Oct 23, 2015 3 min read

Her parents found themselves in a place no one would want to be: seeing their daughter’s favorite teddy bear in a coffin with the body of their 15-year-old daughter.

Tina Spalla may have been laid to rest 36 years ago, but the case of the man who was twice convicted of shooting her to death on a hot August afternoon in Canonsburg is still alive in Washington County Court. After a 2007 ruling vacated his 1985 death penalty conviction the case remained dormant in Washington County Court, until a judge recently assigned William “Tippy” Wallace an attorney and set up a conference to discuss how to proceed.

Thirty years ago this fall, a Somerset County jury brought here to listen to testimony found Wallace guilty of murdering Canonsburg dry cleaner Carl Luisi, 63, and his young clerk, Spalla, in a robbery of Carl’s Cleaners, Adams Avenue, on Aug. 17, 1979. For fatally shooting Luisi, he received a life sentence on a second-degree murder conviction. For Tina Spalla’s first-degree murder, the jury gave Wallace a death sentence.

“Both died for a sum of $227.05 stolen that day,” according to court records. The girl was killed because she had witnessed the shooting and robbery of Luisi, according to a state Supreme Court opinion.

Wallace’s first trial in 1980 before a Washington County jury ended in a mistrial when members of the panel could not agree on a verdict. He was a convicted by an Erie County jury a year later, but the State Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1983. A jury from Somerset County convicted him again in 1985, but U.S. District Judge Sean McLaughlin vacated Wallace’s death penalty in 2007, and the case languished until early this year, when new President Judge Katherine B. Emery assigned it to one of her colleagues.

Washington County Judge John DiSalle recently signed an order, filed Friday, scheduling a status conference for Nov. 12, and appointed attorney Dennis J. Popojas to represent Wallace in what could be his fourth trial. The judge has not ordered that Wallace, 61, who has been imprisoned at the State Correctional Institution-Greene, attend the proceeding.

Popojas hadn’t yet seen the order.

“I haven’t had a chance to review the file or talk with Mr. Wallace yet,” Popojas said Friday

Wallace and co-defendant, Henry Eugene Brown, were arrested in their Wheeling, W.Va., neighborhood just days after the double homicide. Brown pointed to Wallace as the triggerman. He had previously entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to two concurrent life terms, but, on the eve of Wallace’s third trial, under a plea bargain with then-District Attorney John C. Pettit, Brown’s sentence was re-negotiated to third-degree murder, with a total maximum sentence not to exceed 10 to 20 years in exchange for his testimony against Wallace.