[citation needed] On March 8, 1990, Wallace murdered 18-year-old Tashanda Bethea,[3] a Barnwell High School student.
In February 1991, Wallace broke into Barnwell High School and the radio station where he once worked as a disc jockey.
[2] He found jobs at several fast-food restaurants in East Charlotte before becoming a manager at a Taco Bell near the now-defunct Eastland Mall.
In June 1992, Wallace raped and strangled Caroline Love, 20, at her apartment,[2] then dumped her body in a wooded area.
On August 10, 1993, Wallace raped and strangled Valencia M. Jumper, a 21-year-old college student from Columbia, South Carolina, his sister's friend.
A month later, on September 14, 1993, Wallace went to the apartment of 20-year-old Michelle Stinson, a college student and friend of his from Taco Bell.
[2] On February 20, 1994, a day after Shawna's mother appealed to the public to find her daughter's murderer, Wallace raped and strangled Vanessa Little Mack, 25, in her west Charlotte apartment.
[4] The police increased their patrols in east Charlotte after two bodies of young black women were found at The Lake Apartments complex.
[6] One woman stated that the police did not care because they viewed the young female murder victims as "fast girls who hang out a lot".
[citation needed] As Shawna Denise Hawk's mother, Dee Sumpter, said: "The victims weren't prominent people with social-economic status.
Charlotte's police chief, Dennis Nowicki, had said he was unaware of a killer until early March 1994, when three young black women were murdered within four days.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department apologized to Charlotte citizens for not spotting a link between the murders sooner.
Until Wallace's murder pace picked up in the early weeks of March 1994, the deaths were sporadic and not entirely similar.
Over the next two years, Wallace's case was delayed over the choice of venue, DNA evidence from murdered victims, and jury selection.
At the same time, defense attorney Isabel Day asked for a life sentence, arguing that Wallace suffered from mental illness, and that the killings were not first-degree murder because they did not result from "premeditation and deliberation."
On June 5, 1998, Wallace married a former prison nurse, Rebecca Torrijas, in a ceremony next to the state's execution chamber.
[8] Mecklenburg County public defender Isabel Day served as an official witness and photographer.
In 2005, Superior Court Judge Charles Lamm rejected Wallace's latest appeal to overturn his convictions and death sentences.