“You aim perfectly and, boom, one in the head… She collapses.” The way John described that crime shocked the agents present during the interrogation. It was a cold-blooded execution, in which the twenty-year-old fired a shot into the back of Mary's head and three more into his friend James. The reason: he had a date with a girl and needed her car to get to his destination.
However, that explanation actually hid a strange story: the murderous hitchhiker had fallen in love with a minor through Facebook and had planned to "rescue" her to free her from an abusive stepfather. Nothing could be further from the truth…
About the life of young John Asher Farrell-Villarreal, from Travelers Rest, in South Carolina, little is known except the details provided by our protagonist. According to his testimony, the physical and psychological abuse exercised by his father towards his mother had created “extreme trauma.”
In fact, he claimed that being a direct witness to these beatings, and even attempted murders, generated such post-traumatic stress disorder in him that he needed psychiatric hospitalization for a year and a half. Before being discharged, he was also diagnosed with “autism spectrum disorder,” which prevented him from “having empathy and social cues that normal people experience.” He was 18 years old.
The following years, John combated his mental health and sociability problems with alcohol intake. But the habit became an addiction and this was his downfall. A situation that coincided with his arrival at Appalachian State University.
From then on, John tried to fit in with his peers, but there was no way. In fact, he began to experience a certain obsession with the female sex, mainly with those girls who showed no interest in him. Then came the harassment and threats. One of the victims went to Boone police, but ultimately did not file a report or request a protective order. The agents also did not believe that this strange and harmless young man would go any further.
On December 23, 2014, John met a teenager on Facebook and the two began a virtual romantic relationship. He, at 22 years old, called himself Jack, the Killer and she, at 17 years old, the Black Widow. During those hours before Christmas, the girl confessed to him the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather, and the college student offered to rescue her from her. And there he began to devise his deadly plan.
First, John needed a car to get to Fitzgerald, Georgia, but he didn't have one. So he decided to rent one, although it was impossible. So he chose to hitchhike. At five in the morning and in the middle of a storm, a 2013 Hyundai Elantra stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 85 and picked up the boy dressed in a black raincoat. James Dobson and his friend Mary Fowler were traveling inside.
“They unknowingly entered into their plans. "They were just trying to help him and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Nathan Mitchell, lead investigator on the case in Anderson County, told the media. But the trip had a cost. James and Mary first agreed to five dollars for part of the journey and a total of twenty-five until they reached the Georgia state line. John accepted without question. “They were very kind,” the hitchhiker acknowledged.
But as they drove down the interstate, all John was thinking about was how he could get the car. So he pretended to need to go to the bathroom to get James to stop. As soon as the man stopped the vehicle, John pulled out a gun and shot Mary in the back of the head and subsequently “put three bullets right in the neck” of James.
He then took the victims' bodies out of the car and abandoned them on the highway. While he fled at full speed towards the nearest exit heading south he changed the license plate for a stolen one and headed to a car wash. There, he thoroughly cleaned the blood-soaked interior of the car and continued his journey.
Upon arriving at the teenager's home, John knocked on the door and started a strong dispute with the mother because she wanted to take her daughter. The woman stopped him, called the police and he was arrested. But, at the same time that the victims were dying on the shoulder of the road, he was released. No one linked the young man to the shooting.
Around 6:30 in the morning, a patrol found the bodies of James and Mary, who were still alive, although in critical condition, to the nearest hospital. Shortly after, the woman died from the severity of her injuries.
For his part, James miraculously survived, but with significant consequences. He lost his left eye, part of the vision in his right, and ended up confined to a wheelchair due to the impossibility of walking. In addition, they could not remove six bullet fragments from his brain, which also caused speech problems and constant pain.
During the six days of the escape, John was quite lucky. The young man drove without problem to Anderson County to send a Facebook message to the minor. He did it from the library. Additionally, a state police officer issued him a speeding ticket without realizing that he was driving a stolen car.
Once at home, the fugitive used different computers to communicate through social networks, but also to learn about the progress of the investigation into the shooting and the health status of the victims. John tirelessly searched for news about it, he just wanted to find out if anyone had identified him.
On December 30, John decided to visit a friend and take James and Mary's car. As he was parking on a rural road, an Anderson County sheriff's deputy recognized that the Hyundai matched the description of the vehicle associated with the shooting and approached.
John's attitude was so suspicious that the officer asked him to get out of the car and proceeded to search the vehicle. Inside he found the black waterproof suit with blood stains, four firearms (one of them the one used in the shooting), several homemade silencers, two bullet casings, the victims' cell phones, James's wallet and several local newspaper clippings about the investigation of the case.
During the interrogation, John narrated the car shooting quite calmly and without showing any emotion. “The only time he really got excited was when he was talking about God and going up to heaven. Nothing else mattered to him,” said one of the police officers who interrogated the murderer.
On the other hand, there was something that also puzzled the detectives: his statement about the kidnapping of the minor. “She was going to wear the rain suit for what she called a 'wet extraction'. He was prepared to kill the Georgia girl's mother, stepfather and brother if they were home when he arrived. He called it 'wet extraction' because of how gory he expected it to be. "I was going to wear the rain suit during the murder because it would be easy to wash the blood off," prosecutor Lauren Price explained.
In August 2017, the Anderson County Courthouse sentenced John Villarreal to life in prison without parole for the murder of Mary Fowler. He also received a 30-year prison sentence for the attempted murder of James and five years for the car theft and illegal weapons possession.
“There is no place for someone like John in our society. His actions were atrocious and cold, with a total lack of respect for human life,” said prosecutor David Wagner. “He took one life and permanently altered another. “The court gave Mr. Farrell-Villarreal the correct sentence,” he concluded.
Currently, John remains incarcerated at the Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina and is 31 years old. However, despite the prisoner's youth, for Lt. Rob Gebing of the Sheriff's Office, the hitchhiker “is a sinister man. Cold, calculating and deliberate. He is an evil man.”
