"Honeybee Killer" Update: Suspect Robbed Prostitute Before He was Killed, Say Police

CHICAGO (CBS/WBBM/AP) The handgun used by 48-year-old Gary Amaya, who was killed by a customer as he tried to rob a suburban Chicago tanning salon over the weekend, matches the gun used in a shooting spree in October along the Illinois-Indiana border, a law enforcement officer said Tuesday.

But in another twist, Amaya apparently tried to kidnap a prostitute in Chicago just hours before the botched robbery.

According to CBS station WBBM, the prostitute's purse was found in Amaya's pickup truck that he drove to the tanning salon.

The woman told  police that on Friday night, a man in a truck picked her up near the underpass, which is a busy truck route.

The woman, who would only give her last name "Anderson," told the Chicago Sun-Times Amaya forced her into the truck at gunpoint early Saturday.

She had just visited a sandwich shop when Amaya "came up to me, stuck a gun in my face and told me to get in the truck," she told the Sun-Times.

He wanted to handcuff her, but she says she wouldn't let him.

She says she bolted from his truck into a nearby deserted lot, hiding face down in the snow, fearing for her life.

She told the paper that Amaya shot at her as she ran. She held her breath in the snow, hiding behind a trailer and prayed as Amaya's truck drew near then stopped. Amaya eventually left.

According to WBBM, police found the purse, along with handcuffs and rope, inside Amaya's pickup truck after he was shot and killed.

Ballistics tests showed the gun used during the failed robbery on Saturday at an L.A. Tan in Orland Park was also used in the Oct. 5 shootings that left one dead and two wounded, said the officer, who has knowledge of the investigation but spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk about the tests results.

The robber - shot dead with his own gun after a tussle with a salon customer - was identified by police as Amaya of Rankin, a tiny farming village some 60 miles south of where the border-area shootings occurred.

The Will County Sheriff's office, which took the lead in investigating the Indiana-Illinois border shootings, has said only that Amaya is a potential suspect.