New Details: Serial Killer Samuel Little Confessed To Strangling 16 Women In LA Area Before Dying In Prison
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — Before he died in prison in December 2020, confessed serial killer Samuel Little gave a disturbingly thorough accounting of the dozens of people he strangled, including 16 women in Los Angeles during the 80s and 90s.
Little was 80 years old when he died in a California prison while serving three life sentences for the murders of three women in the 1980s. But according to new details released by the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Texas Rangers, whose investigator interviewed Little extensively in 2018, the prolific killer may have strangled as many as 16 women in the Los Angeles area in the 80s and 90s.
Authorities say Little had a photographic memory and could describe where he met and killed his victims, where he left their bodies, and what they looked like. But while his details proved accurate, his judgment of time and distance was not – in some instances he was off by more than 10 years and 40 miles, according to the Texas Department of Safety.
Little's killing spree in Los Angeles began in 1984 with a woman whose body he says he left along a service road near Florence and the I-10. According to the details released by the Texas Department of Safety, Little targeted mostly Black women and strangled them. He occasionally did drugs and had sex with his victims, and once tried to have sex with the body of a woman he killed in a vacant house off Slauson Avenue.
According to Texas officials, Little met at least two of the women near Tam's Hamburgers, which still has three hamburger stands operating in South LA.
"The information contained in these narratives could be the missing piece to solving some of these murders," Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department Of Public Safety, said in a statement.
Authorities say several of the deaths were misclassified as drug overdoses or natural deaths because even though Little claimed to have strangled all these women, they may have been suffocated because they did not have broken or fractured throat bones.
The details of Little's confessions have been released by the Texas Department of Public Safety. Anyone with information that might help investigators solve any of these cases can contact the Texas Rangers at (512) 424-2160 or via email at rangers@dps.texas.gov, or the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or at tips.fbi.gov.