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Serial killers are supposed to be white “lone wolves.” Exceptionally intelligent men with master plans to murder strangers. Many people find them fascinating. At least criminologists and people who like true crime podcasts and television series do. And this stereotype is exactly how authorities let Henry Louis Wallace get away with murder for years.
Wallace has been called the first known Black serial killer. Like many other criminals who hadn’t gotten caught, the press gave him a lurid nickname: the Taco Bell Strangler. As a manager at the restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, he came into contact with many of his victims there. He raped and killed 11 Black women between March 1990 and his arrest in 1994. He didn’t value the lives of his victims, and neither did the criminal legal system.
Community members and victims’ families complained something was wrong. But police were “too busy fighting the war on drugs.” Wallace didn’t fit the assumed mold of a serial murderer, so he was overlooked, just like other serial killers targeting Black women have been.
In response to his trial, police responded with a Band-Aid: heightened staff recruitment. The homicide unit quadrupled in size.
But while serial killers are rare, overarching violence against Black women isn’t. When the criminal legal system portrays violence as committed by a select few criminals, and not systemic - and invents personalities and stereotypes too. It makes serial killers exceptional while Black victims who are already considered disposable fall through the cracks.