A West Virginia prostitute who killed a threatening john may have inadvertently ended an Oregon serial killers reign of terror that took him on a cross country murder spree.
Neal Falls, 45, was shot dead last week after meeting up for a tryst with a sex worker he met online named Heather. But when Falls showed up at the womans Charleston, W. Va., home, the armed man barged in and asked her, live or die? before choking and strangling her.
Heather was able to wriggle out of his grasp and fight for her life.
"When he strangled me, I grabbed my rake, and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him," Heather told CBS News. "I grabbed the gun and shot behind me."
The trembling woman ran from the home and flagged a neighbor, who called 911 for the scratched and bruised sex worker. When officers arrived and searched Falls car, bearing an Oregon license plate, they discovered a shocking kill kit. The deranged john had four sets of handcuffs, trash bags, a sledgehammer, several knives, axes, a machete, bleach, a bulletproof vest and boots.
Now, authorities in Ohio, Illinois and Nevada, all places Falls once lived, are investigating whether cases of missing women, all escorts, can be linked to the Springfield, Ore., man.
Its likely that Mr. Falls is a serial killer, Steve Cooper, the Charleston police departments chief of detectives, told CBS. I believe she saved lives by shooting Mr. Falls, based on what he did to her and based on the items found in his car.
Falls spent eight years living in Henderson, Nev. a Las Vegas suburb. During that time, four prostitutes went missing and three were later found dismembered.
Jessica Foster, 21, was never found after she vanished sometime in March 2006.
But 22-year-old Lindsay Marie Harris, who disappeared in May 2005, was later found dismembered in Divernon, Ill., some 1,600 miles from where she was last seen alive.
It took three years to match her DNA to the mutilated body parts found in the rural area, which is just 350 miles from an Indiana town where Falls once held a firearms permit, according to the Huffington Post.
Las Vegas escorts Misty Marie Saens, 25, and Jodi Marie Brewer, 19, both disappeared from Sin City in 2003. Saens was later found dismembered along a Nevada highway while Brewers body parts were found strewn along a roadway in San Bernardino, Calif.
No one was ever charged in the killings, though it appeared that the same person was likely responsble for both.
Police in Chillicothe, Ohio, just a two hour drive from Charleston, W. Va., are taking a similar approach. The rural town has had six women, all drug abusers and prostitutes, disappear in a 14 month span. Only four of those women have been found dead, in or near bodies of water.
Falls spent the last seven months living on the road, having recently been pulled over in Texas, according to the Huffington Post. He had a background as a security guard, spending time during his Nevada days working at the Hoover Dam.
Based on the nature and sheer brutality of the assaults, along with all of those suspicious items, we suspect that Mr. Falls has been involved in other violent crimes," Cooper told the Review-Journal.
"We've shared this case file with law enforcement across the country, hoping to assist on any open or cold murder cases."
Heather, for her part, won't be charged in the killing because authorities determined it was self defense.
"I knew he was there to kill me," she told CBS.
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