Samuel Little
Samuel Little was an American serial killer who was convicted of 8 murders and confessed to committing 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 murders, the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in American history. Little provided sketches for twenty-six of his victims, although not all have been linked to known murders. His crime spree stretched across the country from Miami to Los Angeles.
Early life
Little was born Samuel McDowell on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia. The census from the year Little was born said his mother, Bessie Mae, worked as a maid and that his father was 19-year-old Paul McDowell. Little said that his teenaged mother was a "lady of the night", and that she abandoned him as an infant. Soon after his birth, Little's family moved to Lorain, Ohio, where he was brought up mainly by his grandmother. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School. By his own account, he began having sexual fantasies about strangling women as a child, starting when he saw his kindergarten teacher touch her neck; as a teenager, he collected true crime magazines depicting the strangulation of women.In 1956, after being convicted of breaking and entering into property in Omaha, Nebraska, Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders. His mother was listed on the booking card as "whereabouts unknown." Little moved to Florida to live with his mother in the late 1960s. By his own account, he was working at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant. He said he then "began traveling more widely and had more run-ins with the law," being arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and rape. Little took up boxing during his time in prison, referring to himself as a former prizefighter.
Crimes
In 1961, Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in 1964. By 1975, he had been arrested 26 times in eleven states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.In 1982, Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and he faced charges for the murder of 22-year-old Melinda Rose LaPree, who had gone missing in September of that year. A grand jury declined to indict him for her murder. However, while under investigation, Little was extradited to Florida and tried for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body had been found in September 1982. Prosecution witnesses identified Little in court as a person who had spent time with Mount on the night before her disappearance. Due to mistrust of witness testimonies, Little was acquitted in January 1984.
Little moved to California, where he stayed in the vicinity of San Diego. In October 1984, he was arrested for kidnapping, beating, and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. One month later, he was found by police in the back seat of his car with an unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled, in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros. Little served two and a half years in prison for both crimes. Upon his release in February 1987, he immediately moved to Los Angeles and committed at least 10 additional murders.
Little was arrested on September 5, 2012, at Wayside Christian homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California to face a narcotics charge, after which authorities used DNA testing to establish that he was involved in the murders of Linda Alford, killed on July 13, 1987, Audrey Nelson Everett, killed on August 14, 1989, and Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca, killed on September 3, 1989. All three women were killed and later found on the streets of Los Angeles. He was extradited to Los Angeles, where he was charged on January 7, 2013. A few months later, the police said that Little was being investigated for involvement in three dozen murders committed in the 1980s, which until then had been undisclosed. In connection with the new circumstances, in Mississippi, the LáPree murder case was reopened. In total, Little was tested for involvement in 93 murders of women in many states.
Trial and incarceration
Little was tried for the murders of Alford, Nelson, and Apodaca in September 2014. The prosecution presented the DNA evidence as well as testimony of witnesses who were attacked by the accused at different times throughout his criminal career. On September 25, 2014, Little was found guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. On the day of the verdict, Little continued to insist on his innocence. Before his death, Little was serving a sentence at California State Prison, Los Angeles County.Later confessions
On November 9, 2018, Little confessed to the 1996 fatal strangulation of Melissa Thomas. On November 13, 2018, Little was charged with the 1994 murder of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas, after having confessed the crime to a Texas Ranger in May 2018. Little pleaded guilty to the murder of Brothers on December 13 and received another life sentence. The Ector County, Texas, District Attorney and Wise County, Texas, Sheriff's Office announced on November 13 that Little had confessed to dozens of murders and may have committed more than 90 across fourteen states between 1970 and 2005.On November 15, 2018, the Russell County, Alabama, District Attorney announced that Little had earlier that month confessed to the 1979 murder of 23-year-old Brenda Alexander, whose body was found in Phenix City, Alabama. On November 16, 2018, Macon, Georgia sheriffs announced that Little had credibly confessed to the 1977 strangling murder of an unidentified woman and the 1982 strangling murder of 18-year-old Fredonia Smith. In the fall of 2018, Little confessed to the 1982 murder of 55-year-old Dorothy Richards and the 1996 murder of 40-year-old Daisy McGuire; both of their bodies were found in Houma, Louisiana.
On November 19, 2018, Harrison County, Mississippi, sheriff Troy Peterson said that Little had confessed to strangling 36-year-old Julia Critchfield in the Gulfport area in 1978 and dumping her body off a cliff. On November 20, 2018, Lee County, Mississippi law enforcement officials announced that Little had admitted to killing 46-year-old Nancy Carol Stevens in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 2005 and that the case would be presented to a grand jury in January 2019. On November 21, 2018, Richland County, South Carolina, authorities announced that Little had confessed to murdering 19-year-old Evelyn Weston, whose body was found near Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 1978. Little confessed to having killed 20-year-old Rosie Hill in Marion County, Florida, in 1982.
On November 27, 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program team had confirmed 34 of Little's confessions and was working to match the remainder of Little's confessions to known murders or suspicious deaths. Little began making the confessions in exchange for a transfer out of the Los Angeles County prison in which he was being held. One included his confession to a previous cold case homicide in Prince George's County, Maryland, previously one of only two homicide cases in that county with unidentified victims.
In December 2018, Little was indicted for strangling Linda Sue Boards, 23, to death in May 1981 in Warren County, Kentucky. Her body was found on May 15, 1981, near U.S. Route 68. One of Little's victims was identified in December 2018 as Martha Cunningham of Knox County, Tennessee, who was 34 when Little murdered her in 1975.
On May 31, 2019, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutors announced indictments, with four counts of aggravated murder and six counts of kidnapping, that accuse Little of killing Mary Jo Peyton in 1984 and Rose Evans in 1991 in Cleveland. Both victims were strangled and dumped. The body of Rose Evans, 32, was found on August 24, 1991, in a vacant lot on East 39th St. She left her hometown of Binghamton, New York, when she was 17. Evans had been strangled, according to coroner Elizabeth Balraj. As for Peyton, an anthropologist had to create a model of what she looked like, but she remained unidentified until 1992 when Cleveland put her thumbprint in an FBI data base and got a match. Little picked up Peyton at a bar near East 105th and Euclid Avenues. He described her as a short, plump woman in her twenties with brown hair. Little confessed to killing another Cleveland woman in 1977 or 1978. The woman murdered in 1977 or 1978 was found on March 18, 1983, in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. She was likely Black and somewhere between 17 and 35. The woman's body had been dumped down a grassy slope, near a fence in a wooded area just off Interstate 271; when her body was found by a man walking his dog, only her skeleton, some clothing, and jewelry remained.
Little confessed to killing one woman in Akron, Ohio, two in Cincinnati, one of the bodies having been dumped outside of Columbus, Ohio, and one woman he met in Columbus and disposed of in Kentucky. Of the two women Little murdered in Cincinnati, one was identified as Anna Stewart, 33, whose body was dumped in Grove City, Ohio. Stewart was last seen on October 6, 1981, getting out of a cab at General Hospital to see her sister in the hospital. She was killed on October 11. He killed the other woman between 1980 and 1999. The "Jane Doe" was anywhere from 15 to 50 as the details of her age and the date of her murder are unclear. She was Black, slender, wore glasses and lived in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati with a "heavy female Hispanic". Little left her beside a cigarette billboard in Ohio. On June 7, 2019, Little was indicted in Hamilton County, Ohio, for murdering the two women killed in Cincinnati.
Little had drawn portraits of many women he killed. These portraits were released by the FBI in hopes of someone identifying the women. At least one portrait solved a cold case in Akron, Ohio. In November 2020, Little confessed to two Florida murders, one of which another man had been wrongfully convicted. On April 22, 2022, a woman Little killed in Memphis, Tennessee, whose body was found on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, in 1990 was identified as 30-year-old Zena Marie Jones.