Evil of killer matches memory
(AP) — Samuel Little’s depravity is matched only by his prodigious memory.
Little, a California inmate considered by the FBI to be the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, has confessed to 93 slayings committed across the country between 1970 and 2005, recounting the crimes with astonishing, near-photographic detail. He even drew color portraits of dozens of the women he strangled.
His case, featured on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, has offered a frightening look inside the mind of a killer and the wrongheaded assumptions on the part of law enforcement that enabled him to escape justice for so long.
Little, who is 79 and has been behind bars since 2012 for several killings, preyed on prostitutes, drug addicts and other women on the margins, many of them black like Little himself, and many of the deaths were originally deemed overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes. Some bodies were never found.
In a case out of Tennessee, for example, Martha Cunningham’s body was found bruised and nude from the waist down in the woods in 1975, her pantyhose and girdle bunched around her knees. Detectives initially attributed her death to natural causes; the cause was later classified “unknown.”
But in 48 straight days of interviews with Texas Ranger James Holland, who kept the killer supplied with pizza and Dr. Pepper, Little offered a wealth of details that were used to corroborate his accounts one by one.
One woman wore dentures, for example. Another was killed near a set of arches in Miami. There was a 5-foot-6 woman with brown skin in Florida in the mid-1980s. In 1984 in Kentucky, there was a 25-year-old woman outside a strip club with short blond hair, blue eyes and a “hippie” look.
Law enforcement authorities in several states have verified 50 of his confessions so far and are scrambling to link dozens more cold cases to his recollections.