#COLD CASE FILES LITTLE GIRL LOST SHAUNA SERIAL#
And later, when the serial pattern was clear, Sumpter had to wonder how they had missed it.
She also saw gaps in the questions they asked her, and as the weeks dragged on into months and then a year, they never came back for another interview. They had come barging in to the scene of the crime, not being very careful, or so it appeared, and she wondered what evidence was being destroyed. From the beginning, even in the midst of her horror and grief, Sumpter had doubts about the police. Dee Sumpter’s daughter, Shawna Hawk, was one of the victims, killed February 19, 1993. (MOM-O), which was established after the grisly rampage of accused serial killer Henry Louis Wallace. “But perhaps the most outspoken critic of all was Dee Sumpter, executive director of Mothers of Murdered Offspring.
The paragraph in which Dee Sumpter was quoted as saying regarding the police investigation of her daughter’s death and the murder of Black women in Charlotte:
Shawna’s mother commented that the police were careless in its investigation of her daughther’s death and didn’t interview her friends, fellow students, and co-workers in the aftermath of Shawna’s death. I found an article on the web concerning Crime in Charlotte from Charlotte Magazine. Some say it took them so long because Wallace killed “only” black women. It was not till August when three other women turned up dead in East Charlotte that the police began to take the whole thing seriously. It took the police two months just to find her missing car. But then she thought it could not possibly be him: he was such a gentleman! In that moment she remembered that she forgot to put Wallace on her list of Shawna’s old boyfriends as possible killers. He told her how he missed Shawna, how he was sorry to hear about her death. Several months later Wallace ran into Shawna’s mother. At the viewing he sat all alone at the back of the room with a strange look on his face, just staring. He filled the bathtub, put her body in it, took $50 (ten crowns) and left. He hit her over the head and knocked her out and then put a cord or something round her neck to cut off her breathing. Somehow that pushed the wrong button inside him. Then Shawna started teasing him about a fight he had had with his girlfriend. They talked for an hour about this and that. They had gone on a date the summer before, but they were just friends. Henry Louis Wallace had come by earlier that afternoon to visit Shawna. The boyfriend came over and searched the house looking for some sign of what became of Shawna. As it turned out Taco Bell and Shawna’s boyfriend did not know either. Then the mother of the godson called and asked where Shawna was. But something was not right: her purse and coat were still there. When her mother came home on that day she did not see Shawna’s car. Without anyone asking her one day she went down to McDonald’s and lied about her age so she could work to help support her mother. So she took them off and threw them out the car window onto Independence Boulevard. All dressed up and on the way to the junior prom her date told her she did not need the false fingernails. Shawna Hawk was beautiful, shy and unassuming. She worked at the nearby Taco Bell, where a nice young man named Henry Louis Wallace hired her. She was studying law to become a paralegal. She was going to Piedmont Central Community College. Hawk was living with her mother in East Charlotte, North Carolina. It took 13 months and seven more dead women before the police found him.Ī month after Shawna’s murder, her mother and godmother founded Mothers of Murdered Offspring (MOM-O). He killed her on February 19th 1993, two months after she turned 20. Shawna Hawk (1972-1993) was the fourth of 11 women killed by Henry Louis Wallace, the Charlotte Strangler, an American serial killer.
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