serial killers of sin city:

part ii

We bring you the second installment about the serial killers that have passed through Las Vegas over the decades.

Neal Falls

Heather Saul answered the knock on the door of her home in Charleston, West Virginia on July 18, 2015.  She recognized the face that greeted her – it was Neal Falls, one of several prospective clients Sault had interacted with on Backpage.com in the course of her work as an escort.  Nothing about the middle-aged Falls had struck Saul as particularly out of the ordinary during their prior online interaction, but now here he was at her door.

Falls brandished a handgun, grabbed Saul, and told her, “Live or die” as he shoved her back inside the house.  While holding the gun to Saul’s head, he demanded the young woman choose whether to be sexually assaulted or murdered.  The assailant then set his gun down and strangled Saul, but amidst the struggle she managed to get ahold of the firearm.

Bang!

Neal Falls fell lifeless onto the floor after Saul placed a single round into his head.  Responding officers discovered a toolkit of mayhem in Falls’ vehicle parked outside of Saul’s residence, including four pairs of handcuffs, bleach, knives, and trash bags.  Further investigation would reveal that Falls’ attempted murder of Heather Saul was just the latest in as many as eight murders across the United States, including three women in the Las Vegas area.

Misty Saens’ partial remains were discovered by two bikers off of State Route 159 near Red Rock Canyon on March 6, 2003.  Her body was found wrapped in plastic and a sheet.  The 25-year-old Saens had found work in the sex trade before she went missing and was murdered.

Jodi Brewer struggled through high school and fell into prostitution, but she ultimately earned a grant for beauty school.  But when she lost her grant, Brewer returned to the streets.  She went missing in Las Vegas in August of 2003.  Her torso, wrapped in a sheet and plastic, was discovered in the desert on the I-15 offramp to Cima Road in California. 

Lindsay Harris was employed as a sex worker in Las Vegas after moving to the city from her native New York, and it seems she may have been targeted while on the job.  The 21-year-old Harris faced arrest on solicitation charges in 2005 and had attempted to hide her profession from her family.  She disappeared on May 4, 2005, shortly after leaving a message on her boyfriend’s phone. 

Harris spent time at the Luxor on the night of her disappearance, and she was last seen walking along the Strip during the early morning hours.  Harris’ rental car was discovered later in the desert.  It would take three weeks from Harris’ disappearance before her legs were discovered off the freeway near Springfield, Illinois. 

Police in Nevada and Illinois had long suspected connections between the slayings of Harris, Brewer, and Saens but were unable to find a common link between the crimes.  Though Falls is a strong suspect in the three murders, he has not yet been conclusively tied to the young women’s deaths.

Among the circumstantial evidence supporting a connection between Neal Falls and the three women’s murders is the fact that Falls resided in Henderson, Nevada starting in 2000, and he lived there until around 2012.  Falls worked at Hoover Dam but was fired after sexually harassing a female coworker.  Falls also developed a reputation for torturing animals that ventured around the Dam and for his obsessive focus on firearms and survivalism in his conversations with coworkers.  After his job at the Dam, Falls found employment as an unarmed security guard.

“It’s likely that Mr. Falls is a serial killer,” said Steve Cooper, Charleston Police Department Chief of Detectives.

Billy Lee Chadd

21-year-old Billy Chadd had already taken a life when he moved to Las Vegas in 1975. 

Chadd was married, and he and his wife attempted to establish their young family in San Diego during the early-70’s.  In 1974, Chadd broke into what he thought was the empty house of Patricia Franklin, a secretary at the Scripps Clinic.  Chadd surprised Franklin while she was in the shower as she prepared for a date with her boyfriend.  Chadd grabbed Franklin and restrained her with the cord of a window blind.  He then sexually assaulted his unfortunate victim before stabbing her to death. 

Chadd and his wife moved to Las Vegas not long after the Franklin murder. Upon arriving in Vegas, Chadd took a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant located on Fremont Street and 11th Avenue, while his wife found work as a housekeeper in one of the city’s hotels. 

One day while walking down Fremont Street, Chadd encountered Delmar Bright, a 31-year-old porter at the Fremont Hotel.  The two struck up a conversation about the sweltering heat on this particular August day and eventually went back to Bright’s nearby apartment upon him offering Chadd some cold beers.

A week later, on August 7, 1975, Chadd again found himself inside of Bright’s apartment located at 513 South First Street.  As Chadd later recounted the events, Bright had suggested they head to his apartment for some drinks as they had done the week before.  The two went back to Bright’s apartment, had a few beers, then Bright made the short trip to the Fremont Hotel to pick up his paycheck.  When Bright returned to his home, he offered to pay Chadd $20 to take a few nude photographs.  Chadd agreed to the proposition, telling police he needed the money.

The nude and bound body of Delmar Bright was found in his apartment on August 11, 1975.  He was located on his bed with his arms tied behind his back and had suffered numerous stab wounds. 

Chadd did not remain in Vegas for long before moving to Arizona, and, from there, to Louisiana.  Apparently seeking something approximating stability, Billy Chadd enlisted in the U.S. Marines sometime after relocating to Louisiana. Fate returned Chadd back to San Diego – back to the city where he had first killed.  It was not long after being stationed in California before he again acted on his murderous impulses – or as Chadd later described it, he was prompted to kill again when the “monster” that lurked inside of him “peeked out.”

On February 15, 1978, while Chadd was taking a bus back home after dropping his car off at a repair shop, he encountered 28-year-old Linda Hewitt and her infant son. Chadd and Hewitt struck up a conversation, during which Hewitt mentioned she was on the clock as a babysitter and was returning to her employer’s house before his children arrived home from school.

Chadd accompanied Hewitt to the front door of the house where she babysat in Mira Mesa.  But when Hewitt refused his requests to come inside, Chadd forced his way in and pulled out a knife.  Chadd sexually assaulted Hewitt before stabbing her repeatedly in front of her child.  The gruesome crime scene was discovered later that afternoon when the two children for whom Hewitt babysat came home during their school lunch break.

Police tracked down Chadd to his latest change of station in Lafayette, Louisiana.  He was extradited back to California to stand trial for the murders of Patricia Franklin and Linda Hewitt, as well as for the sexual assault and kidnapping of a mother and daughter in Chula Vista.

The mask slipped off once Chadd was incarcerated. The murderous Marine started writing down the purported details of his crimes as well as his internal motivations in what would end up as an 84-page manuscript titled Dark Secrets. 

Within Dark Secrets, Chadd recounts his life story and the inner-workings of his mind, including the internal force that drove him to kill. Chadd wrote about what went through his mind during the murders he committed: “My monster peeked out. He had been awakened…I tried to stop what was happening, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t me anymore. It was the creature who thrived on fear and death, a creature who had lain dormant for so long that he would not be denied.”

Brookey Lee West

Brookey Lee West – dubbed one of the most dangerous women in Nevada – grew up in a life of violence.  West’s mother, Christine Smith, was carrying on an affair with a married man in the early 1960’s.  Smith became enraged after the relationship was broken off, so she concocted a plan to lure her ex and his wife to a restaurant so Smith could apologize.  Once the couple sat down, Smith produced a shotgun and fired a blast into her ex’s chest.  He survived, and Smith served time for attempted murder. 

Her father was a violent white supremacist that was guided by the darkest areas of occult belief.  When West became embroiled in a bitter custody dispute with the father of her child, West’s father sent a threatening letter to West’s ex.  Days later an unknown individual showed up knocking at the ex’s door and shot his elderly grandmother when she answered.

After West established a lucrative career as a technical writer, the first known suspicious death to occur around her happened in the mid-90’s.  West met Howard Simon St. John at a substance abuse rehabilitation center in California and within a month the two were married.  It was only a few weeks after being wed that West lashed out by shooting St. John in the neck during a domestic dispute.  St. John lived and decided to not pursue charges.  But days later, St. John was shot in the back and killed.  Police suspected West was responsible for the slaying as part of an effort to collect a life insurance policy, but prosecutors decided not to bring murder charges.

In 1998, West made her way to Las Vegas where her mother was residing.  Christine Smith’s health had deteriorated from chronic alcoholism, and West was on hard financial times.  West suffocated her mother with a plastic bag and placed her body in a sealed garbage can which West then placed in a storage facility on West Sahara Avenue.  West proceeded to cash her mother’s Social Security checks in the amount of $1,000 each month for the next several years.  When people inquired as to her mother’s whereabouts, West claimed she was residing with her brother Travis in California.

West claimed to possess psychic abilities, including having premonitions of the TWA 800 crash and 9/11.  Despite these purported powers, West did not foresee that the airtight garbage can would eventually develop a leak in February of 2001.  Other tenants at the storage facility reported the foul odor coming from West’s storage unit, and police discovered a grotesque scene when they unsealed the garbage can. 

At her murder trial, West maintained that her mother had died of natural causes and she simply panicked about what to do with the body.  West’s defense relied heavily on the fact that Smith’s body was liquefied by the time it was discovered, which prevented the coroner from rendering a determination on the cause of death. 

The jury did not believe West’s version of events that lead to her mother’s death.  She was convicted of murder and sentenced to life.  Investigators in California also took a renewed look at the murder of Howard St. John to see if there was a basis to seek charges against West.  She was also suspected of involvement with the murder of her brother, Travis Smith, in an effort to steal his Social Security benefits. Travis disappeared and West had made an effort to have his benefit checks routed to an address in her name.

West made her way into the news again in 2012 when she briefly escaped from the Florence McClure Corrections Facility in Nevada before being recaptured. Today, the woman convicted of one murder and a suspect in two others continues to serve her time in a Nevada prison.

Craig Leslie Jacobsen (aka John Flowers)

Ginger Rios, a young entertainer that performed with a group called Salsa Machine, and her husband pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center at 3507 Maryland Parkway not far from the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas on April 4, 1997.  She told her husband that she was running into the Spy Craft store to pick up a book on credit repair so the couple could fix their finances in order to purchase a house.  He waited outside but never saw Rios exit the store. 

Police questioned the owner of the store, John Flowers, but he claimed Rios purchased a book on how to disappear and then left the establishment.  A local reporter even interviewed Flowers about Rios’ disappearance, and Flowers complained that Rios’ disappearance was causing him bad publicity.  A few months before Rios went missing, Flowers had done an interview with the Associated Press about the chain of Spy Craft stores he was opening in Vegas, Phoenix, and across California.

Investigators would receive a major new lead three months later when Flowers’ wife, Cheryl Ciccone, came forward to tell police about discovering Ginger Rios’ lifeless body in the back of the Spy Craft store with a pool of blood surrounding her head.  Flowers told Ciccione that he had struck and killed Rios after she “got in his face and he snapped.”  Flowers stuffed Rios’ body into plastic garbage bags and then traveled to Arizona with his wife and their infant child, where he buried her body in concrete out in the desert.

Police searched the Spy Craft store and identified blood belonging to Rios on the floor of a back room.  And Rios’ body was eventually uncovered in a grave in the Arizona desert.

After his arrest, police found out that “John Flowers” was actually Craig Jacobsen, who had a criminal record for counterfeiting and a warrant related to battery of a federal officer.  Jacobsen was initially incarcerated at a facility for mentally ill offenders while being assessed for competency to stand trial.  Jacobsen had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he claimed to investigators that “the Russians are after me.”

Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty, but the questions over Jacobsen’s mental state and a recent change to Nevada law making a first-degree murder conviction more difficult lead the State to accept a plea agreement.  Jacobsen was convicted of murder after pleading no contest to the charges and sentenced to twenty years with the possibility of parole.

Three months before Rios’ body was discovered in the Arizona desert, police uncovered the body of an unidentified teenage girl only about 1/8 mile from Rios’ gravesite.  The remains were later identified as those of 15-year-old Christina Martinez, who had gone missing a week before her body was discovered.  Jacobsen owned another Spy Craft store only a few blocks from where Martinez disappeared.

Jacobsen was extradited to Arizona to stand trial for the murder of Christina Martinez. He also confessed to the killing of another missing woman, Mary Stoddard, a teenager possibly abducted in the Las Vegas area. Jacobsen claimed that Stoddard’s body was buried near the site of Rios’ grave, but he has never been charged in relation with Stoddard’s death.

Edward Allen See

Sheila Gay Griffith, a 22-year-old cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace, had only recently moved to Nevada from Oklahoma and was staying at her sister’s residence in North Las Vegas.  Griffith and her sister went out to the Silver Nugget Casino on the evening of September 23, 1979.  Griffith was last seen alive leaving the Silver Nugget with a man described as white, about 5’7 – 5’9, between the ages of 26 and 30, 5’7 – 5’9, with a medium build and brown hair.

Griffith’s 1972 Plymouth Satellite would later be found torched behind a hotel in the commercial district of Eloy, Arizona on September 30, 1979.  While Griffith’s body was not located in the vehicle, detectives were able to determine that a toolbox had been taken from the car. 

The search for Griffith would end on November 27, 1979.  A hunter scouring for rabbits instead found a nude female body wrapped in a sleeping bag located in a ravine about half-mile from Whiskey Pete’s Casino near the Nevada-California state line.  Though several teeth were missing from the remains, police were able to positively identify the body as that of Sheila Griffith.  The cause of death was eventually determined to be strangulation.

Another woman was taken only days after Griffith disappeared from the Silver Nugget.  62-year-old Johnsie Bame was leaving a local casino when she slipped and fell in the parking lot, badly skinning her knee.  As her focus was consumed by the pain emanating from her knee, Bame was approached by a young stranger that offered her a ride home.

Bame entered the young man’s car and was never seen again.

A break in the investigation of Sheila Griffith’s murder occurred several thousand miles from Las Vegas when 32-year-old Edward Allen See was arrested on charges of robbing a restaurant in Robeson County, North Carolina. 

See had prior convictions for kidnapping and rape, which resulted in him receiving consecutive life sentences in North Carolina after being convicted of the restaurant robbery for being a prior violent felon.  Telling police investigators that he was “sentenced to all the time he could,” See confessed to five murders – including two in Las Vegas.

Agents from the FBI lead the interviews with See about his claimed murders.  See told the agents that he convinced Sheila Griffith to leave with him from the Silver Nugget.  However, See became enraged when Griffith rebuffed his sexual advances.  He responded by sexually assaulting the young waitress and then strangling her to death before disposing of her body in the desert.

See also confessed to being the stranger that had enticed Johnsie Bame to enter his car after she scraped her legs in a casino parking lot.  He had witnessed the woman fall and saw an opportunity to strike.  He drove the woman home so she could clean up the wounds to her legs.  But during the drive back to the casino, See attacked and strangled Bame.  He left her body in the desert, though he could not remember the location.  Bame’s body was never recovered.

Police believe See may also have been responsible for the murder of Linda Jenkins, who was also enticed to leave a Las Vegas area bar around the same time Griffith went missing.  Witnesses described the man Jenkins left with as “almost identical” to the man last seen leaving with Griffith.

Edward Allen See was convicted for one of his five confessed murders in North Carolina and received another life prison sentence for the crime. The conditions at the North Carolina prison where See was incarcerated – which used to be a former prisoner of war camp for Union soldiers during the Civil War – were too harsh for See’s tastes, and part of his plea agreement with Clark County prosecutors provided that he serve his sentence in Nevada. See plead guilty to two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Griffith and Bame and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy is one of the most notorious and well-known serial killers in American history. Gacy murdered at least 33 young men and buried 26 of them in the crawl space of his house in Chicago. At the same time Gacy was embarking on his murder spree, he presented a façade of normalcy as a husband, successful businessman, and political activist.

But before he committed his first of many murders, Gacy would spend time working with corpses that he had no hand in killing while employed as an assistant at Palm Mortuary in Las Vegas. And on one lonely night, when it was just Gacy and the voiceless dead, the budding killer for the first time gave into urges that had been roiling beneath the surface of his psyche.

Seeking to escape his tyrannical father, a teenage Gacy made his way to Las Vegas where his cousin resided. After blowing most of his money and owing a debt to a local ambulance company as a result of a trip to the emergency room, Gacy sought employment with the ambulance service. He lied and claimed he was 21 years old - the minimum age to work as a driver. Once his true age was discovered by his employer, he was transferred to work as an assistant at Palm Mortuary.

In his employ with the mortuary, Gacy was left alone for hours every night with only corpses for company. Due to his dire financial circumstances, Gacy was also permitted to live at the mortuary, allowing him even more time with the dead.

Gacy’s interactions with his lifeless wards began with him speaking to the dead bodies at the mortuary. However, Gacy was soon wearing the clothes of the deceased as his fascination with the dead grew.

But what most piqued Gacy’s interest were the bodies of young men. One day, Gacy became fixated on the body of a 16-year-old boy in the repository. Unable to control his compulsion to possess the young man’s body, Gacy proceeded to strip down and engage in necrophilic acts with the corpse.

The funeral director was suspicious of his assistant’s late-night activities, but Gacy was never caught int he act. Gacy later confessed to his actions at Palm Mortuary after his arrest for dozens of murders, but once he was on death row the sociopathic killer later denied that he had done anything improper to the bodies he oversaw.

Stephen Peter Morin

Stephen Peter Morin had been in trouble with the law his entire life.  When he was fifteen, Morin was arrested in Florida for stealing a car and sentenced to a term of six months to five years in the state prison.  Morin next ran afoul of the law in 1972 while he was living in his native Rhode Island.  He was arrested for possession of LSD and stealing a Ford Ranchero.

Giving in to his itinerant tendencies, Morin abandoned the East Coast for San Francisco sometime around 1976, taking up work as an auto mechanic.  As he traveled, Morin made sure to change his physical appearance, which would later lead to authorities dubbing him “The Chameleon.”  At this point, Morin had a chance to start his life over, but he proved unable to control his impulses – and his move to the West Coast would see him escalate his crimes to a vicious new level.

Morin’s legal troubles were initially more of the same petty crimes that marked his history up to that point – he was arrested in San Rafael on April 9, 1976, for possessing a syringe and resisting arrest, ultimately receiving a year of probation.  His crimes escalated and he was next arrested for killing his girlfriend’s cat and then sending the remains to her workplace.  Morin and this girlfriend later married but unsurprisingly soon divorced.

A few months later, in September of that year, Morin lured a 14-year-old friend of his sister to an apartment where the drifter tortured and raped the young girl.  This brutal crime led to Morin’s indictment on felony charges by a San Francisco grand jury.  

But Morin continued staying just one step ahead of the law.  He moved to Las Vegas under the alias Robert Ireland and soon took up with an unsuspecting woman named Sylvia.  While on a vacation with his new fiancée, Morin visited the Yale University Library to scour the obituaries until he found the name of a man that was of a similar age and appearance to himself. 

The name was Robert Generoso.

Not long after Morin moved to Vegas, he changed his name to Robert Generoso and then two young women went missing from public locations.  Susan Belote disappeared after leaving work at a local cleaners, while Cheryl Daniel went missing from a supermarket parking lot while her boyfriend ran into the store to make a quick purchase. 

The FBI informed Vegas police of Generoso’s real identity.  After placing a few short and cryptic calls to Sylvia in December of 1980, Stephen Peter Morin embarked on a nationwide crime spree that would take him from one coast of the country to the other.

Morin first traveled from Hawaii to northern California.  Even though he was now a wanted federal fugitive, Morin was unable to keep a low profile.  He was arrested in Pleasonton, California for brandishing a .45 pistol at two men during an argument on January 5, 1980.  Morin provided authorities with an alias and he was released on $500 bail pending trial.

The fugitive was wise enough to know he could no longer hang around California.  Morin hitchhiked across the country, landing in Branch, Louisiana, where he took up work as a machinist.  Morin kept on the move and traveled north to Buffalo, New York.  The serial killer used his trademark ability to gain the trust of unsuspecting people to strike up a friendship that quickly turned romantic with a woman named Rita that owned a local antique store.

When it again was time for Morin to return to the road, he convinced Rita to sell her antique shop and use the money to purchase a van for their travels.  Morin and Rita stopped for about a week in the Denver area where he obtained work as a painter while the couple resided at a local motel.  It wasn’t long before Denver was hit by tragedy.  Sheila Whalen, a recent college graduate, went missing from her job as a waitress.  Her body was later found strangled at a motel room in Golden, Colorado, the victim of Morin’s steadily worsening compulsion to kill.

Fleeing Colorado around November of 1981, Morin and Rita headed south to Texas.  Rita grew frustrated at her new boyfriend constantly checking out other women and finally decided to split up, returning to New York.  In short order, Morin charmed another woman by the name of Sara Clarke to accompany him on his continuing spree.  Morin murdered two more women – both times to steal their car – as the couple traveled through Texas.  Morin and Sara even kidnapped a woman from an apartment complex in Corpus Christi and forced her to accompany them on their journey.

Police finally tracked Morin and his accomplice to a hotel in San Antonio, where they located the hostage taken in Corpus Christi alive and were able to arrest Sara.  But Morin had managed to escape out a window.  Amidst the police manhunt, he took another woman hostage from a department store parking lot, but over several hours she managed to use the quotation of Bible verses to convince Morin to turn himself in without further bloodshed.  Morin released his hostage and phoned the police from an Austin bus station, where he was soon arrested without incident.

Morin faced two separate trials in Texas for the murders of Carrie Scott and Janna Bruce during his frenzied flight from the authorities.  Morin was convicted in both cases and was twice sentenced to death by lethal injection.  In response to learning he had two death sentences, he whispered to his attorney, “Now I guess I’ve got it in both arms.”  Morin was also found guilty and received a death sentence in Colorado in relation to the murder of Sheila Whalen. 

Shortly after midnight on March 13, 1985, officials at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville led Morin to the execution chamber.  A technician spent several minutes trying to locate a vein to insert the intravenous line into the condemned man’s left arm without success.  Morin’s years of chronic drug abuse had left his veins shot.  The technician then tried to find a vein in Morin’s right arm.  As the serial killer had inadvertently predicted after his sentencing, he “had it in both arms.”

Prison technicians eventually found a viable vein in Morin’s arm. He was put to death after making a last statement professing his conversion to an evangelical branch of Christianity and granting forgiveness to the executioners – but without expressing remorse for the lives he had taken.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/26/serial-killer-shot-west-virginia-neal-falls

http://themurdersquad.com/episodes/is-neal-falls-a-serial-killer/

https://nealfallsinvestigation.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/who-is-neal-falls/

https://murderpedia.org/male.C/c/chadd-billy-lee.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12file-fly.html

https://www.recorderonline.com/body-in-nev-turns-attention-to-tulare-cty/article_caed484b-7360-564c-a157-98547f57b7d0.html

http://womenincrimeinks.blogspot.com/2011/02/jane-doe-and-serial-killer.html

https://www.deseret.com/1997/8/21/19329561/does-spy-store-harbor-secrets-about-a-murder

https://www.sinisterisles.com/post/john-wayne-gacy-slept-in-a-coffin-with-a-dead-teenage-boy

Las Vegas Review-Journal archives accessed via Las Vegas-Clark County Library District