In October 2019 the FBI confirmed Samuel Little as the most prolific serial killer in United States history. He had confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005; the FBI's analysts believed all of the confessions were credible, and 50 had been matched to a case.
Las Vegas, describe the Las Vegas victim. That was in ’93. OK I bought, eh, El Dorado. What color El Dorado?
It was a yellow. OK. Yellow Cadillac El Dorado? Yup Alright.
What year? ’78 OK, well tell me about this girl. What did she look like? She was kinda thin, dark-skinned.
About 40 years old. She’s out there hustling. I think she was a drug addict because she wouldn’t been out there. How tall was she?
She was about 5’5,” 5’3.” And how much do you think she weighed? She weighed about 110, 120. OK. What about her did you know?
The boy came, that was her son, and she called him over there. And he came over and, “Hey, how you doing?” Shook my hand and everything. Now, how old was he? He was about 20…or about 19, 20.
OK, black male or? Black male. And where were you at when you met her? It was on Owens Avenue.
OK That’s down in the black section. Owens and Jackson. Where do you eventually take her body to? I was headed toward California.
So as I drove out of Las Vegas…I seen a motel and a road leading up to the motel. And a lot of bushes and brushes beside the road, before you got to that motel. That’s where I dropped her. Pulled her body out, and rolled it down there.
And I heard a secondary road noise that meant she was still rolling. So, you basically roll her into a pretty big ditch that’s got a bunch of… Well, it wasn’t a ditch. It was a slope. OK.
That didn’t look like a slope ‘cause of the vegetation had growed up out of the slope, and it looked like, even though, you would think that the road would just be flat, but actually the road was going down the slope way. And that’s why she rolled. So this is a slope right off a road? Yeah And tell me about how far do you think you were outside of Las Vegas?
The road I was on was going toward Searchlight. So whatever the name of that road is, that’s the road I was on. How far outside of Las Vegas do you think you were? Were you in Las Vegas?
I was still in Las Vegas, yeah. OK But I was on the very outskirts, the very outskirts. There was a couple of motels I remember, the gas station there. It was scattered dot, dot, dot, dot.
Because it was getting thin, population, as you go further out. That is Samuel Little, describing a woman he killed in Las Vegas in nineteen ninety-three. The man asking the questions is a Texas Ranger. The recording is not a leak: the FBI published it, with four more like it, because nobody has ever worked out who she was.
In October twenty nineteen the FBI confirmed Little as the most prolific serial killer in United States history. He had confessed to ninety-three murders. Its analysts believed all of the confessions were credible. Fifty had been matched to a case.
The rest, including the five in this film, had not. He said he strangled them, between nineteen seventy and two thousand and five, across nineteen states. Most were women. Many, the FBI wrote, had their deaths recorded at the time as overdoses, or as accidental, or as undetermined.
Some of the bodies were never found. The FBI's crime analyst put the reason plainly. For many years, she said, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught, because he thought no one was accounting for his victims.
What caught him was a drugs charge. Arrested in twenty twelve and sent to California, he gave a DNA sample that matched three unsolved killings from the nineteen eighties. Los Angeles police told the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and its background check found what the FBI calls an alarming pattern. He was convicted in twenty fourteen and given three consecutive life sentences.
Then, in May twenty eighteen, he began to talk to a Texas Ranger. What he gave them was not a list of names. He remembered cars, bars, roads, the colour of a dress. He drew the faces.
The FBI published five of the interviews, with a drawing and a case summary for each, and asked the public to help match them to a woman who has been missing, or to a body no one has ever named. Booking photographs of Samuel Little, 1966-1995, published by the FBI.
Miami, nineteen seventy-one or seventy-two. The FBI's summary: a transgender woman of about eighteen or nineteen, whom he called Marianne or Mary Ann, met at a bar near Seventeenth Avenue. He says he drove her out on Highway Twenty-seven and killed her, then dragged her body about two hundred yards into a swamp. He does not believe it was ever found.
Tell me about Marianne. She was what nowadays you call a transgender. She’s a black male dressed up as a female. (nodding) How tall is she?
Marianne was about 5’7”...5’6”. She weighed about 130...5. Maybe 140. And how old do you think she was?
About...she was 19. Okay. And where was she from? Miami.
Down in Liberty City. Okay. And did she...you mentioned before she had a boyfriend or she talked about a boyfriend. Named Wes.
Wes? Yes. And tell me about where you met her at. I seen her down at the bar on 17th Avenue...and she had on a short cream miniskirt.
Cream and red. So then this opportunity popped up...take her to the store. Instead of me bringing her back to the apartment...I went to I-27, see. That’s going down to, uh, Fort Lauderdale.
Called the gator...the Alligator Alley. It turns into, it runs into Alligator Alley. But the further out you get, the further you get out of Miami...and you got vegetation in there. Now, how far outside of Miami you think you were?
About...you wasn’t too far out of Miami right there. I was in my stepdaddy’s car. Pontiac Le Mans. And where’d you take her to?
Continue down 27. Got back on 27. Going outside of Miami? Going away from Miami?
Going away from Miami. We got down past the, uh...past the city limits. So I continued on toward Fort Lauderdale. And I seen a road going off the main road back into vegetation on the left side.
So, I got her out of the car. Pulled her out and drug her into the growth back there. And pulled her deeper into...there’s a path, a little path that went in somewhere. I don’t know where it led to, but it running deeper into the undergrowth.
It’s like Everglades like that, and we ran into some water running. And but before we got to the water, the earth was mushy. I turn her loose and she fell into it face down. And how far outside Miami do you think you were?
About a mile. Two miles. What year did Marianne occur? Uh...‘72 OK.
1972.
North Little Rock, Arkansas, between nineteen ninety-two and ninety-four. He says he stayed with her for about three days, and that he was arrested for shoplifting from a grocery store while they were together. The FBI checked: he was arrested at that store, on the twentieth of April, nineteen ninety-four. He says he drove her out of town and strangled her, and left her body on a pile of branches near a corn field.
He thinks her name may have been Ruth. North Little Rock. Tell me what that girl looked like? Oh, man, I loved her.
I forget her name…oh wait, I think it was Ruth. She was a heavy set, big old yellow gal. And had buck teeth. Had a gap between her teeth.
That’s what it was. And she, she was light...honey-colored skin. And she had...like her hair was not really long it was... How tall do you think she was?
She was about 5’7”. How much do you think she weighed? She weighed about close to 200, about 170, 180. Pretty big girl.
Yeah. Now, where did you meet her at? OK. Down in the crack house.
Her and about six other girls were sitting on a porch...doing some crack in there. I stopped to go in there...I seen a girl, that’s why I stopped. We stayed together two days or more. I think it was about three days.
We was going shoplifting. We went to Sears. We went to, uh....Kroger’s. And that’s where I got busted.
They took me to jail, and she went and stayed in the car. And the manager of Kroger’s...got…I guess he got tired of her laying around on his property in that car. He called the station where I was at in North…North Arkansas...to drop the charges so he come down and get this gal and car out of here. They cut me loose!
So we...was headed toward...what’s that place where Walmart’s, uh, original store? Benton(ville). I whipped off the road and backed into that little woods. It was a corn field back there.
I pulled through it. And on the other side was a corn field with a trash pile. Well, I parked the car face it out where I could see anybody coming in. So, I pulled her out of the car.
She’s too big for me to carry, carry her. So I just pulled her out of the car, laid her on that trash...that was left there. So is it like a corn stalk pile or was it? Yeah, a bunch of corn stalks.
What could you see from there? Uh, I could see the highway. And, uh, in the woods is that way. But it’s right outside of Little Rock.
Uh, I was about 10 miles from there. From North Little Rock, you take 10 miles? Yeah, it’s about 10 miles.
Covington, Kentucky, about nineteen eighty-four. A woman of about twenty-five outside a club in Columbus, Ohio, who asked him for a ride to Miami because her mother lived there. He says he killed her on a small hill off Interstate Seventy-five, in northern Kentucky, and left her there. Hey, so tell me about, um, Northern Kentucky.
The girl that you met in Columbus. So you meet this girl, I guess you’re at a strip bar downtown Columbus. I want on out the car. And this white girl come out behind the building.
You know, I mean, my trunk open. She walked over to me say, “Come on, y’all. Can you take me to Miami?” Describe this girl to me. Is she white?
Black? What’d she look like? She’s white. Blonde hair.
Dishwater, Dishwater blonde they call it. And short. Short like shoulder length or...? No, no, ear...it was a little over ear length.
Like a bob? Yeah, like a bob. How tall do you think she was? She was about 5’7”.
And how much do you think she weighed? She weighed about 130. How old do you think she was? She was about 25.
You mentioned before that, that uh, you said she kind of had like this hippie aura to her? Yeah, she did give you a hippie feeling. I think she was some kind of hippie, yeah. So, you go to Cincinnati.
You mess around on Vine Street. And then eventually you guys both get in your car and you cross over the bridge into Kentucky. Tell me about going into Kentucky. We got to Covington and then we continued through Covington.
And there was a park that they were having a festival in. And she heard the music and sh** off the band in there. And by her being a hippie type she “whoa”…she want to get to that. But the police came over and peeked in the car.
He really wanted me to move out of there. So we...instead of going in there, I took her the other way. Winding around...they got hills out in Kentucky. And the road winds around the hills.
I seen a little short road going up the hill. And up top, there was, uh, vegetation. There wasn’t no houses or nothing. So I pulled up in there and concealed the car in that little vegetation up there on top of the hill.
So tell me about this, this road that goes up the hill. What kind of road is it? It was...it was like a dirt road. It was like dirt.
The grass was growing in the middle between two tracks. When I left her up in there, in that little road up there, on the side of the road, she was like partially concealed by the vegetation. I left her there.
New Orleans, about nineteen eighty-two. He met her at a club, where she was at a birthday party with friends and one of her two sisters. She told him she lived with her mother, who was ill. He says he drove her to a canal off Interstate Ten and killed her there.
She was pretty. Light skinned, brown, honey-colored skin. And she was about 5…she was tall…she was tall for a woman. About 5’8,” 5’9.” And beautiful shape.
And uh, friendly. And how much do you think she weighed? Uh, she had a beautiful body on her, a beautiful 150. Well put together.
And, uh, how old do you think she was? She was about 30. OK, and she’s a black female? Yeah And tell me where you met her.
I met her in a nightclub in New Orleans. Her and her sister, two, she had two sisters. Her youngest sister was having a birthday party. Her sister was dancing with this guy on the floor.
And when I come in, the girl that I was with offered to dance with me. And while were dancing, she says, “You want to go riding after this, you know, after this party’s over?” We walked outside and she looked and seen my car, that Lincoln. She said, “Woo, that’s a beautiful car, too.” So she had me arm in arm, walking to the car. We got in.
We stopped at a gas station. We was on Highway 10, and uh, going toward Slidell. I seen the sign that said Little Woods. So I cut off.
I took off the exit. And we went and that, sure enough, was a road leading me into the woods. And we went in and park. So we finally got to where we were going, and it was by a bayou, a river, a little water thing.
The big, they had a machine out there in that little river. Dredging? Dredging. I grabbed her by the legs and pulled her to the water.
That’s the only one that I ever killed by drowning. Describe the location where she’s left OK. I left her with her head still there in the water. Half her body under water, and the thighs and legs on the bank.
Those are five. The FBI published the others as a map and a list: a state, a year, an age, a first name if he had one. Black female, twenty-three, Savannah, nineteen seventy-four. Hispanic female, forties, Phoenix, nineteen eighty-eight or ninety-six.
Black female, fifty, Los Angeles, nineteen eighty-seven, possibly called Granny. Some are marked as matched to a Jane Doe. Most are marked unmatched. The FBI adds a warning of its own about the man it is quoting.
His recollection of dates, it says, is not always accurate, and he sometimes struggles to remember what a victim was wearing. A possible link should not be dismissed on those two grounds alone.
The program that is supposed to match them is the one that caught him: ViCAP, the FBI's national database of violent crime. In July twenty twenty-four the Justice Department's Inspector General audited it, and its report opens by naming this case as the example of the program working. Then it gives the numbers. Cases submitted to the database rose from four hundred and sixty-three in twenty eighteen to thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty in twenty twenty-three: an increase of almost three thousand per cent.
Over the same years, the audit says, the staff and the money stayed about the same. The tool that links one case to another has not been updated since it was built in twenty ten. Quality control is done by hand. Requests for analysis and training were delayed, and some were refused.
ViCAP has been unable to keep pace with its workload, including demands for investigative assistance, system improvements, outreach, and training - leading to delayed and, in some instances, denied requests for analysis and training. And several large city police departments, the audit found, are not submitting their cases at all. The FBI, it concluded, has no overall strategy for any of this, and no measures of whether the program is working. Without one, the auditors wrote, ViCAP risks losing the confidence of the agencies that feed it, which would erode the one thing it does: linking crimes.
Without such a plan, we believe that ViCAP risks losing the confidence of its participants, which could hinder their participation in the program and, in turn, erode ViCAP's ability to link crimes.
Five women. A bar, a car, a road, a face drawn from memory by the man who killed them. The FBI is still asking: if any of it is familiar, call one eight hundred, call F B I, or go to tips dot f b i dot gov.
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