Investigators Wednesday were seeking to match a confessed serial killer’s sketch of a woman he says he killed in Los Angeles in 1996 to an actual case.
Samuel Little, 78, who is imprisoned in Texas, has confessed to 90 murders, according to the FBI, which is working with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies “to match Little’s confessions with evidence from women who turned up dead in states from California to Florida between 1970 and 2005,” according to the FBI.
“Little was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter in September 2012 and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge,” according to an FBI statement released in November. “Once Little was in custody, Los Angeles Police Department detectives obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989 and charged him with three counts of murder. For these crimes, Little was convicted and sentenced in 2014 to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.”
According to the FBI, all three victims were beaten and strangled. One body was found in a trash bin, another in an alley and a third in a garage.
Little denied his guilt during trial, which included testimony from women who said they narrowly survived violent encounters with him.
“In the early 1980s, Little had also been charged with killing women in Mississippi and Florida but escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida,” according to the FBI. “He had, however, served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri and for the assault and false imprisonment of a woman in San Diego.
“When Los Angeles got the DNA hit on Little, they asked the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program to work up a full background on him. The FBI found an alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders,” according to the FBI.
FBI investigators contacted the Texas Rangers after finding a case in Odessa, Texas, that fit Little’s profile.
Two investigators accompanied a ranger to California to interview Little in the spring of 2018 and in exchange for helping him change prisons, Little agreed to provide information.
He went through cities and states and told investigators the number of victims he had killed in each locale, even providing sketches of the victims from memory.
So far, investigators have confirmed 34 killings with more confirmations pending, according to the FBI, which reports that a number of Little’s confessions remain uncorroborated.
Investigators said Little remembers many details about his victims, the locations of the killings, even the vehicles he used at the time, but he is less certain of dates, making it difficult to establish a reliable timeline.
Little, who is described by FBI crime analysts as one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history, lived a nomadic life, traveling cross country and selecting “marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs.”
“Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated,” according to the FBI.
Little was indicted for the Odessa homicide and extradited to Texas, where he remains in custody. He is in poor health and investigators are trying to identify his victims and solve open cases, the FBI reports.
In May of 2017, the California Supreme Court refused to review his case involving the three women — Carol Alford, Audrey Nelson and Guadalupe Apodaca — he was convicted of murdering in the 1980s in Los Angeles.
A three-justice panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal previously turned down the defense’s claims that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Little was the person who committed the murders and that the trial court erred by allowing jurors to hear evidence about similar attacks in the 1980s against four other women who survived.
In court papers, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman described the defendant as a “remorseless, vicious serial killer.” She told reporters he “absolutely” would have faced a potential death sentence had it not been for his age.
In a sentencing memorandum, the prosecutor wrote that the evidence “established that he derived sexual gratification from the act of strangling and murdering his victims.” She said Little’s “method of killing was particularly ruthless; he lured vulnerable women to him with the promise of drugs and then killed them by beating and manually strangling them.”
Alford, 41, was found dead on July 13, 1987, in an alley off East 27th Street.
Nelson, 35, was discovered dead on Aug. 14, 1989, in a trash bin behind East Seventh Street, while Apodaca, 46, was found dead less than a month later – – Sept. 3, 1989 — inside a South Los Angeles commercial garage.
Little — who had lived in the South Los Angeles area in the late 1980s and said he was a middleweight prize boxer — was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2012 on an unrelated drug charge out of Los Angeles and extradited to California, where he was charged with the murders.
Little’s attorney questioned the evidence and challenged the prosecutor’s insistence that DNA proved his client’s guilt.
“I didn’t do it!” Little interrupted after Mary Louise Frias, the niece and goddaughter of one of the victims, told the judge at Little’s September 2014 sentencing that the convicted killer has “no conscience, no soul.”