"I Left Her There": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, Northern Kentucky, 1984

Name: "I Left Her There": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, Northern Kentucky, 1984
Uploaded: 2019-10-06
Duration: 2 min 45 s
Description: Samuel Little described a young white woman he met outside a strip bar in Columbus, Ohio, a drive through Cincinnati and Covington, and a dirt track on a hilltop in northern Kentucky where he says he left her. She has never been identified.

Samuel Little described a young white woman he met outside a strip bar in Columbus, Ohio, a drive through Cincinnati and Covington, and a dirt track on a hilltop in northern Kentucky where he says he left her. She has never been identified.

Subject: Samuel Little
Runtime: 2:45

Content warning: Little describes leaving a young woman's body on a hilltop dirt road.

The Interview

In this clip, released by the FBI on October 6, 2019, Samuel Little tells Texas Ranger James Holland about a white woman he met outside a strip bar in downtown Columbus, Ohio. He says she was about 25, with dishwater blonde hair cut in a bob, and gave "a little hippie feeling". Holland sums up the route: Cincinnati, Vine Street, then across the bridge into Kentucky. Little says they drove through Covington past a park festival, that a police officer looked into the car and he moved on, and that he followed winding roads into the hills to a dirt track at the top of a hill, where he left her, partly hidden by vegetation.

Historical Context

Samuel Little, born Samuel McDowell in Reynolds, Georgia, in 1940, spent decades drifting across the United States, with a long record of arrests. In September 2012 he was arrested at a homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California, where DNA linked him to the murders of three women in Los Angeles in 1987 and 1989. In September 2014 he was convicted of those murders and sentenced to life without parole. In 2018 Texas Ranger James Holland interviewed him about the 1994 killing of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas. Little confessed to it in May 2018 and went on to describe dozens of other killings, often drawing the women from memory. Working with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), investigators matched his accounts to cases across the country. On October 6, 2019, the FBI said he had confessed to 93 murders between 1970 and 2005, that 50 had been verified, and called him the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. To find the women still unidentified, it published his drawings and five short interview clips, of which this is one.

Circumstances of the Interview

The FBI has not said when or where this interview was recorded; in October 2019 it called it "a recent interview", and Holland had been questioning Little since the spring of 2018. The clip is an edited excerpt focused on a single victim. The FBI's written summary says Little picked up a white woman of about 25 outside a strip club, drove through Cincinnati into northern Kentucky and strangled her in the back seat of his car on a hill near Interstate 75, leaving her body there. The FBI lists the confession under Covington and northern Kentucky, without a confirmed city.

What the Interview Covers

Holland asks for a description; Little gives her hair, height (about 5'7"), weight (about 130 pounds) and age. He describes the festival in Covington, the police officer, the hills and the "little short road going up the hill", the grass growing between two tracks, and leaving her on the side of the track. The clip does not describe how she died; the FBI's summary does.

What Makes the Recording Significant

This is one of the clips in which Little's route can be traced on a map, from Columbus through Cincinnati into Kentucky. The woman remained unidentified and the confession unmatched.

Archival Importance

The FBI released these five clips for a practical purpose: to identify victims. They show how ViCAP and the Texas Ranger worked, asking for heights, weights, cars, roads and landmarks that could be checked against old records. Little died on December 30, 2020, so the recorded interviews and the FBI's written summaries now hold what remains of his accounts of the unmatched cases.

Important Caveats

Everything in the clip is Little's own account. The FBI regarded his confessions as credible but warned that his memory for dates was not always accurate, so the year (1984) is approximate. The woman is not named and has not been identified. No YouTube captions were available for this clip, so the transcript rests on one machine reading, with doubtful words checked against the FBI's transcript. Little also mentions "Miami" early in the clip; what he means is unclear and the page should not explain it. This case is separate from Little's other Kentucky case (Linda Sue Boards, 1981), for which he was indicted in December 2018.

Ranger James Holland: Hey, tell me about Northern Kentucky, the girl that you met in Columbus. So you meet this girl, I guess you're at a strip bar downtown Columbus.

Samuel Little: I want on out the car. And this white girl come out behind the building. [unclear: "I don't need my trunk" / "my trunk open"]. She walked over to me, saying, you know, "Come on, [unclear: "can you take me" / "I'll keep taking you"] to Miami."

Ranger James Holland: Describe this girl to me. She's white, black, what she looked like?

Samuel Little: She was white, blonde hair, dishwater, dishwater blonde hair, short.

Ranger James Holland: Short, like shoulder length, or?

Samuel Little: No, no, a little over, a little bit.

Ranger James Holland: Like a bob?

Samuel Little: Yeah, like a bob.

Ranger James Holland: Okay. And how tall do you think she was?

Samuel Little: She was about 5'7".

Ranger James Holland: How much do you think she [unclear: "weighed" / "was"]?

Samuel Little: She weighed about 130.

Ranger James Holland: How old do you think she was?

Samuel Little: Oh, she was about 25.

Ranger James Holland: Okay. You mentioned before that you said she kind of had, like, this hippie aura.

Samuel Little: Yeah, she did give you a little hippie feeling. I think she was some kind of hippie, [unclear: "yeah" / "here"].

Ranger James Holland: So you go to Cincinnati, you mess around on Vine Street, and then eventually you guys both get in your car and you cross over the bridge into Kentucky. Tell me about going into Kentucky.

Samuel Little: We got to Covington, and then we continued through Covington. And there was a park that they were having a festival there. And she heard the music, and [unclear: "she'd offer the band"], and by her being a hippie type, she was, "You want to get to that." But the police came over and peeked in our car. He really wanted me to move out of there. So we, instead of going in there, I took her the other way, winding around the, they got hills out in Kentucky, and the road winds around the hills.

Samuel Little: I seen a little short road going up the hill. And up top there was vegetation, but there wasn't no houses or nothing. And so I pulled up in there and concealed the car in that little vegetation up there on top of the hill.

Ranger James Holland: So tell me about this road that goes up the hill. What kind of road is it?

Samuel Little: It was like a dirt road. It was like dirt. The grass was growing in the middle between two tracks. When I left her up in there, in that little road up there, on the side of the road, she was partially concealed by the vegetation. And I left her there. ---