A sex worker has shot and killed a man in self-defense—and that man just so happened to be a serial killer.
In a case for Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, the unnamed Charleston, W.Va. based woman said that she sensed something immediately wrong with Neal Falls when he arrived at her apartment in answer to an ad she had placed on Backpage.com.
“I knew he was there to kill me,” the visibly shaken woman told KPTV after being released from the hospital, where she was treated for broken vertebrae and lacerations. “I could tell that he had already done something because he said that he was going to prison for a long time. And that’s when I knew he was gonna kill me.”
When Falls began to strangle her, she said, she reached for a nearby rake. Falls put down his gun to try and wrestle the rake out of her hands—that’s when she grabbed the gun and shot him. Falls died from the gunshot wound, and she ran outside to get help.
When police arrived, they found an extensive “kill kit” in the trunk of Falls’s Subaru. In the trunk were knives, a shovel, a machete, several axes, a sledgehammer, a pair of hiking boots covered in dirt, trash bags, and cleaning supplies.
Police also apparently found a list Falls made of other targets, all women who advertised on Backpage. He’s also suspected in a string of sex worker deaths in Chillicothe, Ohio. The police there scoffed at the idea of a serial killer when it was first presented to them, but they’re going to have to take it much more seriously now.
(Via Daily Dot)