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The Washington Post reports that an internet escort in Charleston, W.Va., may have saved her own life and the lives of many other women, when she shot and killed an alleged attacker who showed up at the woman's home on July 18 after answering an escort ad she had placed on Backpage.com. Neal Falls showed up with multiple pairs of handcuffs and a Subaru full of weapons and tools, including a shovel, knives, a bulletproof vest, a machete, bleach, trash bags, sledgehammers and axes. In Falls's pocket, police said, was a list of names of potential future victims, all of whom are sex workers who advertised on Backpage. Investigators are trying to determine whether Falls is responsible for a string of slayings targeting sex workers in Ohio and Nevada. "We are entering his DNA profile into CODIS, which is a national crime DNA database, to see if it matches any previous submissions from anywhere in the United States," says Steve Cooper, the Charleston Police Department's chief of detectives. "If his DNA has been located in any other crimes and his profile was entered into CODIS, there will be a match."
From the moment Falls showed up at the home of his latest alleged victim, he turned violent. "I knew he was there to kill me," says the victim who asked not to be identified. Falls pulled a gun on her and began strangling her. "When he strangled me he just wouldn't let me get any air. I grabbed my rake and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him. I just grabbed the gun and shot behind me." Local authorities are treating the shooting as an act of self-defense. According to Cooper, "when we find multiple sets of handcuffs, a machete, an axe, a bulletproof vest and container of bleach, the first thing that comes to an investigator's mind is, 'This is a serial killer kit.'"
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday July 27 2015, @05:48AM
ummm, I'm not sure that I disagree with you, but the "tools [to] murder people in mere seconds" also includes common objects like knives, hammers, rocks, glass, pencils, etc.
Yes, in an ideal world, "nutjobs" shouldn't have access to anything dangerous, but "non-nutjobs" shouldn't be denied tools for self preservation / defense.
BTW - did you know a news magazine can be easily used as a lethal weapon? I learned that decades ago, from a Special Forces instructor. He explained the lethal use of DOZENS of commonly available objects.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @06:03AM
> BTW - did you know a news magazine can be easily used as a lethal weapon?
You have a different definition 'easily' than most people. I'm confident that the average person can kill much more easily with a gun than with a rolled up magazine. If that weren't the case, nobody would bother with guns, we'd all just walk around with magazines in concealed holsters.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @07:48AM
It is a one step method to turn any glossy magazine into a lethal weapon. The only thing stopping people from doing it more is ignorance. Would you like to bad literacy too? After all, words like "declaration of war" have killed orders of magnitude more people with less effort than any other weapon in recorded history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @05:24PM
So then why aren't those used for mass murders? Could it be, I don't know, that guns are somehow different from other tools that could potentially be lethal if used in a certain way in that they're specifically created for murder and let you kill with a tiny movement of a single finger, significantly less effort than any other commonly available tool? That other tools can be used for murder is not a counterpoint to the fact that guns are specifically designed to murder many people in mere seconds. Comparing guns to knives, hammers, etc, is a false analogy because they are in no way analogous.