Wallace was born in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1965, served in the navy, and moved to Charlotte, where he worked in fast food restaurants and was known as a reliable, sociable employee.
Between June 1990 and March 1994 he raped and strangled ten women. All were Black. Almost all were people he knew: Caroline Love was his girlfriend's best friend; Shawna Hawk was a colleague at a Taco Bell he managed; Valencia Jumper was a friend of his sister; Michelle Stinson, Vanessa Little Mack, Betty Jean Baucom, Brandi June Henderson, Audrey Spain, Deborah Slaughter and Berness Woods completed the series. He robbed the flats afterwards and in several cases set fires. He attended funerals and consoled the families.
The victims lived and died within a few miles of one another, were killed by the same method, and had one acquaintance in common, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police did not link the cases for nearly four years. The department later acknowledged the failure. The families' position, argued publicly ever since, is that ten murders of young Black women in one neighbourhood did not produce the response that would have followed elsewhere in the city, and the case is cited in North Carolina in that context rather than as a puzzle of detection.
He was arrested on March 12, 1994 and confessed at length on videotape. He was convicted on nine counts of first degree murder in January 1997 and sentenced to death on January 29, 1997. He remains on death row in North Carolina, where no execution has been carried out since 2006. In 2020 he apologised to the families in a televised interview.
The nine is the number of counts he was convicted on; ten women were killed, the tenth being Caroline Love, whose body was found last and whose death he admitted.