An Escort Killed Her Client In Self-Defense — Then Came The Aftermath

Heather Saul is smoking cigarettes on her sofa with her white wire-haired dog Fancy in the West Virginia heat, texting on the phone the police took from her on that day last July when she was almost killed.

She gets a message from Lt. Steve Cooper, Charleston Police Department, asking if it’s OK if some women from his church come over and check on her. Cooper worked the case, investigating the man who came to kill her, Neal Falls.

When police searched Falls’ car, they found a King James compact reference Bible, a road atlas, a Crown Royal bag containing 10 white dice, and a half-dozen empty Subway sandwich bags. According to Cooper, Falls had “several axes, a shovel, a bulletproof vest, numerous handcuff keys, a container of bleach, a large cache of trash bags, other cutting instruments — knives and box cutters. A sledge hammer.” There was a duffel bag, and in it, five identical sets of clothes: black T-shirts, black cargo pants. A machete, packing tape, and a black blanket. There was a Rubbermaid tub: one so big officers noted a woman could fit inside it.

On the driver's side floor was the most significant piece of information Neal Falls left behind. Printed on the reverse side of a Kanawha County Public Library computer pass, in careful grade-school pencil lettering, were the telephone numbers, first names — Alyssa, Armani, Trinity, Sara, Alley, and Sylvia — and ages of six women. Because of Heather, they survived.

The details made Heather’s story an instant media attraction. An escort had killed her client in self-defense. He had a list of women he was targeting next, and he was potentially linked to several other sex workers’ disappearances and deaths across the country. Within 24 hours local law enforcement decided Heather would not be charged with any crime.

Crime buffs began to aggregate news about her and Falls in web forums and a Facebook group. They dug up her ads. They traced his previous arrests, and speculated about his possible connections to other cases of missing women across the country. Elsewhere online, sex workers rallied around Heather. The Sex Workers Outreach Project issued a statement of solidarity. The hashtag #Hookers4Heather gathered praise: “You are the most amazing, beautiful, courageous woman. You deserve the world!”; “You have our support! Thank you for being so brave!” News outlets appeared at Heather’s fence, outside her window. On its front page, the New York Daily News ran one of Heather’s selfies with the headline “HOOKER BLOWS KILLER AWAY.”

On the September morning I arrive in Charleston, Heather is struggling with some basic bureaucracy, annoying even in the best of circumstances. Her ID is gone. Some guys robbed her recently, she says; she thinks they saw her on the news and guessed she’d have money. But she doesn’t have the right documents to prove her identity, and anyway, the DMV is closed today.

The walls in her place are a powdery dark violet. A sheet is tacked up over the window to block out the view, but it still wouldn’t be difficult for someone to peer in through her yard. Her hair is pulled back, dyed red and something else, maybe green or blue or violet, fading. She’s got on shorts, a tank top. The air conditioner is loud and a little busted, so it’s still hot inside.

“I put your Coke in the fridge,” she says. She already apologized for the dishes in the sink; she thought it makes the place a mess. It’s not. It’s lived in, a haze of accumulated cigarette smoke suspended in the air, small-seeming and sleepy. There’s a little TV with a stack of DVDs on top, and a vintage vanity covered in personal things, some dried roses. Then there’s Fancy, nuzzling a red chenille throw.

Heather texts Cooper back that she is busy — he keeps checking up on her, she says — and sets the phone on the coffee table next to the ashtray and the candle burning in a dish. If it’s not the detective texting, it’s the well-connected women in the community who want to bring her food and counsel. Or it’s the guy raising money for her who says her story will be huge. Or it’s the reporters and camera crews, looking for an interview. But with attention comes something even more out of Heather’s control. Police knock when she won’t answer the door to do-gooders. Internet drama ensues over what should be done with the thousands of dollars people donated. Reporters interview would-be spokespeople it’s not clear Heather asked to speak on her behalf.

The knocks at the door hadn’t let up by September. One day it was the FBI. “They were telling me,” she says, “we’ve seen your phone.” (She didn’t take a business card, though, and the FBI couldn’t confirm. Charleston police said they did work with the FBI in the investigation into Falls’ telephone activity.)

Heather really is busy. She sits cross-legged on the far end of the couch, a notebook on her lap. In round script, the cover lists first names: I recognize my own. Tomorrow Heather will go again to try to get an ID, get signed up for health insurance, figure out where to move, to work. Outside Charleston, a city where there is no organized and visible sex worker community, across the country and the world, other sex workers were sharing her story — or what they knew of it from media reports, from inference. But in Heather’s apartment, it was just one more day in the place where she fought for her life.

Heather’s lived in Charleston her whole life. She says she hasn’t lived with her father and mother together since she was 14. They left her dad’s place when Heather was young. She’s long supported herself.

After high school, Heather enrolled in community college. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do," she says, petting Fancy, who gently interrupts us from time to time. "Still really don’t.” She thought about going into medical admissions, or taking a paralegal course. She didn’t graduate; she left before the year was up. “I had a student loan, and that first semester it gutted me. And I couldn’t go back, because of that loan. I still can’t go back — it’s only $1,200. It’s in default.”

Then Heather worked as a waitress. She was a head cook for a while. The last time she waitressed was about a year ago at Pizza Hut. She got a place of her own, but when things got hard, she went back to her mom. They spent nearly two years living together on the hill in Charleston, in which time she adopted Fancy. “It was a lot for both of us.” But it was safer than the neighborhood where she moved in June, a part of town called the flats. “It was just something fast and cheap, and you know.” She met the landlord when she came by one day to help a friend who was a hundred bucks behind on the rent. She did some work, fixing up the walls, redoing the floors.

“My dad does drywall and he paints, so that’s what I’ve always done,” Heather tells me. Rebuilding houses — gutting them for HUD. “If anything else, that’s what I can do,” she says, “but my back’s broke now, so I can’t even pick up nothing.”

Heather had been supporting herself and helping out her mother and friends by working as an escort. That’s the word she uses: “I mean, the escort stuff is not for me. I was miserable. If all else failed, I would answer the phone.”

I ask her if she has other friends who did escort work, too. “Just people like, they’re not really friends, but — they had told me about it, when me and my mom lived up on the hill,” she says. “But some people, it just doesn’t bother them at all, to do stuff... but I just can’t, I just can’t. I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

When Falls called Heather from a number she’d posted on Backpage, a low-cost classified listings website and host to escort ads, she didn’t want to pick up the phone. But she needed the money. “I got to figure something else out. I can’t do this. But I answered the phone for” — she pauses — “him. And I was just trying to figure out what I should do.”

Heather's neighborhood is a mix of one- and two-story houses tucked in small lots, some run-down and split into odd-sized apartments. Outside, kids biked on streets running past big, broad porches where a few older ones hung out. There were shootings in the area, she said, and police didn’t come out her way very often. But on the day Neal Falls tried to kill her, Heather says, “about 30 of them” showed up. (Even in the chaos, her count was spot on: The official crime scene log for the incident contains 33 names, 28 of them identified as working for the Charleston police or fire departments.) “The whole freaking force was here in no time.”

Her apartment wasn’t far from the restaurants and hotels in downtown Charleston, where old-school shops and delis sit sit-by-side with new restaurants serving dishes laden in multiply hyphenated condiments: burritos with kimchi and “lime-Sriracha crema,” smoked gouda—sweet grape flatbread. There is the Elite Gentlemen’s Club, a forgotten-looking adult business with telltale neon in the windows and some holes in the glass. It is the only such club in Charleston proper. Across the street is the county’s public library. Housed in a former federal court building, it is flanked by eight monumental stone columns that face out on Capitol Street. The library, according to police documents, is where Neal Falls searched Backpage — where he looked up women’s ads, and then penciled in six names and numbers on the back of a computer pass.

Heather’s friends Lisa and Harley were over when his call came in. Harley "always sits on the front porch for safety,” Heather says, to be another set of eyes and ears when a guy from Backpage comes by. But shortly before Falls arrived, Lisa headed over to the Save-A-Lot to grab a soda, and Fancy got loose. Harley ran off to find her.

Falls didn’t leave much of a digital trail; he had a telephone, but it was a brand-new TracFone Alcatel with a West Virginia area code — police are pretty sure he was disposing phones as he went from place to place, buying new ones when he arrived. He asked if it was her own apartment, if anyone else was there. Around 3 p.m., he pulled into her driveway in his gold Subaru, facing Heather’s door.

“He was just real thick, like, stocky,” Heather remembers. “And short. He seemed short to me.” As soon as Falls came into her kitchen and saw they were alone, she says, “He walked over here to me and just stuck the gun in my side and told me, ‘Live or die.’”

“That was it,” she says clearly. “He started strangulating me out.” She describes his movements, her voice steady. “He was clamped down on my throat so bad that I could — I’ve never been choked like that, and I’ve been through some...” She pauses just a moment. “A lot of physical abuse. And that was horrible.”

“You could tell from his upper-body strength, you could tell that he’s done this for a long time. He knew how to keep control of me.”

“I knocked him off of me,” she continues, looking into the kitchen where it happened, where he landed on his back when she shoved him. “I remember, my feet even being up, climbing up over, up the door while his hands were around my throat — he knew how to keep ahold of me. He was good. He knew what he was doing.” She emphasizes this last part, with calm and certainty. “He had done it before.”

Something snapped in Heather. “I started screaming,” she says. She decided to fight harder. “I just said, if he was gonna shoot me, he would’ve shot me — I’m fighting him.”

She started clawing his eyes out. She started hitting him. He didn’t have any teeth, she remembers. He jumped on her again. He landed on her chest, both of them on the floor now between the kitchen and the couch where we sat. He said to her, she says, “Now get up, you get up and don’t say nothing else.” She remembers begging him, “Please, please just let me get a breath.” He wouldn’t.

Into the kitchen, she kept fighting. In the struggle, she noticed a little rake, something she used to clean up after Fancy in the yard. He lunged to grab the rake from her hand, lifting himself off of the table, clawing it up, the mark still there. He was distracted. She had a second, and saw something else. “The gun was laying on the table. And I grabbed it.” Aiming just over her shoulder, she took the shot.

“And then finally it was over,” she says, quietly. “I looked over, and it was horrible. But he was slowly like, going down to the floor, and fluids was hitting the floor, I could hear it. And it was over. And I could breathe. I was finally — I couldn’t breathe at all.”

Rushing back from the Save-A-Lot, Lisa heard the gunshot and froze. Then she saw Heather run out the front door. “I asked her to call the police,” Heather tells me, “but she took off on me. So I had to go to the neighbor and ask her to call.” The neighbor called 911, Heather at her side, explaining to the dispatcher, relaying the answers to her questions: What was the man wearing; was he white or was he black. The neighbor stayed on the line for just shy of four minutes, until the first officer arrived.

Cpl. Steven Webb was first on the scene. “This visibly shaken white female had blood on her arms, was hysterical, and crying,” he later wrote in his report. Heather told Webb her attacker was still inside, and led him to the door, but it was blocked by Falls’ slumped body, an apparent gunshot wound to his head. Webb noted that his back was to the door, and his belt was hooked on the door’s handle. Falls was declared dead at 3:59 p.m.

Lt. Cooper arrived around 4, and he and the other detectives spent hours working over the crime scene. “It became clear pretty quickly that Mr. Falls was not your run-of-the-mill attacker,” he told me. “We found four sets of handcuffs in his pants pockets. I've never seen anything like that personally and I've been a detective for 18 years.”

"He clearly had plans to store something or carry something away from the apartment,” Maryclaire Akers, assistant prosecuting attorney for Kanawha County, told reporters at the time, regarding the Rubbermaid bin.

Heather was transported to the Charleston police station. She stood beside a beat-up green chair in the station, barefoot with her hair pulled back off her neck, while her body was photographed 25 times: her outstretched hands, her chin, the marks on her neck. According to Detective Adam Kuhner’s statement, it was Harley and Lisa who told police that Heather was a “prostitute,” though it’s not clear whose words those are, his or theirs or hers.

Police told Heather she should go to the hospital, but she was hesitant. “I was black-and-blue,” she remembers, but just wanted to get home to her dog. But she agreed to go. She got a CT scan and an MRI, and learned she had broken her back and dislocated her shoulder as a result of the struggle.

Heather says the police told her to call as soon the appointment was over, so an officer could escort her home. “I thought that was nice of them.” Her mother was there waiting at the hospital, and came home with her.

When they arrived, the kitchen was as she left it. After the police photographs, the remnants of Falls — the phone, his wallet, a car key, the shell casing from the one bullet fired from his gun — were removed, but his blood remained. “It smelled like a funeral home in here,” she says, settling into the couch, facing the counter and walls and floor she had to clean up herself.

And something else was still missing: Fancy. “I was so heartbroken because she wasn’t here. I was hollering for her at 5:30 in the morning. I put her bowl of food and stuff outside,” on the other side of the door where police found the body. “Just in case she’d come home.”

Clay Rodery for BuzzFeed News