Pickens County has a history replete with convicts who escaped local authorities. This particular story took place near Sharptop Church (near the present-day corner of Grandview and Pendley Road) and moved to the Connahaynee Lodge grounds within Tate Mountain Estates before the convict escaped our county.
On September 2, 1937 a group of convicts were near Sharptop Church, when one of the convicts, a man convicted of murder, escaped from the group and ran up an embankment. A flurry of bullets was released and the man stumbled. When the deputies ran to where the man fell, they were surprised at the lack of blood in the area. Wallace Hughes was not wounded, nor did he stay around for any length of time. A posse of 50 men with bloodhounds searched in vain for a week without finding him.
Hughes had made his way to Burnt Mountain to the quarters of some servants of the Connahaynee Lodge. Reports differ as to whether or not Wallace acquired any clothes from the servants. Regardless, for the fourth time in Wallace’s illustrious criminal career, he had escaped. After escaping North Georgia Wallace made his way to California, New York and Chicago before returning to Atlanta.
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Wallace’s criminal career began in 1932, when at the age of 17, he killed two men while holding up a restaurant in Atlanta. He fled the restaurant being chased by police. Gunshots were exchanged as Wallace made his way across several rooftops of buildings in downtown Atlanta before finally being captured atop the Georgia Power Company building. He was arrested and sent to trial. After taking his own defense, the presiding judge had sentenced Wallace to death by electric chair.
Wallace Hughes, Jr. was born in Fulton County, Georgia in 1915. He lived with his mother and father, and two older sisters. During the trial, he testified that his father Wallace Hughes, Sr. had introduced alcohol to him as a child and had eventually deserted the family. He claimed that the effects of his childhood had led him to a life of crime.
A year later, feeling pity on the youthful Wallace, Governor Talmadge had commuted his death sentence within seven hours of his execution. Yet Wallace decided that prison life was still not for him and decided to escape. In 1936, Hughes fled from a prisoner camp in Soperton, Georgia. This was his third escape.
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Fast forward to January of 1938. After having been on the lam for 3 months, Wallace was recaptured by Atlanta police. The police had noticed a stolen car outside of a house on Beryl Avenue and searched the car. After securing two pistols, they raided the house. Hughes and three other criminals were arrested. Upon being arrested, Hughes was subsequently identified in a lineup for having robbed someone else between his escape and capture.
Wallace was sent to a prison farm at Reidsville, Georgia for a few years. However, in the spring of 1942, he and seven other prisoners, orchestrated an escape. Three of the eight convicts were shot. Five of the eight were captured immediately. Wallace was neither shot nor captured right away. Later that summer, be was captured using the alias Buddy Hughes and charged with transporting a stolen automobile.
Miraculously and surprisingly Wallace was allowed out of prison after having his life sentence commuted on November 11, 1956 and by 1958 he was living in Rome, Georgia, married and had taken up employment as an office machine repairman. Wallace outlived his wife and became a regular attendee of the Second Avenue Baptist Church of Rome. He passed away peacefully at the age of 64 in 1978.
Wallace lived most of his life as an outlaw, with blatant disregard for the property, life or rights of others. And yet, time and time again, he consistently escaped justice, breaking free repeatedly and amazing luck, avoiding gunfire in every case. In my research, I could not find record of his pardon from prison. After his death sentence was commuted to life without parole, barring a pardon, he should have never been released.
Regardless, his last decades were spent in marriage, work and church as a contributing member of society. He found redemption.
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