Q: Several years ago, a chiropractor named Wallace committed a murder in Powder Springs. He choked his wife to death and was going to drop her body in the Okefenokee Swamp. What were the details of that murder? Is he still living? Is he still in jail?
—Eddie Webster, Douglasville
A: Jack Wallace and his wife Kimberly were in the middle of a divorce in 1990.
They had separated and he was paying monthly support, but he didn’t want her gaining half his assets.
Kimberly Wallace, in divorce papers, claimed Jack Wallace was worth more than $2 million, the AJC reported at the time.
She went missing on Dec. 13 to start a strange, but swift, saga.
Kimberly Wallace’s body was found early the next morning, stuffed inside a large toolbox in the back of a plane on a landing strip in Waycross.
The plane had landed without lights, alerting a prison guard, who called police.
Officers arrived before the plane could take off and arrested Michael A. Glean, the pilot, who also was Jack Wallace’s attorney, and another man.
Authorities believed the men were planning to fly over the Okefenokee and dump Kimberly Wallace’s body into the swamp.
Jack Wallace was later arrested, and in September 1992, was found guilty in a trial that was called the “Toolbox Murder” and shown on Court TV.
Wallace, who was born in 1929, received a life sentence, which he is serving at Augusta State Medical Prison, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections’ website.
Q: What can you tell me about how Covington was named? Was it named after a person or taken from another city or what?
A: Folks loved their war heroes 200 years ago.
Covington originally was called Newtonsboro, after a Revolutionary War soldier named John Newton. (It’s been written that Newton wasn’t a real person, which is another story for another day).
Newtonsboro was renamed Covington — in honor of Gen. Leonard Covington — before it was incorporated in 1822.
Covington was from Maryland, fought against Native Americans in the early days of the United States and was elected to Congress in 1805.
He rejoined the Army and commanded troops in the War of 1812 before he was killed fighting British and Canadian forces at the Battle of Crysler’s Farm in Ontario in 1813.
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