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posted by CoolHand on Monday July 27 2015, @03:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the backpage-bada$$ dept.

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.'"


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheLink on Monday July 27 2015, @08:53AM

    by TheLink (332) on Monday July 27 2015, @08:53AM (#214187) Journal

    All that shit in the bible (a worse guide for morality is hardly imaginable) was from a time when for the most part, women didn't get to make those choices.

    There's another factor too. Thousands of years ago there wasn't stuff like the "Green Revolution" and effective safe birth control, one farmer or one shepherd couldn't really feed as many people as today. Famines were fairly common.

    You can afford a lot more mercy when one farmer can feed 100+ other people than when one farmer could barely feed himself and his family (and his children would have to start working the farm pretty early - whatever modern child labour laws say).

    Back then who would feed and raise the mostly inevitable children of prostitutes? Would the resulting adults be better or worse than average in upbringing, education etc? I wouldn't be surprised if many of the children starved or were murdered.

    Who feeds the bastards? The children born out of wedlock? Would a farmer want to toil hard and have his children share food with a bastard even in a famine?

    Who feeds a thief who can't pay for his crime? Who feeds those you want to give "life sentences" to instead of barbaric death penalties? Are you going to force the whole village to build a prison and feed murderers for 20 years?

    Those laws are harsh. But the conditions were quite harsh too, so I can understand why some of the laws are the way they are (not so sure about some of the others). They are actually a lesser evil compared to the practical alternatives available
    back then.

    See: http://animalsmart.org/animals-and-the-environment/comparing-agriculture-of-the-past-with-today [animalsmart.org]
    http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/how-many-farmer-feed.htm [howstuffworks.com]

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