KILLER PROFILES: Samuel Little America's Most Prolific Killer
A smile came across his grandfatherly face as he remembered the woman on the dance floor in that New Orleans Club. “She was pretty,” Samuel Little said during a 1982 confession. “She had a beautiful body on her.” Wearing a lovely dress with buttons down the front. she was about 30yrs old with “honey-colored skin.” They danced for a while, and then she asked him if he wanted to take her for a drive.
As they walked arm in arm to his Lincoln Continental Mark III, she told him, “Woo, that’s a beautiful car.” He drove along Interstate 10 to a dirt road that led to the bayou. He led her through the woods toward the water. He paused and thought for a moment, “That’s the only one I killed by drowning.”
By his own admission, between 1970 and 2005, Little murdered 93 women across the country; all but this one strangled.
The FBI has confirmed 50 of the murders so far, making Little the most prolific serial killer in American history-which is down right shocking since he had multiple arrests with various stints in jail yet continued killing.
Claiming to be the son of a prostitute, Little was raised by his grandmother in Ohio and began his life of crime as a child. By the time he was 35 in 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for assault, attempted rape, fraud, and other offenses.
Arrested for murdering a woman in 1982. Little was released after the grand jury failed to indict him. He went to trial two years later for murdering a woman in Florida but was acquitted.
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” said FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo. In some ways, he was right.
Over and over again, police gave scant attention to the murders of Black people, the homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes or transgender victims. Many of the deaths were attributed to accidents or overdoses, if they were looked into at all. Still, dozens of bodies have yet to be found.
Little once bragged he could kill whenever he wanted, since he never targeted anybody who would be missed. “I’d go back to the same city sometimes and pluck me another grape.”
After serving two and a half years for beating two women in separate incidents in San Diego, he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2014 of the murders of three women and sentenced to life in prison.
It was only when a Texas Ranger investigating a cold case interviewed Little, when he was in his late 70s, that he started confessing to his multitude of murders.
While Little could only remember his victims first names or no names at all, he could draw their portraits with eerie accuracy. This created a haunting and macabre gallery for the FBI to present to the public in the hopes of solving their cases that remained opened. Each portrait conveyed blank emotionless faces. He gave them lips covered with bright red or purple lipstick, detailed hairstyles and jewelry.
As prosecutors were trying to decide whether to charge him in at least 14 states, he died in a California prison in December of 2020 of natural causes at the age of 80.
