last ones to
get a two time full Grace scholarship.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
You know, it's one of those things where when you
hear fulbright scholar, I mean that kind of stops you
in your tracks anyway, because now it's like, Okay, I'm
dealing with somebody that you know might be right here
in the education line. But then when you hear too,
and you hear about the two different countries that you
were at, you know, Ireland and Indonesia, and then your
(03:18):
work and then your whole body of work, it is
shocking to me that you did not start writing earlier
in your life.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I didn't really sell anything until I was thirty five
on that, and didn't really start writing, and I published
my first book when I was about forty on that.
So yeah, it was quite amazing. When I was young.
I wanted to be a writer, I really did, but
I didn't see any point in broadcasting it if I
wasn't doing any writing, because I knew enough people that
(03:48):
said they were writers who never owned anything on that,
and I promised myself that I would never be like that.
I said I would commit myself to the craft if
I ever decided to do it. And what happened was
I was on the sabbatical, the first one from my
university where I was teaching in Ireland, and I was
studying at the National University of Ireland and for some reason.
(04:11):
One day I decided I wanted to write. You know,
I just woke up and I wanted to be a writer.
And I said, well, I'm going to write. And there
was this library there chester Chester, Baty Library started by
an American, really famous, and I said, I'm going to
write a profile of that library. I'm going to sell
it to a library magazine because I was trained as
a librarian. And I sat down and I said, well,
(04:34):
how am I going to do this? I remember it
still like it was amazing that I finished the article
and I sent it off and it was published, which
was really a crowd achievement for me. And then I said,
well if I do it once and maybe I could
do it again. And I found out it wasn't that easy.
I was rejected hundreds of times, you know, with magazine
ideas that I sent off to publications asking if they'd
(04:56):
be interested in articles about them. You got to stick
with it. Asked me, what do you need to be
a writer. He said, you gotta have perseverance, love everything
you know. It's a craft. You may not be able
to write like anyway if you study the craft, but
you should be able to write well enough to be
a qualified as a professional writer and to be able
(05:16):
to maybe make a living at it, well.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
You absolutely stuck with it. And that's another reason I'm
so thrilled to have you here, because I want to
talk about Henry Lewis Wallace, aka the Taco Bell Strangler.
Now just for our listeners, he killed eleven women between
March eighth, nineteen ninety and March eight, nineteen ninety four.
(05:44):
He was a Navy veteran. He was known around the
Seattle area. He had committed burglaries. He had been arrested
in nineteen eighty eight prior to the murders for breaking
an entering where he got a couple of years of probation.
Make most of those meetings, but again he was on
law enforces radar. A little an unusual thing about him,
(06:09):
and Ron, if you could talk about this, he had
social graces.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He's really chilling and it really makes you question your
belief in humanity because to have a person like this
walk around. I talked to one of his classmates in
high school and she was shocked to learn that Henry
was a serial killer. You know, she said, there was
no indication in high school. He was very popular, he
(06:35):
was the only cheerleader on the school team. He was
a member of the four h club and student council.
And you know, all these girls trusted him. They really
liked him. You know, they confided to him at about
their boyfriends and other things in their lives. And then
(06:57):
he'd go home to a complete different experience. He grew
up in a shack, I mean, with no indoor plumbing
at all, and he had to carry the excrement out
every day in pales. And he had a really brutal
mother who didn't have much success in life with the
(07:20):
opposite sex, and she took out her frustrations on her children.
And he had a sister too, Levonne, and she would
beat him regularly, and if she was too tired to
beat him, she'd get each of them to beat the
other person. On that. She paraded her son around in
a girl's outfit. In the neighborhood. It was a poor neighborhood.
(07:41):
This is Barnwell, South Carolina, about six thousand people, half
of them black, half white. The neighborhood was kind of tough.
He was sexually abused by some of the older girls
in the neighborhood on that and he really had developed
this intense inner hatred of the opposite sex, you know,
(08:02):
which eventually came out in the various murders that he committed.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Now, when she would make him parade around in girls'
dresses and beat him, did that go up until what age?
Do you know?
Speaker 2 (08:15):
She stayed in his life until is his twenties when
he went away to the military, he came back, he
stayed with her, and she had this real hold over
him on that she really didn't like the fact that
he was interested in the opposite sex. And she would
check on his girlfriends. On that. There was one girlfriend
(08:37):
he had in Charleston, which is a city a couple
hours away from Marnble. She went to Charleston to look
up this girlfriend to tell her to stay away from her.
Henry on that sort of stuff. She, you know, had
a hard life. She worked in a textile factory. Like
I said, she just took her frustrations out on her
(08:59):
children and accumulated. I talked to a couple of psychologists
that interviewed him, you know, and they said that he had,
deep down inside him, this visceral deeply felt hatred of
the opposite sex.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
So March eighth, nineteen ninety He murders an eighteen year
old high school student and dumps her body in a
lake to chand Bethea.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
He had a crush, He had sort of a fascination
with her, you know. He wanted her to go for
a ride with him, and she always refused him and
all that. But one day she decided that she would
go and go with him, and he took her out
to the lake and I put the make on her
and she resisted. She made the mistake of saying that
(09:42):
she was going to tell her parents, and he panicked
and he murdered her. He strangled her and dumped her
body there. And it should have been an easy murder
to solve for the police, incredibly, because they were onto
him right from the beginning. You know, he was on
the last few will to see him. And I interviewed
a couple of the cops that investigated the case, and
(10:05):
they said that they really suspected Henry, but they never
had any evidence. He eventually decided to get out of
Dodge and he left Barnwell. By that time, he was
married and his marriage was falling apart, and he had
broken into a radio station and the high school and
(10:26):
stolen some stuff and was caught, and so he realized
that his stay in Barnwall was was pretty well over.
So he decided to leave, and that's when he left
for my town here, rock Hill. He actually spent about
nine months here in my town and was accused of
attempted rape of this woman. And again he always always
(10:48):
seemed to leave at the right time. But he left
rock Hill and went to Charlotte down the road Charlotte's
about thirty thirty minutes from my town, started to get
jobs in fast food restaurants. That's where the tackle bell
connection came from.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Well before we get to November nineteen ninety one, I
just want to point out for everybody because this always
drives me crazy when I'm looking at a case file
with Shanda Bethea, the police actually questioned him, so they
had a reason to go to him and you know,
question him about her murder. So again, I always tell
(11:28):
people ninety percent of the time when you have a
cold case, that killer's name is going to be in
your case file. I promise you.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
They said they wanted to charge him, but they didn't
have enough evidence to keep him. He was really blessed
in a lot of ways, you know, in Charlotte. He
had said, incompetent police work on that people just couldn't
make the connections. You know, most of the murders that
he committed where in East Charlotte within a five mile radius.
Could you imagine that? No, Yeah, he killed like ten
(11:59):
women and couldn't over a two year period, as these
murders are being committed of these young, black, relatively poor women,
they never made the connection. None of the cops made
the connection. And he had connections with all of the
people that he murdered, he knew them. It was believed
that he was the first serial killer to know all
(12:20):
of his victims, which was very abnormal for But I
found out I had somebody on my radio show told
me about Jerry Marcus and he was a serial killer
before for Wallace, and he knew all of his victims.
He murdered about seven I think a seven women on
that so he wasn't really the first, but he was
one of the first that knew all of the women,
(12:40):
and the police still couldn't make the connection. But it's
a little more complicated than that. The police were really
understaffed at that time. Charlotte was changing, it was becoming
a big commercial center and the population was exploding. We're
having a lot of people coming up from the north
and all that. With that came crime. Right in nineteen
(13:00):
ninety three was the biggest murder rate in the history
of Charlotte's I think some of the one hundred and
twenty nine murders. And at that time you only had
like seven police investigating felonies, right, and so you imagine
each had like twelve thirteen cases, pretty well overwhelmed, and
the city government refused to increase their resources, you know,
(13:21):
technology and all that, so they were behind in technology vanpower,
and Wallace was able to slip through the cracks because
of that.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
It's just mind blowing. But you know, then May of
ninety two he kills Sharer Nance. He beat her and
then dumped her near some railroad tracks. So again you've
got one thrown in a lake, one now with railroad tracks,
so maybe law enforcement is not making the connection. And
then June of nineteen ninety two, he rapes and strangles
(13:52):
Caroline Love, twenty years old, at her apartment and then
dumps her body in a wooded area.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, this is interesting. Carolyn Love actually was the roommate
of his girlfriend Sadie Night McKnight.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Oh yeah, this is where it starts to get twisted.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Ron Yeah, yeah, but this may be the only murder
that he committed that had a real sexual component from
the beginning. He admits that he was attracted to her.
He saw her in shorts and he was attracted on that,
So in may I've had a sexual component. But yeah,
he murdered her and actually went with a Caroline's sister
(14:32):
and Sadie McKnight his girlfriend to the police station to
help them file a missing person's report.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Now, I want to be sure everybody heard you. He
goes with the victim's sister and his girlfriend to the
police station to report her missing.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Nobody thought anything of it, even the next murder, you know,
Shaanna Hawk, I mean the mother of Desumpter, who was
a really a remarkable woman, came up to her a
couple of days after them and told her, I'm really sorry,
miss Sumpter about your daughter. You know, I can't imagine
the loss and all that on that and she put
(15:10):
out of her mind. She goes, oh, Henry, Henry's too sweet.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and he was her supervisor at Taco bail and listen,
I want everybody to understand. I know, legally she was
a woman that y'all, she was twenty years old.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
All of these these younger ladies were really good, good people.
They were they were ambitious, you know, they were going
to school. They're working hard. You know, some of them
had two jobs. They have had big ambitions. Unfortunately, knew
Henry Wallace who befriended them and eventually murdered them. Now,
his big problem was drugs. You know, he had a
(15:47):
he had a bad drug habit. He picked it up
in the in the military. He picked up cocaine and
then the crackway was sweeping the United States in the
early nineties and he got hooked on crack. So he
needed money for his crack to support his crack habit,
and he started to murder some of the girls for that.
You know. They were like assistant manager at one of
(16:10):
the fast food places he worked, and he thought that
they would know the combination to the safe and all that,
and he ended up, you know, when he murdered some
of them, he's ended up selling their stuff. He put
in the car and sell it and all that. But
like I said, you know, all of this is going
on within a five mile radius, and a lot of
the girls knew each other, you know, the victims knew
(16:31):
each other, sure, and they worked with each other, and
still there was no connection. The police did not talk
to each other. That was part of their problem. They
did not compare notes on their cases. You know, that's right.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
They were all in apartments, all were working at a
fast food restaurant. Most were in college. And like SHAWNA. Hall,
here's another little tidbit for y'all, he also went to
her funeral. So now you've got to go into the
police department on one victim and now he's at the
funeral of another victim.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
He was very careful. I told you he had about
he had average intelligence. His his IQ was about average.
You know, he covered up his crimes. He knew, he
knew how to how to cover up his crimes, you know,
get rid of the fingerprints, even bade the bodies on
all that. He was very careful about earlier in his
(17:23):
crime speed, about covering up his his his murders. And
he would go home. He would expect something on TV
about some girl being murdered, right that he had murdered,
and he never saw anything on TV. You know, nobody
was paying attention, and so that encouraged him more. And
he might have actually got away with it if he
(17:43):
didn't have that drug habit, because as as the murderers progressed,
he got more careless because of his drug habit. And
then his girlfriend eventually left him, which shook him up.
She kicked him out because of his drug habit, and
he was essentially homeless. He was living with friends and
all that on Crack needed the money. Near the end
(18:03):
of his murder spree, he ended up killing two women
in the same apartment complex, which you know, I mean
here the police was right in front of you, police,
you know. So finally they caught on the made a
few connections and were able to identify him as as
the killer, and they went to arrest him March twelfth,
(18:25):
nineteen ninety four. And he was really strung out by then,
and so when he took him in, he was willing
to talk. And boy did he talk. I saw the transcripts.
The transcripts were amazing. He covered his whole life in
ten hours. Later. His defense team tried to get the
interviews expunged, but they were allowed into as evidence in
(18:50):
the case. Helped contribute to his sentence, which was death.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
I want to tell everybod about a few more victims
so they can see what you're saying as far as
some of the similarities. So June twenty second, Audrey Spain
is murdered. She's also a co worker at Taco Bell.
August tenth, nineteen ninety three, he rapes and strangles Valencia
Jumper twenty one, a college student who is also his
(19:22):
sister's friend. And here he sets her body on fire
and attends her funeral. Then we go to September fourteenth,
nineteen ninety three, Michelle Stintson again in an apartment, a
friend of his from Taco Bell. He rapes her stabs
her in front of her oldest son. Now an interesting thing.
(19:45):
On February the fourth, he's arrested for shoplifting. So they
have arrested him again, so they know about the burglaries.
Now we've got shoplifting, and they're not putting two and
six together. The twentieth, nineteen ninety four, he strangles and
rapes Vanessa little Mack twenty five in her apartment. He
(20:09):
knew her through her sister, who was a coworker at
Taco Bell. Now this is the day that Ron was
talking about. A minute ago. March the eighth, nineteen ninety four,
Wallace robbed, raped, and strangled twenty four year old Betty
Jean Backam. The victim worked with Wallace's girlfriend at Bojangles,
(20:30):
another fast food restaurant. Now this time he took several
valuables and her car and pawn them. On this day,
he goes back to the exact same apartment complex and
strangles a friend of his girlfriend, Brandy June Henderson eighteen,
(20:52):
while she held her baby. Attempted to strangle the baby.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
As well, right and lead. He he was watching the
news where they were talking about the murder with the
cousin of Brandy, isn't amazing, And he was talking about
how bad it was that she was murdered.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Well, you said a minute ago that he was lucky
in a lot of stages of his crimes.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, he was very lucky. Like I said that the
Indian competence helped it too, But he was very lucky.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Well, is it true that the FBI said that these
murders were not connected, it was not a serial killer.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah. There was a real famous FBI profiler, a guy
named Wrestler, that said that you know, he said if
he was if he was trying to be a serial killer,
he's going about it the wrong way. Whatever that meant
on that and so yeah, I mean they didn't attribute
because they were stumped. And so they brought the FBI
ended and they said that, you know, can you help
(21:49):
us And they looked at the case and they said no.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
If you're looking at just bodied disposal sites, I can
see that. When did they connect the fast food restaurants?
When was the taco bell connection made?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Well, they sat down some of the victims eventually and said, look,
he said, who knew your sister or your daughter wherever
they that they that they were victim of. And uh,
the only name that came up was Henry Wallace. You know,
he was connected to to to all of them. And
that's when they started to focus their attention. When when
(22:27):
he murdered Bachham, he had the ATM card, They had
the video, uh the ATM, but they didn't have a
good picture of him. But he had an ear ring
with a cross, and uh later you know, uh they
saw Henry when he brought him in that he had
the same cross. He didn't wipe the trunk of the
car that he had parked after he he killed Bacham
(22:50):
and they got a pomp print off that, and then
they started to check on him and they found out
that he had a criminal passed, you know, he he
was a rested like during that time, we're trying to
steal a thirty eight dollars sweater from Eastland Mall, you know,
which is a big mall there. They decided to bring
him in. By then he was in really bad chap
(23:12):
and he found him in a friend's house hiding and
they run him in and like I said, he was
willing to give everything up, babbed the way.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Well, you know, it's also one of those things you
tend to from TV. Always think this person's going to
be a loaner. They're going to be kind of creepy,
and as soon as you see him, you'll know, oh
my gosh, that's got to be him. He's got to
be the killer. But again, Wallace was friendly. He was
a high school cheerleader. He was a manager at a
(23:39):
fast food restaurant where he smiled and greeted people eight
to ten hours a day. They even called him Uncle Henry.
I mean, this was somebody that was sociable and very
connected to the community. I mean, even his sister and
girlfriend didn't suspect and they both lost more than one
person in this series of events.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
He had everybody full and when he came down, it
was shocking to a lot of people. And the trial
lasted two years. It was the biggest, biggest trial in
North Carolina history, biggest murder trial in North Caroline history.
They took about two years for it to be resolved,
and he was convicted of of murder and rape and
(24:24):
there's a whole bunch of slu of charges sent to death,
although the defense we're trying to get him off, you know,
saying there was no deliberate intent in his motive, so
he couldn't possibly be eligible for the death penalty. The
average weight from the time of sentencing to the time
of getting the chair was about eight years, so he
should have been probably dead by two thousand and five.
(24:47):
And in two thousand and five he had his last
appeal was denied, so all it took was a signature
from the governor, right, and he would have been executed
very quickly afterwards. But then, you know, the mood in
the country changed about the death family. Right in the
nineteen nineties when he was sentenced, more people were in
(25:08):
favor of the death family. But it came out that
a lot of people were being executed were innocent, or
there is questions about their sentencing or whatever, and so
that the tie turned, and so the governor of North
Carolina put a more attorney on the death sentence. So
he's been languishing in Central Prison in Raleigh since nineteen
ninety seven, twenty seven years.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Almost. Well, y'all, here's the takeaway. Victimology. Victimology, victimology. Somebody
should have sat down with these families. And I mean,
in the first three questions, where did she live? Where
did she go to school? Where did she work? I mean,
it's not you don't have to talk long to get
(25:50):
to where did she work? And when Taco Bell comes
up more than once, and then bo Jangles comes up
more than once, the connection is right there.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Ron.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
I shit you being here. I appreciate you talking about this,
and why don't you tell everybody about your project that's
coming up.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
I also have a TV series that's come out on vix,
which is the biggest Spanish language streaming service in the world.
The series is called Raso Blanco White Paradise and it's
based on my book Crazy Charlie, and it's a thirty
part series and I've seen the first season. There's gonna
(26:27):
be two seasons. I've seen the first fifteen and I'm
very pleased with it. So that's another project that came out,
and I'm working on a book now about it, Dallas
soil Man, which is going to be interesting. And I
got several other other things in the works. I'm a
screenwriter as well, and I've got several my screenplays of
(26:47):
an option from movies and I'm hoping that some of
them click pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Well, we're going to be looking for all of them.
And Ron I again cannot thank you enough for being
with us and talking to us about the Taco Bell Strangler.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Well, it's a pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I'm going to end Zone seven the way that
I always do with a quote. There's a pattern in
every chrome, something that gives the police an edge on
the criminal's weakness. And we know he has a weakness,
or he wouldn't be a criminal. Helen Nielsen. I'm Cheryl McCollum,
(27:24):
and this is Zone seven.
Host
Sheryl McCollum
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!