Doug Richards and Julie Wolfe

WXIA-TV, Atlanta

PINE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — The story of John Wallace Road ends on a sparsely traveled, five-mile stretch of asphalt that winds through rural Meriwether County.

The story starts with weathered scrapbooks that chronicle the life of the road's most prominent resident, a roughneck 1940s-era bootlegger named John Wallace.

"Sixty-something years later, he's still respected," said Bruce O'Neal, Meriwether County public works director.

Wallace was respected as a county kingpin. Historians say he controlled local politicians and financed local churches with money from illegal liquor.

The stretch of asphalt on which he lived is a modern-day memorial named for the liquor lord in a town about 75 miles southwest of Atlanta that now has about 1,300 residents and was too small in 1940 to be noted as a separate locale in census records.

"Our deed when we bought the house says John Wallace Road," said Reba Crisp, who lives at the southern end of the road.

And no one really knows when it was formally named.

"All my life it's always been John Wallace road," O'Neal said.

Wallace still has kinfolk in the area, known in the '40s as "the kingdom." Mike Strickland, the grandson of Wallace's cousin now lives on the farm where Wallace lived.

"He looked after his own," Strickland said.

In 1948, things turned ugly on Wallace's farm when a man named Wilson Turner was arrested for stealing two of Wallace's cows.

When Turner was released from the old jailhouse in the county seat of Greenville, Ga., he drove up U.S. 27. Wallace and two other men followed him to the Coweta County line and killed Turner. The incident became a book and 1983 TV movie called Murder in Coweta County.

Andy Griffith played the swaggering Wallace. Johnny Cash played the man who arrested him, Coweta County Sheriff Lamar Potts.

A Coweta County jury sent Wallace to Georgia's electric chair in 1950.

"He wasn't framed. He was just doing what anyone else would have done at the time," Strickland said.

Wallace's fate was sealed when the cow thief he was chasing made it out of Meriwether County, where the kingpin's influence stopped, Strickland said.

"That man came back here and stole both his dairy cows. You think he needed doing away with?" Strickland asked. "It wasn't harsh in that day. Man, you're talking about 1949. Everybody wore two pistols on their hip."

The essential facts aren't in dispute:

• Wallace killed a man.

• The state of Georgia executed him for it.

• The road is named for a convicted killer.

Perhaps raising an obvious question: Has the county considered renaming the road?

"No sir. Not to my knowledge," O'Neal said.

Residents like Crisp seem to embrace Pine Mountain's dark history and the killer behind the road.

"He was well liked. There were people that were afraid of him," said Crisp, who knows Wallace only through conversations she's had with a close friend of the killer who lived across the street. "Very intriguing."

"I would hope that it doesn't glorify him," said Arthur "Skin" Edge, grandson of the Coweta County sheriff who arrested Wallace. Edge is a former state senator and now works as a lobbyist at the state capitol.

Edge is mostly untroubled by the road named for the killer.

"Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it teaches people a lesson. And maybe the more they hear about it, the more they learn about it, the more they realize that everyone is accountable under the law and should be," Strickland said.

In this rural community, the story ends with a curving stretch of road whose name has a certain twisted logic, honoring a man whose residents say was more than a murderer.