It was Thursday, May 20th, 1999 when George Wallas failed to come home for dinner. His wife would later tell police that this was not an uncommon occurrence during baseball season, and therefore she had originally thought nothing of it. He was often kept late in his office by schedules and strategies for the upcoming games.
She and their two children, Billy, seven, and Joann, nine, all finished their spaghetti and meatballs and then the kids went to work on their homework and to get ready for bed while Angelina Wallas cleaned up after the meal. She put some leftovers aside for George, poured herself a glass of wine, and then turned on the television to watch the season finale of Friends.
She must have had an extra glass or two of wine, she later told the authorities, because by the time the show ended, she suddenly realized that George still wasn't home. It was rare for him to be this late, and so she began to worry that something might be different this particular night. She called his office and reached the recording, and then took to pacing the living room. She called three more times that evening.
It was nearly midnight when the knock at the door came, and Angelina opened it with a growing trepidation that there would be terrible news on the other side
Terrible it was, and she was informed by the officer in uniform that her husband, the renowned Coach Wallas, had been found dead in the men's locker room of Stanford University just an hour earlier. The other grisly particulars of the case were not relayed to the newly grieving widow at that time, and only came out much later on the news, once the trail had gone colder than ice and the homicide division was at its wit's end trying to find a suspect or a motive.
It would be twenty years before a new break in the case would come to light, and in the meantime, the Wallas family tried desperately to pick up the pieces in the wake of the tragedy. People would often remember hearing about the horrific murder of the renowned baseball coach, though, mostly, they simply recalled the investigation as a whole surrounding a person the media had dubbed "The Santa Clara Killer".
No one, however, knew or cared that Angelina Wallas would eventually overdose on a bottle of pills, or that young Billy ended up living under a bridge, or that his sister, Joann would later jump from one rehab clinic to another as she desperately tried to rid herself of the demons from her past.
No one, that was, except for Robert Malone, former police officer and previous head homicide detective on the Wallas case and all of the cases related to "The Santa Clara Killer". Robert would remember every single detail of every single one of those murders until the day he died.