He's America's most prolific serial killer. With a photographic memory and a talent for sketching his victims; he's recounting his crimes to authorities.
Serial killer Samuel Little openly admits to over 90 strangulation murders. Knowing he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison why is Little talking? Pascagoula, Mississippi Police Lieutenant Darren Versiga says plainly, "At the ripe old age of 78 he was a little upset we didn't find all his victims. And I think this is him wanting to take credit for all he's done."
Little's life was spent as a drifter, in and out of jail for minor felonies like theft, assault. During stints in prison he honed his boxing skills and learned to draw. Both talents that would serve him as a killer and in his second life as jail-house celebrity.
Outside... "He was able to live a life on the streets travelling from town to town continued to commit these homicides and never got convicted until 2014. FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo.
Now that he's talking, Palazzolo, as part of the FBI's ViCap or Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, is taking information on unsolved crimes and maintaining a data base of the details. It's how much of Little's crimes have been proven. "We are working on that aspect of it, try to get as much as we can moving forward and apply it if there are any more like him."
Little has confessed to a pair of murders in Houma, a killing in Monroe and the murders of two women in New Orleans.
Born in Georgia, raised in Ohio, A high school drop out, Samuel Little's first prison sentence was in 1961. The 21 year old did a three-year stretch for breaking into a Lorain, Ohio furniture store. For 10 years after his 1964 release, he'd been arrested 26 time in eleven states for theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud and attacking police officers.
Little's first murder was 1971. By 1975, he'd killed 11 women in Florida, Maryland, New Orleans, Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee. How did he amass such an incredible amount of victims and go mostly unnoticed? "He's attacking prostitutes and drug abusers and victims that society has just thrown away," says Lieutenant Darren Versiga.
Versiga says Little killed by opportunity since he mostly hung around with pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. His murders were indiscriminate, female victims were white and black. At least two as young at 18, and as old as 50. But once he focused on a victim. "He talks of stories of seeing women that he wanted to kill, but he was busy tied up with whatever he was doing and when he came back several years later he came back to find that particular girl and couldn't find her."
Between 1971 and 2005, Samuel Little says he's killed 93 women across 14 states.
Doing life, confined to a prison cell, what is prison life like for America's most prolific serial killer? You might be surprised.
The 79-year old Little is confined to a wheel chair, his body wracked by diabetes and heart problems. But that doesn't mean he's just sitting around waiting to die. Little's claimed to have killed 93 women over 43 years, including 5 in Louisiana, and he claims to remember them all. ...Really?
"He's legit, I'll tell you that. He was vetted when he was first talked to. They didn't give him any information. They basically just let him talk. He brought information up that departments didn've even know," Pascagoula Police Lieutenant Darren Versiga says that's made Little a hot topic among cold case detectives like himself.
Along with a near perfect memory, Little is quite an accomplished artist... ...drawing from memory. Angela Williamson a Department of Justice senior policy adviser and ViCAP liaison states, "We've definitely made matches to his confessions based on the drawings, based on the public seeing them, based on older law enforcement recognizing the victims. So it has been really helpful."
It's said Little hated being confined in the arid high desert at Lancaster State Prison northeast of Los Angeles. Little was extradited to Texas where he plead guilty to a 1994 killing. Recognzing this, and now being directly connected to 60-murders, Little may find himself more than happy to help investigators if it means travelling to interviews and to testify.