"The Only One That I Ever Killed by Drowning": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, New Orleans, 1982

Name: "The Only One That I Ever Killed by Drowning": Samuel Little's FBI Confession, New Orleans, 1982
Uploaded: 2019-10-06
Duration: 2 min 28 s
Description: Samuel Little described a woman he met at a New Orleans nightclub during a birthday party she and her sister were having, a drive along Interstate 10 to the Little Woods exit, and a river where, he said, he drowned her. She has never been identified.

Samuel Little described a woman he met at a New Orleans nightclub during a birthday party she and her sister were having, a drive along Interstate 10 to the Little Woods exit, and a river where, he said, he drowned her. She has never been identified.

Subject: Samuel Little
Runtime: 2:28

Content warning: Little describes drowning a woman and how her body was left in the water.

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 at a nightclub in New Orleans, where she and her youngest sister were having a birthday party. He says she was about 30, tall for a woman, and that she asked to go riding with him after the party. He says they drove his Lincoln along Highway 10 toward Slidell, turned off at the Little Woods exit onto a road into the woods, and stopped by a river where a dredging machine was working. He says he pulled her into the water by her legs, and calls her "the only one that I ever killed by drowning".

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 Black woman of about 30 to 40 at a club, drove her to a dirt road by a canal near the Little Woods exit off Interstate 10, killed her and left her body there, then went back to his motel in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The FBI's case list also has a separate 1982 New Orleans confession that has been matched to a Jane Doe; this clip concerns the unmatched one.

What the Interview Covers

The clip opens in the middle of Little's description of the woman. Holland asks her weight, age and race, and where they met. Little describes the party, the dance, the walk to his car, a stop at a gas station, the drive and the exit sign, the road into the woods, the water and the dredging machine, and how her body lay when he left it.

What Makes the Recording Significant

Little singles this killing out from the others: he says it is the only one he committed by drowning. The confession remained unmatched; the details he gives, a birthday party at a nightclub and two sisters, were released so that someone might recognise them.

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 (1982) 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. Do not confuse this confession with the separate New Orleans 1982 case that the FBI has matched to a Jane Doe.

Samuel Little: She was pretty, a light skin, brown, honey-colored skin. And she was about 5... she was tall for a woman, about 5'8", 5'9". And [unclear: "a beautiful shape" / "it's a beautiful shape"], and she's friendly.

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

Samuel Little: [unclear: "Nah" / "Oh"], she had a beautiful body on her, a beautiful 150, thick and well put together.

Ranger James Holland: And how old do you think she was?

Samuel Little: She was about 30.

Ranger James Holland: Okay, and she's a black female?

Samuel Little: Yeah.

Ranger James Holland: And tell me where you met her.

Samuel Little: I met her in a nightclub in New Orleans. Her and her sister, she had two sisters. Her and her youngest sister was having a birthday party. Her sister was dancing with this guy on the floor. And when I come in, the girl that I was with offered to dance with me. And while we were dancing, she said, "You want to go [unclear: "riding" / "ride him"] after this, after this party's over?"

Samuel Little: We walked outside, and she looked and seen my car, that Lincoln. "That's a beautiful car," too. So she had [unclear: "me arm in arm" / "an arm in arm"], walked to the car, got in, stopped at the gas station. We were on Highway 10, and going toward Slidell, and I seen a sign saying Little Woods. So I cut off, I took off the exit, and, sure enough, there was a road leading [unclear: "me into" / "into"] the woods. And we went in and parked. So we finally got to where we were going, by a bayou, a river, a little water thing. They had a machine out there in that little river.

Ranger James Holland: Dredging?

Samuel Little: Dredging. I grabbed her by the legs and pulled her to the water. That's the only one that I ever killed by drowning.

Ranger James Holland: Describe the location where she's left.

Samuel Little: Okay, I left her with her head still there in the water. Half her body under water, and the thighs and legs on the bank. ---