Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.'"


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday July 27 2015, @06:14PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Monday July 27 2015, @06:14PM (#214446)

    Here in the Netherlands, prostitution is actually legal. Trafficking is still a big problem. Insecure young women, sometimes even minors, get trapped into those "relationships" nevertheless. They are typically blackmailed to keep working under the threat of being outed towards their friends and parents.

    Would this still happen if prostitution was legal and accepted everywhere? It seems to me that one could only be trapped into a position such as this as long as there is only a limited, "shameful" industry to take advantage of it. Maybe we should bring back the temple prostitutes, and ally prostitution with all the churches.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2