Samuel Little dead: America's worst serial killer responsible for 93 murders dies

America's worst serial killer Samuel Little, responsible for 93 murders, has died aged 80.

The nomadic 6ft 3in drifter - a bare-knuckle prizefighter in his youth - slaughtered dozens of innocent women during an horrific 56-year crime wave throughout the US.

He strangled all of his victims and after admitting to his sadistic crimes years later went on to draw all of their faces from memory to help in police investigations.

Detectives are still using the sketches to trace some of those killed, having so far been able to verify 50 of Little's confessions.

The killer, who at one time served as an ambulance attendant, appeared bemused or smiling as he recounted the circumstances of the murders in FBI videotapes from prison.

He never showed any remorse for his crimes, even raising his fist in a triumphant gesture in front of victims' families during a murder hearing in 2014.

Little reportedly once told a detective how "God put him on this Earth to do what he was doing".

 

At the time of his death on Wednesday morning, he had been serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences from Los Angeles County for the deaths of three women that occurred in the late 1980s.

He was linked to the murders through DNA that was matched to evidence found in the crime scenes and convicted on September 25, 2014.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Little began confessing to additional murders to a Texas Ranger who interviewed him in his California prison cell in 2018, and ultimately admitted to killing 93 people across the country by strangulation between 1970 and 2005.

 

The FBI said investigators continue to work to confirm many more of his confessions, making him the deadliest US serial killer on record.

Authorities have said he appeared to have targeted mostly vulnerable young black women, many of them prostitutes or drug addicts, whose deaths were not well-publicised at the time and in some cases not recorded as homicides.

Many of his victims' deaths were originally ruled overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to an only FBI profile of the killer.

 

Little served two prior sentences in a California state prison, including a four-year term ending in 1987 for assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, and stint of about 14 months ending in April 2014.

He had been incarcerated at a state prison in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles, but died early in an outside hospital at 4.53am on December 30.

An official cause of death will be determined by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Born in July 1940 in Georgia, Little was raised by his grandmother in Ohio.

At 16, he picked up his first charge, for breaking and entering.

Between then and 1975, he was arrested 26 times in 11 states on charges ranging from shoplifting to aggravated assault on a police officer.

His first known attack on a woman was in 1976, when St Louis drug addict Pamela Kay Smith was found pleading for help, stripped from the waist down with her hands tied behind her back with electrical cord.

Smith told police a man had picked her up, strangled her, then beat and raped her before she managed to escape.

Police arrested Little in a car matching the victim’s description and found her clothes inside. “I only beat her,” he told them.

Remarkably, he only got three months in jail after being convicted of assault with the intent to ravish-rape in December 1976.

Little was emboldened and was regularly arrested or suspected of violent attacks on women over the next five decades.

Incredibly, a lack of communication between police forces meant he always managed to get off relatively lightly – and often scot-free.

In 1982, as police probed the murder of Melinda LaPree in Pascagoula, Mississippi, two prostitutes came forward to claim Little had attacked them.

He was arrested for the murder and the two assaults but a grand jury failed to indict him.

Later that same year, Little was charged with the murder of Patricia Mount in Forest Grove, Florida. But despite being charged, he was acquitted in 1984.

Months later, in October 1984, he was charged with attacking a woman in San Diego. Little avoided a more serious charge when he agreed to plead guilty to assault and false imprisonment and served two and a half years.

On his release, he moved to southern California – where, in 1987, Carol Alford was found murdered and Audrey Nelson found dumped in a skip two years later.

Guadalupe Apodaca’s body also turned up in an abandoned building in the state in 1989.

All three cases went cold until April 2012, when Roberts put DNA evidence found on the bodies into a national database. The results linked to Little - who was finally traced to a Christian shelter in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 2014, he was put on trial and convicted of murder.

“This is a man … who believes he can take whatever he wants from women,” prosecutor Beth Silverman told the Los Angeles jury.

At the time he was crippled by poor health and using a wheelchair, with Ector County District Attorney Bobby Bland speculating that Little had finally confessed after the appeals to his life sentence in California were rejected and he no longer had any reason to hide his guilt.

However, police warned that any hope relatives of his victims have that he was showing some remorse for his crimes were sorely misplaced.Follow the Official Rokna NEWS Telegram Channel For More and fresh NEWS.

Mirror