Samuel Little

Samuel Little (born Samuel McDowell; June 7, 1940 – December 30, 2020) was an American serial killer. He was convicted of eight murders and admitted to ninety-three killings across nineteen states, spanning from 1970 to 2005. The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has verified at least sixty of those murders, making him the serial killer with the highest number of confirmed victims in U.S. history. Little produced sketches for twenty-six of his victims, though not all of those drawings have been matched to known cases. His crimes occurred nationwide, with a heavy focus on Miami and Los Angeles.

Little was born in Reynolds, Georgia. According to the 1940 census, his mother, Bessie Mae, worked as a maid, and his father was nineteen-year-old Paul McDowell. Little described his teenage mother as a “lady of the night” and said she abandoned him as an infant. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Lorain, Ohio, where his grandmother raised him. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School. By his own account, he began having sexual fantasies about strangling women as a child, starting when he saw his kindergarten teacher touch her neck. As a teenager, he collected true crime magazines that showed women being strangled.

In 1956, after a conviction for breaking and entering in Omaha, Nebraska, Little was placed in a juvenile detention facility. His mother’s whereabouts were listed as unknown on the booking card. In the late 1960s, he moved to Florida to live with her. He said he worked at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant. He then “began traveling more widely and had more run-ins with the law,” getting arrested in eight states for offenses including DUI, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault, and rape. While in prison, he took up boxing and later referred to himself as a former prizefighter.

In 1961, Little received a three-year sentence for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in 1964. By 1975, he had been arrested twenty-six times in eleven states for crimes such as theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.

In 1982, Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for the murder of twenty-two-year-old Melinda Rose LaPree, who had disappeared that September. A grand jury declined to indict him. While under investigation, he was extradited to Florida and tried for the murder of twenty-six-year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body was found in September 1982. Witnesses identified Little as someone who had been with Mount the night before she vanished. Distrusting the witness testimony, the jury acquitted him in January 1984.

Little then moved to California, staying near San Diego. In October 1984, he was arrested for kidnapping, beating, and strangling twenty-two-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. A month later, police found him in the back seat of his car with an unconscious woman—also beaten and strangled—at the same location as the Barros attack. He served two and a half years in prison for both crimes. After his release in February 1987, he immediately moved to Los Angeles and committed at least ten more murders.

On September 5, 2012, Little was arrested at the Wayside Christian homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky, and extradited to California on a narcotics charge. Authorities then used DNA testing to link him to the murders of Linda Alford (killed July 13, 1987), Audrey Nelson Everett (killed August 14, 1989), and Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca (killed September 3, 1989). All three women were killed and found on Los Angeles streets. He was extradited to Los Angeles and charged on January 7, 2013. Months later, police said Little was being investigated for involvement in three dozen previously undisclosed murders from the 1980s. In Mississippi, the LaPree case was reopened. In total, Little was tested for involvement in ninety-three murders of women across many states.

Little stood trial for the murders of Alford, Nelson, and Apodaca in September 2014. The prosecution presented DNA evidence and testimony from witnesses he had attacked earlier in his criminal career. On September 25, 2014, he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole. On the day of the verdict, he continued to insist he was innocent. Before his death, he was serving his sentence at California State Prison, Los Angeles County.

On November 9, 2018, Little confessed to the 1996 fatal strangulation of Melissa Thomas. On November 13, 2018, he was charged with the 1994 murder of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas, after confessing to a Texas Ranger in May 2018. He pleaded guilty to that murder on December 13 and received another life sentence. The Ector County, Texas, District Attorney and Wise County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office announced on November 13 that Little had confessed to dozens of murders and may have committed more than ninety across fourteen states between 1970 and 2005.

On November 15, 2018, the Russell County, Alabama, District Attorney announced that Little had confessed earlier that month to the 1979 murder of twenty-three-year-old Brenda Alexander, whose body was found in Phenix City, Alabama. On November 16, 2018, Macon, Georgia, sheriffs announced that Little had credibly confessed to the 1977 strangling murder of an unidentified woman and the 1982 murder of another unidentified woman.