If Samuel Little is telling the truth, he may very well become the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, a badge of infamy that has an uncorroborated connection to Las Vegas.
Little’s sinister, coast-to-coast rampage — in which he’s recently admitted to at least 90 slayings — spanned from 1970 to 2005, according to the FBI.
Through his confessions, authorities have tied him to 34 unsolved deaths. One of the dozens of yet uncorroborated cases is that of a 40-year-old woman in Las Vegas he allegedly killed in 1993, officials said.
The FBI only described her as a black woman.
Metro Police is aware of Little’s statements, Officer Jay Rivera said Thursday afternoon. They hadn’t pinpointed an exact date or location, but homicide detectives were looking into it, he said.
The 78-year-old suspect has been a skilled and vivid interviewee, officials said. He not only remembers his victims and their fateful endings in “great detail,” but he’s illustrated some of them.
His memory on exact dates is not as great, officials said. It wasn’t clear when Metro detectives will get a shot at him, Rivera said, however, “it’s in the works.”
It’s too early to say which agency will take the lead in the probe and which court the case would be prosecuted at, Rivera said.
Little was taken off the streets in 2012 and has been serving a life sentence for each of three California killings he was convicted of two years later.
But in a bid to move prisons earlier this year, Little agreed to confess to killings authorities weren’t aware of.
Dozens of law enforcement agencies in cities such as Phoenix, Cincinnati and Jackson, Miss., are working with the Texas Rangers and the Department of Justice to vet Little’s explosive claims, the FBI said.
Little, who is in poor health, will likely die behind bars in Texas, the FBI said. The goal of investigators is to identify victims and provide a sense of closure to their families.
‘A dark, violent streak’
Little first entered the radar of authorities in 1956, the FBI said. His lengthy rap sheet ranges from shoplifting to murder.
“There are clear signs of a dark, violent streak,” the FBI said.
Wanted in California in a drug case, Little was arrested in Kentucky and extradited to the West Coast in 2012. But while he was in custody, his DNA linked him to three unsolved murders of women authorities there had investigated in the late 1980s.
In his 2014 murder trial, a string of victims — who likely cheated death — gave harrowing testimonies on how he’d attacked them in similar ways, officials said.
Most of them shared patterns.
Little often targeted vulnerable female victims, perhaps prostitutes or those addicted to drugs. Typically, he would draw on his boxing experience to punch them out, then strangle them while he masturbated, the Associated Press reported.
His California victims from the late '80s were beaten, strangled and their bodies dumped in an alley, dumpster or garage, officials said. Earlier that decade, he escaped guilt in a pair of murders in Mississippi and Florida.
Others not only have gone unidentified, they also haven’t been mourned.
"With no stab marks or bullet wounds, many of these deaths were not classified as homicides but attributed to drug overdoses, accidents or natural causes," the FBI said. “Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated.”
A closer look
After the DNA matches in California, authorities there asked the FBI to create a profile. “The FBI found an alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders.”
One of them led investigators to rural Odessa, Texas. “That sounded very much like him,” an investigator told the FBI. “And we could place him passing through the area around the same time.”
That was the big break.
Texan authorities then traveled to California this spring and encountered a suspect willing to speak in exchange for a prison move. Once extradited to the Lone Star State, he began to speak, perhaps more than they could have ever imagined.
Since then, sitting inside a jail in Wise County — population 66,000, not far from Dallas — an aging Little has carefully detailed each of his victims, every way they died.