Neal Falls

Neal Martin Falls (September 24, 1969 – July 18, 2015) was an American suspected serial killer who was shot and killed in self-defense by Heather Saul, a woman in Charleston, West Virginia.

Falls had been stopped by police in over twenty states during his life but did not incur any serious criminal charges.

Only after his death did police discover evidence possibly tying Falls to other crimes.

Neal Falls was born on September 24, 1969, in Eugene, Oregon, into an impoverished family with nine other children.

He spent his childhood and formative years living in various cities around Oregon.

During his school years, he began to show an interest in firearms and subsequently became obsessed with military paraphernalia.

After leaving high school, Falls was forced to engage in low-skilled labor.

Despite this, he was not known to break the law, refrained from abusing alcohol or drugs, and was keen on collecting weapons and ammunition.

Most of his friends and acquaintances spoke very positively of him.

In early 1992, Falls moved to Greensburg, Kansas, where he lived with his father until his death in 1995.

He then returned to Oregon and found a job as a private security guard.

Since 1995, Falls had been detained by the police for violating traffic rules in sixteen states, and his true scale of movement and activity remains unknown.

A list containing the names of six women involved in sex work and their contacts on social networks was found in Falls' pocket, which, according to the prosecutor's office, may have been intended victims.

However, police investigations determined that all of them were alive and well; five of them were located across West Virginia and the sixth worked in San Diego.

After finishing his training, his fingerprints were entered into a national database in 1998.

In 2000, Falls moved to Henderson, Nevada, where for the next eight years he worked as a security guard at Hoover Dam.

During this period, he began to exhibit deviant behavior, including abusing animals in the desert regions of Arizona, over which he was subjected to disciplinary action.

At the same time, Falls began to spend most of his leisure time in the company of various sex workers and pimps.

In the mid-2000s, he visited the Philippines for the purpose of sex tourism.

During the eight years he lived in Nevada, from 2003 to 2007, several sex workers disappeared, three of whom were later found dismembered in Nevada, California and Illinois.

All the missing women, like Saul, advertised their activities on the Internet.

In 2008, Falls was forced to quit his job over alleged sexual harassment.

Following the dismissal, he began to frequently change his place of residence.

Between 2009 and 2015, he lived in Oregon, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas, where he was detained by police on several occasions for traffic violations.

A dozen sex workers vanished in and around Chillicothe, Ohio, a two-hour drive from Charleston in 2014.

Despite the fact that no evidence was found of Falls' presence in Chillicothe, he is still considered a suspect.

In January 2015, Falls found out that a woman with whom he was intimately involved was married, after which, in the same month, his mother died.

These two events greatly affected his emotional state, making him become internally conflicted and disorganized.

In April 2015, Falls underwent retraining courses to continue working as a security guard in the private sector in Oregon, but by that summer he went to Texas, from where he moved to West Virginia.

Shortly after moving to West Virginia, Falls met a sex worker named Heather Saul online and tracked down her address.

After entering Saul's residence, he held her at gunpoint.

Saul described the struggle that ensued as follows: "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."

Falls died at the scene, shot by Saul in the head, killing him instantly.

Four sets of handcuffs were retrieved from Falls' body.

When police officers searched the inside of his car, they allegedly found a machete, axes, knives, a shovel, a sledgehammer, bleach, plastic trash bags, bulletproof vests, clean white socks, and underwear.

Police linked the objects found, Falls' modus operandi and his previous known locations to the murders and disappearances of women in three states.

In 2018, Falls was tested for involvement in the I-70 Killer murders, a series of killings in the Midwestern United States in the spring of 1992.

During that time he lived in Kansas, where one of the murders had occurred, and corresponded very closely to the suspect's image, but no physical evidence was located to corroborate these speculations.

Based on the circumstances surrounding Falls' death, law enforcement conducted an extensive investigation into his background to determine his culpability in any unsolved murders and disappearances of women.

This led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to believe that Falls had killed at least ten people.