America has a pantheon of ghouls, where the bloodiest of villainies earns an assurance of immortality. And now there are two more candidates for this hellish hall of fame.
Henry Louis Wallace was smooth -- very, very smooth. Listeners tuning into WBAW-FM in Barnwell, South Carolina, during the late evening hours four years ago responded positively to Wallace, a.k.a. "Night Rider," a silky-voiced disk jockey who favored urban contemporary music. Women, taken with his sweet smile, solicitous attitude and pleasant looks, trusted him all along. They invited him to their homes for dinner, watched while he cradled their babies in his arms, accepted his invitations to date.
Today Wallace, 28, sits in a jail cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, charged with the worst killing spree in the area's history. According to police, Wallace murdered at least 10 women over the past two years in North Carolina. His last alleged victim was a 35-year-old supermarket clerk who was found strangled in her apartment two weeks ago. Her tragically apt name: Debra Ann Slaughter.
Like Wallace, Frank Potts was a good neighbor to the 300 residents of Estillfork, Alabama. He helped widows cut wood and brought friends oranges from Florida, where he worked each year as a fruit picker. To some, he could sound like a preacher in full sermon. "I found Frank Potts to be the kind of person you could trust," says James Robert Henshaw, who once hired Potts to cut trees and haul wood. "I found Frank Potts to be just like us."
Well, maybe not. Up on remote Garrett Mountain, the local police, FBI and ! National Guard have been searching the grounds around Potts' cabin for the past three weeks, ever since the body of 19-year-old Robert Earl Jines, his head bashed in, was discovered in a shallow grave 75 yds. away. Potts, 50, a wiry, intense man, is the prime suspect in Jines' murder, as well as the death of up to 14 others. The murders stretch back 15 years and all the way to New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia and Florida. Potts denies involvement in all these murders, but a law-enforcement spokesman noted, "It seems wherever Mr. Potts is, people disappear and die."
Already, trucks and cars filled with smiling adults, and sometimes young children, are streaming into Estillfork. Roy Taylor and his wife Emogene drove 40 miles from Tennessee to catch a glimpse of Potts' cabin. "We've been seeing this on TV so much . . . so we thought we'd come out here," explains Emogene. "I guess this'll make history," says local resident Jeanette Gifford, as the cars cruise by. "There'll probably be a movie about it."