Samuel Little

What the record shows

Samuel Little was an American serial killer convicted of eight murders of women in California, Texas and Ohio, and who confessed to killing 93 people across the country between 1970 and 2005. A Los Angeles jury convicted him in 2014 of three killings from the late 1980s, and he later pleaded guilty to one murder in Texas and four in Ohio. The FBI described him as the most prolific serial killer in United States history; authorities said at the time of his death that nearly 60 of the confessed killings had been confirmed. He died in California state custody on December 30, 2020, at age 80.

Little was born on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia, according to the Wikipedia article, and was raised by his grandmother in Lorain, Ohio. He often went by the name Samuel McDowell. The Boston Globe, reporting the Associated Press account of his death, described him as a former boxer and a career criminal who was jailed repeatedly over decades on charges including larceny, assault and drug offenses. He moved frequently between cities, which the FBI said helped him avoid detection. According to the Wikipedia article, he was acquitted in Florida in January 1984 of a 1982 murder and served about two and a half years for a 1984 attack in California on a woman who survived.

In 2012 Little was arrested at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California on a narcotics charge. Los Angeles police then matched his DNA to three women strangled in the Los Angeles area between 1987 and 1989. The Wikipedia article names them as Linda Alford, Audrey Nelson Everett and Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca. Little denied the killings, but a jury found him guilty in September 2014 and he received life sentences, reported as three consecutive life terms.

The wider case opened through Texas. Little was extradited from California in 2018 and charged with the 1994 killing of Denise Christie Brothers, whose body was found in a vacant lot in Odessa. Texas Ranger James Holland interviewed him almost daily, and beginning in May 2018 Little started describing killings across the country, eventually in some 700 hours of interviews. He also drew portraits of many of the women. On December 13, 2018, he pleaded guilty to the Brothers murder in Ector County and received another life term, according to the district attorney. NBC News reported that day that authorities had by then concluded he was the killer in 36 cases.

In August 2019 Little pleaded guilty by video link from a California prison to four Ohio murders. In Hamilton County he admitted killing Anna Stewart, a mother of three, in 1981, and an unidentified woman killed in the Mt. Adams area at an unknown date; Judge Melba Marsh imposed two consecutive terms of 15 years to life. Prosecutor Joe Deters said the Ohio sentences would allow the state to reclaim him if California ever ended his sentence. The same day in Cuyahoga County he pleaded guilty to the strangling deaths of Mary Jo Peyton in 1984 and Rose Evans in 1991 in Cleveland and was sentenced to 40 years to life. The Wikipedia article also lists a 2019 conviction in Arkansas, which the news sources cited here do not confirm.

On October 7, 2019, NBC News reported that the FBI had confirmed 50 of the 93 confessed deaths. FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo said Little had believed he would not be caught because no one was accounting for his victims. Most of his victims were women who were sex workers, drug users or otherwise vulnerable, and many deaths had first been recorded as accidents, overdoses or undetermined. He usually strangled them soon after meeting them. By his account the first killing was in Miami at the end of 1970 and the last was in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 2005. According to the Boston Globe, most of the killings took place in Florida and Southern California, and Holland said nothing Little told him had been shown to be false.

Little suffered from diabetes, heart trouble and other ailments. He died at a California hospital on December 30, 2020. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed the death, officials said there was no sign of foul play, and the cause of death was left to the coroner. At the time, authorities said they had confirmed nearly 60 of his killings and had no reason to doubt the others; many of the remaining victims had not been identified.