Neal Martin Falls

Neal Martin Falls was a suspected serial killer who was shot and killed by a sex worker in self-defense after he stalked and attacked her. Although he became a prime suspect in the disappearance of dozens of women following his death, and although he was stopped by police in nearly half of the states in the continental United States over the course of his adult life, the incident in which he was killed is the only crime he can be tied to with any certainty.

Born in Eugene, Oregon, on September 24, 1969, Falls grew up in relative poverty in a family that reportedly included nine siblings and an abusive father. Falls’ early life was largely unremarkable, and most of his friends and acquaintances are reported to have spoken well of him. After high school, he worked in a variety of low skill jobs, and was reportedly obsessed with firearms.

Falls moved around within his home state of Oregon until 1992 when he moved to Greensburg, Kansas, where he lived with his father until his death in 1995. Falls then moved back to Oregon and took a job as a private security guard, and his fingerprints were submitted to a national database in 1998 due to this line of work.

In 2000, he moved to Henderson, Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas, where he worked security at the Hoover Dam. During this time, he began to act out with disturbing behaviors, to include animal abuse for which he was disciplined at work. In 2008, Falls was charged with sexually harassing a coworker, for which he was forced to resign.

Falls is also alleged to have begun to spend his time in the company of sex workers and pimps, and in the mid-2000s, he visited the Philippines, allegedly for the purposes of sex tourism.

At some point in 2015, he learned that a woman he had been seeing was actually married, and had been lying to him. Then his mother died. After the death of his mother, Falls moved from Oregon to Texas and then to Charleston, West Virginia, where sex worker Heather Saul lived. Falls met Saul on the internet before stalking her down in real life.

Heather Saul

Falls broke into Saul's home and held her at gunpoint, and as Saul described the struggle, "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 was shot in the head and he died instantly. Saul ran out of the house and found a neighbor, who called 911. When police arrived, four sets of handcuffs were found on his person. A search of his car led them to a massive “kill kit” that included a machete, axes, knives, a shovel, a sledgehammer, bleach, plastic trash bags, bulletproof vests, clean white socks, and underwear.

Saul was reportedly deeply traumatized by her experiences, not only coming so close to being brutally murdered, but also by the experience of shooting someone in the head. In the struggle with Falls, she broke her back, and dislocated her shoulder, and in the aftermath her experiences were reported to have made her existing drug problem worse.

Federal law enforcement suspect Falls in the murder and disappearance of a large number of women. During the years he lived in Henderson, Nevada many sex workers disappeared, three of whom were later found dismembered in California, Illinois, and Nevada. A dozen more vanished around Chillicothe, Ohio, just a two-hour drive from Charleston, West Virginia.

Despite the fact that no evidence was found linking Falls with Chillicothe, and only circumstantial evidence linking him to the Nevada killings, he is still considered a prime suspect in those disappearances due to the fact that all of the missing women advertised on the internet as sex workers just like Saul. A list of six other sex workers was found on Falls body after he was killed; five were in West Virginia and the sixth was in San Diego. Law enforcement speculates that they were potential future victims.

Falls’ found Saul through the website Backpage, which was seized and taken down by the United States Department of Justice on April 6, 2018, when the justice department filed a 93-count indictment against seven former owners and executives, charging them with facilitating prostitution as well as money laundering and conspiracy. On July 31, 2023, James Larkin committed suicide about a week before his second trial was scheduled to start following a mistrial. In November 2023, a jury found Michael Lacey guilty on one count of money laundering, acquitted him of another money laundering charge, and deadlocked on 84 other charges leading to a second mistrial.

Falls is also a suspect in the I-70 murders, which happened along interstate Highway 70 in the midwest. At the time, Falls lived in Kansas, relatively close to where one of the murders took place. No evidence is known to exist to corroborate the speculations of his involvement in these murders.

The I-70/I-35 Killer Task Force recently created a portal for DNA testing accessible to all the various agencies involved in the investigation, which have have shifted their strategy to a more collaborative focus.

The FBI conducted an extensive investigation into Falls, the result of which is that the FBI believes that Falls killed at least ten people. Despite this, a google search for Falls uncovered that he has has been memorialized by the National Gun Violence Memorial as a “victim of gun violence.”

On their site, they justify this by saying that they provide links to stories of these crimes, and note that 14% of their “victims of gun violence” were killed in the commission of “some kind of crime.”

When the FBI identified Falls as a prime suspect in the murder of a series of sex workers working the Las Vegas strip from 2003 to 2007, as well as the unsolved sex worker disappearances around Chillicothe, Ohio, they noted that the pattern of these disappearances seemed as if it had been disrupted after Falls was killed by Heather Saul.

• Misty Marie Saens disappeared from Las Vegas on March 12, 2003. Her torso was found wrapped in black plastic bags and bed sheets just west of Las Vegas in the desert on a road leading to the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

• Jodi Brewer had been dropped off by her boyfriend at the Harbor Island Club Apartments, in Las Vegas, on August 14, her mother reported her missing on August 15, and her torso was discovered wrapped in plastic on August 29, 2003 near a highway in San Bernardino County, California, 25 miles from the Nevada border. A search also uncovered a sheet near the off-ramp to the Mojave National Preserve. When interviewed by police, one witness claimed to see her get into a white car with California licence plates. Her remains were identified by her tattoos.

  

  Jodi Marie Brewer, Lindsay Marie Harris, Misty Marie Saens and Jessica Edith Foster.

• Jessica Edith Louise Foster disappeared from the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada, United States in 2006. In 2005, Foster and a friend of hers visited Florida together, and then stopped by Las Vegas on the way back to Canada in May. Foster decided to stay. Foster became involved in prostitution, was arrested once for solicitation, and was the victim of battery several times before her disappearance.

• Lindsay Marie Harris disappeared from her home in Henderson, Nevada, on May 4, 2005. She was last observed at a nearby bank making a deposit, after which her rental car was discovered abandoned in the desert at the southern end of the valley. On May 23, 2005, children discovered human legs in a grassy field a couple hundred yards from Interstate 55 in Divernon, Illinois, and the FBI was able to verify by DNA that the legs belonged to Harris. Divernon is about 30 miles from Butler, Illinois where Falls held a firearms permit. Rex Heuermann, the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer, is also linked to Harris's murder.

• Megan Nicole Lancaster was last seen in Wheelersburg, Ohio on April 3, 2013 when she went out to run errands before heading back to her parents' house. She never arrived, and her wallet was found on the passenger seat of her car at a Rally's fast food restaurant in Portsmouth, Ohio, two days later.

  

• Holly Renee Logan was last seen in Columbus, Ohio on July 21, 2013. She was not reported missing until December 2014.

  

• Jayme Malynn Bowen was last seen in Columbus, Ohio on April 10, 2014, leaving her sisters’ house to walk a few blocks to her parents' home. Bowen and Logan were known to be friends.

  

• Charlotte Eliza Trego was last seen in Chillicothe, Ohio on May 3, 2014. She had been living with a roommate on Ewing Street, but after the roommate evicted her, she left on foot, and was never heard from again.

  

• Tameka Lynch, who was friends with Trego, went missing on the same day she did. Three weeks later, Lynch's nude body was discovered in Paint Creek; the autopsy determined she had died from an overdose of cocaine, alcohol, and amphetamines, although the exact circumstances of her death are unknown. Her family believes she was murdered.

  

• Wanda Jean Lemons was last seen in Chillicothe, Ohio on November 3, 2014 trying to hitchhike to Galveston, Texas.

  

• Shasta Himelrick went missing on December 25, 2014, from Chillicothe, Ohio. She was last seen on the CCTV of a Speedway gas station around 3:15 a.m. Her car was found abandoned near Higby Bridge, which crosses the Scioto River, in south-eastern Ross County, Ohio. The driver and passenger doors were open, the battery was dead, and the car was out of fuel. Her body was found in the Scioto River on January 2, 2015. Her family vehemently disagrees with the coroner's determination of suicide by drowning and insists that Himelrick was killed and dumped in the river.

  "She spent the day with me," Himelrick's grandmother, Shirley Himelrick, told The Huffington Post. "She was excited and happy because she had just found out she was pregnant."

  "My life is pretty close to normal," Himelrick wrote in a text message on Dec. 16, 2014. "I'm so happy I'm going to have his baby.”

  

• Tiffany Sayre went missing on May 11, 2015. She was last seen heading to the Chillicothe Inn, which had a reputation as a place of prostitution. Her body was found wrapped in a sheet by two people walking along a creek bed along Cave Road in Highland County, Ohio, about 30 miles west of Chillicothe, Ohio, on June 27, 2015, and her death is considered a homicide.