Plague of Strength

On this glorious consumer holiday celebrating the necessity of expenditure to secure romantic interest from whomever you’re trying to fuck, what better way to celebrate than to investigate the life, times, and training methods of someone in the strength training community who let her romantic freedom ring with a shotgun blast?

I, for one, can think of no better way. Meet Sally McNeil, an amateur bodybuilder chasing her pro card through the 80s and early 90s who ended seven years of marriage by blowing half of Ray’s face off and putting a gaping, smoking hole where his liver should have been with a couple of shotgun blasts on Valentine’s Day, 1995. As with any story about anything, there are many facets and peculiarities surrounding the events of that night and the events leading up to it that make it one of the more compelling stories in the Killer Workouts series, because while the “Who?” and “How?” questions have been thoroughly answered regarding this blood-splattered celebration of the horned Greek God of Fuck, Pan, but the “Why?” remains to this day very much unanswered.

The Facts, As We Know Them

• Ray and Sally McNeil were married for seven years and lived with Sally’s two kids from a previous marriage.
• Ray finished his workout at the Gold’s Gym in Oceanside, CA at about 10PM.
• Roughly 40 minutes later, Ray arrived home.
• Heedless of the joyous corporate holiday they were intended to be sharing, the couple began to argue, and the holiday’s true face started to take shape.
• As Ray cooked, Sally went into the bedroom and loaded her 12 gauge.
• Some shit went down, then shit got real, and Ray emerged nearly dead, mostly faceless, sporting a massive hole in his abdomen.
• Almost a year and a month later to the day, Sally McNeil was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 19 to life, ostensibly in a vain effort to prevent the people reading her sentence to sing it Skid Row-style.

In this dramatic reenactment, sourced from a combination of articles about the murder and my personal correspondence with the inspiration for the film in development between my ears entitled ‘Builder with a Shotgun, we can envision the scene as it seems to have occurred on that fateful Valentine’s Day in 1995.

Bleary-eyed but still speedy from his preworkout, 260lb contest-ready bodybuilder Ray McNeil waddled from the entrance of Gold’s Gym in Oceanside, CA (one of San Diego’s dope beach towns) to his car. Four days out from the South Beach Pro Invitational, Ray was cranky as fuck, hungry as hell, and generally exhausted all the time. After four fairly uneventful years as a professional bodybuilder, however, he was more or less to used to this state- he’d done ten pro shows in ’93, so a year’s break from the stage had him chomping at the bit for a triumphant return.

Just before 11, Ray walked into the apartment he shared with Sally and her two children from her previous marriage, and the two immediately began screaming at each other like they were Italians living in 1940’s NYC. Fighting was more common than peace in the McNeil household, where Ray’s indiscriminate cheating with members of both sexes reportedly fueled straight-up brawls. Spittle sprayed the room as these two hyper-muscular primates circle each other, hurling verbal abuse. Sally’s daughter later reported that she heard a gurgling noise after the shouting ceased, the sound of a person being strangled. As Ray fired up the stove to cook his last meal of the day, Sally repaired to the bedroom to cook up a red-hot plate of murder.

When Sally emerged from the bedroom, a tanned and glistening goddess of death seemingly forged from bronze, she was brandishing a loaded 12-gauge shotgun, which she cocked and leveled at his thick, striated, chest. Sally’s first shot hit Ray in the abdomen, smashing three ribs and disintegrating a full third of his liver. Ray slumped to the ground in a pool of blood, blood steadily pumping from the gaping, 6″ by 5″ hole in his torso, drooling blood as he struggled to breathe. Every time he coughed, blood and bits of shredded lung spattered against the wall and carpet to create a homage to Jackson Pollock in human viscera.

As Ray crawled to the door, dragging his guts behind him, he spat gobbets blood on the same “desert sand” colored carpet every apartment complex in the US had at the time. With every bit of forward progress the massively muscled man managed, more of his mangled pancreas, adrenal gland, kidney, and abdominal aorta oozed from his body as reddish-black ichor. Seeing the faint flicker of light still glowing within Ray’s rapidly deteriorating body, Sally stalked back to the bedroom to reload.

She re-emerged as stone-faced as a contract killer and calmly fired again. This time, she was sure she’d done the job, because half of the former love of her life’s face now decorated the floor and wall, dripping merlot between sticky clumps of his upper palate and tongue while the teeth and chucks of jawbone lay around him like fetishes in a dark chthonic ritual.

Understandably, their children utterly lost their shit. Startled by the thunderous crashes splitting the air as they slept, they emerged from their rooms to find their stepfather as a centerpiece of a gore-drenched abattoir, mumbling wetly as blood and saliva bubbled from his ruined face. Horrified, the eleven- and nine-year-olds fled into the street as Sally covered the still-breathing shambles of Ray with a blanket. Sally called 911, then followed her children into the parking lot and calmly handed the shotgun to a neighbor with the explanation that Ray had been beating her.

When emergency services arrived, they found a still very-much-alive Ray disputing Sally’s accusations of abuse, swinging his head wildly from side to side as she recounted her tales of domestic horror. Within two hours, Ray McNeil was dead, and Sally McNeil was charged with second degree murder. Subsequent urine tests found that Ray tested positive on five counts for halo, deca, anadrol, clen and mast. Sally, on the other hand only tested positive for deca. And because they’re lazy, unimaginitive, useless fuckheads, the mainstream media saw she popped positive for deca and immediately made their main plotline “roid rage” (McGough).

The story, however, is much, much more deliciously and scandalously complex than simple gear use. As Joe Kenda said,

“Something I learned a long time ago: Don’t ever judge people based on their appearance or their physical size. Humans are all capable of enormous levels of violence given the proper motivation.”

Sally McNeil Vital Statistics

Height: 5’4″

Weight: ~150lbs

Best Lifts: 1000lb total at 148 (400-225-375); 20 x 10 x 225lbs squat, which is pretty fucking sick

Number of victims: 1

Date of Murder: February 14, 1995

Date of Arrest: February 14, 1995

Date of Birth: c. 1960 (I didn’t think to ask for her birthdate, but she was 34 at the time of the murder)

Victim Profile: Ray McNeil (her husband), age 29

Method of Murder: Shotgun

Location: San Diego, CA, USA

Status: Sentenced to 19 to Life at Central California’s Womens Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA

The Background

Sally McNeil’s life had known little but tumult. As with most of the stories beginning in Allentown, PA, she had a rough upbringing in a town that was suffering serious depressions from the ignominious death of the US steel industry. Her first marriage, to a guy named Tony Lowden, was jam-packed with enough cheating and domestic abuse to be fodder for a made-for-TV chick flick on Lifetime. According to Sally, he took the blame for her incarceration, saying if he’d not treated her so badly she never would have been in that situation. This is just the first time her story diverges from the one told by the media, as he told a reporter in a separate interview that he was happy to have divorced her because if he hadn’t, he’d have been next- bodybuilding had made her “unhinged” (Krajicek). Regardless, the two endured a highly acrimonious divorce in 1986 and Sally was unleashed upon the free market.

With a taste of fisticuffs and iron, Sally was a fucking force with which to be reckoned. She joined the Marine track and field and powerlifting teams after flunking out of admin school (Though according to Sally she was the only broad in her class who could type worth a shit) and assignment to the chow hall, which was basically hell on Earth for Sally. The track and field and powerlifting teams offered her the opportunity to travel, though the rampant misogyny in the Marines meant that unlike the men, she had to fight to get time off from work to participate in the teams for which she competed.

Looking back, I would imagine Sally and Ray’s ghost regret only having dated a couple of months, because those two crazy, musclebound Marine sargents got hitched at the end of 1987 . As with any two hard-charging lifters in their mid 20s, Sally and Ray fought like Khabib and McGregor would if they were roommates, and I doubt their drywall was what anyone would describe as “pristine.” Sally had put her newborn up for adoption in 1986, so her two small children shared the apartment with the perpetually brawling leathernecks. Being the idiot that he was, Ray persisted in cheating on Sally endlessly (with both men and women), and judging by the reaction he received, declined to invite his wife to participate (Penman). This led to an endless string of confrontations that almost invariably ended in blood and broken bones.

According to the brawny barbell bombshell herself, Sally was on the receiving end of most of the thrown hands- in her letters she detailed a broken nose, broken toe, and broken rib leading to a punctured lung, but for whatever reason, her Marine medical records were incomplete and evidence of these injuries was not shown at trial (McNeil). What was shown at trial, however, was a picture of a woman running white hot at all times, and who would throw fists with anyone, for any reason. Had the baddest bitch on the planet at the time, Christy Martin, even thought about fucking Sally’s husband, it’s a safe assumption Sally would have tried to tune her up for it (in spite of the fact that Christy Martin was essentially Jake LaMotta with a vagina).

Saying Sally McNeil had no fucks to give is an understatement on par with “Jeff Bezos is an uncharitable piece of shit.”  She’d been demoted and refused re-enlistment due to her poor service record (no record on what she did, but I get the sense she hated what she did and made it very apparent), but she did manage to win the 1990 US Armed Forces Championships in bodybuilding before she found her way to the door. After getting out, Sally began wrestling schmoes and making wrestling videos under the hilariously on-the-nose name “Killer McNeil.” As one of her videos was entitled Time to Die in an amazing bit of foreshadowing, her fate seems to have been set five years prior to splattering bloody chunks of her husband across her kitchen and living room.

With that, I will conclude the opening salvo of this badass entry into the Killer Workouts series, and because I am utterly psychotic about research, I’ll share some of Sally’s poetry with you, mostly due to the fact it was sent to a schmoe from jail… post-murder.

CONQUEST

To have me is the possession of power.
I am the power of life.
To love me is the love of life.
I am the freedom you seek.
To possess me is to rule
The kingdom of power.
I am the uncontrollable power
that is untapped,
The raw power that only nature can claim.
The man who claims my love
Claims eternity.
Forever,
Sally

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Sources (for the series):

Krajicek, David J.  The tale of Killer Sally: Her 12-gauge & her husband.  NY Daily News.  28 Dec 2009.  Web.  13 Feb 2020.  https://www.nydailynews.com/news/tale-killer-sally-12-gauge-husband-article-1.435829

McGough, Peter.  The Sally-Ray McNeil murder.  Muscular Development.  12 Feb 2015.  Web.  20 Jan 2020.  https://www.musculardevelopment.com/news/the-mcgough-report/13954-the-sally-ray-mcneil-murder.html

McNeil, Sally.  Mail interview.  29 Dec 2019.

Middleton v. McNeil. 541 U.S. 433. Supreme Court of the United States. 2004. Supreme Court Collection. 3 May 2004.  Web.  14 Feb 2020.  https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/134740/middleton-v-mcneil/

Nack, William.  The muscle murders.  Sports Illustrated.  18 May 1998.  Web.  13 Feb 2020.    https://www.si.com/vault/1998/05/18/8098022/the-muscle-murders-when-bertil-fox-a-former-mr-universe-was-arrested-for-double-homicide-last-year-he-became-only-the-latest-accused-murderer-among-hard-core-bodybuilders-whose-subculture-is-a-volatile-mix-of-fragile-egos-econo

Penman, Leigh.  Sally McNeil… this is my story: part 1.  RX Muscle.  4 Nov 2009.  Web.  20 Jan 2020.  https://www.rxmuscle.com/articles/latest-news/869-sally-mcneil-this-is-my-story-part-1.html

Penman, Leigh.  Sally McNeil… this is my story: part 2.  RX Muscle.  4 Nov 2009.  Web.  20 Jan 2020. https://www.rxmuscle.com/rx-girl-articles/female-bodybuilding/914-sally-mcneil—this-is-my-story-part-2.html

T Nation.  The Craziest thing you’ve seen in the gym.  T-Nation,  22 Nov 2016.  Web.  8 Nov 2019.  https://www.t-nation.com/opinion/the-craziest-thing-youve-seen-in-the-gym

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