Samuel Little was convicted of eight murders and confessed to ninety-three. The distance between those two numbers measures what the databases built to catch men like him did not do for roughly thirty years. It also measures what one of them did in 2018, when the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, flagged his name against an unsolved killing in Odessa, Texas, and set in motion the longest chain of confessions in American criminal history.
That is the argument for a linkage database, and its counterargument sits in the same case. The system works when someone enters the right record and someone else asks the right question. Neither condition can be taken for granted. Nine cases, from the 1970s to 2025, show the machinery catching, being asked and staying silent, and holding for decades a record that nobody thought to read.
Three tools recur. ViCAP keeps a national database of violent crimes, entered by police agencies, and is searched for patterns across jurisdictions. CODIS is the national DNA database, in which a profile from crime evidence can be compared with profiles from convicted offenders and from other crimes, and in which one case can be matched to another case with no suspect at all. NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, holds reports of people who have gone missing and of the unidentified dead, so that one can be matched to the other. State offender databanks feed the DNA index. None of them thinks. Each returns a result only when an input has been entered, and the cases below turn on who entered what, and when.
Little’s first conviction came through DNA and ordinary legwork, not through ViCAP. In April 2012 Detective Mitzi Roberts of the Los Angeles Police Department’s cold case unit received a DNA match that linked the late-1980s killings of two women, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca, to each other and then to Little, through California’s offender DNA databank. A National Institute of Justice grant from the Department of Justice had paid for the screening and testing, the department said.
He was hard to find. In a Los Angeles drug case he had skipped a diversion program and a court date, and a judge had issued a bench warrant that could not be used to extradite him from another state. Over the next five years he had about a dozen encounters with police. Some officers saw the warrant, saw that it could not take him anywhere, and let him go. "He wouldn’t stay in one place more than a week or two and then he would move on to the next one," Roberts said later. He was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on September 5, 2012, on a Los Angeles narcotics warrant, and charged in January 2013 with three murders. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him in the fall of 2014, and on September 25, 2014, he received three consecutive terms of life without parole. DNA evidence had been central at trial, and prosecutors told the jurors that for at least two items the chance of a random match was one in 450 quintillion.
The database caught him. A warrant system that could not cross a state line had let him go a dozen times first.
Years later, ViCAP flagged him in connection with the unsolved killing of Denise Brothers in Odessa, Texas, and referred the case to the Texas Rangers. In May 2018 Ranger James Holland and two FBI crime analysts visited him in California. An Ector County grand jury indicted him for the Brothers killing in July 2018, and he was moved to Texas.
The flag opened a door. A person walked through it. Holland, who specializes in interviewing serial offenders, brought Little pizza, Dr Pepper and grits, talked sports with him and assured him he would not be executed, the Associated Press reported. Little called him Jimmy. Over about 700 hours of interviews, Little described 93 killings between 1970 and 2005, and drew many of the women’s faces from memory. The FBI judged the confessions credible. On October 1, 2018, ViCAP notified the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office that Little had confessed to killing Ohio women; two guilty pleas followed in Cuyahoga County in 2019 and two more in Hamilton County, and Little received a further life term in Texas for Brothers in December 2018.
Investigators had verified about 60 of the confessions by 2021, 62 according to CBS News. On December 1, 2021, the Texas Rangers, the FBI and the Department of Justice released new details on 31 confessions that had not been matched to any victim, spanning 1970 to 1997 and nine states. By then Little had been dead for almost a year. The numbers are his claims, with the confirmations the FBI and the investigators have stated, and a court tested only eight of them.
Most of the women Little described were Black, many were poor, and many were cut off from their families. When their deaths were first recorded, many were ruled overdoses, accidents, natural deaths or causes unknown. A death recorded as something other than a homicide is not the kind of case a violent-crime database is built to receive, and no amount of searching closes that gap.
Timothy Krajcir was in prison when he was caught. He had been in the Illinois system since 1963 and free for only a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In the summer of 2007 Lieutenant Paul Echols of the Carbondale police, who had been a rookie patrol officer when a university student named Deborah Sheppard was killed in April 1982, sent the old evidence from her case to the Illinois State Police crime lab and worked with forensic scientists there on newer techniques. The profile they developed matched Krajcir, who had been moved to the Big Muddy River Correctional Center and was in the Illinois DNA registry, in August 2007. Carbondale police announced an arrest on August 31, 2007.
The match was only the first. A detective in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Jimmy Smith, went back through his files after the Sheppard arrest. DNA from the case of Mildred Wallace matched Krajcir’s profile in CODIS, and a partial palm print matched him as well. When prosecutors and the families agreed not to seek the death penalty, Krajcir confessed to nine killings of women between 1977 and 1982 in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. He pleaded guilty in Illinois on December 10, 2007, in Missouri on April 4, 2008, to five counts of first-degree murder with other charges, for which he received 13 consecutive life sentences, and in Kentucky in 2010.
The registry also exposed an error that no database had ever flagged. Krajcir told Echols about a 1981 assault on an elderly woman in Mount Vernon, Illinois, and gave details that matched it. A man named Grover Thompson, a Black man of 46 who was traveling by bus when he was picked up, had been convicted of attempted murder for it in December 1981 and sentenced to 40 years. He died at Menard Correctional Center on June 28, 1996, still maintaining his innocence. In January 2019 he became the first person in Illinois to be exonerated after death. Krajcir was never charged with that crime. Echols recalled that Krajcir had said he thought someone had been arrested for it.
For twenty-five years the system had held the right man’s biology in a box. It took a lieutenant who remembered being a rookie to send it back.
Richard Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders in Los Angeles County, committed between June 1984 and August 1985, and was sentenced to death. He was on death row at San Quentin for twenty years when a San Francisco cold case produced a DNA profile that was searched against CODIS, then holding samples from about 1.2 million people, according to the San Francisco Examiner. It returned a match to him. San Francisco police announced in October 2009 that the 1984 killing of Mei Leung, 9, was attributed to Ramirez on the strength of that evidence. Detectives went to San Quentin with a warrant for a fresh sample to confirm the match, and he cooperated. "He made no comment," one of the detectives said.
No charge was ever filed. Ramirez was never tried for Mei Leung’s death. It is a killing attributed to him by police on DNA evidence, not one of his convictions. He died on June 7, 2013, of complications of B-cell lymphoma, aged 53. The match was a clean catch of an old case against a stored profile, and it was possible because his profile was already in the database.
Vincent Groves died in prison in 1996 with three homicide convictions: second-degree murder of Tammy Sue Woodrum, 17, in 1982, and, after his release on mandatory parole in 1987, the murders of Juanita Lovato, 19, and Diann Mancera, 25, in 1990. Those prosecutions were among the first in Colorado to rely on DNA. Prosecutors believed he had killed many more women, but a judge kept those cases out of his trials.
Fifteen years after his death, a Denver cold case investigator named Yearling worked a set of 1979 cases. Suspect DNA from the deaths of Emma Jenefor and Peggy Cuff had produced no match in CODIS, according to 5280. When he turned to the case of Joyce Ramey and located Groves’s name in the old files, he asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for a profile of Groves in September 2011. None existed. On October 5, 2011, he learned that Lakewood police might hold Groves’s DNA from the Woodrum case; a sergeant supplied the report, the profiles matched, and the Denver crime lab confirmed the match to the Cuff and Jenefor cases. In January 2012 the lab linked the Ramey case. On March 7, 2012, District Attorney Mitch Morrissey and Denver Police Chief Robert White announced publicly that four killings, including that of Pamela Montgomery, 35, in 1988, were linked to Groves. Prosecutors spoke of as many as 20 victims; later reports said as many as 24. The sheriff’s office in Douglas County says DNA and investigative leads link him to at least 12 homicides.
The Montgomery attribution rests on a witness and circumstance. The other three rest on DNA. In each of them the database held nothing on the man until a person went looking in a police file instead of the index.
The second round came in 2025. Evidence in the 1987 killing of Rhonda Marie Fisher, 30, had been kept in Douglas County for 38 years without testing. Shane Williams, a forensic scientist, developed a mixed profile that included Groves’s DNA, Denver7 reported. In late October 2025 CODIS returned a case-to-case match: the profile matched evidence from three 1979 Denver homicides that the sheriff’s office attributes to Groves. The office called a usable profile from material that old exceptionally rare. On December 2, 2025, Sheriff Darren Weekly announced that the Fisher case was closed. "While Vincent Groves cannot be held accountable in a court of law," he said, he hoped the result would bring answers and a measure of peace to her family and friends.
The cases called the Redhead Murders are a group of unsolved killings of young women, many with red or auburn hair, from February 1983 to April 1985, in West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi. No one has been charged in any of them, and police have not confirmed that they are connected. The Greeneville Sun reported in 2023 that Tennessee agents had said in 2018 the Tennessee killings were not linked and were being investigated separately. The databases did their work here on names more than on a suspect.
One case has a name attached. A woman whose death came to light in Campbell County, Tennessee, in 1985 had no name for three decades. In November 2016 a detective sent evidence to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation lab, which developed a DNA profile; entered in CODIS, it matched Jerry Leon Johns. Johns had been convicted in 1987 of aggravated kidnapping and attempted first-degree murder in Knox County, Tennessee, in an assault on a woman who survived, and he died in custody in December 2015. The match came while the woman was still unidentified. In August 2018 agents learned of a blog about missing persons that listed Farmer as missing from Indiana, and a TBI analyst, Amy Emberton, located a card of her fingerprints from the early 1980s; it matched the unidentified woman’s prints and gave her name as Tina Marie McKenney Farmer, reported missing from Indiana. On December 18, 2019, a Campbell County grand jury concluded that Johns, if he were alive, would be indicted for first-degree murder.
Other women got their names by different routes. A Kentucky woman, Espy Regina Black-Pilgrim, was identified in October 2018 when DNA from her children, whose relative had seen a social media post, was compared through NamUs. Elizabeth Lamotte, 17, of Manchester, New Hampshire, had left a youth center on a furlough in November 1984 and was not reported missing to Manchester police until 2017; searches of the national crime database and of ViCAP by Greene County, Tennessee, investigators had produced no match, and a DNA sample had gone into NamUs in 2006. Her mitochondrial DNA matched two brothers on November 13, 2018. Lorie Ann Mealer Pennell was entered in NamUs after her death came to light in DeSoto County, Mississippi, in 1985, but no match came, and she stayed unnamed for nearly forty years until an evidence clerk sent material to a genetic genealogy company in 2023 and the sheriff’s department announced her name in March 2024. Tracy Sue Walker’s profile sat in CODIS and NamUs from 2007, and she was named on August 30, 2022, after a genealogy lead led to relatives in Lafayette, Indiana.
Tennessee’s record is three kinds of result. A DNA profile named a suspect who was already dead. NamUs matched families who submitted samples. And a sample that sat in CODIS and NamUs for fifteen years waited for a technology the registries did not have.
Some of the most informative cases are the ones in which a database was asked and said nothing.
James Dale Ritchie was never charged. The Anchorage Police Department announced on April 26, 2017, that detectives had sufficient probable cause to conclude that he had killed five people in the summer of 2016, in three separate events, and the state crime laboratory linked all five deaths. He died on November 12, 2016, in a confrontation with police in downtown Anchorage. Investigators examined his movements in Alaska and elsewhere over several years, including Virginia and Nevada, and the FBI compared his history with unsolved killings in places he had lived or visited, using ViCAP. No connection to any other case was announced. Nothing was announced. Whether that meant nothing to find, or that nothing relevant had been entered, no one outside the inquiry can say.
Richard Evonitz is a more direct case. He was named by the Virginia task force and the FBI on August 13, 2002, as the killer of Sofia Silva, 16, and Kristin Lisk, 15, and Kati Lisk, 12, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1996 and 1997. He had died on June 27, 2002, in Sarasota, Florida, before he could be charged. The identification followed the escape of a 15-year-old South Carolina girl whom he had kidnapped, and not any database. In March 2008 the FBI and the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Office issued a ViCAP alert, asking other agencies to compare their unsolved cases with him. The alert described his habits as investigators understood them and said his travels for the military and for sales work were documented in twenty-two states.
Evonitz’s name later entered a Maine case, the 1988 killing of Sarah Cherry, 12, for which Dennis Dechaine was convicted in 1989. A Portland Press Herald investigation in 2022 reported that Maine State Police and Portland police had told the federal task force in 2002 that they had no matching unsolved cases, and later said they had no record of its requests. New DNA testing ordered in 2022 excluded Dechaine from some items and left others inconclusive, and the new profiles were not matched to anyone. On January 30, 2025, a Superior Court justice denied a new trial and wrote, "This is not a close case." No court or police agency has linked Evonitz to Sarah Cherry’s death. An alert is a request. Its worth depends on whether the request reaches a person who can answer it, and on whether the answer is yes.
A parallel claim failed the other way. A University of Virginia law professor, Deirdre Enright, once connected Evonitz to the 1996 Shenandoah National Park killings of two women. In June 2024 the FBI announced that new DNA testing had identified a different man, a convicted rapist who had died in prison in 2018, and put the chance that the crime evidence came from anyone else at one in 2.6 trillion.
Paul John Knowles was never tried. Police in Florida, Georgia and other states attributed at least 18 deaths to him in 1974, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and he was killed in custody on December 18, 1974. One of the deaths attributed to him was that of Ima Jean Sanders, 13, of Warner Robins, Georgia. No report that she was missing could later be traced, and she was never entered in the national database of missing persons, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. For 35 years the Georgia Bureau of Investigation laboratory held an unidentified young female as "unidentified victim No. 5." In January 2011 an investigator in Texas, working on another cold case, learned that Sanders’s information had never been entered in the database used to match missing persons with unidentified dead, the Associated Press reported. Her mother and sister gave DNA samples, which were compared through CODIS with the sample in the Georgia laboratory, and they matched. The GBI announced the result on December 21, 2011.
The laboratory held the unidentified girl for 35 years. What was missing was the report that would have given her a name to match.
Larry Eyler’s case runs the same logic into a different group of victims. He was convicted in 1986 in Cook County, Illinois, of the murder of Danny Bridges, 15, with other charges, and sentenced to death. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Indiana to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, 23, and received 60 years. After he died on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center in March 1994, his lawyer released a confession to 21 killings of young men and boys in Illinois and Indiana. Reveal reported in 2015 that as many as six of his victims were still unidentified, four of them in Indiana, and that DNA from the Newton County, Indiana, victims had been sent to a University of North Texas laboratory and to CODIS.
Genetic genealogy changed that. In April 2021 the Newton County Coroner’s Office, working with the DNA Doe Project, identified one man as John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. of Chicago, 19. On July 21, 2023, the last of four men from an Indiana farm was identified as Keith Lavell Bibbs, a 16-year-old from Chicago. His DNA was highly degraded, the project said, and the work took more than two years. Its team leader said the family tree was complicated by many name changes, and the project said identifications of Black victims had been hampered because Black people have long been underrepresented in DNA databases. McCord, who worked on the identifications, said of Eyler’s own account that "literally everything he told us about him just matched." A second young man, whose death came to light in Hendricks County, Indiana, in 1983, has not been publicly named.
A linkage database is a record of what a society chose to write down. It finds the man whose sample was taken, when someone remembers to compare it. It finds the girl whose family was asked, when a family is asked. It works best on those who were already counted: convicted offenders, reported missing persons, victims whose deaths were called homicides. Little’s victims, Knowles’s 13-year-old, the young men of Eyler’s confession and Lamotte, who stayed an unidentified Jane Doe for thirty-three years because nobody had told Manchester police she was gone, were not in the file, or were in it under a label that did not send anyone searching.
None of this makes the machinery less necessary. It makes plain what each success rests on. In 2012 it was a warrant system that let a man go and a databank that remembered him. In 2007 it was a lieutenant who sent evidence back after twenty-five years. In 2025 it was a forensic scientist who developed a usable profile from evidence kept since 1987. The databases return what they hold. The people who feed them decide what that is.
• 1974: Paul John Knowles' attributed deaths in Georgia and Florida; killed in custody December 18, 1974.
• 1976: an unidentified young female is held by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation laboratory (identified as Ima Jean Sanders in 2011).
• 1981: Grover Thompson convicted of attempted murder in Illinois; exonerated after death in 2019.
• 1984: Danny Bridges, 15, killed in Chicago; Larry Eyler convicted in July 1986.
• 1989: Richard Ramirez convicted of 13 murders (September 20) and sentenced to death (November 7).
• 1990: Vincent Groves convicted of two further murders.
• 2002: Richard Evonitz named in Virginia as the killer of three girls (August 13).
• August 2007: Timothy Krajcir matched through the Illinois DNA registry to the 1982 Sheppard case; Carbondale police announce an arrest on August 31.
• March 2008: FBI ViCAP alert on Evonitz.
• October 2009: San Francisco police attribute the 1984 killing of Mei Leung to Ramirez by DNA.
• January 2011: Ima Jean Sanders identified through CODIS; announced December 21, 2011.
• March 7, 2012: Denver prosecutors link four killings to Groves.
• April 2012: DNA databank match links Samuel Little to Los Angeles killings; arrested September 5, 2012.
• 2014: Little convicted by a Los Angeles County jury; life without parole on September 25.
• 2018: ViCAP flags Little in the Odessa case; Ector County indictment in July; Cuyahoga County notified on October 1; Black-Pilgrim and Lamotte identified.
• December 18, 2019: Campbell County grand jury finds Jerry Leon Johns would be indicted in the Farmer case.
• December 30, 2020: Little dies.
• April 2021: John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. identified; July 21, 2023: Keith Lavell Bibbs identified.
• October 2025: CODIS case-to-case match in the Fisher case; Groves attribution announced December 2, 2025.