Yesterday, 57 year old Kenath Dwayne Peale of Horn Lake, Mississippi, best known as pro wrestler “Nightmare” Ken Wayne, was sentenced by Judge Richard Chamberlin to 20 years on charges of possession of child pornography. Per the terms of his guilty plea, he will serve the first five years of the sentence in prison and the remaining 15 years under post-release supervision. Peale had been on house arrest since he was first charged in September 2014, and was facing 40 years in prison. He will also pay $1,000 each to the Mississippi Children’s Trust Fund and the Mississippi Crime Victim’s Compensation Fund as well as being required to register as a sex offender when he’s released.
In a press release, Attorney General Jim Hood commented on the case:
We focus all our resources, including advanced computer hardware and software, to seek out and find child predators and bring them to justice. We will continue to work with the task force to put these kinds of criminals behind bars, and we thank Judge Chamberlin for the sentence and the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office for their assistance on this case.
While not a huge name, it’s a bit surprising that most of the area newspapers didn’t play him his wrestling career, as he was a star in the area for many years. He first got a Memphis TV push in 1979 in a memorable father and son program where he and his father, Buddy Wayne, feuded with Tommy Gilbert and his son Eddie, who had just debuted. It was in 1981, though, that he first formed the team that defined his career.
Danny Davis had formed the masked Nightmares tag team with David Oswald and then Ted Allen before Wayne replaced them as the masked Speed. Eventually, the team of Nightmare and Speed became the masked Nightmares, and they were one of the most underrated combos of the era, a pair of really solid, athletic, and high flying heels a la the Midnight Express. Their size held them back from getting shots in a lot of territories, though, so they mostly worked in areas with a junior heavyweight focus, like Memphis, Stampede Wrestling in Calgary (unmasked as The Tennessee Studs), and Alabama. During one of their runs at home in Memphis, they became The Galaxians, Alpha and Beta, managed by a rookie named Jim Cornette, who credits them with teaching him how to manage a great tag team.
Eventually, they unmasked. In Alabama’s Continental Wrestling Federation, booker Eddie Gilbert split them up for a memorable program that was a big part of why Gilbert’s run in that promotion was so critically acclaimed. As the territories dried up, Wayne would do WCW and WWF TV jobs between indie dates and eventually opened up a wrestling school. He was an excellent worker with a reputation for having a great mind for ring psychology and reading a crowd, but obviously, in the grand scheme of things, none of that matters given the crimes he’s admitted to committing.
