"She Was Still Rolling": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, Las Vegas, 1993

Name: "She Was Still Rolling": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, Las Vegas, 1993
Uploaded: 2019-10-06
Duration: 2 min 44 s
Description: Samuel Little described a woman of about 40 he met on Owens Avenue in Las Vegas, and a slope on the city's outskirts, on the road toward Searchlight, where he says he rolled her body. She has never been identified.

Samuel Little described a woman of about 40 he met on Owens Avenue in Las Vegas, and a slope on the city's outskirts, on the road toward Searchlight, where he says he rolled her body. She has never been identified.

Subject: Samuel Little
Runtime: 2:44

Content warning: Little describes disposing of a woman's body by rolling it down a roadside slope; drug use is mentioned.

The Interview

In this clip, released by the FBI on October 6, 2019, Samuel Little tells Texas Ranger James Holland about a woman he met in Las Vegas in 1993, when he was driving a yellow Cadillac Eldorado. He says she was about 40 and thin, that he met her on Owens Avenue, and that her son, a young man of about 19 or 20, came over and shook his hand. He says he drove her body out toward the edge of the city, on the road toward Searchlight, and rolled it down a slope hidden by vegetation beside the road.

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 met a thin, dark-skinned Black woman of about 40, took her to a motel and strangled her, then rolled her body down a steep slope on a remote road on the city's outskirts. The FBI considers it highly likely that her body was never found.

What the Interview Covers

Holland asks for the car, the woman's description, height (about 5'3" to 5'5") and weight, and what Little knew about her. Little mentions her son, the place they met ("Owens and Jackson"), the motel and the bushes beside the road, and the sound of the body still rolling down the slope. Asked how far out he was, he says he was still in Las Vegas but on "the very outskirts", where motels and gas stations were thinning out. The clip does not describe how she died; the FBI's summary does.

What Makes the Recording Significant

Little mentions a detail that could identify her: a son of about 19 or 20 whom he met. The confession remained unmatched; the FBI released the clip in the hope that someone would recognise her.

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 (1993) is approximate. The woman is not named in the clip and has not been identified. The year of the car is unclear in the audio. The automatic captions for this clip are poor, and several passages rest on the Whisper reading checked against the FBI's caption track.

Ranger James Holland: Las Vegas. Describe the Las Vegas victim.

Samuel Little: That was in '93.

Ranger James Holland: Okay.

Samuel Little: I bought an Eldorado.

Ranger James Holland: What color Eldorado?

Samuel Little: It was a yellow.

Ranger James Holland: Okay. Yellow Cadillac Eldorado?

Samuel Little: Yep.

Ranger James Holland: All right. What year?

Samuel Little: [unclear: "'70" / "'78"].

Ranger James Holland: Okay. Well, tell me about this girl. What did she look like?

Samuel Little: She was kind of thin, dark-skinned. About 40 years old. She's out there hustling. I think she was a drug addict, because she [unclear: "wouldn't been out there" / "was with the good idea" / "would do good idea"].

Ranger James Holland: How tall was she?

Samuel Little: She was about 5'5", 5'3".

Ranger James Holland: And how much do you think she weighed?

Samuel Little: She weighed about 110, 120.

Ranger James Holland: Okay. What about her did you know?

Samuel Little: The boy came, that was her son, and she called him over there. And he came over there, [unclear: "Hey, how you doing?" / inaudible], shook my hand and everything.

Ranger James Holland: Yeah. Now, how old was he?

Samuel Little: He was about 20, or about 19, 20.

Ranger James Holland: Was that a black male, or?

Samuel Little: Black male.

Ranger James Holland: And where were you at when you met her?

Samuel Little: It was on Owens Avenue. That's down in the black section. Owens and Jackson.

Ranger James Holland: Where did you eventually take her, her body to?

Samuel Little: I was headed toward California. So as I drove out of Las Vegas, I seen a motel and a road leading up to the motel. And a lot of bushes and brushes beside the road, before you got to that motel. That's where I dropped her. Pulled her body out and rolled it down there. And I heard a secondary road noise; that meant she was still rolling.

Ranger James Holland: So you basically rolled her into a pretty big ditch that's got a bunch of...

Samuel Little: Well, it wasn't a ditch. It was a little slope.

Ranger James Holland: Okay.

Samuel Little: That didn't look like a slope, 'cause the vegetation had grown up out of the slope, and look like, you know, you would think that the road would just be flat. But actually the road was going down the slope way. And that's why she rolled.

Ranger James Holland: So this is a slope right off the road?

Samuel Little: Yeah.

Ranger James Holland: Okay. And tell me about how far do you think you were outside of Las Vegas?

Samuel Little: The road I was on was going toward Searchlight. So whatever the name of that road is, that's the road I was on.

Ranger James Holland: How far outside of Las Vegas do you think you were? Were you in Las Vegas?

Samuel Little: I was still in Las Vegas, yeah.

Ranger James Holland: Okay.

Samuel Little: But I was on the very outskirts.

Ranger James Holland: All right.

Samuel Little: The very outskirts. There was a couple of motels I remember, [unclear: "gas stations and everything" / "the gas station there"]. It was scattered, dot, dot, dot, dot, because it was getting thin population as you go further out. ---