Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / The Taco Bell Strangler

Transcript

The Taco Bell Strangler · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

0:11
Hello, Welcome to ten Minute Murder, Brief and binge Able true Crime.
0:16
Hi. I'm Joe. I'm the host, and thank you for joining today.
0:20
And I need to let you know about a brand new thing on the
0:22
Internet. You're gonna love it. Well, maybe not love it. You
0:26
might like it's a it's a Facebook group for ten Minute Murder. But Joe,
0:31
don't you already have a Yes, I have a Facebook page for ten
0:35
Minute Murder already. This one's a Facebook group. There's a big difference.
0:40
My plan is to make the page solely dedicated to this podcast. Everything you
0:46
see and here on this podcast you can find it on the Facebook page for
0:51
ten Minute Murder. Now, the group I look at is more of like
0:54
a discussion. It doesn't have to be related to this podcast necessarily can be
0:59
breaking news in the world of true crime. It can be or we're discussing
1:03
cases that are you can hear on this podcast. But there it's more of
1:07
a discussion type of thing, and you can post things as well. It
1:10
doesn't have to be me all the time. But I hope for that to
1:11
be eventually turned into just a big discussion page about the world of true crime.
1:17
All right now here comes the confusing part. How to tell you how
1:21
to get to the group. I don't really know. I wish I was
1:26
more prepared at this point, but I'm not. But here's what I can
1:27
tell you. If you go to the ten Minute Murder Facebook page, I
1:30
put a link there that takes you to the group, And to get to
1:34
the page, you just type in ten minute Murder into the search bar and
1:37
it's going to pop up. It might pop up the group too. I
1:40
don't really know how it works, but as far as at this moment,
1:42
that's the quickest way I can tell you how to get there. If this
1:47
is your first time listening to ten Minute Murder, please subscribe now so that
1:49
you can catch up on all of the back episodes. It's three hundred plus
1:53
at this point. You can catch up on all those episodes, plus never
1:57
miss any new ones. Cannet with me on social media. See the visuals
2:00
that we're talking about here in the podcast. And if you like this episode,
2:05
please leave a rating and review at any place that's possible. Your positive
2:08
feedback is helpful and it's very much appreciated. Go to ten minute Murder dot
2:14
com for all things related to ten Minute Murder. Now to today's story.
2:30
After being sentenced to death nine times, over one death sentence for each of
2:36
his nine confirmed victims, Henry Lewis Wallace addressed the families of his victims in
2:40
a statement. He told them, quote, none of these women, none
2:46
of your daughters, mothers, sisters, or family members, in any way
2:51
deserved what they got. They did nothing to me that warranted their death.
2:55
In one short statement, Henry did what so many killers failed to do over
3:00
the course of their entire lives, acknowledging that each of his victims had been
3:05
a human with a complex life of their own, and that none of them
3:08
had deserved to be hurt by him. As a statement, it would have
3:13
been powerful except for that Henry had not only deliberately hurt these women, but
3:19
brutally assaulted and murdered them. But that statement wasn't the only way in which
3:23
Henry did not fit the media image of a serial killer. According to FBI
3:29
profilers, most serial killers are a white men who don't know their victims.
3:34
Henry was a black man, and he had a personal connection to each and
3:38
every single person he killed. With a clear link between Henry and his victims,
3:43
it seems that the breadcrumbs would lead directly back to him. So how
3:46
did he avoid capture long enough to murder so many people and why did he
3:52
do it? On surface level, it seems as if the motive was money.
3:57
Each of Henry's victims was robbed after their death, and he used that
4:00
money to fuel one of his greatest vices, his addiction to crack. However,
4:05
the motive ran much deeper than that. In reality, Henry attacked his
4:10
victims because of his sexual desires, his need to have control, and the
4:14
ability to inflict fear. This characteristic is very similar to fellow serial killers like
4:20
Ted Bundy. Getting money to fuel his addiction was a bonus, but it
4:25
wasn't why he killed. Born in South Carolina, Henry had been well liked
4:30
and popular in high school, popular to the point where nobody laughed when a
4:33
six foot tall teenager signed up to be the only guy on the school's cheerleading
4:39
squad. It's more common now, but in the early nineteen eighties, that's
4:44
basically social suicide. College wasn't for him. He ended up working at a
4:48
local radio station, calling himself the night Rider, earning himself praise for his
4:54
smooth voice and relaxed manner. Henry liked working in radio and he could have
4:59
been happy there, but one day he was caught stealing a bunch of CDs
5:02
and was immediately fired. With no job and no plans, Henry joined the
5:08
Navy in nineteen eighty five. While he was there, he got married,
5:12
made friends, and started to work his way up through the ranks. His
5:15
performance as a sailor was almost flawless, but the end of his career was
5:19
undignified. He was caught attempting to commit burglary close to the naval base and
5:26
then discharged from service. It was only because of his immaculate performance during his
5:30
time as a sailor that he avoided being stamped as a dishonorable discharge. After
5:35
eight years, Henry was trying to hold down a steady job with little success,
5:41
and also making an attempt to remember how to be a civilian. But
5:45
he was struggling with these things, and his wife told him that she wanted
5:47
to leave him. With no money and few options, Henry moved back home
5:51
to Charlotte, North Carolina, where his family lived. It felt like he
5:56
was right back where he started, just a teenage boy who had thrown away
5:59
his job working in late night radio. Although Henry had certainly dabbled in drugs
6:03
before his true addiction to substances began. Around this time, his life was
6:10
unstable and his future was uncertain, but when he was using crack cocaine,
6:15
he felt good. Krack became an expensive emotional crutch for Henry, and to
6:19
support it, he got a job as a manager at a taco bell restaurant.
6:24
He also attempted to move on from his ex wife, finding love again,
6:28
and he met a lady named Sadie mcnight, who quickly became his girlfriend.
6:32
The killings began in June nineteen ninety two, when a young black woman,
6:38
Caroline Love, vanished seemingly into thin air. Caroline was labeled as a
6:43
missing person until two years later when her remains were found her roommates Sadie mcnight,
6:49
the same Sadie who had recently begun dating Henry and had given him a
6:54
key to the apartment that she shared with. Caroline had no idea what happened
6:58
to her friend. With nobody else to share her apartment with, Sadie moved
7:01
in with Henry, taking their relationship to the next level. In February nineteen
7:06
ninety three, Shauna Hawke answered a knock on the door and found that the
7:11
manager of the Taco Bell restaurant where she worked was standing in her doorstep.
7:15
She was surprised to see him, but she liked Henry and didn't feel uncomfortable
7:19
around him. She invited him in without hesitation, and the two of them
7:24
chatted for nearly an hour. Eight months after Caroline's disappearance, Shauna was found
7:29
dead in her own house. Her boyfriend found her in a bathtub full of
7:32
water, naked, beaten, and bruised around her head, but the autopsy
7:38
determined that despite being beaten and submerged in water, Shauna's cause of death was
7:43
strangulation. She had also been sexually assaulted and money had been taken from her
7:47
wallet. When another young woman, Audrey Spain, was found naked and strangled
7:53
to death in East Charlotte, the media began referring to the killer as the
7:58
Charlotte Strangler. Apart more bodies were found, there were common threads. All
8:03
the murders were within the same general radius of East Charlotte, all the victims
8:07
were black, and every one of them had been strangled. Even for victims
8:11
like Michelle Stinson, where Henry stabbed her to death and then strangled her after
8:18
the fact. Still Henry was evading suspicion and capture. It was mid March
8:24
of nineteen ninety four when Henry's carefully constructed plan to avoid capture began to fall
8:28
apart. He was out of control. He couldn't stop. If a screw
8:33
had been loose in his head, it had somehow fallen out of whatever it
8:37
was holding together. He needed the robberies to fund his drug habit, and
8:41
he needed the sexual assault and violence to scratch the itch and side of him.
8:46
Up until this point, he'd been cautious at every scene, cleaning away
8:50
fingerprints and DNA evidence, and making sure that he waited until things quieted down
8:56
to kill again. Now he was in a state of gluttony riding the constant
9:00
high of murder, began to get sloppy. For want of a better term,
9:03
he went on a killing binge. Between the ninth and the eleventh of
9:07
March, Henry committed three separate murders, one per day. It was a
9:13
massive change from the several month long gaps he'd been deliberately leaving in the past.
9:18
The public terrified, police investigators frustrated. Suddenly there was a light bulb
9:24
moment in the room. They had cross referenced the names of the acquaintances with
9:28
the names of the victims and noticed that even though the victims weren't acquainted with
9:33
each other at all, there was one name that kept popping up, a
9:35
man that they knew in some way. Henry Lewis Wallace. Valencia Jumper had
9:41
been friends with Henry's sister, and Betty Balcom had been friends with his girlfriend,
9:46
Sadie. Caroline Love had been actually Sadie's roommate at the time of her
9:50
disappearance, and Henry managed the Taco Bell restaurant where the two victims, Audrey
9:54
and Shawn worked over and over. Henry Wallace, Henry Wallace, Henry Wallace.
10:00
How had they missed this? The police department was left desperately trying to
10:03
justify why it had taken them so long to figure out the link between all
10:07
of these missing women. They faced a serious accusation from the public that they
10:11
had neglected the case because of Henry's victims they were black. The argument that
10:18
they gave was they had no experience with serial killers, and prior to Henry's
10:22
last killing spree, the FBI had refused to help them investigate due to the
10:26
belief that the killings were not related. During his interview, Henry was forthcoming
10:31
with information, readily walking them through each of the murders he committed. He
10:37
forced them to step into his shoes, reliving from his perspective the crime and
10:41
grotesque detail. The investigators were shocked by the contrast between his demeanor and what
10:46
he was telling them, and at one point, one of the investigators asked
10:50
Henry if he believed he could have schizophrenia because he didn't seem to be a
10:56
bad guy. Henry was quick to reply, no, there's only one Henry,
11:03
a bad Henry. When you find out that a loved one is a
11:05
killer, you remember every detail of your relationship with them in a new light.
11:11
For Henry's girlfriend, Sadie, this new lens led to a grim realization.
11:16
Throughout their entire relationship, he'd been giving her constant gifts of jewelry,
11:22
but she had no idea where he got it from. Now she knew,
11:26
but she wished that she didn't. This whole time, Sadie had been wearing
11:30
the jewelry of at least nine murdered women,