Samuel Little was born in Reynolds, Georgia on June 7, 1940 and raised by his grandmother in Lorain, Ohio. He was arrested for the first time at sixteen and accumulated, over the next fifty years, a record across more than twenty states: burglary, shoplifting, assault, armed robbery, rape.
He drifted, shoplifting to live, and boxed a little, which is where the strength in his hands came from.
He killed women for thirty-five years without being convicted of any of it. His victims were almost always women on the margins: sex workers, women with drug addictions, women who were homeless, and a great many of them Black.
He punched them and strangled them, usually leaving no stab or gunshot wound, and often left the bodies where a medical examiner would rule the death undetermined, accidental or an overdose.
That is why he lasted. Many of the killings were never recorded as killings at all.
He was tried twice in the 1980s and walked both times, in a Mississippi case and a Florida case. In 1982 he was acquitted of a murder in Pascagoula.
He was arrested at a shelter in Louisville in 2012 on a drug charge and extradited to California, where DNA connected him to three unsolved Los Angeles murders from the late 1980s. He was convicted in September 2014 of killing Carol Alford, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca, and sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole.
In 2018 he began talking. Texas Ranger James Holland, who had gone to interview him about one case, spent months with him, and Little described killing after killing in detail: cities, years, physical descriptions, what the women were wearing, what was said.
He had an extraordinary memory for faces and none at all for names. He drew dozens of the women in coloured pencil, and the FBI published the portraits in the hope that someone would recognise a daughter or a sister.
He gave a total of ninety-three. As of 2020 the FBI had confirmed sixty and considered all ninety-three credible, which makes him the most prolific serial killer in the recorded history of the United States.
He died on December 30, 2020, aged eighty, at a California hospital in the custody of the state. Dozens of the cases he described are still open, and some of the women in his drawings have still not been named.
Eight convictions, sixty confirmed, ninety-three described. He was the most prolific killer in American history and he was caught on a drug charge, because the deaths of the women he chose were being filed as accidents.