The trick went south el pronto.
According to cops, the tryst had been booked on backpages.com between a john named Neal Falls and an escort in Charleston, West Virginia.
By the end of the encounter on July 18, 2015, Falls’ ticket had been punched one-way. Destination: Morgue.
The 45-year-old punter had attacked and choked the escort but the quick-thinking would-be victim turned the tables, grabbed his gun off the ground and squeezed the trigger twice, sending him to oblivion.
“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 … I grabbed the gun and shot behind me,” escort Heather Saul later said.
When detectives searched Falls’ car, they discovered axes, knives, handcuffs, a shovel, bleach and other items.
“The fact that he was 45 years old, and carrying tools like he was, and committing a crime that was so organized and so violent, it’s unlikely that this was his first violent crime,” Lt. Steve Cooper, Charleston chief of detectives, told reporters.
Indeed.
***
Neal Falls grew up poor in Eugene, Oregon in a brood of 10 children with an abusive father. The family drifted around the state moving from one luckless locale to the next.
Friends liked him but he was developing a taste for guns and military paraphernalia. Like his parents before him, he fell into dead-end low-wage jobs. But he wasn’t a boozer and didn’t do drugs.
Yet some acquaintances and co-workers described him as “odd and creepy.”
By the mid-1990s, he was spending a lot of time with sex workers at hot-sheet motels. Once, he even travelled to the Philippines for sex tourism.
***
With Falls dead as a doornail, detectives began looking into his background and were shocked. In the dead man’s pocket was a list of 10 other women, nine of them in West Virginia and one in San Diego. All were online escorts.
Not only that, cops revealed that the dead man had been stopped, interviewed, or investigated by police in at least 20 states. Detectives were now looking into possible links to unsolved disappearances or slayings of women around the U.S.
Investigators began working backwards, looking at his suspected modus operandi and tracing his movements across three states.
– Between 2003 and 2007, Falls lived in Nevada. During that time a number of sex workers vanished. Three were later found dismembered in Nevada, California and Illinois.
– In 2014, at least a dozen escorts disappeared from the Chillicothe, Ohio area, south of Columbus and a short two-hour drive from Charleston. Falls is the prime suspect.
– In every instance, the victims advertised their sexual services online.
***
Across the U.S., homicide detectives began scrambling to put together the pieces of the enigma that was Neal Falls’ violent life.
In suburban Las Vegas, Falls was linked to the 2005 disappearance of sex worker Lindsay Harris, 21. Her rental car was discovered abandoned 30 minutes from the Vegas strip. Three years later, she was identified via parts of a leg discovered 2,575 km away near Springfield, Ill.
The remains of Misty Saens, 25, were discovered in 2003, wrapped in plastic and cloth.
And there were scores of other slain sex workers investigators linked to Falls, who had been living in his car at the time of his death.
“He had no cash, no credit cards,” Cooper said. “It’s a mystery how he had travelled across the country to us right now. There’s something that we haven’t discovered yet.”
***
As investigators scoured unsolved files across the country, they believed that before Falls’ trail of death came to an abrupt conclusion in Charleston, his final victim was an Ohio sex worker.
Tiffany Sayre, 26, disappeared on May 11, 2015. Friends said she had been en route to the Chillicothe Inn, an alleged prostitution hub in southern Ohio.
Her body was discovered wrapped in a sheet about 50 km west of the city.
***
Sometimes, what cops think and believe in their guts does not match the evidence. And despite being the prime suspect in nearly 20 unsolved murders, that lack of concrete physical evidence has hindered efforts to definitively link him to crimes.
But for Heather Saul, who ended Falls’ suspected reign of terror, there is little doubt about exactly who he was.
“You could tell he was confident with what he was doing and saying. He had done it before. You could tell,” Saul said.
MOST WANTED
ABDELMUNIEM ABDALLA
411: Abdalla, 37, is wanted for first-degree murder in the Sept. 10, 2020, brazen daytime murder of Andre Rodriguez, 26. Toronto Police say around 1:50 p.m. in the Walmart parking lot at 2525 St. Clair Ave. W., near Runnymede Rd., officers responded to reports of a shooting. Rodriguez was discovered suffering from gunshot wounds and obviously deceased in a car. Three others were arrested in connection to the killing. Abdalla is wanted on a Canada-wide warrant.
CONTACT: If you have any information regarding Abdalla’s whereabouts contact the Homicide Unit at 416-808-7400.