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.”
