The Nurse and the Drifter: Charles Cullen and Samuel Little on 60 Minutes, 2013 and 2019

Two 60 Minutes reports in one: Charles Cullen, the nurse who estimated he killed 30 to 40 patients, tells Steve Kroft he does not know if he would have stopped; and Samuel Little, on tape and by phone, describes the murders he confessed to a Texas Ranger.

Subject

Charles Cullen, Samuel Little

Recorded

April 28, 2013

Runtime

40:14

Content warning: Concerns the killing of hospital patients by poisoning and the strangling of women; Little describes killings in his own words.

The Interviews

This upload from the 60 Minutes channel joins two reports. In the first, from 2013, Steve Kroft interviews Charles Cullen, a former critical care nurse who admitted to killing patients in hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, through a layer of glass at New Jersey State Prison. CBS described it as the first interview with a serial killer in the programme's history. Cullen says he gave investigators a number "between 30 and 40", that he "thought I was helping", and, asked whether he is sorry, that he is, but "I don't know if I would have stopped". In the second, from 2019, Sharyn Alfonsi reports on Samuel Little, whom the FBI had called the most prolific serial killer in United States history. 60 Minutes was not allowed to film him, so Little is heard on Texas Ranger James Holland's interview tapes, entering a guilty plea by video link, and in a phone call to the programme.

Historical Context

Cullen worked as a nurse at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for sixteen years, beginning at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston. He was arrested in December 2003 after an investigation at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey, and in 2004 began a series of guilty pleas that came to 29 murders and 6 attempted murders. He was sentenced in March 2006 in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to consecutive life terms.

Little, a drifter born in 1940, was convicted in Los Angeles in 2014 of strangling three women in 1987 and 1989. In May 2018 Holland interviewed him in California about the 1994 murder of Denise Brothers in Odessa, Texas. Little confessed to it and to many more. By October 2019 the FBI counted 93 confessed murders between 1970 and 2005, of which 50 had been verified. He died in December 2020 while serving life sentences.

Circumstances of the Interviews

Cullen agreed to the interview, Kroft says, after being persuaded by the nurse the programme calls "Amy Ridgway", who had worked with him at Somerset and helped detectives Tim Braun and Daniel Baldwin build their case. The report also uses footage of his silent 2006 sentencing hearing, at which relatives of his victims addressed him, and Dr. Steven Marcus's recording of his July 2003 call urging the hospital to go to the authorities.

Alfonsi's report follows Holland to the California State Prison and tells how he persuaded Little to talk: by avoiding appeals to remorse, by obtaining a letter from the Odessa district attorney, Bobby Bland, waiving the death penalty, and by keeping Little in the Wise County jail for 48 days of interviews, during which he confessed to 65 murders.

What the Interviews Cover

Cullen explains how he took digoxin from the Pyxis dispensing system without leaving a record, says that both St. Barnabas and St. Luke's had caught him, and that St. Luke's offered neutral references if he resigned. He says hospitals feared lawsuits more than they wanted to know. He describes his suicide attempts and says he knew what he did was wrong "at the time, and, and later". The report also hears from the author Charles Graeber, who believes the real number of deaths may be in the hundreds.

Little, on Holland's tapes, says he "got away with numerous murders of women" over fifty years, names Florida and California as where he killed most, and, in the report's words, grows "disturbingly animated" as he describes strangling his victims. On the phone to 60 Minutes he says that helping to free anyone wrongly convicted for his crimes might make God "smile a little bit more on me", and says of what he did, "that's not an honor. That is a curse."

What Makes the Recording Significant

The Cullen report is his only known on-camera interview and, according to CBS, his first public account of his crimes. It puts his explanations on record beside the evidence that contradicts them. The Little report brought Holland's method and Little's drawings of his victims to a national audience while investigators were still asking for help to identify them, and it preserves the sound of Little's phone call to the programme.

Archival Importance

CBS's published script of the Cullen report is also published here as text, and five FBI-released clips of Little's confessions have their own Video pages. This upload links both to the broadcast as viewers saw it, and it documents, through the detectives, Dr. Marcus and the hospital-references deal, the institutional failures that let Cullen move from hospital to hospital.

Important Caveats

The upload's title, "Interviews with serial killers", applies fully only to Cullen: Little was not interviewed on camera. Its description says Cullen "confessed to killing 40 patients"; he gave an estimate of 30 to 40 and pleaded guilty to 29 murders. Cullen's claims that he thought he was "helping" are his own; the report itself says the evidence does not support them. "Amy Ridgway", as the 2013 report names her, is the nurse now publicly known as Amy Loughren. The counts of Little's murders are those reported in 2019; later FBI figures differ. Graeber's estimate of "multiple hundreds" is his opinion.

Steve Kroft: Tonight you're going to come face to face with a serial killer, one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. They don't usually talk to reporters, and in the 45 years of 60 Minutes, we've never interviewed one until now. Charles Cullen was a critical care nurse who admits to killing up to 40 people. Some suspect it was a lot more. The murders took place over 16 years in seven different hospitals. There were suspicions at nearly all of them that Cullen was harming patients, yet none of them passed that information on to subsequent employers. Newspaper headlines called him the "angel of death", but as you will see, Charles Cullen was no mercy killer. Until we interviewed him a few weeks ago, he'd never spoken publicly about his crimes, never tried to explain why he did it, or even expressed remorse to the families of victims when he finally faced them in court.

Thomas Strenko: This monster didn't even know us or our son, but had the audacity to end his life.

Richard Stoecker: I'd like to tell you a little bit about my mother, that you murdered. You don't even have the guts to look this way, do you?

Clara Hardgrove: Charles, why don't you look up at us? I'd like to show you what you did to our children. This is their dad [unclear: "in" / "and"] his coffin. How do you like that? [unclear: "Would you like this?"]

Steve Kroft: This was the scene seven years ago at the Somerset County Courthouse in New Jersey, as Charles Cullen sat through his sentencing hearing, refusing to speak, or even acknowledge the family members of people he had murdered. Even the judge was exasperated.

Judge Paul Armstrong: Mr. Cullen, I asked you a question. Why is it that you have chosen not to address the court? Can you hear me, Mr. Cullen?

Steve Kroft: He's kept that silence behind the walls of the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where he is in protective custody to keep him safe from other inmates. Protecting himself from his own demons has been more difficult. We found out when we sat down across from him in a cramped cubicle, separated by a thick layer of glass, to talk about the people he's killed. Is 40 an arbitrary number?

Charles Cullen: Forty is an estimate. I gave a number between 30 and 40. I think I have identified, you know, uh, most of them.

Steve Kroft: Look, you, you pled guilty to murder. You don't use that word.

Charles Cullen: I think that I had a lot of trouble accepting that word for a long time. Um, I accept that that's what it is.

Steve Kroft: Do you consider yourself a serial killer?

Charles Cullen: I mean, I guess it depends upon a person's definition. If it's more than one, and it's a pattern, I guess then, yeah. Yes.

Steve Kroft: In Cullen's case, all of his victims were patients assigned to hospital units where he worked as a nurse. They ranged in age from 21 to 91. Some were critically ill. Others were ready to be discharged when Cullen injected them with drugs that would kill them. It was a pattern that began 26 years ago at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey, Cullen's very first nursing job.

Charles Cullen: I worked on the burn unit, so, I mean, there was a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. And I didn't cope with that as well as I thought I would.

Steve Kroft: And that was the first place that you gave someone medication that caused them to die. The patient was John Yengo, a judge from New Jersey who was suffering from a severe case of sunburn, until Cullen injected him with a fatal overdose of lidocaine. Do you remember the person?

Charles Cullen: Uh, I mean, I remember one, and that's the only person I've been able to identify. But there could have been more.

Steve Kroft: St. Barnabas didn't know about the patient Cullen murdered, but it did suspect him of trying to kill or harm a half a dozen other patients by randomly and repeatedly poisoning bags of saline solution. Someone was spiking IV bags with insulin in the storeroom. Charles Graeber, a New York writer, as well as a former medical student and researcher, has spent seven years investigating Cullen's murders for a new book called "The Good Nurse". Graeber says a number of patients at St. Barnabas went into insulin shock and nearly died.

Charles Graeber: He was the main suspect for poisoning random bags of saline. He, if you, if you talk to the investigators there, they'll tell you Cullen was our man. We knew he was dirty. They couldn't prove anything. It's all circumstantial.

Steve Kroft: They fire him?

Charles Graeber: He moved on.

Steve Kroft: When Cullen left the hospital, the insulin overdoses stopped.

Charles Cullen: St. Barnabas [unclear: "that day" / "day"] could have had my license investigated and probably revoked at that point in time.

Steve Kroft: Should they have?

Charles Cullen: Should they have? Yes.

Steve Kroft: But instead of ending Charles Cullen's nursing career, St. Barnabas marked the beginning of a 16-year killing spree. Cullen would work at eight other hospitals and be suspected of harming patients at six of them. But those suspicions never reached subsequent employers, and Cullen continued to murder patients with virtually impunity. In 1993, prosecutors investigated Cullen for murdering 91-year-old Helen Dean. An autopsy tested for nearly 100 medications, but not the one Cullen used to kill her: a powerful drug called digoxin, or dig for short. It was Cullen's first weapon of choice. Why did you like dig?

Charles Cullen: Dig, you know, was a, was a very powerful cardiac medication.

Steve Kroft: What does it do to someone?

Charles Cullen: In small amounts it slows the heart rate down. In larger amounts it, it can cause what's called complete heart block, and then the heart is very irregular. And, you know, it can cause death. It does cause death in large amounts.

Steve Kroft: It was also readily available in critical care units, and Cullen figured out ways to conceal his digoxin withdrawals from an automatic drug dispensary system called Pyxis, which required nurses to type in the name of the patient and the drug to be administered.

Charles Cullen: I wouldn't go in under dig. I would go under Tylenol or another medication that would be in the same drawer. So, um, you know, there was no record of me going in for a dig, other than the fact that, you know, it was in the same drawer.

Steve Kroft: How did you choose who you were going to give this medication to?

Charles Cullen: It's difficult for me to go back in time and think about what things were running through my mind at the time.

Steve Kroft: Was it personal?

Charles Cullen: No. No.

Steve Kroft: Did you get pleasure out of it? Satisfaction?

Charles Cullen: No. I mean, I, I, I thought that, that people weren't suffering anymore, so in a sense, I thought I was helping.

Steve Kroft: Cullen suggested several times that his actions were merciful, but the evidence doesn't support it. Sixty-year-old Eleanor Stoecker, an asthma patient, was recovering and in no pain when Cullen administered a fatal digoxin overdose. College student Michael Strenko, who suffered from an autoimmune disease, was recovering from what his parents called routine surgery to remove his spleen.

Mary Strenko: My heart, it aches for my son. It bleeds for my son.

Thomas Strenko: We vividly remember Charles Cullen walking into the waiting room. He looked us right in the eye and stated how Michael was gravely ill and people don't make it. And my wife told Cullen, "That's enough. You could leave now." We are haunted by the memory of Charles Cullen coming to the waiting room to get our reaction.

Steve Kroft: There were people that you caused to die who were not near death, and not suffering that much.

Charles Cullen: You know, um, again, you know, I mean, my goal here isn't to justify, you know, what I did. There is no justification. Um, I just think that the only thing I can say is that I felt overwhelmed at the time.

Steve Kroft: Can you give us anything? Can you give the families anything? Any explanation for how this happened and why this happened?

Charles Cullen: Uh, like I said, I, I can't. I just can say that it was more or less, you know, felt like I needed to do something. And I, I did. And that's not an answer to anything.

Steve Kroft: Charles Cullen was the youngest of eight children and grew up poor on this street in West Orange, New Jersey, protected by his mother. Cullen was 17 when she died. He tried to kill himself. He spent six years in the Navy, most of them as a missile technician on a nuclear submarine. He was miserable, felt bullied, tried to kill himself again. After receiving a general discharge, he decided to take up nursing. He got married and started a family, but it all went sour: a messy divorce, custody battles, bankruptcy, heavy drinking, more half-hearted suicide attempts, and trips to the psychiatric ward. That was Charles Cullen's state of mind when he was killing people, and on the night he finally confessed to the murders.

Charles Cullen: I tried to kill myself throughout my life, because I never really liked being who I was, 'cause I didn't think I was worthy of anything.

Charles Graeber: It was never about anyone but Charlie Cullen. He did what he did because of his own needs, his own compulsions.

Steve Kroft: Author Charles Graeber interviewed Cullen more than a dozen times for his book, and he remembers seeing words like paranoid, major depression, hostile, passive-aggressive and antisocial on psychiatric reports.

Charles Graeber: He sees himself as a victim, and as a victim he's entitled to lash out in any way he wants, uh, to, uh, to make things right, uh, if that means killing patients. It just, anything justifies his victimhood.

Steve Kroft: You said at one point that, um, you thought it was about power and control. What do you mean?

Charles Graeber: If the rest of his life was spinning out of control, if he was losing custody, if he was feeling depressed, if his love life was in the toilet, he could poison patients, he could save patients, he could make decisions. He had an arena in which he mattered and where his actions had definite consequence.

Steve Kroft: Here you have a, a, a person who tried to kill himself at least 20 times, who was in and out of psych wards, and on some occasions walked right out of the psych ward and right into a job as a critical care nurse.

Charles Graeber: Right. He actually took a call asking him back on shift from a psych ward.

Steve Kroft: Why wouldn't the hospitals do some background checks?

Charles Graeber: Well, partially because they weren't required to, and partially because there was a nursing shortage on. Charlie Cullen looked good. By the end of his career he was a 16-year veteran. He had recommendations. And for a hospital to ask too much or say too much became a liability. You can't penalize a nurse for seeking counseling, for seeking treatment, for going to a rehab center successfully. Um, and so, because of that, Charlie [unclear: "hid in" / "hidden"] those shadows.

Steve Kroft: When Cullen was hired at St. Luke's University Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he'd been fired or forced to resign from five other hospitals, yet none of this was in his file with the state nursing board. By his own count, Cullen had already murdered 11 people, and he would kill at least five more at St. Luke's. Nurses were suspicious, there were rumors about his past, and Cullen was caught red-handed stealing lethal drugs. But instead of calling the police, St. Luke's brought in a lawyer to confront Cullen. Do you think that they knew what you were doing at St. Luke's?

Charles Cullen: I think that they had a strong suspicion.

Steve Kroft: Did you expect to get caught?

Charles Cullen: Uh, well, I, I think you can say I was caught at St. Barnabas, and I was caught at St. Luke's. There's no reason that I should have been a practicing nurse after that.

Steve Kroft: They offered you some kind of a deal?

Charles Cullen: They said if you resign, we'll give you neutral references. And I decided to go with that.

Steve Kroft: What is it about this system and about hospitals that no one went to the police, no one really wanted to find out what was going on? They gave you an opportunity to leave.

Charles Cullen: I think because it's, it's a matter of worrying about lawsuits. If they pointed out that there was a problem, we're going to be found liable for millions of dollars. So [unclear: "I think they just saw it as" / "they, I guess, say just so it is"] a lot easier to not put themselves in a position of getting sued.

Steve Kroft: After Charles Cullen was escorted out the door of St. Luke's Hospital with no consequences, one of the nurses called a friend at the Pennsylvania State Police with her suspicions, and an investigation was begun. By then, Cullen had already found another job at the Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey. He would murder another 13 people there, but it would be his final stop. That story when we come back.

Steve Kroft: In September 2002, when Charles Cullen was hired as a critical care nurse at New Jersey's Somerset Medical Center, the hospital knew nothing about his dark past. It didn't know that he'd been fired or forced to resign at a half a dozen hospitals, or that he'd been investigated by authorities for harming patients. And there was no reason to suspect that Cullen had murdered five patients at his last job. He was able to move from hospital to hospital without so much as a bad reference. Cullen would kill another 13 people at Somerset in 13 months, and try and kill three more, before two detectives, a state bureaucrat and a female nurse finally connected the dots.

Steve Kroft: You were under suspicion at St. Luke's, yet you went off to Somerset and kept doing exactly the same things. And it looks like, to me, that you wanted to get caught.

Charles Cullen: I don't know.

Steve Kroft: You don't know?

Charles Cullen: Because, you know, you're right, I mean, I continued. But I was also, I was also careful. I was also [unclear: "denying" / "deny"] any time anybody would have asked me.

Steve Kroft: It was the suspicious death of a Roman Catholic priest named Florian Gall that set in motion the events that would eventually expose Charles Cullen. Reverend Gall had died unexpectedly overnight while recovering from pneumonia, and the hospital discovered high levels of the heart drug digoxin in his blood. It was the second unexplained overdose in two weeks.

Dr. Steven Marcus: The blood levels were astronomical. Uh, they're way higher, uh, than you would ever shoot for, uh, by using the drug therapeutically.

Steve Kroft: Dr. Steven Marcus is the director of New Jersey's Poison Control Center. He heard about the digoxin overdoses when a pharmacist at Somerset called his office asking for help with some dosage calculations. The pharmacist also confided that two more patients in the same unit had turned up with abnormally high levels of insulin.

Steve Kroft: What's going through your mind?

Dr. Steven Marcus: My number one, two and three thought was that there was something malicious going on in the institution.

Steve Kroft: In July of 2003, Marcus set up an urgent conference call with the hospital's medical director, Dr. William Cors, and taped the conversation, in which he told the hospital to notify the authorities.

Dr. Steven Marcus: This is a police matter.

Dr. William Cors: What we're wrestling with is, um, you know, throwing the whole institution into chaos versus, uh, you know, responsibility to, to, you know, protect patients from further harm. And, um, we have been trying to investigate this to get some more information before we made any kind of rush to, you know, judgment.

Dr. Steven Marcus: If there is somebody out there that is purposely doing this to, to individuals at your hospital, we have a legal obligation to report this.

Dr. William Cors: Okay.

Steve Kroft: Somerset Medical Center would eventually notify authorities, but it would take them three long months. Do you know how many patients died in between those?

Dr. Steven Marcus: No, I, I don't know the number, but I, I do know that there were some patients that died in between that, five that we know of. Uh, but those, but those five deaths will, I, I'll remember them the rest of my life. Sorry.

Steve Kroft: They didn't have to happen.

Dr. Steven Marcus: I, I, they, they should have been preventable, yes.

Steve Kroft: It was October before Somerset County detectives Tim Braun and Daniel Baldwin finally met with hospital officials. They were told about a half a dozen incidents in the critical care unit. No one used the word homicide.

Detective Tim Braun: They had dropped a couple names on us with regards to their own internal investigation that they claimed to have conducted for, uh, several months. And they did provide us two names in particular, uh, but did not identify them as any type of suspect or anything like that.

Steve Kroft: One of them was Charles Cullen?

Detective Daniel Baldwin: [unclear: "Correct" / "Yes"].

Steve Kroft: The detectives ran a routine background check on Charles Cullen and discovered that he'd been arrested for stalking a female nurse and breaking into her apartment in eastern Pennsylvania. The file there also contained a Post-it note saying that the Pennsylvania State Police had called just a few weeks earlier, asking similar questions. Detective Baldwin called the trooper who made the inquiry and hit pay dirt.

Detective Daniel Baldwin: After speaking with the trooper, he informed me that his agency had conducted an investigation on Mr. Cullen with a suspicion that he was, um, murdering patients in Pennsylvania as well, that he was using digoxin to, to murder patients.

Steve Kroft: And you found this out with making two phone calls?

Detective Daniel Baldwin: Yes, basically. That, that was it.

Steve Kroft: Do you think you had your man?

Detective Daniel Baldwin And Detective Tim Braun: Yes. Yes.

Steve Kroft: But the detectives knew that proving it would be difficult. A number of law enforcement agencies had tried and failed. How helpful was the hospital in this investigation?

Detective Tim Braun: How helpful was the hospital? They were very helpful by answering court-issued subpoenas. Uh, that was the extent of their cooperation.

Steve Kroft: When the detectives asked to see computerized records from the automated drug dispensary in the critical care unit, they say the hospital told them that it wasn't possible because the drug dispensing machine only stored records for 30 days. They learned otherwise from the machine's manufacturer. They lied to you?

Detective Tim Braun: Yes, they did.

Steve Kroft: They didn't want to give you records that turned out to be crucial to your investigation.

Detective Tim Braun: Yes, that's, that's correct.

Steve Kroft: You think they tried to obstruct your investigation?

Detective Tim Braun: They didn't try to help it, that's for sure.

Steve Kroft: When the detectives informed Somerset that Charles Cullen was the target of their investigation, the hospital fired him, not for harming patients, for lying on his job application. Did you get the sense at, at Somerset, for example, that any of your colleagues, any of the nurses, any of the doctors knew what was going on?

Charles Cullen: No. I mean, until, you know, uh, the day I was fired, I mean, nobody gave me any indication that anybody was suspicious. I mean, the weird thing about Somerset Hospital was, is that they were planning on firing me the night before, so they let me work one more shift, knowing that they were going to fire me the next day. So they let me work an additional shift with the suspicion that I had harmed patients, which, I, you know, it's kind of bizarre thing to do.

Steve Kroft: Did you harm anybody that night?

Charles Cullen: No.

Steve Kroft: With Cullen gone and the medical center uncooperative, detectives Braun and Baldwin decided they needed an ally inside the hospital to help them gather evidence to make their case. They decided to approach Amy Ridgway, a critical care nurse who worked with Cullen on the night shift and was his best friend at the hospital.

Amy Ridgway: He was always early, always on time, crisp, and sat down and was very serious about getting to work.

Steve Kroft: Did you consider him to be a good nurse?

Amy Ridgway: I did.

Steve Kroft: When the detectives first interviewed Ridgway, she was hostile and upset that Cullen had been fired, so they decided to show her the evidence that they had gathered: the Pyxis record showing Cullen's drug withdrawals from the dispensary, and his real employment history. What did you tell her? Do you remember?

Detective Daniel Baldwin: I just told her that he was released from several facilities. There were allegations about him at other facilities for doing similar things that were going on at Somerset Medical Center.

Steve Kroft: And I guess at that point she realized this couldn't be a coincidence, and she offered to help.

Detective Daniel Baldwin: Yes.

Amy Ridgway: Danny pushed this piece of paper across the table to me, and it was the Pyxis printouts. And, and I was devastated. I knew. I knew he was murdering people.

Steve Kroft: How did you know that?

Amy Ridgway: There were so many withdrawals of lethal medications. There's no reason, no reason, except if, if you want to kill someone.

Steve Kroft: Were you angry?

Amy Ridgway: I was sad for my patients. I was, um, so many things were going through my mind. I was sad I didn't see it. I felt betrayed by my own intuition.

Steve Kroft: Amy Ridgway, who later persuaded Cullen to do the interview with us, spent days analyzing medical records for the detectives, and schooled them on a computerized record system that would help reconstruct Cullen's activities on specific days. She recorded phone conversations with Cullen and wore a wire at a meeting in this restaurant, the same day a newspaper article reported that he was being investigated for killing patients.

Amy Ridgway: I said, "I know you're guilty. I know. I, I know you did this, and yet I'm still here. I'll, I'll take you down to the station. We'll, we'll go together." And he changed. His face just changed.

Steve Kroft: And what did he say?

Amy Ridgway: He said, "I want to go down fighting. I want to go down fighting."

Steve Kroft: Cullen told us he suspected that the police were listening in.

Charles Cullen: I knew that Amy had helped the police. I strongly suspected that she was wired when she was asking me those questions. So, uh, you know, uh, you know, that didn't stop me having the same opinion of Amy, which is that she's a good nurse, that she's a caring nurse, and that she did it because she felt it was the right thing to do.

Steve Kroft: He was arrested right after that meeting on what police now admit was mostly circumstantial evidence. What they needed was a confession, but Cullen refused to say anything. So once again, the police turned to Amy Ridgway for help. What did you say to get him to confess?

Amy Ridgway: I, I wasn't, I wasn't very honest with him, and there's a part of me, I still feel guilty about that. I was, I was manipulating him a bit. I told him, I told him the investigators were also looking at me, and how could he think that I wasn't somehow going to be implicated. I remember saying to him, "So who was, who was your first, first victim? And was it a long time ago? Was it recent?" And he started to talk. He said it was a long time ago.

Amy Ridgway: I believe it was with a medication to drop the blood pressure.

Steve Kroft: Cullen's formal confession with the detectives would last seven hours. We'll never know how many people Charlie Cullen killed. Charles Graeber spent seven years investigating the case for his book, "The Good Nurse".

Charles Graeber: It's very difficult going back. There's no paperwork. There, there are no bodies to exhume. He was working over 16 years. In St. Barnabas alone, he later told investigators he was [unclear: "dosing" / "ghosting"] three to four people a week. He didn't always know their outcomes.

Steve Kroft: How many do you think?

Charles Graeber: I would be, I would be very surprised, as would pretty much everyone I've spoken to with any knowledge of, of this case, if it was not in the hundreds. Multiple hundreds.

Steve Kroft: You've been in here a while.

Charles Cullen: Nine years.

Steve Kroft: You knew it was wrong?

Charles Cullen: Yes, I did.

Steve Kroft: At the time?

Charles Cullen: At the time, and, and later.

Steve Kroft: Are you sorry what you did?

Charles Cullen: Yes. Um, but like I said, I don't know if I would have stopped. ### Segment B: "The Ranger and the Serial Killer" (2019)

Sharyn Alfonsi: Tonight you're going to hear about the man the FBI is now calling the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. His name is Samuel Little, and over the last year and a half he has confessed to 93 murders. That's more than were committed by Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer combined. No one would have known the scale of Little's crimes, if not for a Texas Ranger who had a hunch. Little had never confessed to anyone about anything, but over the course of 700 hours of interviews, Ranger James Holland coaxed the 79-year-old into revealing his life's work. The confessions have enabled investigators across the country to solve dozens of cold cases, but Holland needs help to match up the rest. It's why the Texas Ranger is telling us the story of how he got America's deadliest serial killer to confess.

Sharyn Alfonsi: With a swagger that would make John Wayne envious, Texas Ranger James Holland arrived this summer at the California State Prison. He was escorted to the interview room for another round with Samuel Little, the killer who went undetected for nearly half a century.

Unidentified Voice: [unclear: "When you come up..."]

Sharyn Alfonsi: Don't be fooled by his grandfatherly appearance.

Samuel Little: I got away with numerous murders of women in my life, over a span of 50 years.

James Holland: Mm-hmm.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Ninety-three murders in 19 states, from 1970 to 2005. Now, near the end of his own life and out of appeals, Little has been spilling his secrets to Ranger Holland over the course of several interviews since May of last year.

James Holland: Where did you kill the most?

Samuel Little: Oh, that's [unclear: "going" / "easy"], that's easy. Florida and California.

James Holland: Yeah. What city did you kill the most in?

Samuel Little: Miami and Los Angeles.

James Holland: And how many did you kill in Los Angeles?

Samuel Little: Los Angeles, uh, approximately 20.

Sharyn Alfonsi: So how did he skip by so long?

James Holland: He was so good at what he did, you know.

James Holland: How did you get away with it, Sammy?

Samuel Little: Did the crime, left town.

Sharyn Alfonsi: The drifter from Ohio preyed upon the fringes of society: prostitutes, drug addicts, women he believed the police wouldn't work too hard to find. The ranger says Little was a cunning killer who sized up his victims and his surroundings.

James Holland: The first thing I picked up on is how wicked smart he was.

Sharyn Alfonsi: [unclear: "Smart?" / "This guy is..."]

James Holland: Oh, like genius.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Why? Why do you say that?

James Holland: Well, number one, you know, the photographic memory. His memory for details. Like, "Sammy, tell me what's around her." "There's three tombstones over there. There's a caliche road. Drive down a quarter mile, there's a white Baptist church that needs to be whitewashed." Phenomenal.

Sharyn Alfonsi: For example, Little remembered unusual arches close to the spot where he killed a woman outside of Miami. Sure enough, when Miami detectives investigated, they saw the arches. Little had strangled Miriam Chapman near those arches in 1976. You never felt like he sent you on some wild goose chase?

James Holland: No. Nothing he has ever said has been proven to be wrong or false. We've been able to prove up almost everything he said.

Court Voice: Mr. Little.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Because of Little's confessions, judges and prosecutors nationwide have been able to close longstanding cases.

Court Voice: What is your plea to the charge of murder?

Samuel Little: Guilty.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Here was Little, via a video link from his prison in August, pleading guilty to two stranglings in Cincinnati. In just over a year, 50 cold cases that had been dormant for decades have been solved due to the detailed confessions Little provided to the ranger.

James Holland: Tell me about North Little Rock. Tell me what that girl looked like.

Samuel Little: [unclear: "Yeah, well, too" / "He had buck teeth"]. [unclear: "He had a gap between people" / "He had a gap between the teeth"]. [unclear: "That what" / "Yeah"].

Sharyn Alfonsi: Little grows disturbingly animated as he describes how he strangled his victims.

Samuel Little: [unclear: "No" / "You know"], she['s] fighting for [unclear: "life" / "her life"], and I'm fighting for my pleasure.

James Holland: Yeah.

Sharyn Alfonsi: So how do you reach a serial killer? How do you get him to talk?

James Holland: You avoid the things that normally work for investigators.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What do you mean by that?

James Holland: You avoid things like, um, you know, remorse, and, and closure for the family, 'cause they don't have remorse and they don't care about closure. No, no, it doesn't appeal to them at all. I mean, you're asking them to open up their soul to the things that are more intimate to them than anything in life. Why should they do that with you? And that's what you're working for.

Samuel Little: [unclear: "This" / "The"] skinny Black girl, real friendly. She, she, she [unclear: "was laughing while I was killing her" / "would laughing when I was killing them"].

James Holland: With Sammy, there's indications of visualization of when he's thinking about a crime scene. He'll start stroking his face. And as he's starting to picture a victim, you'll see him look out and up, and you can tell he has this revolving carousel of victims, and it's just spinning, and he's waiting for it to stop at the one that he wants to talk about.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Investigators had discovered that Little liked to sketch. Ranger Holland gave him art supplies, wondering if he might be able to use his remarkable memory to draw his victims. And he has. Wow.

James Holland: These are all of his drawings.

Sharyn Alfonsi: These are all his? They're pretty detailed. Is there one that you looked at and you knew right away?

James Holland: Oh, there's a lot of them.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Really?

James Holland: Yeah, as soon as we matched it up.

Sharyn Alfonsi: How many has he sketched?

James Holland: There's somewhere around 50.

Sharyn Alfonsi: The note on this one's super creepy. "Sam killed me, but I love him."

James Holland: Uh, he writes notes on some of the, the drawings.

Sharyn Alfonsi: "Tall girl by the highway."

James Holland: Right.

Sharyn Alfonsi: "Girl in a strip joint."

James Holland: Right.

Sharyn Alfonsi: "Left in the woods. 1972."

James Holland: Right, yes. And we matched that one up.

Sharyn Alfonsi: [unclear: "And it's so, you have..." / "You have..."]

James Holland: Yes, that's a New Orleans murder.

Sharyn Alfonsi: I can't remember the person who checked me out of the hotel this morning. If someone gave me a million dollars to draw [unclear: "her" / "a"] face, I couldn't do it. The fact that he can still do this...

James Holland: Right. He basically takes a photograph in his mind of exactly what he sees as he leaves them.

Sharyn Alfonsi: A year and a half ago, Ranger Holland had never heard of Samuel Little. Little was rotting away in this prison at the edge of California's Mojave Desert, sentenced to three life terms in 2014 for strangling three women. In court, prosecutors had labeled Little a sexual predator. He denied everything and was defiant to the end. But the FBI noted that Little had somehow skirted charges for violent crimes year after year, in state after state, in places where women disappeared, including Texas. That drew the interest of Ranger James Holland, a skilled interviewer who says he's convinced dozens of killers to confess during his career.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when people want you involved in a case, they want you there because why?

James Holland: Virtually every single case that I ever deal with, there's no DNA evidence, there's no forensics, there's no nothing.

Sharyn Alfonsi: And there was nothing linking Samuel Little to additional murders, just suspicions. The ranger was intrigued by a cold case in Odessa, Texas. Denise Brothers was a prostitute working on the wrong side of town. Then she went missing in 1994.

Damien: We looked everywhere.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Her son, Damien, remembers driving around Odessa with his grandparents looking for her. A month later, Denise Brothers' body was found at the back of an abandoned parking lot, dumped in brush.

Damien: We were asked to come down and look at the body.

Sharyn Alfonsi: You had to do that?

Damien: Yeah.

Sharyn Alfonsi: How old were you?

Damien: Fourteen.

Sharyn Alfonsi: That sticks with you.

Damien: Yeah.

Sharyn Alfonsi: For 24 years, Damien didn't know who killed his mother or why. Ranger Holland learned Denise Brothers had been strangled, and that Samuel Little was in West Texas at the time. Did Sammy do it?

James Holland: I don't know, but I felt like there was a, you know, a reasonable probability that he did it.

Sharyn Alfonsi: To find out if his instinct was right, the ranger went to California last year to interview Little, who had always been hostile to law enforcement.

James Holland: Did I believe he was going to confess? Complete arrogance on my part, absolutely. And for the first couple minutes, it really was going quite poorly.

James Holland: Oh, horrible. He's raging. Oh, yes.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Little vented in the interview room for 30 minutes that he had been wrongly depicted as a rapist.

James Holland: There was no doubt in my mind that Samuel Little was not a rapist. But I told him, he knew it and I knew it, that he was a killer. And, uh, he stops, and he kind of looks at me for a second. He didn't seem to mind it. And then you could see in his eyes, as he's looking away and he falls back, as I say the word "killer", and that appealed to him. That's how he defines himself.

Sharyn Alfonsi: As a killer?

James Holland: Yes.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Was there a moment where you said, "I've got him"?

Christie Palazzolo Or Angela Williamson: Yeah, when he talked about there may be three victims in Texas.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Three victims.

Christie Palazzolo Or Angela Williamson: And one of them was in Odessa, Texas. All of a sudden we turned to each other, [unclear: "and said"], "Oh my gosh, he's talking about Odessa." And we grab our files and start going through and checking what he's talking about, and verifying, and...

Sharyn Alfonsi: Christie Palazzolo of the FBI and Angela Williamson of the Department of Justice analyze violent crimes. They were listening to the interview across the hall, and had access to the FBI database and the Denise Brothers file. You've got the photos of the crime scene in front of you. Did it match up right away?

Christie Palazzolo And Angela Williamson: Oh, yes. Yeah.

Sharyn Alfonsi: And he had details...

Christie Palazzolo Or Angela Williamson: Yes.

Sharyn Alfonsi: ...that hadn't been reported.

Christie Palazzolo Or Angela Williamson: Extreme details.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Like what?

Christie Palazzolo Or Angela Williamson: In Denise's case, he remembered that she wore a denture.

Sharyn Alfonsi: The autopsy confirmed Brothers did wear a denture. All the details matched. Samuel Little had killed Denise Brothers. Ranger Holland knew he was on to something big. He schemed to have Little extradited to Texas for a few months, so he could talk to him around the clock and extract more confessions. I would think Texas, with the death penalty, is the last place a killer like Samuel Little wants to go.

James Holland: You know, basically what I told him was, I can, can go to the district attorney, and I can ask him to take the death penalty off the table, and, and I believe that he will do that.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Which was especially brazen, since Ranger Holland had never met the district attorney in Odessa, Bobby Bland.

Bobby Bland: And he said, "I'd like a letter from you, uh, on your letterhead, saying that you would waive the death penalty." And I said, well, you know, that's a pretty tall order just to do blindly.

Sharyn Alfonsi: So why, why did you do it?

Bobby Bland: There's a greater good. The, the strange ranger that was calling me from California, telling me he had a serial killer. I put my faith in him.

Sharyn Alfonsi: The next morning, the letter waiving the death penalty was in Samuel Little's hands. Last September, the ranger sent a plane to whisk Little to Texas, where he was housed in the Wise County jail. For 48 straight days, for hours on end, the two men sat in the small room. During that time, Little confessed to 65 of his murders. The ranger plied Little with pizza and Dr Pepper to keep the stories flowing. People will hear this and go, why were you treating a serial killer so well?

James Holland: What do I say to that? I say that we can have one case, or we can have 93 cases.

Sharyn Alfonsi: It was in your best interest for him to be comfortable.

James Holland: Oh, absolutely. Yes, yes.

Sharyn Alfonsi: So why you? Why did he finally confess to you?

James Holland: At the end of the day, um, you know, maybe Sammy just liked me.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Today, Little is back at the California State Prison. We wanted to interview him on camera, but state law won't allow it, so we asked him to call us. He did, answering our questions for nearly an hour. We wondered why he decided to confess now. Are you worried that there might be innocent people in jail for some of your crimes?

Samuel Little: Probably [unclear: "be"] numerous people who are, [unclear: "in"] convicted and sentenced on my behalf. I see if I can, can help get somebody out of jail, God [unclear: "will" / "might"] might smile a little bit more on me.

Sharyn Alfonsi: For most of our call, Little spoke of his victims.

Samuel Little: They were broke and homeless, and they walked right into my [unclear: "fighting wheel" / "f..."].

Sharyn Alfonsi: It was uncomfortable to listen to his graphic stories. Towards the end of the interview, we asked him to reflect on the depths of his crimes.

Samuel Little: I don't think there was another person that did [unclear: "what I'd like to do" / "well, I'd like it to do"]. I [unclear: "don't think there was only one" / "think the only one"] in the world, and that's not an honor. That is a curse.

Sharyn Alfonsi: With Little's old age, failing health, and a fear that his memory could slip, there is urgency to figure out who and where the rest of his victims are.

James Holland: It's kind of like never-ending. You have to continue. You have to, to finish it.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Ranger Holland's been encouraging Little to keep drawing. Three new sketches arrived at the ranger's office just last week. Three new faces lasting in the mind of the most prolific serial killer in American history. ---