Good Henry: The Social Killer Who Hunted His Friends

Good Henry: The Social Killer Who Hunted His FriendsBetween March 1990 and March 1994, Henry Louis Wallace murdered eleven women across South Carolina and North Carolina. He was not a stranger lurking in the shadows. He was a coworker, a neighbour, a friend, a man whose victims opened their doors to him willingly because they had every reason to trust him and none to fear him. Good Henry reconstructs the full arc of Wallace's life and crimes, from the abusive childhood in Barnwell, South Carolina, that shaped his psychology, through the years of escalating violence in Charlotte that a catastrophically under-resourced police department failed to connect into a pattern, to the trial that sentenced him to nine deaths he has never faced. This is not only the story of one man's predation. It is the story of a city that failed its women, systematically, structurally, and along lines of race and class that made the deaths of young Black working-class women invisible to the institutions nominally responsible for protecting them. Drawing on court records, criminological research, and the testimony of survivors and victims' families, this book insists that the eleven women Wallace killed deserve to be remembered as people, not as entries in a case file, and that the society which allowed him to kill for four years owes them a reckoning that has never fully arrived.