78-year old Samuel Little sits across a table from a Texas Ranger matter-of-factly describing
how he took the lives of his many victims.
He’s frail, wheelchair-bound, has heart disease and diabetes.
With armed guards around him, he talks about how he got away with over 90 murders in 19
states over a period of decades.
He doesn’t seem to have a care in the world, which is why he’s been described as “pure
evil.”
From 1970 to 2005 this man traveled from state to state, covering much of the US, in search
of vulnerable women that would satisfy his deranged needs.
In 1971, in Kendall, Florida, there was “Sarah” or “Donna.”
Little describes this “Jane Doe” perfectly and then sketches her face for investigators.
He does the same for a 25-year-old woman he says he met outside a strip club in 1984 when
driving to Cincinnati.
Slight of frame, short blond hair, blues eyes, and with the look of what he says is a “hippie”,
her fate was sealed when she got in his car.
These confessions with their detailed descriptions - and it has to be said, fairly accomplished
sketches - not only surprised investigators but rocked the USA.
The authorities knew very well that Little wasn’t making it up.
Not all of his confessions have been confirmed, but enough of them have for the FBI to announce
that Mr. Little is the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history.
Before we get into some of those cases, and how on Earth he got away with his crimes,
what do we know about Samuel Little the child?
We know he was born on June 7, 1940, in the small town of Reynolds, Georgia.
This is a place that right now only has a population of just over a thousand, with almost
a quarter of those people living below the poverty line.
According to Little, he wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth, describing
his mother’s job as being a “lady of the night”.
It’s thought he was born in prison after his teenage mother had been arrested for plying
what some people have called the oldest trade in the world.
At one point she gave up trying to look after her son and ditched him at the side of the
road.
That’s one reason why while growing up Little spent a good deal of time living with his
grandmother in Lorain, Ohio.
He attended Hawthorne Junior High School in Ohio, but it seems his grades were poor and
his behavior even poorer.
He soon dropped out and set in motion what would become a lifetime of crime.
At age 16 in 1956 he was convicted of the crime of breaking and entering and spent some
time in a juvenile detention center.
Five years later, he was sent to adult prison after being arrested for breaking into a Lorain
furniture store.
For the rest of his free life he moved from state to state, occasionally holding down
jobs, but always committing crimes.
It’s believed that before the man hit 35-years old he was arrested at least 26 times in 11
states.
Those crimes included assault, theft, fraud, DUIs, breaking and entering, solicitation,
armed robbery, shoplifting, aggravated assault on a police officer, and more.
Little did the police know, though, by this time he’d already started killing.
By the time the mid-70s rolled around, stealing through the day and going out looking for
women at night was how he spent many of his days.
Those women were almost always African Americans living on the fringes of society.
They were women who worked as prostitutes, or were addicted to drugs, or were homeless
or living in shelters, or all of those things.
Little once commented, “They was broke and homeless, and they walked right into my spider
web.”
His modus operandi didn’t often change in that he went to the places where the most
vulnerable people could be found, and there he befriended women.
Sometimes he’d offer them a ride in his car.
Sometimes he’d ask them to go for a drink with him.
At other times, he tempted them with the promise of drugs.
Once they had gotten in his car, they had little chance of surviving.
This was a strong man, a muscular man who’d fought as a light-heavyweight boxer.
He would often knock his victims clean out before strangling them, an act which gratified
his perverse desires.
Sometimes he’d stroke their necks, feigning intimacy, kindness, and then his powerful
hands would tighten around them.
His crimes shouldn’t have gone on for as long as they did, but as you’ll find out
later, his choice of victim was very likely the reason why he could do what he did and
get away with it.
He almost came unstuck at the start, though.
On September 11, 1976, a woman named Pamela Kay Smith was found half-naked, her hands
tied behind her with electrical cord.
Pounding on a stranger’s house door, she screamed and shouted until someone came to
help her.
This woman, a drug addict, said Little had picked her up in the city of St Louis.
They’d driven around for a while and then when parked in a quiet area, Little attacked
her.
She managed to escape and soon the cops found Little still in his car.
He denied any kind of sexual motive for the attack and said, in his own words, I “only
beat her.”
For that crime, he spent just three months in the county jail.
Had the woman not escaped, that could have been a murder.
Had she not been in trouble with the law in the past for her heroin addiction and failing
to turn up to court on occasions, Little might have been scrutinized some more.
In 1982, a mentally disabled woman named Patricia Ann Mount was found in Forest Grove, Florida.
This woman, who had an IQ of just 40, was last seen dancing with a man in a tavern.
That man was Samuel Little.
He was acquitted of the crime, with the defense attorney stating, “There is more doubt than
there is fact.”
Many years later, Little would let the authorities know that indeed he had committed the murder.
She wasn’t his only victim in Florida, either.
Then there was Melinda Rose LaPree.
Her body was found in 1982 in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
She’d been dead a long time so the body was in a state of advanced decomposition,
which didn’t help investigators.
The night she went missing she’d been working as a prostitute.
When she left the streets in a station wagon the other women on the street saw the man
who was driving the car.
They gave a description of him to the police, and so when six weeks later Little was picked
up in a traffic stop, he was taken in for questioning.
Not only did one of those women pick out his image in a photo line-up, but another woman
came forward and said the same man had assaulted her in the past.
The problem was, prosecutors said there was no physical evidence to link Little with the
murder.
They said a positive ID wasn’t enough to take the case to trial, so Little was allowed
to go.
An even worse blemish on the justice system is the fact the district attorney's office
said it wasn’t happy about prosecuting a man when the only witnesses were prostitutes.
Investigator Darren Versiga later said that police back then were “hesitant to believe
assault claims from black prostitutes.”
Such discrimination is of course sad and patently unethical, but it’s not that unusual, and
certainly wasn’t so unusual in the past.
You see, there’s a term in the world of crime called the “less dead” people.
These are the folks that serial killers often prey on.
They are the poorest, most disenfranchised citizens, folks who can go missing and no
one even reports it.
Sometimes they end up as Jane or John Does.
Even if the police do have an ID, due to their low socioeconomic status, and in some cases
their rap sheet, they might not exactly drum up a lot of sympathy from the public or be
the most pressing cases for homicide detectives.
They were seen as less alive, less valued before they died, and so when they did die
they became less dead, even though you’d think they’d elicit the most sympathy given
their difficult circumstances.
This is how one person described how law enforcement sometimes treats the less dead, “A great
deal less pressure is felt by the police when victims of crime come from the marginal elements.”
Samuel Little knew what he was doing by targeting society’s most vulnerable.
He talked about it once in an interview, saying, “I never killed no senators or governors
or fancy New York journalists.
Nothing like that.
I kill a journalist, it’d be all over the news the next day.
I stayed in the ghettos.”
The FBI has since said that many of his victims didn’t look as though they’d been murdered.
Since he punched and strangled the women, police often thought the cause of death was
a drug overdose or an accident or death from natural causes.
Still, others have written that police didn’t look hard enough and that’s because of the
lives the women had led.
Perhaps rather than rigorously scrutinize the cause of death, a death of a woman with
a history of petty crime or drug use was sometimes overlooked.
If you look at Little’s many victims, almost every single one of them fits into the less
dead category.
We’ll get around to them soon, but first, let’s see how he Little was caught.
In 1984, he was arrested in San Diego.
He’d kidnapped one prostitute and left her for dead on a dirt road, and then a month
after that he was found on the same dirt road with an unconscious woman in his car.
Both women had been hit hard and then choked, but both of them survived the ordeal.
A jury couldn’t reach a verdict and Little in the end pleaded guilty to the crimes of
false imprisonment and assault with great bodily injury.
He was out after two and half years and then moved to Los Angeles.
During his time in the City of Angels, it’s thought he killed at least another 10 women
and at one point was arrested for possession of cocaine.
He never turned up to court and then fled LA.
He moved around yet again and had many brushes with the law, although because the warrant
for his drug possession charge was non-extraditable, he was never sent back to LA to face the charges.
It wasn’t until September 5, 2012, when he was staying at a homeless shelter in Louisville,
Kentucky, that his web of crimes started to become untangled.
An LAPD Detective named Mitzi Roberts had been working on murder cases and she found
that Little’s DNA could be connected to two murders.
He eventually was extradited to California on a narcotics charge, and it’s there that
DNA testing linked him with a third murder.
Shortly after this, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was in contact with police
from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Los Angeles detectives were talking to these people, too, and it soon became apparent that
this guy they had could have killed women from one coast of the US to the other.
He was charged in 2013 for the murders of the three women in LA.
One had been found in a dumpster, another in a garage, and the third down an alleyway.
All three had been strangled.
For those brutal crimes, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility
of parole, all the time maintaining that he was an innocent man.
It wasn’t until 2018 until Little started dropping confession bombs.
He was 78 and on the verge of death, and it’s then that he started talking to law enforcement
from various US states.
These confessions solved the cases of many deaths police had deemed suspicious, as well
as unsolved murders.
Little had a good memory when it came to faces and how he’d killed each victim, although
he wasn’t always good with dates.
What was surprising was the fact he was able to accurately sketch many of the people he’d
murdered.
While cops might have suspected him to be behind a lot of murders, they weren’t prepared
for what he told them.
They were in fact interviewing the most prolific serial killer in American history.
There’s such a thing as serial killers that have claimed to have killed many more people
than they’ve been convicted of killing.
It’s said serial killer Gary Ridgway might have killed many more than the 49 people he
was convicted of killing, but that’s not been proven.
Richard Cottingham, aka, The Butcher of Times Square, claimed to have killed 85 to 100 people
during his 13 years hunting down women, but it remains to be seen if that’s true.
As for Little, it’s now thought he killed 93 people, but the FBI has said for now they
can only confirm that he killed 60 women.
It’s likely he killed his first person back in 1970.
The FBI had said this about Little’s confessions, “He remembers where he was, and what car
he was driving.
He draws pictures of many of the women he killed.”
It’s very likely he did kill 93 women given his honesty about the other murders and the
details he could recall, although corroborating his stories is still a work in progress.
We’ll give you some examples of what he told the FBI.
The reason the FBI has put these examples on its website is so someone might be able
to help them with their investigation.
Maybe some of our viewers could be of help after hearing this.
Little said sometime between 1992 and 1994 he met an African American woman in an area
of Little Rock, Arkansas.
He said it was a cold night and it might have been snowing.
The two went shoplifting together and Little was arrested for that.
Police records corroborate the story.
He got out of jail and went to move his car, which he said was a Cadillac El Dorado or
a yellow Dodge.
His accomplice was sleeping in the car.
The next day after driving down an old dirt road he stopped the car and committed the
murder.
He told police that he dumped the body near a cornfield.
The problem is, Little couldn’t remember her full name.
He said he thought her first name was Ruth, but he wasn’t sure.
He also was able to sketch her face.
Then there was the African American woman who he says he met in 1982 in New Orleans.
He described her as being 30-40 years old, 5’8” to 5’9” tall, and weighing in
the region of 160 pounds.
He said her skin was honey-colored brown and her hair was medium length.
She was in a club celebrating someone’s birthday when they met.
Little and the woman left the club in a Lincoln Continental Mark III.
She told him that she lived with her mom and that her mom was either very sick or an invalid
since the woman had to look after her.
Together they drove towards an area called Little Woods and took the exit off I-10.
He said he drove down a dirt road where a canal was being dredged.
He killed her and left the body next to the canal.
He drew a picture of her, too:
It was either in 1971 or 1972 when he met another one of his victims, this time in Miami,
Florida.
He said she was an 18 to 19-year-old African American transgender person named Mary Ann
or Marianne.
She was 5’6” - 5’7” tall and weighed around 140 pounds.
The two met at a place called The Pool or Pool Palace which Little said was on 17th
Avenue in Miami.
It wasn’t until a few days later that they met again, and this time the location was
the historic Overtown neighborhood.
During these meetings, he said he learned that she lived with a bunch of roommates in
either Brownsville or Liberty City.
Little said he turned up at that house and one of the roommates asked him to go out and
buy some shaving cream.
He agreed and set off in his gold 4-door Pontiac LeMans.
Except he had no intention of buying the cream.
Instead, he and Marianne headed north on Highway 27.
He said he stopped the car close to a sugarcane field and killed her there in someone’s
driveway.
He then continued down Highway 27 until he reached the Everglades.
He turned down a dirt road until he arrived at a river or a swamp.
He dragged the body through mud and water, and left the scene.
These are just a few of the unmatched confessions.
Others have been matched and murders have been solved, although in some cases the bodies
were never identified, so they are still Jane Does.
It’s uncertain how much guilt Little felt for what he’d done.
Sometimes he smiled a lot while being interviewed.
There was certainly no trace of remorse or shame in his voice or his face.
He also once said he didn’t fear God for what he’d done.
“I live in my mind now.
With my babies.
In my drawings,” he said in one interview.
By his ‘babies’ he was perversely referring to the women he’d heartlessly murdered.
He also said in that interview, “The only things I was ever good at was drawing and
fighting.”
In fact, that’s how he sometimes lured women, telling them they were beautiful and then
promising to employ his formidable artistic skills to draw them.
He did just that to a victim in Odessa, Texas.
He kept his promise, but she was already dead when he sketched her.
Little died on December 30, 2020.
The cause of death wasn’t reported in the media, although he was a sick man... a very
sick man.
Now you need to watch, “The Most Shocking Unsolved Murders In The World.”
or, have a look at, “FBI Confirms Zodiac Killer Cypher Has Been Cracked.”