In May 2018 a Texas Ranger named James Holland flew to California to ask a seventy-seven-year-old inmate about one dead woman in Odessa. The inmate, Samuel Little, had been in prison since 2014 for three murders in Los Angeles and had never admitted any of them. Holland spent a few days with him and then arranged to have him moved to the county jail in Decatur, Texas, where over the months that followed, in some seven hundred hours of conversation, Little described killing ninety-three women in nineteen states between 1970 and 2005. He could not remember most of their names. He remembered their faces, their clothes, the make of the car, the weather, which side of the highway he had left them on, and he drew them from memory in colored pencil, dozens of portraits that the FBI put on its website in the hope that a sister or a daughter would recognize one. By October 2019 the Bureau had verified fifty of the cases and said that all ninety-three were credible, and it named him the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. He had been caught, in the end, on a drug warrant.
He was born Samuel McDowell in Reynolds, Georgia, on June 7, 1940, to a teenage mother, Bessie Mae, whom he described as a sex worker who abandoned him as a baby; the census of that year lists her as a maid and his father as Paul McDowell, nineteen. He was raised by his grandmother in Lorain, Ohio, west of Cleveland. He was a good athlete and a poor student, in reform school at sixteen for breaking into a furniture store, and by the early 1960s in the Ohio penitentiary for burglary. He boxed, well enough to fight in prison tournaments, and he told Holland that he had learned from boxing how to hit a woman once, hard enough to stun her, and then put his hands around her neck. He drifted for the rest of his life: Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, California, Kentucky, living out of cars, shoplifting to eat and to buy drugs, collecting an arrest record of more than a hundred entries in two dozen states for theft, assault, armed robbery, rape, and, twice, for murder. Neither murder case stuck.
What he did to women was almost always the same and it was designed, whether he understood it that way or not, to be missed. He picked women who would not be reported missing quickly, or at all: sex workers, women addicted to drugs, women living on the street, women who had left home young, and a large majority of them Black. He talked to them, offered a ride, drink or money, drove somewhere quiet, knocked them out with a punch and strangled them while he masturbated. There was no knife and no gun. A woman found in a ditch, a vacant lot or a culvert with no wound on her, a needle history and a record for prostitution was, in most of the jurisdictions where he left them, an overdose, an accident, an exposure death or undetermined, and the file closed. He told Holland he had never killed anyone who would be missed. He was wrong about that, but not by much.
The women who have been named are a small part of the ninety-three, and the record on each is thin because the record was thin at the time. Martha Cunningham was thirty-four, from Knox County, Tennessee, and was last seen on New Year's Eve 1974; he drove her out of Knoxville and strangled her in the car, and her death was ruled natural. Julia Critchfield was thirty-six, and on January 21, 1978, he strangled her near Saucier, Mississippi, and rolled her body off a bluff into a dirt pit; the autopsy found she had been dead about two hours when she went over. Clara Birdlong was killed in Mississippi in 1977 and was identified by DNA in September 2021, forty-four years later. Evelyn Weston was nineteen and was killed near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, that same year. Brenda Alexander was twenty-three; she left a dance club in Columbus, Georgia, with him early on August 27, 1979, and was found across the river in Phenix City, Alabama. Linda Sue Boards was twenty-three, from Smiths Grove, Kentucky, found beside U.S. 68 on May 15, 1981. Fredonia Smith was eighteen, killed in Macon, Georgia, in July 1982, in the same city where in 1977 he had strangled Yvonne Pless, twenty, whose body went without a name for more than four decades until she was identified in May 2023. Patricia Ann Mount was twenty-six, a woman with an intellectual disability who lived with her mother in Gainesville, Florida, and was found in a field near Forest Grove in September 1982; he was tried for her murder in January 1984 and acquitted. Mary Jo Peyton was twenty-one, killed in Cleveland in 1984. Frances Campbell was twenty-three, from Savannah, killed that year. Carol Alford was forty-one and Audrey Nelson thirty-five and Guadalupe Apodaca forty-six, all killed in Los Angeles between July 1987 and September 1989 and left in alleys and a garage; Alford's body was found by a passerby the same day. Zena Marie Jones was thirty; he picked her up at a Memphis motel in 1990, strangled her in his car as a police cruiser went by, and dropped her from a bridge into the Mississippi on the Arkansas side, and she was identified in April 2022 when her family saw a likeness in one of his drawings. Alice Denise Duvall was thirty-four, Long Beach, June 1991. Rose Evans was thirty-two, had left Binghamton, New York, at seventeen, and was found in a vacant lot on East 39th Street in Cleveland on August 24, 1991, after he spotted her from his car and offered a ride. Tina Taylor was twenty-seven, Gulfport, December 1992. Bobbie Ann Fields Wilson was thirty-seven, Lubbock, August 1993. Gwendolyn Simmons was twenty-three, North Little Rock, April 1994. Denise Christie Brothers, of Odessa, Texas, was thirty-two in some records and thirty-eight in others, and is described as the mother of two children or of three; she was reported missing on January 1, 1994, and found strangled in a vacant lot on February 2, and her case was the one that took Holland to California. Melissa Thomas was twenty-four, killed in Opelousas, Louisiana, in 1996. Nancy Carol Stevens was forty-six, killed in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 2005, when he was sixty-five, the last he admitted to. The rest are cities and years and a drawing.
He was tried twice before 2014 and beaten both times. In September 1982 he was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for the murder of Melinda LaPree, twenty-two, a sex worker found in a cemetery, and a grand jury declined to indict him; he was convicted instead of assaulting two other women in the town and, while held on that, extradited to Florida for Patricia Mount. A Gainesville jury acquitted him in January 1984 after the defense went to work on the state's witnesses, who were sex workers. In San Diego later that year he beat and strangled two women who lived, and served two and a half years for assault and false imprisonment; one of them, Laurie Barros, testified against him thirty years later. Every one of those files carried his description, his method and his car, and no one put them side by side.
The arrest that finished him came from an old Los Angeles narcotics warrant. In September 2012 the LAPD's cold case unit, running DNA from unsolved 1980s strangulations, got a match to Samuel Little, whose profile was in the system from the San Diego case, and Detective Mitzi Roberts traced him to a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, where U.S. Marshals picked him up on the drug charge on September 5, 2012. His DNA matched Alford, Nelson and Apodaca. At trial in the summer of 2014 the prosecutor, Beth Silverman, put on the three dead women's cases and three living ones from the 1980s under the rule that allows prior acts to show pattern, and the pattern was the whole case: the punch, the strangling, the neighborhoods, the choice of victim. He was convicted on September 2, 2014, and Judge George Lomeli sentenced him on September 25 to three consecutive terms of life without parole. He maintained his innocence at sentencing and told the families they were mistaken.
He talked to Holland because Holland treated him, he said, like a human being, and because he had nothing left to lose and enjoyed the audience. The Ranger brought him drawing supplies and Dr Pepper and let him tell it his way, and checked every detail against the FBI's ViCAP database, where analysts Christie Palazzolo and Angela Williamson matched his descriptions to unsolved deaths one by one. Little pleaded guilty in Odessa to the Brothers murder on December 13, 2018, and received another life term; in August 2019 he pleaded guilty in Ohio to killing four women, among them Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans in Cleveland and Anna Stewart, thirty-two, recorded in some files as Annie Lee Stewart, strangled in Cincinnati on October 11, 1981, and got life on each. Prosecutors in other states declined to go through the exercise for a dying man already serving four life sentences, which is why the count of convictions stops in single figures while the count of confirmed murders passed sixty. In November 2020, weeks before he died, he confessed to two more killings in Florida, and for one of them another man had been wrongfully convicted. On December 1, 2021, the FBI, the Justice Department and the Texas Rangers released profiles of thirty-one of his victims who were still unidentified, killed in nine states between 1970 and 1997; by then sixty-two of his confessions had been confirmed.
He was a diabetic with heart disease in a wheelchair for most of the interviews. He died on December 30, 2020, aged eighty, at a hospital in Los Angeles County while in the custody of the state prison at Lancaster, and the sheriff's department said there was no sign of foul play. The FBI has kept his drawings online. Most of the women in them have still not been named, and the jurisdictions where they died have, in a number of cases, no file to reopen, because there was never a homicide file to begin with.