In September 1982, the body of Patricia Ann Mount was found in a hayfield near Gainesville, Fla. Then, four weeks after going missing in September 1982, Melinda LaPree’s skeletal remains were found in a cemetery near Pascagoula, Miss. Like Mount, LaPree had been strangled to death. The hyoid bone in LaPree’s neck had been dislodged due to forceful manual strangulation.
Little was linked to both murders by witnesses who saw his vehicle, but a pattern emerged that would help Little get away with murder for years: In most cases, he chose runaways or prostitutes as victims because they were less likely to have family or close friends checking on them.
Additionally, many victims were homeless, Black, poor, mentally ill and addicted to drugs or alcohol, so their testimonies were often considered to be less than reliable, and complaints from prostitutes about abusive clients were unlikely to concern law enforcement. In the LaPree case, Little was never indicted due to lack of solid evidence; for the murder of Mount, “it took the jury all of 30 minutes to find him ‘not guilty,’” according to one deputy.
Unbeknownst to officials, by the time of Little’s arrest for LaPree’s murder, he had already killed more than a dozen women, beginning in December 1970, according to later evidence and his own confessions. Even decades after a murder, Little was able to recall significant details about his victims, and as a self-taught artist, he created surprisingly accurate paintings of their faces.
By October 1984, Little had drifted west to Southern California, where he was arrested for assaulting two women. After pleading guilty, he served two and a half years in prison, then moved to Los Angeles, where he committed at least 10 more murders.
Investigation
By the 2010s, Little continued moving across the country assaulting, raping and murdering women who lived on the margins of society, and getting arrested dozens of times for crimes like shoplifting, driving under the influence and armed robbery. He served less than 10 years in prison despite more than 50 years of arrests.
“He got off over and over and over again,” Beth Silverman, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, told The New York Times. “There are a lot of agencies around the country that dropped the ball on this case.”
With advances in DNA technology, Little came under increased scrutiny in 2012 when two Los Angeles Police Department detectives, Tim Marcia and Mitzi Roberts, discovered that his DNA matched that found on two Los Angeles murder victims from the 1980s: Audrey Nelson, found dead in a Los Angeles trash bin, and Guadalupe Apodaca, whose body was discovered in an abandoned garage in South L.A.
In September 2012, Roberts received a call from investigators in Louisiana who traced Little’s whereabouts through an ATM purchase in Louisville, Ky. He was arrested at a nearby homeless shelter and extradited to Los Angeles to face murder charges for the deaths of Nelson, Apodaca and a third victim, Carol Alford, whose death was also linked to Little through a DNA match.
Legal Proceedings
