Written by: Sam Santiago
A faint smile crossed Samuel Little’s grandfatherly face as he recalled a woman he met on a dance floor in a New Orleans club. “She was pretty,” he said during a 1982 confession. “She had a beautiful body on her.” He remembered the details with unsettling clarity: a dress with buttons down the front, honey-colored skin, and a woman about 30 years old. They danced. She suggested a drive. As they walked arm in arm to his Lincoln Continental Mark III, she admired the car. He drove down Interstate 10, turned onto a dirt road, and led her through the woods toward the bayou. Years later, reflecting on the murder, he said quietly, “That’s the only one I killed by drowning.”
Samuel Little, 79, has confessed to killing 93 people, nearly all women, between 1970 and 2005. Although he avoided a murder conviction until 2014, he had numerous run-ins with law enforcement throughout the country over the years. A series of booking photos shows how the nation's most prolific serial killer looked during the years spanning 1966 to 1995. - Original Timeline by FBI
By his own account, between 1970 and 2005, Little killed 93 women across the United States. All but one were strangled.
The FBI has confirmed at least 60 of those murders as of 2026, a number that makes Little the most prolific serial killer in American history. The grim irony is that he was arrested repeatedly over the decades and served multiple jail terms, yet continued to slip through the cracks.
Little claimed he was the son of a sex worker and was raised by his grandmother in Ohio. His criminal record began early. By age 35, in 1975, he had been arrested 26 times across 11 states for crimes including assault, attempted rape, and fraud. Violence followed him wherever he went, but long-term consequences rarely did.
In 1982, he was arrested for murder, only to be released when a grand jury declined to indict him. Two years later, he stood trial in Florida for another killing and was acquitted. Again and again, he walked free.
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo later said. In many cases, he was right.
Little targeted women on the margins of society, often Black women, sex workers, people struggling with addiction, or those experiencing homelessness. Their deaths were sometimes misclassified as overdoses or accidents, if they were thoroughly investigated at all. Even today, some of his victims remain unidentified, and some bodies have never been found.
He once boasted that he could kill whenever he wanted because no one would notice. He described returning to cities and, in his words, “pluck me another grape,” a chilling glimpse into how casually he viewed human life.
After serving two and a half years in prison for beating two women in San Diego, Little was arrested again. In 2014, he was convicted in Los Angeles for the murders of three women and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It seemed, finally, that the door had closed.
The breakthrough came when a Texas Ranger, revisiting a cold case, interviewed Little in his late 70s. Faced with mounting evidence, he began confessing, not just to one or two killings, but to dozens. He spoke about highways, bus stations, motels, and back roads as if recounting a long road trip.
Although he often could not remember full names, he had an astonishing memory for faces. Investigators provided him with art supplies, and he sketched portraits of his victims from memory. The drawings, eerily detailed, showed women with carefully rendered hairstyles, jewelry, and bright lipstick. The FBI released the images to the public, hoping someone would recognize a sister, daughter, or friend and finally give a name to the unidentified.
As prosecutors in multiple states weighed additional charges, Little died in a California prison in December 2020 at age 80 of natural causes.
Since his death, law enforcement agencies have continued working through cold cases linked to his confessions. Additional identifications have been made in recent years, providing long-overdue answers to some families. Even so, investigators believe there may still be victims who have not yet been matched to his admissions.
In the end, what allowed Samuel Little to operate for so long was not cunning genius, but neglect. He preyed on those society too often overlooked. His story is not only about one man’s violence, but about the gaps that let him keep going.
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