Since December 1977 when her skeletal remains were found, she’s been known simply as “Escatawpa Jane Doe.”
As the name would imply, she was found in Escatawpa, Miss., by hunters about three to four months after her death, according to an autopsy, and she was later identified by Samuel Little, America’s most prolific serial killer, as one of his victims during a confession in 2018.
But while Little, who confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005 remembered killing the woman with the distinctive gold tooth, he said he did not know her name. But we do now, thanks to DNA testing.
Clara Birdlong.
Born in 1933, Birdlong went missing from Mississippi’s Leflore County, about 300 miles northwest of Jackson County where Escatawpa is located, in the 1970s, according to a relative. And while Little’s victims were primarily found in California and Florida, he was definitely in Mississippi around the time of Birdlong’s disappearance.
Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell, in a news release Tuesday, issued a jail photo of Little from August 1977 when he was arrested in Pascagoula and charged with petty theft.
Little is no longer around to ask him for more details. He died in December while serving out a life sentence for murder in California.
"Although he is now deceased, Samuel Little is considered a prime suspect in the death of Clara Birdlong," read the JCSO’s news release. "Her cause of death is undetermined."
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