Case File: Samuel Little

Little was born in Georgia in 1940 to a teenage mother he described as “a lady of the night.” After a move to Lorain, Ohio, he was raised mostly by his grandmother. As a kid, Little developed an odd fascination with women’s necks—and with strangulation.

Throughout his teenage years, Little cycled in and out of juvenile detention centers for petty crimes like stealing a bicycle and breaking and entering. By the mid-1970s, he had been arrested 26 times in states from Massachusetts down to Florida and across the country to California. Little’s crimes included shoplifting, theft, assault, rape, aggravated assault on a police officer, driving under the influence, fraud, breaking and entering and solicitation of a prostitute. 

During his time in prison, Little became an avid boxer and described himself as a “prizefighter.” His physical prowess combined with an engaging personal charisma would prove to be a lethal combination in the years to come.

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. 

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.

Little, who consistently protested his innocence, faced a trial in 2014 that included witnesses from as far away as Mississippi who had survived his assaults and identified him as their attacker. 

After his long life in crime, Little’s luck at avoiding hard time had finally run out, and at age 74, he was found guilty of all three murders and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. Little was incarcerated at the California State Prison in Lancaster, Calif., until his death in 2020 at age 80.

The start of Little’s lifetime sentence didn’t end the search for his victims, however, and Little—who seemed to possess a photographic memory—proved to be a cooperative inmate for investigators trying to solve cold cases as far back as the 1970s.

In 2018, Little confessed to the 1994 murder of Denise Brothers in Odessa, Texas, and received a fourth life sentence. Within a year, he had confessed to dozens more assaults, rapes and murders, helping officials close cases that had gone cold for decades.

In October 2019, the FBI confirmed that Little is the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. He eventually confessed to a total of 93 murders, at least 60 of which have been corroborated by authorities. He also created drawings of many of his victims, which helped investigators in their efforts to identify the bodies of unclaimed “Jane Doe” victims. 

The fact that dozens of victims of assault and murder were largely ignored by police underscores how authorities treat crime victims differently. “If these women had been wealthy, white, female socialites, this would have been the biggest story in the history of the United States,” criminologist Scott Bonn told The Washington Post. “But that’s not who he preyed upon.”

Little himself understood the disparities in crime investigations. During one interrogation, he told authorities about seeking out women on the margins of society instead of “people who would be immediately missed.” He explained, “I’m not going to go over there into the white neighborhood and pick out a little teenage girl.”

Though Little remains largely unknown compared to other, less prolific serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, author Jillian Lauren interviewed him at length in prison and wrote Behold the Monster: Confronting America's Most Prolific Serial Killer and Uncovering the Women Society Forgot. Lauren’s work with Little was also featured in the 2021 television miniseries Confronting a Serial Killer.