Quincy Allen (WIS/YouTube).
A man already serving life for two murders in North Carolina, who told authorities he “got tired of waiting” for his first assignment as a mafia hit man and decided to “embark on his own killing spree” got another life term for two more killings in South Carolina.
Quincy Allen, 44, was given life in prison without the possibility of parole on Monday in the 2002 deaths of Dale Hall, 44, and Jedidiah Harr, 22. He is already serving a life sentence in North Carolina for the killing of convenience store clerk Richard Hawks, 53, and customer Robert Shane Roush, 29.
“People were scared to death,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said, recalling the long-ago cases, Wilmington, North Carolina, NBC affiliate WECT reported. “We had a serial killer that had gone wild, and it scared our community. Everybody was scared.”
“He will kill again. He likes it. He likes it, and he will do it again,” Lott added.
Hall was the first of Allen’s murder victims. On July 10, 2002, Allen picked up Hall on a road in Columbia during a break from his job at a restaurant.
In an isolated cul-de-sac, he shot her with a 12-gauge shotgun in the leg and torso as she pleaded for her life. Allen then dragged her to the woods, where he put the gun in her mouth and fatally shot her before dousing her in gasoline and setting her body on fire. He then went back to work.
On Aug. 8, 2002, he killed Harr with a shotgun, meaning to kill a man who was with Harr with whom Allen had been arguing. That man managed to escape, but Allen later went to the man’s home and set the front porch on fire.
The following day, Allen torched a car and pointed his shotgun at a patron in a strip club in Columbia, South Carolina, before driving to New York City and back. On his way back, during a stop at a convenience store in North Carolina, he killed Hawks, whose obituary said he planned to retire and spend more time gardening, and Roush, an Ohio schoolteacher on his way to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to meet a friend from college, his obituary said.
Allen, then 22, was arrested in Texas on Aug. 14 after a police pursuit while driving Roush’s red 2002 Ford Explorer.
Allen was later convicted and initially sentenced to death for the murders in South Carolina. The sentence was overturned in 2022 after attorneys presented evidence showing he had tried to kill himself, had schizophrenia and had an abusive childhood.
The opinion in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals written by Chief Judge Robert L. Gregory reversing the death sentence detailed the motive behind Allen’s violent attacks.
Allen confessed to committing the crimes. He began killing people because, while he was incarcerated, an inmate told Allen that he could get Allen a job as a mafia hit man. But Allen got tired of waiting for his first assignment and decided to embark on his own killing spree. He would have killed more people if he could have gotten his hands on a gun sooner, Allen explained. But, of course, his prior record made that difficult.
Allen was later resentenced to life for the South Carolina slayings.
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