How America's Deadliest Serial Killer, Who Confessed To Over 90 Murders, Hoodwinked Law For Years

Samuel Little confessed to killing 93 women but when he passed away at the age of 80, most of his victims remained unknown.

Samuel Little chose to kill marginalised and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs. Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths were uninvestigated.

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Known as America's most prolific serial killer, Samuel Little passed away at the age of 80 in 2020 at a hospital in California while he was serving three life sentences without parole for killing three women. However, he had confessed to killing at least 93 women, specifically those from black or vulnerable backgrounds whose deaths would have fewer chances of being investigated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Little began confessing to additional 93 murders across the US to a Texas Ranger who interviewed him in his California prison cell in 2018. According to Reuters, he admitted to killing his victims between 1970 and 2005 by strangulation. However, only 50 of his confessions were verified by the investigating agency while the rest lacked final confirmation.

"Little’s run-ins with the law date back to 1956, and there are clear signs of a dark, violent streak among his many shoplifting, fraud, drug, solicitation, and breaking and entering charges. But law enforcement has only recently begun unraveling the true extent of his crimes," the FBI said in a statement.

 

Undated sketches of his victims that Liitle drew himself released by the FBI and the Texas government.

He was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter in September 2012 and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge. This is when the police obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims of three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989 and charged him with three counts of murder. For these crimes, Little was convicted and sentenced in 2014 to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.

According to the FBI, the women, in all three cases, had been beaten and then strangled and their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster, and a garage. Little asserted his innocence throughout his trial — even as a string of women testifying for the prosecution told of narrowly surviving similarly violent encounters with Little.

LITTLE'S TARGETS AND METHODS

The FBI said Little chose to kill marginalised and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs. Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths were uninvestigated. His method of killing also did not leave obvious signs of murder.

As a competitive boxer, he usually stunned or knocked out his victims with powerful punches and then strangled them. With no stab marks or bullet wounds, many of these deaths were not classified as homicides but attributed to drug overdoses, accidents, or natural causes, the probe agency said in a statement.

Little could also escape the law for a while as DNA profiling was not a big part of the legal machinery in the 1970s and early 1980s -- when he committed several of his murders. DNA evidence was often not available or could not provide a clear link back to Little. After DNA analysis came into play, the victims’ work as prostitutes complicated the ability of police to gather telling physical evidence.

AVOIDED PEOPLE WHO WOULD BE MISSED IMMEDIATELY

Boasting about how he got away with the murder for years, Little told investigators that he avoided people who would be missed immediately, the Guardian reported. "I’m not going to go over there into the white neighbourhood and pick out a little teenage girl,” he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post. Several of his killings were initially assumed to be cases of overdose or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to his profile by the FBI.

He was first convicted of first-degree murder in 2014 and prior to this, he was involved in at least eight sexual assaults, attempted murders or killings, but escaped serious punishment, the Guardian reported. In the early 1980s, Little had also been charged with killing women in Mississippi and Florida but escaped charges in Mississippi and conviction in Florida. However, he served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri and for the assault and false imprisonment of a woman in San Diego, the FBI said.

"When Los Angeles got the DNA hit on Little, they asked the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) to work up a full background on him. The FBI found an alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders," the probe agency said in a statement in 2018.

CHILLING CONFESSIONS

Little finally opened up about his killings in his interview with Texas Rangers James Holland convinced in exchange for a change of prison.

ViCAP Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo who along with Ranger James Holland interviewed James said, "He went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi—one; Cincinnati, Ohio—one; Phoenix, Arizona—three; Las Vegas, Nevada—one.” It is in this interview that he confessed to killing over 90 women.

Palazzolo said Little remembered his victims and the killings in great detail. He remembered where he was, and what car he was driving. He even drew pictures of many of the women he killed, but he wasn't reliable with dates. 

After Ranger James Holland interviewed Little, he was indicted in a homicide case in Odessa and was extradited to Texas a few months later. 

PAST LIFE

Little lived a nomadic life from the time he dropped out of high school and left his home in Ohio in the late 1950s. The FBI said he would shoplift or steal to get money to buy alcohol and drugs but never stayed in one place for long. He would drive from New Jersey to California from time to time depending on his run-ins with police. However, the police just wanted to shoo him out of town.