By the time George Kent Wallace was released from prison in 1976, High Point had largely forgotten about his three-month reign of terror as The Paddler a decade earlier.

By the time George Kent Wallace was released from prison in 1976, High Point had largely forgotten about his three-month reign of terror as The Paddler a decade earlier.

Wallace, though, had not forgotten.

Nor had he changed. Ten years in prison had done nothing to rehabilitate this man who clearly needed rehabilitation.

If anything, Wallace � sometimes called "The Mad Paddler" � came out of incarceration even madder than he'd been when he entered prison. He would spend the next 14 years in and out of prison for doing exactly what he'd done in High Point: Pretending to be a police officer. Luring adolescent boys into his car. Driving them to secluded areas. Paddling them.

The difference, though, was that Wallace � as he'd begun to do during his 1966 assaults � became even more violent. That night when he punched Thomasville victim Jerry Hazel in the face merely foreshadowed what was to come.

In May 1976, for example � only four months after Wallace's release � he picked up a young hitchhiker in downtown Winston-Salem and tried to kill him with a ball-peen hammer.

"I asked him how far he was going, and he said, 'It doesn't matter,'" the victim told police, according to a Winston-Salem Police report. "He reached over and locked my door, grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved me in the floorboard. He told me to put my hands behind my back, and I said, 'What the hell for?' I had my pocketknife halfway out of my pocket when he hit me in the back of the head with a hammer."

After six or seven initial blows, the hitchhiker managed to fight back and free himself from the car. He tried to scream but couldn't make a sound, so he took off running as The Paddler drove away. The victim later identified Wallace as the assailant after being shown a photograph of him.

Return to prison

That assault sent The Paddler right back to prison. The primary charge � assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury � earned him an eight-year sentence, though he only served about 4� years, from January 1977 to October 1981.

The pattern continued, with Wallace returning to prison from December 1982 to February 1983 on a charge of impersonating a peace officer. He denied the charge when questioned by police, but refused to take a polygraph test.

"George would admit to the cases he was convicted of from 1966 that were very similar in nature," a Winston-Salem Police report stated, "but he said he grew out of that type of behavior."

That was a lie. After his release from prison in February 1983, Wallace went right back the next month and served until June 1984 on similar charges � impersonating a peace officer and false imprisonment � again in Forsyth County.

Then, perhaps believing police in Winston-Salem knew him too well, Wallace began looking for victims in Salisbury. In the fall of 1984, four cases were reported there of young teens being approached by a man claiming to be a police officer, and in one case he put handcuffs and leg irons on the teen before deciding to let him go. Wallace was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, and he actually did time from December 1984 to October 1986.

During his sentencing in Rowan County, Wallace told Judge Robert L. Warren he could offer no explanation for his unusual criminal behavior.

"Well," The Salisbury Post quoted the judge as saying, "I'm going to put you in prison � the public has a right to be free of (people) like you."

During that same 10-year span from 1976 to 1986, when Wallace was bouncing in and out of prison, he committed another crime authorities were unable to pin on him at the time: Murder.

Actually, two murders � the 1976 killing of a 14-year-old male and the 1982 slaying of an 18-year-old male.

"We had zeroed in on George pretty quickly, and I had many, many interviews with him," recalls Allen G. Gentry, who investigated the cases for the Forsyth County Sheriff's Department. "We never had a doubt (that he had committed the two murders), but we just didn't have the physical evidence to prosecute him."

Wallace's involvement in the two murders, and the actual details of the crimes, would not be verified until years later, but both cases started out the same way as The Paddler's original five cases back in 1966 � with a paddle.

Stabbings

In the 1976 case, Wallace picked up 14-year-old hitchhiker Jeffrey Lee Foster, who was hitchhiking from Hanes Mall in Winston-Salem. After driving to the end of a dead-end road, Wallace dragged the teen to the back seat, pulled his pants down and paddled him. Then he resumed driving, "looking for a satisfactory place to kill him," Wallace would say later. When he found that place, he dragged the boy out of the car, put him on his stomach and stabbed him to death.

In the 1982 case, Wallace "arrested" 18-year-old Thomas Stewart Reed at a shopping-center parking lot in Winston-Salem, then drove to some abandoned acreage he had scouted a few weeks earlier. When Reed refused Wallace's order to get in the back seat, Wallace hit him across the legs with a paddle, then struck his head several times with a BB pistol as the two scuffled. The teen stopped struggling momentarily, but when he resumed, Wallace gave up trying to get him into the back seat and stabbed him to death, too.

In both cases, Wallace left the boys' bodies where he had killed them and drove home.

According to Gentry, who no longer works for the sheriff's department, Wallace's brutality was the polar opposite of how he presented himself when he wasn't around teenage boys.

"I think there were two people inside the body of George Kent Wallace," Gentry says.

"When I interviewed him, we would be having a conversation and he would be fairly articulate, well-mannered, almost extraordinarily nice and mannerly, but then I can only imagine the way he was when he was at a crime scene with these kids. You sit here looking at this guy, and it's like, how in the hell can somebody this polite do the things he's done? I mean, he would come across like Mister Rogers."

Nonetheless, Gentry knew that even though Wallace had presented himself as Dr. Jekyll, the evil Mr. Hyde was always lurking just around the corner.

So in 1986, when Wallace got out of prison and moved to Fort Smith, where there was a major trucking center � and no law enforcement officials who were familiar with his Paddler history � Gentry did the only thing he knew to do. He called officers in Fort Smith to warn them about Wallace.

"When you start losing young boys," he told them, "look for this guy."

Sure enough, The Paddler was about to meet more victims in Arkansas.

Unfortunately for him, though, he was also about to meet his match.

COMING THURSDAY: The Paddler meets his end.