Notorious serial killer Samuel Little terrorized women throughout the United States for almost 40 years. He abducted and strangled them to death before dumping their lifeless bodies in remote locations across the country.
Little's capture
Little's luck ran out when in 2012, a DNA hit linked him to multiple unsolved homicides in Los Angeles, California and that was when he was finally captured by authorities and put behind bars.
Little was given three life sentences for the murders of Audrey Nelson, Guadalupe Apodaca, and Carol Alford, all who were killed in the late 1980s. However, local police departments believe that Little had committed more murders over the years.
In 2018, the detectives from the Texas Ranger Division reached out to Little and offered him a deal. If Little confessed to one of their cold cases, he won't be given the death penalty and he will be relocated to a county jail in Texas.
Little agreed to the deal, and in his confessions with law enforcement that lasted for 650 hours, he admitted to 93 murders including the killings of Mary Jo Peyton, Melinda Rose LaPree and Melissa Thomas, whose cases are all included in the "Catching A Serial Killer: Sam Little" documentary that can be streamed on Oxygen.
How he chose his victims
Little bragged about how he killed women and remained undetected for years during one of his interview sessions. He laughed as he told investigators that authorities did not know who the hell was doing it. He said he would go back to the same city sometimes and kill another victim.
Little also revealed how he profiled his victims. He targeted vulnerable young women who lived on the streets or those who worked as sex workers and drug users.
Little admitted that he did not kill those who he knows will be missed or those with family members that may seek justice for the murder of their loved one. He said he never went to neighborhoods and abducted young teenage girls like the other serial killers.
Although Little did not know the names of most of his victims, he asked the Rangers for art supplies so that he could draw portraits of the women that he killed in hopes of identifying them. The FBI seeks the help of the public to match the remaining unconfirmed victims.
According to a former prosecutor and investigative journalist Beth Karas, not only does Little remember the faces, but he also remembers little things about the women that he killed. She said that he told authorities that one victim had a limp and one had a teenage daughter. He can also picture the crime scenes and his victims in photographic detail.
Little described how his obsession with strangulation began in childhood during one of his conversations with law enforcement. He said that as a child, he got attracted to the neck, he also said that he became sexually aroused by looking at women's necks and later in life he choked women during intercourse.
Little's first killing was on New Year's Eve in 1970. He killed Mary Brosley in North Miami Beach, Florida and he said that he knew he was going to choke her and that he had a strong desire to have intercourse with her and kill her after.
Rick Bell, the chief of special investigations with the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, said that one of the things that they wanted to ask him was whether or not when he's engaged in the act of killing if it was about the sex or if it was about the killing. They ended up asking him the question and Little confessed that it was both. In Little's mind, sex and murder are intertwined.
Since his confessions, Little has pleaded guilty to killing five women in Ohio and Texas, thus resulting in additional life sentences, according to Cleveland's The Plain Dealer newspaper.
