Samuel Little was convicted of eight murders, and he confessed to 93 killings. The difference between those numbers is the story of his life and of the women he killed. For about 35 years he moved around the United States, from Florida to California, picking up women in bars, on street corners and outside clubs. Most were Black, many were poor, and many were cut off from their families or using drugs. He strangled them, by his own account, and when their bodies were found many of the deaths were recorded as overdoses, accidents, natural deaths or causes unknown.
He was arrested again and again over those years, for theft, assault, drugs and other offenses, in some two dozen states. He was charged with murder in Mississippi and Florida in the 1980s and walked free both times. He was not convicted of any killing until 2014, when he was 74 and DNA tied him to three women found dead in Los Angeles in 1987 and 1989.
In 2018, while serving life without parole for those three murders, he began talking to a Texas Ranger named James Holland about a woman killed in Odessa, Texas, in 1994. Over more than 700 hours of interviews he described 93 killings between 1970 and 2005. The FBI said in October 2019 that it believed all of his confessions were credible and called him the most prolific serial killer in United States history. By the time he died, on December 30, 2020, investigators had verified about 60 of the cases, and they went on working to put names to the rest.
According to records gathered by the Associated Press in 2013, Little was born on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia. He was raised by his grandmother in Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland. He often used the name Samuel McDowell. (Newsweek, reporting his death, said he was born in Ohio; the earlier record gives Georgia.)
His criminal record began early. He was arrested for burglary in Omaha, Nebraska, on November 29, 1956, and served time with a youth authority. The Washington Post reported that he was first charged at 16 with breaking and entering. Between 1957 and 1975, the AP timeline shows, he was arrested 26 times in 11 states, among them Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, Illinois and Georgia. The charges included shoplifting, theft, assault, rape, aggravated assault on a police officer, drunk driving, fraud, breaking and entering and solicitation of a prostitute.
He told police at one point, "I used to be a prizefighter," the Post reported. News reports through the years describe him as a former boxer, and the AP wrote at his death that he had once been a strong boxer who used his hands to strangle his victims. The Post, citing the Los Angeles Times, said he had once stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed more than 200 pounds. He told the AP he had been married once and had two long-term relationships, and he was a skilled artist.
By 2013 his rap sheet ran to more than 100 pages, covered 24 states over 56 years and held about 75 arrests, according to the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff's Office and the AP. Over those 56 years he served less than 10 years in prison. "It's the craziest rap sheet I've ever seen," the Los Angeles prosecutor Beth Silverman said in 2013. "He's gotten break after break after break."
Little later placed his first killings in 1970 and 1971, in and around Miami and Homestead, Florida. Those cases remain unmatched to any named woman. He was in custody for long stretches during the years of his confessions, and the Texas Rangers later published the periods when he was jailed for six months or more so that investigators could rule cases in or out: May 28, 1971, to March 14, 1972; November 25, 1982, to January 18, 1984; October 25, 1984, to February 1, 1987; June 5, 1988, to April 11, 1989; June 20, 1990, to December 9, 1990; and January 15, 1998, to April 26, 2002.
In December 1976, in Sunset Hills, Missouri, outside St. Louis, he was convicted of assaulting a woman with intent to rape her after she escaped from him. He was sentenced to three months in the county jail.
On January 18, 1975, two hunters found the body of Martha Cunningham, 34, in woods in eastern Knox County, Tennessee. She had been bruised, her clothes had been pulled off, and her purse and some jewelry were missing. Detectives at the time attributed her death to natural causes, and the medical examiner's report gave the probable cause as unknown.
She was a talented singer and pianist who performed with her parents and six younger siblings as the Happy Home Jubilee Singers, the AP reported. When a retired Knox County Sheriff's Office investigator, David Davenport, reopened the case decades later, he found almost nothing. "There was no file in existence, except for the medical examiner's report," he told The New York Times. In October 2019 Knox County authorities said she was likely Little's victim; he had confessed to killing a woman he remembered only as Martha. He was never charged. Little had been in Tennessee custody in 1994, 19 years after her death, when he was convicted of misdemeanor larceny in Nashville and sentenced to 90 days in jail. "They could've settled this, and look at all the people that got killed," her sister, Jessie Lane Downs, told the Times.
In Macon, Georgia, the remains of a young woman were found off Arkwright Road in 1977. For more than four decades she was known as Macon Jane Doe, a name used by the Macon Telegraph. When Little confessed in 2018 to killing two women in Macon, Captain Shermaine Jones of the Bibb County Sheriff's Office began working with Amy Hutsell, who directs the sexual assault, child abuse and human trafficking unit of the Georgia Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. In 2019 the two traveled to Wise County, Texas, where Little was held, to test his accounts against the Macon files, and after interviewing him Jones closed both cases. In 2022 they took up the unnamed woman's case again, using forensic genetic genealogy with the laboratory Othram, and found a relative who led them to her family. On May 18, 2023, the sheriff's office and the council announced her name: Yvonne Pless, about 20 years old when she died. The release described her as Little's first Macon victim, killed in 1977.
On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Little was in and out of local jails in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Jackson County district attorney, Tony Lawrence, said in 2018 that Little was in South Mississippi between 1977 and 1982, and a Pascagoula police file showed an arrest on August 11, 1977.
In December 1977 hunters found a woman's skeletal remains near a highway in Jackson County. She had a gold front tooth and was short, and she lay unnamed for 44 years as Escatawpa Jane Doe. Little confessed to killing a woman there without knowing her name, and authorities confirmed he had been in Jackson County in 1977 and was arrested in Pascagoula that August for petit theft. In September 2021 the Jackson County Sheriff's Department announced that DNA work by a Texas laboratory had traced her to a cousin and then to her family. She was Clara Birdlong, born in 1933, from Leflore County in the Mississippi Delta. A woman who remembered her said she had left the county in the 1970s with a man, and the department said she was never seen or heard from again. Her cause of death is recorded as undetermined, and the department described Little as the prime suspect.
Julia Critchfield was 36. She was found on January 22, 1978, at the bottom of a dirt pit in north Saucier, in Harrison County. An autopsy found she had died of asphyxiation due to strangulation, and the case went cold with no suspect. On October 31, 2018, Harrison County investigators interviewed Little in Wise County, Texas. He admitted the killing again, giving details that, the sheriff's office said, only the killer would know, and they charged him with murder. He was never brought to Mississippi to face the charge.
The Washington Post listed among the cases tied to Little the death of Brenda Alexander, 23, in Russell County, Alabama, in 1979.
On May 15, 1981, the body of Linda Sue Boards was found on a farm on Hydro-Pondsville Road, about 1.4 miles southeast of Smiths Grove, Kentucky. Kentucky State Police investigators interviewed Little in Texas, and in December 2018 a Warren County grand jury indicted him for her murder. No trial or plea in that case was reported.
Anna Stewart was 32 and the mother of three. In 1981 Little met her in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati and strangled her, by his own account to prosecutors. Her killing is one of the eight for which he was convicted.
Patricia Parker was 30. Little confessed to killing a woman in the Chattanooga area in the early 1980s, and remains found in Dade County, Georgia, in 1981 were eventually matched to her. A forensic reconstruction of the skull, shown at a Georgia Bureau of Investigation news conference, led her son to come forward, and DNA confirmed the identification in October 2020, Newsweek reported.
Fredonia Smith was killed in Washington Park in Macon in 1982. Bibb County closed her case after Little's confession, and investigators were able to notify her surviving family member.
Rosie Hill, of Memphis, Tennessee, was last heard from in a hurried telephone call from Florida in August 1982. Her mother, Minnie Hill, said she had sounded worried. Little told detectives he strangled her after meeting her in a bar in Marion County, Florida, and left her body in woods, The New York Times reported. Her strangled body was found near a hog pen, according to The Washington Post. She was identified through X-rays. The Times gave her age as 20 and the Post as 21. Little was not charged in her death.
Patricia Ann Mount lived in Gainesville, Florida. She was 26. She was last seen at Mae's Lounge, at Northwest Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, and her body was found on September 12, 1982, in rural Forest Grove, in Alachua County. Reports in the file said she had a severe intellectual disability and had once lived at the Sunland Training Center.
In October 1982 the skeletal remains of Melinda LaPree were found in a cemetery in Gautier, Mississippi. She had last been seen in Pascagoula about a month earlier, getting into a station wagon with a man whom witnesses later identified as Little. Two women who did sex work later said he had assaulted them in Pascagoula in 1980 and 1981.
In November 1982 Little was arrested for shoplifting in Pascagoula. Police linked him to LaPree's death and charged him with murder and two aggravated assaults. A grand jury did not indict him. Pascagoula police investigator Darren Versiga said in 2018 that there had not been enough evidence to prosecute at the time. Mississippi sent him to Florida to face a charge of murder in the death of Patricia Mount.
In January 1984 a Florida jury acquitted Little of murdering Patricia Mount. The verdict is final, and under the rule against double jeopardy he could never be tried for her death again.
On December 20, 2018, Detective Kevin Allen of the Alachua County Sheriff's Office cold case unit became the first of ten detectives to interview Little at the Wise County jail in Decatur, Texas. Holland set the ground rules, read Little his Miranda warnings and introduced Allen as a friend from Gainesville. Allen brought a letter from the state attorney, Bill Cervone, saying Florida would not seek the death penalty for killings Little confessed to in the state. Little told him he had picked Patricia Mount up at a bar, said he "liked her neck," and described choking her on a dirt road off U.S. Highway 27 in the northwest of the county. He said he was sorry and blamed "a curse or mental deficiency" for his urge to strangle women. Allen described him as warm, open and almost charismatic. No family of Patricia Mount could be found, and the sheriff's office closed her case on the strength of the confession. The acquittal stands.
In Mississippi, LaPree's case was reopened after Little admitted killing her in November 2018. Versiga said he and the district attorney would meet her family to decide whether to put the evidence to a Jackson County grand jury. No new charge in her death has been reported.
His Florida and Mississippi custody ended on January 18, 1984, according to the Rangers' list. In October 1984 San Diego police found him with a woman who said he had attacked her. He was arrested and charged in that attack and in another a month earlier. A jury deadlocked on attempted murder, and he pleaded guilty to assault and false imprisonment. He was admitted to state prison on August 14, 1985, to serve four years for assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, according to the California prison system, and was paroled on February 1, 1987. He moved to Los Angeles.
Carol Alford was 41. She was found on July 13, 1987, in an alley off East 27th Street in South Los Angeles. Audrey Nelson was 35. She was found on August 14, 1989, in a trash bin behind East Seventh Street, downtown. Guadalupe Apodaca was 46. She was found on September 3, 1989, inside an abandoned commercial garage in South Los Angeles. All three had been strangled, and all three tested positive for cocaine at autopsy. Authorities later described them as women living on the fringes of society.
Audrey Nelson had a daughter, Pearl, who was 13 when police came to tell her that her mother was dead. Her sister Sherri Nelson later told the court that her sister did not deserve to have her life taken. Guadalupe Apodaca's niece and goddaughter, Mary Louise Frias, and another niece, Diana Flores, spoke for her family. Little is recorded about Carol Alford beyond her age and where she was found.
The cases went unsolved for more than two decades. Little called Los Angeles his "killing fields," CBS News reported, and the 2021 Rangers release listed 16 of his unmatched confessions in Los Angeles and nearby Compton, from 1984 to 1996.
On or about August 24, 1991, Little offered Rose Evans, 32, a ride near East 55th Street and Central Avenue in Cleveland, according to the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. He took her to a vacant lot near East 39th Street, strangled her and covered her body with two tires. A bystander found her that morning.
Earlier, sometime in May or June 1984, he had met Mary Jo Peyton, 21, at a bar near East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. He drove her to what appeared to be an abandoned factory, strangled her with his hands and threw her body down a basement stairwell. Two employees of a nearby business found her on July 3, 1984.
On the Mississippi coast, Alice Denise Taylor, known as Tina, was found in Gulfport in 1992. Her aunt, Ann Taylor, told the Sun Herald in 2018 that the family had waited 26 years to learn what happened, NPR reported. The Harrison County Sheriff's Office later said Little had been charged with killing Alice Taylor and Tracy Johnson a few days apart in December 1992, according to the Vicksburg Daily News, and it circulated one of his drawings of a third Gulfport woman, killed before December 1992, who has never been identified.
In Perry, Florida, Ruby Lane, 19, disappeared in 1993. Her remains were found in Madison County in 2000 and identified in 2014. Little confessed to killing her, and a Taylor County grand jury indicted him for her murder in 2019. He never faced the charge in court.
Denise Christie Brothers lived in Odessa, Texas. She was found strangled in a vacant lot two blocks from a motel in Odessa in 1994, about a month after she disappeared. CNN reported that she was found in January 1994. Her case was the one that brought the Texas Rangers to Little.
In Louisiana, Houma police said in 2019 that Little had described the death of Dorothy Richard, found in 1982, in a way only the killer could have known, and that his confession to the 1996 death of Daisy McGuire, 40, included the detail that she carried a Bible, as her family said she did. The Washington Post listed the death of Melissa Thomas, 29, in Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1996 among the cases tied to him. Little told investigators his last killing was in 2005, in Tupelo, Mississippi.
In April 2012 Detective Mitzi Roberts of the Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division cold case unit got a DNA match linking the Nelson and Apodaca killings to each other and then to Little, through California's offender DNA databank. The screening and testing were paid for by a National Institute of Justice grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, the department said.
Little was not easy to find. In 2007 he had been arrested in Los Angeles for cocaine possession. He pleaded guilty and was sent to a drug diversion program but failed to attend or to come back to court, and a judge 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 found the warrant and let him go because it was not extraditable. "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.
In April 2012, after a stay at a Salvation Army shelter in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Calcasieu Parish deputy arrested him after stopping him for apparent drunkenness and finding a crack pipe on him. He was released and left. When the LAPD contacted the sheriff's office, Detectives Les Blanchard and Brent Young went to the shelter, found he was gone and began to track him. They traced an ATM purchase to a minimart in Louisville, Kentucky. On September 5, 2012, he was found at a nearby Christian shelter and arrested on a 2009 Los Angeles narcotics warrant, with help from the U.S. Marshals in Louisville.
He waived extradition and was returned to Los Angeles in October 2012. On November 27, 2012, DNA evidence connected him to the killing of Carol Alford. He was admitted to state prison on the drug case on December 10, 2012. In January 2013 Los Angeles County prosecutors charged him with three counts of murder. He pleaded not guilty and was held without bail. Prosecutors said they might seek the death penalty.
Roberts said investigators saw a pattern in his past that matched the Los Angeles killings. Asked about his record, Little said in an interview transcript, "I just be in the wrong place at the wrong time with people." Police in at least nine states began reviewing their cold cases, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement started reexamining unsolved killings across 12 jurisdictions.
Little was tried in Los Angeles County Superior Court before Judge George G. Lomeli in the summer of 2014. Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman of the Major Crimes Division prosecuted, and Michael Pentz represented him. Semen and other DNA on the women's clothing matched his profile. For at least two items, Silverman told the jury, the chance of a random match was one in 450 quintillion. DNA under Audrey Nelson's fingernails linked him to her killing, and prosecutors said she had clawed at her attacker. The defense challenged the DNA evidence.
Prosecutors also presented evidence about four women who had survived similar attacks in San Diego and Mississippi in the 1980s. Silverman told jurors that Little believed he could take whatever he wanted from women. The prosecution said he lured the women with drugs and beat and strangled them for sexual gratification.
On September 2, 2014, after about two hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and found true the special circumstance of multiple murders. At the brief hearing, he chatted with his lawyer and appeared almost cheerful, and when Judge Lomeli asked whether the sentencing date suited him, he answered, "It's your discretion." Outside court, Silverman said he was likely responsible for at least 40 killings since 1980. "It's the end of an entire career of killing," she said.
On September 25, 2014, Judge Lomeli sentenced Little to three consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, the maximum available. Silverman's sentencing memorandum said he had "repeatedly brutalized and dehumanized women over the course of many years," and she called him a remorseless killer who would have faced a possible death sentence if not for his age.
The families spoke first. Sherri Nelson said she could not imagine the horror her sister had felt as she was choked, and that the coroner's evidence at trial had left images that would stay with her forever. Pearl Nelson said a reunion with her mother that she had long hoped for had been taken from her fingertips. "I know she didn't deserve to die the way she did," Diana Flores said of her aunt. When Mary Louise Frias said he had no conscience and no soul, Little shouted, "I didn't do it!" He called the effort to label him a serial killer a legal lynching and told the judge he hoped for a new trial. Pentz said he would file a notice of appeal. Little was admitted to the state prison system on November 24, 2014.
In 2018 the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, which keeps a national database of violent crimes, flagged Little in connection with the unsolved Odessa killing of Denise Brothers and referred the case to the Texas Rangers. In May 2018 Ranger James Holland and two FBI crime analysts visited him in California. The Rangers later dated Holland's interviews from June 2018. An Ector County grand jury indicted Little for the Brothers killing in July 2018, and he was moved to Texas.
Holland, who specializes in interviewing serial offenders, built trust slowly. He brought Little pizza, Dr Pepper and grits, talked sports with him and assured him he would not be executed, the AP reported. Little called him Jimmy. Holland told 60 Minutes that he got Little talking by agreeing with him that he was not a rapist but a killer. The Ector County district attorney, Bobby Bland, said, "James Holland is the one who finally got him to give that information."
In one interview, the FBI analyst Christie Palazzolo said, Little gave Holland the number of people he had killed in each place: one in Jackson, Mississippi, one in Cincinnati, three in Phoenix, one in Las Vegas, and so on across the country. Holland described Little seeing his crimes in his mind, stroking his face and looking up and away as he pictured a woman, and said Little had a "revolving carousel of victims" and waited for it to stop on the one he wanted. He said Little had an almost photographic memory of the women. "Nothing he's ever said has been proven to be wrong or false," Holland said in 2019. He described Little as both a genius and a sociopath.
Little was held at the Wise County jail in Decatur, Texas, through much of this period, and detectives from around the country came there with their files. He remembered places, cars, clothes and faces well, but not dates. The Rangers warned that he could be wrong by more than ten years and more than 40 miles, so the years and distances in his accounts were never treated as fixed.
On December 13, 2018, Little pleaded guilty in Odessa to murder in the 1994 strangling of Denise Christie Brothers and received another life term, to be served alongside his California sentences. He was 78, in poor health and using a wheelchair. "Due to the efforts of law enforcement agencies from around the country, dozens of victims' families now have answers," Bland said. He said none of the information Little had given had been disproved. By then an FBI spokesman said investigators had concluded Little was the killer in 36 cases; Bland, citing the Rangers, put the figure above 40.
Little said he strangled all but two of his victims, whom he drowned. He denied ever shooting or stabbing anyone. Investigators said the method looked more like suffocation than classic strangulation, since several of the women did not have broken hyoid bones, and some deaths had been misclassified in autopsy reports as overdoses or natural deaths. The FBI said he typically stunned a woman with a punch before strangling her, which left few marks.
His choice of victims was deliberate. He met most of them by chance and killed them soon after. Many were sex workers or addicted to drugs, or simply poor and living on the margins, and he said they were people unlikely to have anyone searching for them. Some were hitchhikers or college students, CBS News reported; one woman he called Emily carried a University of Miami student identification card. "For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims," Palazzolo said. The New York Times found that his victims' deaths had often drawn less attention than other killings. Jim Bueermann, a former police chief of Redlands, California, told the Times that departments under pressure to solve many murders could pay less attention to vulnerable victims, and that killers could "exploit those gaps in the social fabric."
Little described the killing as addictive. "It was like drugs," he said, according to Newsweek. To 60 Minutes he said, "I think I'm the only one in the world. And that's not an honor, that is a curse." A detective's report quoted him as saying God had put him on Earth to do what he was doing, and the Washington Post noted that his openness was not the same as remorse. He also told CBS he hoped his confessions might help people who had been wrongly convicted for his crimes.
Little drew. Investigators asked him to sketch the women he described, and he produced portraits from memory, often with rough dates, places and sometimes a possible name. In February 2019 the FBI released 16 of the portraits. "We want to give these women their names back and their family some long awaited answers," an FBI spokesperson, Shayne Buchwald, said. A detective in Prince George's County, Maryland, where a portrait helped connect Little to a 1972 cold case, said he had an artistic ability that no one would expect. A portrait also helped link him to a 1984 killing in Arkansas.
In October 2019 the FBI released 30 portraits, mostly of Black women, along with prison interview videos and new details on cases in Florida, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nevada and Louisiana. One was a woman in New Orleans in 1982 whom he met at a club and drove to a bayou. "That's the only one that I ever killed by drowning," he said.
On October 6, 2019, the FBI announced that it believed all 93 of Little's confessions were credible and that law enforcement had verified 50 of them, with many more pending. On that basis it said he was the most prolific serial killer in United States history. The figure was the FBI's assessment of his admissions; most of the killings were never tried. The same day, 60 Minutes broadcast Holland's first television interview, and the FBI received hundreds of tips. Victims were identified in Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Arkansas as a result, CBS News reported.
On October 1, 2018, ViCAP notified the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office that Little had confessed to killing Ohio women. Assistant Prosecutor Richard Bell and Investigator Jack Bornfeld went to Texas and obtained his confession. On May 31, 2019, a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted him for the deaths of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans on four counts of aggravated murder and six of kidnapping. Prosecutor Michael C. O'Malley called his disregard for human life incomprehensible.
In Hamilton County, Prosecutor Joe Deters announced indictments in June 2019 for the 1981 killing of Anna Stewart and the killing of an unidentified woman whom prosecutors said could have died at any time between 1980 and 1999. Little said he met her on the stairs of a home in the Mount Adams neighborhood of Cincinnati, and he had drawn her.
On August 23, 2019, Little, 79, diabetic and hard of hearing, appeared at both hearings by Skype from a California state prison, wheeled into a conference room. In Hamilton County, before Judge Melba Marsh, he pleaded guilty to both killings and received two consecutive terms of 15 years to life. His lawyer, Timothy McKenna, said Little wanted to make things as right as he could by cooperating. Deters said the terms were made consecutive so that if any future governor ever cut the sentence short, the county could bring him back. Anna Stewart's daughter and sister did not attend, and Deters said they were grateful.
In Cuyahoga County, before Judge John Russo, he pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated murder for the deaths of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans and received two consecutive life terms, to be served after his Texas, California and Cincinnati sentences, the prosecutor's office said. A third Cleveland-area case remained open. "Samuel Little made a career out of killing vulnerable women," O'Malley said.
With the Ohio pleas, Little's convictions numbered eight: three in Los Angeles, one in Texas and four in Ohio. Prosecutors in at least 14 states were still weighing charges in October 2019, The New York Times reported.
Several other cases went as far as an indictment. Harrison County, Mississippi, charged him in the death of Julia Critchfield in November 2018. Warren County, Kentucky, indicted him in the death of Linda Sue Boards in December 2018. Taylor County, Florida, indicted him in 2019 in the death of Ruby Lane. No verdict or plea in any of these cases was reported.
In Tallahassee, the state attorney, Jack Campbell, said in December 2020 that Little had confessed to the 1984 killing of Willie Mae Bivins. Another man had pleaded guilty to her murder and been convicted, and he has since died. Campbell said he had worked with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for more than a year to corroborate Little's account, and that he had waived the death penalty in the fall of 2018 so that Little would talk to state investigators. No finding by Campbell on the earlier conviction was reported.
Little had diabetes, heart trouble and other illnesses, and near the end he used a wheelchair. He went on talking to Holland until shortly before he died, the Rangers said. He died on December 30, 2020, at the age of 80. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he was pronounced dead at 4:53 a.m. at an outside hospital, and that the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office would determine the cause. A department spokeswoman told the AP that he was believed to have died of natural causes and that there was no sign of foul play.
At his death, he was serving three consecutive terms of life without parole in California, with further life terms from Texas and Ohio. "He clearly was a person who caused immeasurable pain in his lifetime," Campbell said.
The work went on after his death. On December 1, 2021, the Texas Rangers, the FBI and the Department of Justice released new details on 31 of his confessions that had not been matched to any victim. They spanned 1970 to 1997 and nine states: 16 in California, five in Florida, three in Georgia, two in Louisiana and one each in Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee. More than 60 confessions had been matched to victims by then, through DNA or closely corroborated interviews; CBS News gave the figure as 62. "It's critical that anyone with information comes forward, as time is running out," said Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The case descriptions are spare. A woman left in a garage off Figueroa Avenue in Los Angeles in 1987. A woman Little called Granny, left in an unroofed frame house. A woman left on the backside of Griffith Park. In Miami, a person Little called Marianne, left in an Everglades canal, whom the FBI described as a transgender woman. In Knoxville, a woman killed in about January 1975. Angela Williamson, a Department of Justice analyst who worked the cases with Palazzolo and Holland, said Little "didn't even know in his own head how many victims he had." Palazzolo said he never wavered and that the 93 were likely his complete series.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Carol Alford, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca (Los Angeles, jury verdict, 2014); Denise Christie Brothers (Texas, plea, 2018); Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans (Cleveland, pleas, 2019); and Anna Stewart and an unidentified woman (Cincinnati, pleas, 2019).
Confessed and verified or linked by investigators, never tried: about 60 killings in all, including those of Yvonne Pless and Fredonia Smith (cases closed by Bibb County), Patricia Parker, and Martha Cunningham (whom Knox County called a likely victim). Investigators reached these conclusions by matching his accounts to records, physical evidence and DNA where it existed; no court tested them.
Indicted, never tried: Julia Critchfield (Mississippi), Linda Sue Boards (Kentucky) and Ruby Lane (Florida).
Acquitted: Little was found not guilty of murder in the death of Patricia Ann Mount in Florida in January 1984. He later confessed to killing her, and the sheriff's office closed the case, but the acquittal is final. In Mississippi a grand jury declined to indict him in the death of Melinda LaPree and on two assault charges after his November 1982 arrest.
Suspected or uncertain: Melinda LaPree, whose killing he admitted in 2018 but for which no new charge was found; Clara Birdlong, whom the Jackson County sheriff called a possible victim with Little the prime suspect; Willie Mae Bivins, for whose death another man was convicted; and Priscilla Baxter-Jones of Memphis, whose family said in 2019 that one of his drawings resembled her and whose son said he recognized Little. Police said they were looking into a link, but she had been reported stabbed, and Little said he never stabbed anyone.
Numbers that vary: the count of states (19 in the FBI figures reported by Newsweek; 20 in an AP report of 2018; 14 in one AP-based report of 2019); the end year of his claimed killings (2005 in FBI and Rangers releases; 2013 in early Washington Post reports); and the verified count (34 in November 2018; 50 in October 2019; "nearly 60" at his death; 62 in December 2021). The FBI's description of him as the most prolific serial killer in the country's history rests on his confessions and on the cases investigators verified, not on convictions.
June 7, 1940: born in Reynolds, Georgia; raised by his grandmother in Lorain, Ohio.
November 29, 1956: arrested for burglary in Omaha, Nebraska.
1957 to 1975: arrested 26 times in 11 states.
1970 to 1971: the earliest killings he later described, in the Miami area.
January 18, 1975: Martha Cunningham's body is found in Knox County, Tennessee.
December 1976: convicted in Sunset Hills, Missouri, of assault with intent to rape; three months in jail.
1977: Yvonne Pless is killed in Macon, Georgia; in December, Clara Birdlong's remains are found in Jackson County, Mississippi.
January 22, 1978: Julia Critchfield is found near Saucier, Mississippi.
May 15, 1981: Linda Sue Boards is found near Smiths Grove, Kentucky. Anna Stewart is killed in Cincinnati that year.
1982: Fredonia Smith is killed in Macon; Rosie Hill disappears in Florida in August; Patricia Ann Mount is found September 12; Melinda LaPree's remains are found in October.
November 1982: arrested in Pascagoula; a grand jury declines to indict him in LaPree's death; he is sent to Florida.
January 1984: acquitted of murder in Patricia Mount's death.
May or June 1984: Mary Jo Peyton is killed in Cleveland.
October 1984: arrested in San Diego; later pleads guilty to assault and false imprisonment.
February 1, 1987: paroled; moves to Los Angeles.
July 13, 1987: Carol Alford is found in South Los Angeles.
August 14 and September 3, 1989: Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca are found.
August 24, 1991: Rose Evans is found in Cleveland.
1994: Denise Christie Brothers is found strangled in Odessa, Texas.
2005: the last killing he described, in Tupelo, Mississippi.
April 2012: an LAPD DNA match links him to the Nelson and Apodaca killings.
September 5, 2012: arrested at a shelter in Louisville, Kentucky.
November 27, 2012: DNA links him to Carol Alford's death.
January 2013: charged with three counts of murder in Los Angeles.
September 2, 2014: convicted of three counts of first-degree murder.
September 25, 2014: sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole.
May 2018: Ranger James Holland and FBI analysts interview him.
July 2018: indicted in Ector County, Texas.
November 2018: charged in Mississippi in Julia Critchfield's death; the FBI announces the confessions.
December 2018: indicted in Kentucky in Linda Sue Boards's death; December 13, pleads guilty in Odessa.
February 2019: the FBI releases 16 of his portraits.
August 23, 2019: pleads guilty to four murders in Cleveland and Cincinnati.
October 6, 2019: the FBI says all 93 confessions are credible and 50 verified.
October 2020: Patricia Parker is identified.
December 30, 2020: dies in custody, aged 80.
September 2021: Clara Birdlong is identified.
December 1, 2021: details of 31 unmatched confessions are released; 62 verified.
May 18, 2023: Yvonne Pless is identified.