Early Monday evening in Gaffney, folks at Daddy Joe's, a popular downtown barbecue spot, were glad to hear the news the killer had been killed.

Gene Wyatt, 35, a housing contractor, said he's "really glad this guy got killed" because he hasn't been able to go to people's houses to do estimates. "People don't want me there," he said.

With a killer on the loose, people, wondering if they might be next, changed their behavior.

"Everybody I know — 75 percent of all my friends — we're all carrying weapons now, everywhere we go," Cody Sossamon, 57, publisher of the Gaffney Ledger, said early Monday before police announced they had shot and killed the alleged assailant.

Sossamon lifted a black .38 Special out of his office desk drawer and said he was in the process of sending his wife and daughter out of town.

"When I went golfing over the weekend, a friend of mine carried a gun in his golf cart," said Sossamon, who for the first time in its 115 years bolted his newspaper's front doors Monday during daylight hours and put this sign up: "Due to Current Circumstances, The Front Door is Locked. Knock for Service."

Such fears were reasonable.

Police behavior science experts said the killer's profile had indicated he might kill again, SLED director Reggie Lloyd said early Monday. SLED had more than 40 agents on the case, Lloyd said.

"We don't believe he is going to stop on his own," Lloyd said. "This one is scary."

By late Monday afternoon, there was a sense Gaffney's widespread fears might be lifted with news that a man shot to death before dawn in Gastonia might have been the Gaffney assassin who had been striking seemingly at random. "Ohhhhhhhhh!" gasped a crowd of more than a dozen Gaffney area folks at Daddy Joe's shortly after 5 p.m. A Spartanburg news show had just flashed a shot of the dead man's brown-gray Ford Explorer on a wall-mounted television screen. Daddy Joe's bar patrons included women who were packing pistols in their purses for the first time in their lives.

"I'm telling you what — people are just scared to death!" said Kim Blanton, 49, a fourth-grade teacher who had a loaded .32-caliber pistol in her purse. No, she said, she doesn't have a permit to carry a concealed weapon — and she doesn't care.

Blanton said she lives alone, but recently she either has been spending the night with friends or having a girlfriend over to her house to sleep.

"My friend, she had a gun, too," Blanton said.

The dread of being the next victim had caused the staff at Daddy Joe's to change a lot of things they do, said general manager Rea Smiley, 44.

"Everyone is just kind of sticking together and being safe," said Smiley, describing how her employees have not walked out to their cars alone at night. "We all walk out together. We don't want to, but we're not being stupid."

Yes, Smiley said, she keeps a gun close these days. "I haven't even gone to the bathroom without it."

Cherokee County had been saturated with more than 200 law enforcement officers. They came from more than 20 S.C. sheriffs offices as well as the S.C. Highway Patrol and various South Carolina and North Carolina agencies.

Forty years ago, the Gaffney Strangler terrorized Gaffney, said the Gaffney Ledger's Sossamon. But the recent killings have inspired far more dread, he said.

For one thing, the murdered women in the late 1960s weren't all widely known. But the victims in the current killings have all been well-known not only throughout Gaffney but all of Cherokee County, Sossamon said.

"If you didn't know at least one of them, you know someone who knew them," he said.

It's bad enough when someone you know is killed, but it is "very, very bad" when more and more people you know keep getting killed, Sossamon said.

— The Charlotte Observer, Charlotte's NewsChannel 36 and The Associated Press contributed.