Conviction in ’79 murder dismissed
Washington County sheriff’s deputies keep tight security as William “Tippy” Wallace is escorted Oct. 7 into the county courthouse for a status conference before Judge John F. DiSalle. Wallace was convicted of the murders of Tina Spalla and Carl Luisi during a robbery in 1979 at Carl’s Cleaners in Canonsburg.
William “Tippy” Wallace returns to the county jail with Deputy Sheriff Sam Secreet in this 1985 photo.
When the parents of 15-year-old Tina Spalla, a clerk at a dry cleaners, learned in the waiting room of Canonsburg Hospital emergency room their daughter died of gunshot wounds inflicted during a robbery, Elsie Spalla screamed and wept as her knees buckled that Friday on a hot August evening in 1979.
Although Elsie died in December 2012, one can almost imagine her reacting in the same way upon learning the murder conviction against William “Tippy” Wallace was dismissed Thursday.
Years ago, a federal judge awarded Wallace a new trial in the Spalla homicide, but because the case languished for years in Washington County Court, Judge John DiSalle, in a seven-page opinion, wrote he was “compelled to agree” Wallace’s right to prompt retrial was violated.
“The court is loath to dismiss such a serious charge on this basis, without an opportunity to officially establish the facts of the case in a new trial,” DiSalle wrote. “However, the law is clear in this regard.”
Tina had a job that summer working at Carl’s Cleaners in Canonsburg for Carl Luisi Sr. During the Aug. 17, 1979, robbery, two men entered the business. Luisi, shot twice, was pronounced dead, but his young clerk, also shot, clung to life and was transported to the nearby hospital.
Wallace was arrested three days later in Wheeling, W.Va., and was charged with homicide, robbery and criminal conspiracy. His co-defendant, Henry Brown, was apprehended shortly thereafter. Wallace stood trial three times. His first prosecution ended in a hung jury; his second conviction, which included a life sentence for slaying Luisi and a death sentence for murdering young Tina, was overturned on appeal; and, during the third trial, Brown testified against Wallace.
A Somerset County jury found Wallace guilty of second-degree murder for Luisi’s death during the robbery and decided he should be given the death penalty – at that time, electrocution – for the premeditated murder of the girl.
After exhausting his appeals at the state level, Wallace’s case headed for federal court. In 2003, a federal judge conditionally vacated his conviction and death sentence for the murder of Spalla, pending a retrial, a decision the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in 2007.
In April 2009, the records were returned to Washington County Courthouse.
Wallace, acting as his own attorney, requested six years ago this month he be released from death row. Days later, prosecutors notified the state Department of Corrections that they no longer intended to seek a capital sentence against Wallace and asked the court to assign a judge to the case and schedule a status conference.
Then-President Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca temporarily placed the case on her own docket, but no action, according to the district attorney’s office, was taken at a status conference. O’Dell Seneca, who was an assistant district attorney during part of the Wallace prosecution, raised the issue of perceived conflict of interest. By November 2012, the district attorney’s office asked a third time for the case to be reassigned, but no action was taken.
After another two years of inactivity, on Jan. 7, 2015, new President Judge Katherine B. Emery assigned the case to DiSalle. In October 2016, through attorney Dennis Popojas, Wallace sought to have the charges stemming from Spalla’s death dismissed because his right to a prompt retrial had been violated.
DiSalle, in the opinion, calculated the lapse of time, noting the prosecution “agrees that ‘there is no evidence of record to explain this delay.'”
Wallace’s life sentence for Luisi’s murder still stands, and, now 62, he is incarcerated in State Correctional Institution at Greene County.