Samuel Little Gets Three Life Terms for Strangling Three Women in South Los Angeles
Families of Carol Alford, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca spoke in court before the judge imposed the maximum; Little shouted that he did not do it.
Published
One by one, the families of three women killed in South Los Angeles in the late 1980s stood up in court and spoke to the man a jury had convicted of strangling them. Sherri Nelson told Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli she could not imagine the horror her sister went through as she was choked to death and her body dragged away and thrown into a trash dumpster. The images from the coroner's testimony, she said, "will be etched in my mind forever." Audrey Nelson's daughter, Pearl, said she was 13 when the police came, and that the reunion she had waited for with the mother who had given her up as a baby so she could have a better life was "taken from my fingertips."
Then Mary Louise Frias, the niece and goddaughter of Guadalupe Apodaca, told the court that Samuel Little had "no conscience, no soul."
"I didn't do it!" Little shouted.
It was Thursday, September 25, 2014. Apodaca's niece Diana Flores said through tears that her aunt did not deserve to die the way she had, and that the conviction meant Little would never hurt anyone again. Immediately after the families had spoken, Lomeli sentenced Little, 74, to the maximum: three consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole. Little told the judge he hoped for a new trial, and his lawyer, Michael Pentz, said he was filing a notice of appeal.
On September 2 a jury had needed about two hours to find him guilty of three first-degree murders, and had found true the special circumstance of multiple murders. Carol Alford, 41, was found in an alley off East 27th Street on July 13, 1987. Audrey Nelson, 35, was found in a dumpster behind East Seventh Street on August 14, 1989. Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, was found inside a commercial garage in South Los Angeles on September 3, 1989.
For more than two decades the three cases had gone nowhere. In April 2012 the Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division was told that a DNA match identified Little as the suspect in Nelson's death, and matches on the other two followed. He was arrested that year in Louisville, Kentucky, on an unrelated Los Angeles drug charge and brought back to California. At trial, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors that for at least two pieces of evidence the chance of a random match was one in 450 quintillion, and she called four women who had survived similar attacks in the 1980s in San Diego and Mississippi. In her sentencing memorandum she described him as "a serial sexual predator" who had "repeatedly brutalized and dehumanized women over the course of many years."
What this story covers. The sentencing, the families' words and the trial evidence come from CBS Los Angeles's report of September 25, 2014; the conviction date, the victims' ages and dates, the special circumstance and the April 2012 DNA notification come from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's announcement of the same day, as reproduced in full online. Prosecutors' claims about his motive are left out here. On this date Little stood convicted of these three murders only; the larger count came years later. The photograph shows Little beside his lawyer in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Sources
- Serial Killer Sentenced to Three Consecutive Life Terms, Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office (press release of September 25, 2014, as reproduced by LA Law Guy)
- Serial Killer, 74, Sentenced To 3 Life Terms Without Possibility Of Parole, CBS Los Angeles
Related News
- November 13, 2018: Samuel Little May Be Linked to More Than 90 Murders, Texas Authorities Say