Samuel Little

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Little, born Samuel McDowell, told investigators that he had committed 93 murders between 1970 and 2005. Courts convicted him of eight. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 of the killings. That is the largest number of confirmed victims for any serial killer in American history. His crimes stretched across the country, from Miami to Los Angeles.

  Little lived from 1940 to 2020, and he spent much of his adult life cycling through police stations, courtrooms and prisons. How did a man arrested so often move from state to state for decades without anyone linking him to the deaths? Why did most of the cases never reach a jury? And how did a set of drawings help restore names to women whom almost nobody had been searching for?

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• 2. Georgia To Ohio

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  Samuel McDowell was born on the 7th of June 1940 in Reynolds, Georgia. The census from his birth year recorded his mother, Bessie Mae, as a maid. It gave his father, Paul McDowell, as 19 years old. Little later described his teenage mother as a "lady of the night" and said she abandoned him as an infant. Soon afterward the family moved to Lorain, Ohio, where his grandmother raised him for the most part. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School.

  Kindergarten, by Little's own account, is where the fantasies began. He said he first imagined strangling women after he watched his teacher touch her neck. As a teenager, he collected true crime magazines that showed women being strangled.

  In 1956, a conviction for breaking and entering in Omaha, Nebraska, put Little in an institution for juvenile offenders. His booking card described his mother's location as "whereabouts unknown." In 1961 he was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain. He was released in 1964.

  Florida came next. In the late 1960s, Little moved there to live with his mother. He later said he worked at times as a cemetery worker and as an ambulance attendant. By his own account he was soon traveling more widely and having more run-ins with the law. He described arrests in eight states, for crimes that ranged from driving under the influence and shoplifting to armed robbery, aggravated assault and rape. Inside prison he took up boxing and began calling himself a former prizefighter.

  By 1975 he had been arrested 26 times in eleven states. The charges included theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.

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• 3. Orelia Dorsey

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  Lucy Madero was Little's girlfriend when both were arrested in Cleveland on the 28th of May 1971 for robbing a gas station. In jail, Madero shared a cell with a woman named Orelia Dorsey. She confided to her cellmate that she planned to testify against Little.

  Records do not explain how Dorsey first came to know Little, and it was a strange coincidence that she ended up in that cell. Dorsey would later become his long-term partner. She passed along what Madero had told her, and Little's defense team used that information to prepare. When the case went to trial in 1972, Madero did testify. Little was found not guilty anyway.

  Dorsey and Little stayed together for years, and she supported them both by shoplifting. She died of natural causes, a brain hemorrhage, in Los Angeles in 1988.

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• 4. Narrow Escapes

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  In 1982, police in Pascagoula, Mississippi, arrested Little and he faced a murder charge in the case of Melinda Rose LaPree, a 22-year-old who had gone missing that September. A grand jury declined to indict him. While he was still under investigation, he was extradited to Florida to be tried for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount. Her body had been found in September 1982. Prosecution witnesses placed Little with Mount on the night before she disappeared. Even so, he was acquitted in January 1984, amid mistrust of the witness testimony.

  After that, Little moved to California and stayed near San Diego. In October 1984 he was arrested for kidnapping, beating and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. One month later, police found him in the back seat of his car with another unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled. It was the same location as the attempt on Barros. He served two and a half years in prison for the two crimes.

  He was released in February 1987 and moved to Los Angeles immediately. He went on to commit at least 10 additional murders.

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• 5. A Shelter In Louisville

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  On the 5th of September 2012, police arrested Little at the Wayside Christian homeless shelter in Louisville, Kentucky. He was extradited to California to face a narcotics charge. Once he was in custody, DNA testing tied him to three Los Angeles killings. The victims were Linda Alford in July 1987, Audrey Nelson Everett in August 1989 and Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca in September 1989. All three women were found on the streets of the city. The first DNA match came from Alford's underwear and from under her fingernails.

  Little was charged in Los Angeles on the 7th of January 2013. A few months later, police said he was under investigation for three dozen murders from the 1980s that had never been disclosed. In Mississippi, the LaPree case was reopened.

  Little went on trial in September 2014 for the deaths of Alford, Everett and Apodaca. Prosecutors presented the DNA evidence. They also called witnesses whom Little had attacked at different times during his criminal career. On the 25th of September 2014 he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. On the day of the verdict, Little still insisted he was innocent.

  He was to serve the sentence at California State Prison, Los Angeles County. That was the facility he would later try to leave.

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• 6. Talking For A Transfer

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  In exchange for a transfer out of the Los Angeles County prison where he was held, Little began to confess. In May 2018 he admitted the 1994 killing of Denise Christie Brothers to a Texas Ranger. Brothers, a mother of two, had been reported missing on the 1st of January 1994. She was found in Odessa, Texas, on the 2nd of February 1994. District Attorney Bobby Bland said she had been strangled. Little was charged on the 13th of November 2018, pleaded guilty on the 13th of December, and received his fourth life sentence.

  On the 9th of November 2018, Little also confessed to the 1996 strangling of Melissa Thomas. On the 13th of November, the Ector County District Attorney and the Wise County Sheriff's Office announced that he had confessed to dozens of murders in fourteen states.

  Announcements came almost daily. On the 15th of November, the Russell County, Alabama, District Attorney said Little had confessed to the 1979 murder of 23-year-old Brenda Alexander, found in Phenix City. On the 16th, sheriffs in Macon, Georgia, called his confession credible in two cases. One was an unidentified woman killed in 1977. The other was 18-year-old Fredonia Smith, killed in 1982.

  In Houma, Louisiana, two bodies matched confessions from the fall of 2018. They were 55-year-old Dorothy Richards, killed in 1982, and 40-year-old Daisy McGuire, killed in 1996. On the 19th of November, Harrison County, Mississippi, Sheriff Troy Peterson named 36-year-old Julia Critchfield, killed near Gulfport in 1978. The next day, Lee County officials said Little had admitted killing 46-year-old Nancy Carol Stevens in Tupelo in 2005. Her case was headed to a grand jury in January 2019. On the 21st, authorities in Richland County, South Carolina, named 19-year-old Evelyn Weston, whose body was found near Fort Jackson in 1978. Little also confessed to killing 20-year-old Rosie Hill in Marion County, Florida, in 1982.

  On the 27th of November 2018, the FBI announced that a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program team had confirmed 34 of the confessions. The team was working to match the rest to known murders or suspicious deaths. One confession resolved a cold case in Prince George's County, Maryland, previously one of only two homicide cases there with unidentified victims.

  In December 2018, a Kentucky indictment charged Little with strangling 23-year-old Linda Sue Boards in Warren County in May 1981. Her body had been found on the 15th of May near U.S. Route 68. That same month, one of his victims was identified as Martha Cunningham of Knox County, Tennessee. She was 34 when Little killed her in the mid-1970s.

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• 7. Overlooked Women

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  Little offered investigators a cold explanation for whom he chose. Most of his victims were sex workers, substance users or homeless people, and most were women. He claimed they would leave fewer clues and have fewer people searching for them. Charges were brought only where the evidence was strongest.

  Annie Lee Stewart was last seen on the 6th of October 1981, getting out of a cab at General Hospital in Cincinnati to visit her sister. She was killed on the 11th of October. Her body was left in woods behind apartments off Queen Anne Place in Grove City, Ohio. On the 7th of June 2019, Hamilton County indicted Little for two Cincinnati killings. The second woman was known only as a Jane Doe. She was Black, slender and wore glasses, and she lived in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Her age was put anywhere from 15 to 50, and the date of her death is unclear.

  On the 31st of May 2019, Cuyahoga County prosecutors announced indictments with four counts of aggravated murder and six counts of kidnapping. They covered Mary Jo Peyton in 1984 and Rose Evans in 1991, both in Cleveland. Peyton, 21, met Little at a bar near East 105th and Euclid Avenues. Two workers from a nearby company found her on the 3rd of July 1984. An anthropologist built a model of her appearance, but she stayed unidentified until 1992. Then Cleveland put her thumbprint into an FBI database and got a match.

  Rose Evans, 32, was found on the 24th of August 1991 in a vacant lot on East 39th Street. She had left her hometown of Binghamton, New York, when she was 17. Coroner Elizabeth Balraj found that she had been strangled.

  Little also confessed to killing another Cleveland woman in 1977 or 1978. A man walking his dog found her remains on the 18th of March 1983 in Willoughby Hills, near Interstate 271. Only her skeleton, some clothing and jewelry were left. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System describes her as likely Black and between 17 and 35.

  On the 23rd of August 2019, Little was convicted of the murders of Stewart, Peyton and Evans.

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• 8. Portraits And Aftermath

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  The FBI released portraits that Little had drawn of many of the women he killed, hoping someone would recognize a face. He provided sketches for 26 victims, though not every drawing has been linked to a known murder. At least one portrait helped solve a cold case in Akron, Ohio, where he had confessed to killing a woman.

  In November 2020, Little confessed to two Florida murders. Another man had been wrongfully convicted of one of them. Little died on the 30th of December 2020 in a hospital in Los Angeles County. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sources gave no cause of death. He had diabetes, heart problems and other health conditions.

  The drawings kept working after he was gone. On the 22nd of April 2022, a woman Little had killed in Memphis was identified as 30-year-old Zena Marie Jones. She had gone missing from Memphis on the 6th of July 1990. A fisherman found her on the 28th of July on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, near mile marker 722.2 by West Memphis. Little had drawn her in 2018, and her family noticed the resemblance between his composite sketch and Jones. He had been found guilty of her homicide in 2019, years before she had a name.

  Jillian Lauren began as a writer of a mystery novel. Then Mitzi Roberts, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, told her in an interview: "Well, I'm proud of them all, but I did catch this serial killer Sam Little once. That was pretty cool." Lauren switched to a non-fiction book about Little and spent more than 40 hours interviewing him in prison. He confessed to multiple murders and sent her drawings of his victims. In December 2018, she wrote about the experience for The Cut.

  Filmmaker Joe Berlinger read the article and met with Lauren. His five-part miniseries, Confronting a Serial Killer, premiered on Starz on the 18th of April 2021. Lauren's book, Behold the Monster, was published by Sourcebooks in 2023. Its subtitle names what it set out to do: Uncovering the Women Society Forgot.

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