Samuel Little: 78-year-old Man Confesses To 90 Killings (in Exchange For A Prison Transfer)

1QTPie

Elder Sim



TEXAS — A 78-year-old man has confessed to 90 killings, and investigators are saying he could be one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history.

Samuel Little is currently being held in a Texas prison. Investigators have confirmed 34 cases so far, and the FBI said in a news release Tuesday that more are pending confirmation.

The killings Little has claimed responsibility for include a black female in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1974 and a white female in Covington, Kentucky in 1984, according to the FBI. Little said he met that second victim in Columbus, Ohio and disposed of her body somewhere in Northern Kentucky. Neither of those confessions had been corroborated by law enforcement as of Nov. 15.

The women Little confessed to killing turned up dead between 1970 and 2005 in states from coast to coast, according to the FBI.


Authorities arrested Little at a Kentucky homeless shelter in 2012. He was extradited to California on a narcotics charge, and then Los Angeles Police Department detectives obtained DNA matching him to three unsolved homicides from the 1980s. Little was convicted and sentenced to three life sentences with no possibility of parole.

In all three cases, the victims had been beaten and strangled, and their bodies were dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage. Investigators from the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program found a similar case in Odessa, Texas. When they interviewed Little, he said he was willing to talk in exchange for a move to another prison.

"Over the course of that interview in May, he went through city and state and gave [investigators] the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi—one; Cincinnati, Ohio—one; Phoenix, Arizona—three; Las Vegas, Nevada—one," ViCAP Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo said.

Little is originally from northern Ohio, but left his home in the late '50s and lived a nomadic life, according to the FBI. Investigators said Little would steal in one city or town to get money for alcohol and drugs, and then would move on. His victims were marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution or addicted to drugs, and their bodies were not always identified.

The FBI asked anyone reporting a potential case linked to Little to call ViCAP at 800-634-4097.


https://www.abc15.com/news/national...ller-78-year-old-man-confesses-to-90-killings
 

1QTPie

Elder Sim


Serial killer Samuel Little says a 1972 unsolved Maryland case is among 90 he got away with, police say


Since 1972, the case of the woman with no name has haunted Prince George’s County homicide investigators.

With only skeletal remains as evidence, they didn’t know where she was from, who she was and how she wound up dead in the woods unnoticed for months before a hunter strolling through the area discovered the bones.

But a month ago, cold case detectives in the county outside of Washington caught a break in the case.

A 78-year-old prisoner in Texas had begun confessing to dozens and dozens of killings committed between 1970 and 2005, stretching across the country. As Samuel Little described each of the 90 killings he said he committed, one matched the description of the slain Jane Doe found 46 years ago in Laurel, Md.

Detectives from Maryland travelled to Texas this fall for an interview. They hoped that one of the most prolific serial killers in history would help them learn the name of Prince George’s longest unidentified homicide victim.


Though decades had passed, it appeared Little remembered much in detail.

County detectives said Little described the signs he saw, the dirt roads he drove and the U-turn he took before precisely pinpointing for them where he left the woman’s body. The details all matched what police knew about the site.

No charges have been filed in the Maryland death.



“Talking with him, you can hear he actually gets excited about describing his homicides and describing how he strangled his victims,” Bernie Nelson, one of the county detectives, said. “He looked you right in your eye and said he couldn’t help himself. He’s a monster.”

With each detail Little unfurled during a daylong interview, Prince George’s cold case detectives became confident that they had closed Jane Doe’s case. Now, they’re hoping Little will help them learn who she was.


The FBI announced this week that Little has been linked to as many as 90 killings.

Little has been serving three-back-to-back life sentences in California for beating, strangling and killing three women. As local and federal investigators looked deeper into Little’s background, they linked him to a homicide in Texas.

A Texas Ranger went to California to interview Little in the spring of this year. During the interview, Little suggested he would talk if he could move prisons.

Little was transferred to Texas and in the course of weeks, law enforcement officials said, he unfurled details of the states he had been to and women he said he killed. FBI investigators said they have confirmed 34 killings that Little described with many more pending and some that remain uncorroborated.

Prince George’s police are in the process of getting a more specific description of the woman from Little, who has shown during interviews to have what appears to be a photographic memory, said Sgt. Greg McDonald, who interviewed Little in Texas with Nelson.

“It gives us great hope that she will be identified,” said McDonald. “It gives us a direction to look. It develops more leads to look at.”

In the description he gave first to the Texas Ranger, Little described picking a woman up from the old Greyhound Bus Station off New York Avenue in the District. Little and the woman had known each other for three days they when drove up I-295 to a wooded area, according to law enforcement accounts of what Little said. The woman suggested they pull off at Exit 197 onto a dirt road for consensual sex, Little told the Ranger, officials said, and that is where he claimed to kill and abandon her body.

After being alerted in October to details Little gave to the Texas Ranger, the Prince George’s police cold case team looked through its files and found the slaying of the Jane Doe from 1972 that “fit perfectly what he described,” McDonald said.

Little offered descriptive details of the woman that detectives had not confirmed previously: that she said she was from the Massachusetts area, had a child, and had recently celebrated getting a divorce from her husband.

Detectives believe she was a white female in her 20s, about 5-foot-2 inches to 5-foot-6-inches tall with dirty blond hair.

Cold case detectives and investigators have worked on the woman’s case regularly through the years, said county police Maj. Brian Reilly. As recently as 2014, Prince George’s County sent the unknown woman’s bones to a university in North Texas that specializes in extracting DNA but made little progress, he said.

With the new information from Little, detectives can narrow their search, look at divorce records and work with the cold case unit in Massachusetts in hopes of learning the woman’s identity.

Prince George’s police said the case Little confessed to is one of only two unidentified homicide cases in the county.

The woman’s bones were found Dec. 1, 1972 by a hunter walking through woods, but police believe she was killed about six months before.

In the interview room of a sheriff’s office in Texas, Little became excited talking about how he would strangle his victims, Nelson said.

“He actually was upset she was not found sooner because he wanted to actually see a picture of her,” Nelson said Little told them.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...8604ed88993_story.html?utm_term=.3c635a7538d2
 

Leeda.the.Paladin

Well-Known Member

Samuel Little, believed to be America's worst serial killer, dies at age 80​


Samuel Little, believed to be America's worst serial killer, dies at age 80​

By Seán Federico-O'Murchú

Updated 1:18 AM ET, Thu December 31, 2020
Samuel Little, who died Wednesday, listens to opening statements at his 2014 trial in Los Angeles.


Samuel Little, who died Wednesday, listens to opening statements at his 2014 trial in Los Angeles.
(CNN)Samuel Little, believed to be the most prolific serial killer in American history, has died at age 80, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Wednesday.
Little had been serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences from Los Angeles County for the deaths of three women that occurred in the late 1980s.
However, he had confessed to 93 other murders, according to the FBI, which said his admissions were "credible."
His gruesome trail of murders was disclosed in a report issued in November 2018 by the FBI. The agency said that his name popped up in their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, in connection with a series of unsolved murders across the country.


Remains of woman found in 1981 identified as victim of serial killer Samuel Little

Remains of woman found in 1981 identified as victim of serial killer Samuel Little

One killing in Odessa, Texas, appeared to be particularly relevant, so two FBI crime analysts and James Holland of the Texas Rangers went out to see Little to try to get him to talk.
"Over the course of that interview in May," ViCAP crime analyst Christina Palazzolo said in an FBI article, "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."
Little targeted marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution or addicted to drugs, the FBI article said. Palazzolo and Angela Williamson, a Justice Department senior policy advisory and ViCAP liaison, who both spoke to Little, said that he remembered great detail from the killings.
The FBI said in October 2019 that law enforcement has been able to verify 50 confessions, with many more pending final confirmation.
The FBI needs your help identifying victims of Samuel Little, America's most prolific serial killer

The FBI needs your help identifying victims of Samuel Little, America's most prolific serial killer

In September 2012, Little was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge, the FBI said. Once he was in custody, Los Angeles Police Department detectives obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989 and charged him with three counts of murder, the FBI said.
The victims, all women, had been beaten and then strangled, and their bodies were dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage, the FBI said. He pleaded his innocence but was convicted in 2014, the FBI said.
On Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections said Little was pronounced dead at 4:53 a.m. at an unnamed outside hospital, adding that cause of death would be determined by the LA County Medical Examiner's Office.
 

winterinatl

All natural!
I feel like there’s a sense of glee reporting this black man as “the worst in American history”.

I’m not convinced he killed ALL those people. I hope he didn’t give false confessions. Some killers get off on claiming others’ murders, and that means the family will never know the truth. I think that happened in the Atlanta Child Murders; only he didn’t confess but the police blamed any missing or dead child on Wayne.
 
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