As yet, there's nothing linking 45-year-old Neal Falls, who was shot and killed by a prostitute in Charleston, W.Va., during a brutal attack last week, with the serial killer of Chillicothe, Ohio. But investigators are hoping there's a connection.
“As it stands right now, we have nothing that ties him to anything here in Chillicothe,” Chillicothe police public information officer Bud Lytle told the USA Today.
That said, Charleston is only two hours from Chillicothe, and Falls fits the profile of the man hunting down escorts in the southern Ohio town of 21,000.
Police on the scene in Charleston were so alarmed by what they found in the trunk of his car, and on his person, that they've put police all over the country on red alert. Falls is from Oregon and is being investigated for connections to some grisly unsolved murders in Nevada as well.
What officers found in Charleston: a list of escorts from Backpage.com that would be (presumably) Falls' next victims; garden variety serial killer stuff — axes, shovels, bleach, sledgehammers, machetes.
The prostitute who shot Falls reported to police dispatch that her attacker entered her home with the foreboding line "Live or die" and immediately drew a gun and began strangling her.
She said she reached for a rake to fend him off, and when Falls set his gun down to get the rake from her hands, she grabbed the gun and shot behind her.
In Chillicothe, (at least) six women have disappeared in the past year-and-a-half. Four of their bodies have been found, dumped in local waterways.
