Samuel Little Part 3 – The Final Reckoning

In this final installment of our three-part series on Samuel Little, we pick up after the chilling events of Part 1 and Part 2, maintaining the same title format that has carried the story from the beginning. Part 3 delves into the latter half of Little’s criminal career—a period defined by increasing brutality, rampant evasion, and an ever-worsening descent into chaos.

This episode begins in 1984, following the collapse of earlier trials due to unreliable witnesses and scant evidence, and follows Little’s relentless rampage as he resumes his spree across multiple states. From his disturbing escalation of crimes in Florida and Georgia to his reign of terror in Los Angeles, where he targeted the most vulnerable, Little’s methods grew not only more heinous—incorporating necrophilia and post-mortem taunting—but also more fragmented, as decades of hard living and drug abuse began to take their toll on his memory.

As law enforcement struggled with a staggering backlog of cold cases, determined detectives like Lieutenant Roberts and Texas Ranger Holland spearheaded a breakthrough, utilizing cutting-edge DNA technology and the killer’s own eerily accurate portraits of his victims. These portraits, which bore the unmistakable marks of his signature brutality, became pivotal in linking Little to over 93 confirmed murders—though many believe the true count may be even higher.

Part 3 not only documents the final chapters of Little’s life—marked by his eventual arrest and conviction—but also serves as a grim reminder of the systemic failures that allowed a ghost-like predator to operate for decades. It’s a story of loss, neglect, and the desperate fight for justice for the forgotten victims whose lives were irretrievably stolen.

Join us as we bring closure to a case that has haunted America, ensuring that even if Samuel Little’s name now rests in infamy, the memories and identities of his victims will not be forgotten.

Transcript

Samuel Little Part 3 (00:00)
Hello everyone, this is the PIC True Crime Podcast and we've come to the final long-awaited conclusion on our part 3 series on Samuel Little, the serial killer responsible for murdering no less than 93 women over a span of 35 years.

He is the USA's most prolific serial killer and definitely one of the most elusive murders we've ever had the displeasure of looking into. If you haven't heard parts 1 and 2, please go give it a listen before coming back to part 3. Little's long life started out rough already, but as soon as he was old enough to drive a car,

He traveled so much that piecing his life and crimes together is a complicated failure.

You don't want to go into this conclusion blind, trust me. But to recap you real quick, we last left off when Little and Jean got back together and the police actually did try to convict him for 3 murders, 2 assaults and they suspected him of yet another murder.

But as close as we all thought this nightmare was to coming to an end, the ball dropped on all of those trials. The witnesses were unstable, emotional, or they'd skip town before they could take the stand. There was barely any evidence to begin with, and when 78-year-old Jean Dorsey took the stand to give Little an alibi, well, everything just fell apart and Samuel Little was let go. And now we pick up where we left off.

It's 1984 and Little's been on hiatus for a year and a half and you can bet that he's going to make up for lost time. Welcome back everybody, I'm Bree

I'm Mike. And I'm Heather. Are you guys ready to jump back into the final? Ready? I haven't been this frustrated since we covered Andre Chickatillo. But remind me real quick, how many murders has Little committed in 83?

It's somewhere in the ballpark of 60 or more.

Alright, let's get this over and hopefully put Samuel Little six feet under by the end of it all, where that bastard belongs. Bree, you gonna start us off?

Sure. Little and Jean took off in a new car and moved around for about three months. Afraid that they were being watched, they kept themselves afloat the same way they always did, shoplifting and selling their trinkets out of the car.

Lots of drinking and a fair amount of drugs were going on too, but that's nothing new. Their first significant stop was Florida where he killed a woman named William May Bevins

Another man was convicted for the crime and ended up serving four years for manslaughter.

He wouldn't be cleared of the charge until the 2000s when Little confessed to it. He also murdered two unidentified black women before heading off to Georgia.

Here he killed Frances Campbell and two more black women that were never found or named. said that one of them was a college student, though that's never been proven. Ohio came next and here 21 year old Mary Jo Payton lost her life after Little picked her up at a bar in June. Wait a minute, that's like seven women in two months, am I hearing that right? Yep you are, and he's not done yet.

Next came Linda Bennett and the double homicide of two friends Hannah Mae Bonner and Ida Mae Campbell.

They were last seen with a man fitting Little's description buying drugs off a drug dealer. The women's bodies were found miles apart and it was determined that they died on the same day.

In California was an unidentified white woman in her mid-twenties, then an unidentified black woman in her late teens.

But this one brings us another change, and a disturbing one at that. Even though this woman's never been found or named, Little drew a portrait of her and admitted to the police that he didn't just kill her,

He then proceeded to indulge in necrophilia for the first time. After he was done violating the body, he dumped her beside the highway in a clump of bushes.

This isn't that big of a jump when you think about it.

We've seen him escalate every few years. First it was just strangulation, then rape with strangulation, then he promotes to biting and kissing of corpses. This was just the last frontier, if you will.

Mindlessly killing like this for so many years,

I can totally see how he'd finally chipped away at any last remaining bits of humanity that he might have had by then. I'm actually surprised that it hasn't happened earlier.

His 13th attack happened in October of 84 in San Bernardino. And finally we get the miracle we've been begging for.

Laurie Barrows was a 22 year old addict that had moonlighted as a prostitute. She was walking to a dealer's house when Little pulled up right next to her to elicit her services. Laurie agreed and the two drove out to a secluded spot right next to a dump site.

As he was putting pressure on her throat, Little said, I like it when you swallow, referring to the feeling under his fingers as Laurie gulped for air. The assault and strangulation was pretty standard for Little, but Laurie somehow managed to play dead so well that Little thought he'd really killed her. Please tell me we're going to like Laurie more than we like Layla, the Little fighter. Definitely.

Laurie went to the police, but she wasn't stupid enough to tell them that she was a sex worker. Smart girl.

The police put out the information again, and besides the description of the call, it was almost identical to the murders he was acquitted of.

the murder he was a suspect for and the two assaults. So he's in the database at least, even with 80s computer systems, at least that's something. But Little likes to return to his old haunts to prove some imagined point, I guess. So when he solicited Tonya Jackson from a bar just three weeks later, Little took her right back to the place where he'd attacked Laurie.

Police were still patrolling the area on the lookout for that Thunderbird. And just as Little had had his hands around Tanya's neck, the blue lights came on. Little had scratches on his face, his pants were down, and he had blood on his shirt. Tanya was badly beaten, her face bruised, and she had welts around her neck.

a minute later, she would have been dead.

She was already unconscious and it took longer to wake her up than it did to cuff Little. She was whisked off to the hospital and Little was brought in and charged with attempted murder, sexual assault, battery, and whatever else they could think of to put on him. He maintained that Tanya tried to take his money without keeping up her end of the bargain, so they got into a fight. Tanya's examination did not show any signs of rape because

Well, Little just never got around to that part of the attack yet. But the wounds from the punches and the strangulation were consistent with assault. But since she did go there with him willingly, the only charges they had against him were attempted murder and assault.

Laurie Barrows was brought in and she picked Little out of a lineup, no problem. They even went a step further and had each man say the words, I like it when you swallow, without Laurie being able to see the faces. And again, she picked out Little. Little was brought to trial for the assault and attempted murder of Tanya and the rape and assault and attempted murder of Laurie. Sadly, Tanya's many years of drug use had affected her speech and left her with permanent tremors and twitches.

that she couldn't control. As you can imagine, the jury weren't convinced by a drug addicted prostitute who could barely string a sentence together. Laurie, on the other hand, was articulate, well spoken, and even though she was nervous, she did a very good job on the stand. But she too was a prostitute with a history of drug abuse. So that made her an unreliable witness. Yes.

Little claimed not to have ever seen Laurie in his life and his account of the attack on Tanya stayed consistent. And he had a witness to give him an alibi.

Let me guess, Jean again? You know she's got every single one of the victims on her head too. She deserved punishment just as much as little did.

I'm guessing she sweet talked little out of that one too.

Not as well as before. The jury was hung and a retrial was requested, so instead of putting two deeply traumatized women through a trial, they could go either way, they made a deal with little. Plead guilty to assault and tanya and take four years behind bars. That is terrible. That is horrible.

It's highly likely that they weren't even aware of the previous cases for murder and assault. This trial went through under the name McDowell, Little's father's name. The others went through the name Little. Different states, different set of information to work with. Little took the deal and ended up only serving two years. No, that heartburns back again. You realize he killed twelve

women in six months since his previous release, right? And he's about to go right back to that when he gets released in February of 1987. Now, Little's 47 and Jean's turned 82 just a month after his release. Between Jean's Social Security and their shoplifting operation, the two managed to keep afloat, staying mostly in the LA area. Jean's health wasn't great.

Please tell me that the Crip Keeper's on her way to the hole Satan uses as a toilet. Almost. She's going to kick the bucket soon, so no worries. Little was out for a week before he killed two black women in a single night. Then two months later came Sonia Colette Austin.

a housewife and mother of four. Next was Carol Alford, and her body was discovered with some DNA still on her shirt. The DNA was collected, stored, and the case went cold. When did DNA officially come into play when solving crimes? In 86, the year before, but there was no huge database to compare it with yet.

And this is a very expensive and time consuming process.

So, unless they had a suspect that was good enough to justify testing it, it wasn't happening. Little killed two more women, both black and unknown. One was around 50 or so, and the other girl was a teenager. I thought that he just took prostitutes. He's escalating again, right? Targeting kids? Little is still in LA, and as much as I hate to say it, Los Angeles is full of people who don't exist on paper.

Drugs, broken dreams, abuse. The place just attracts the vulnerable like moths to a flame. And yes, that does include kids.

Samuel Little Part 3 (11:51)
And remember, the 14-year-old victim, Karleen he's not above abducting kids.

As long as the women are within reach and easy to grab, doesn't really care who they are. But back to Los Angeles. Here, Little finally found his favorite hunting grounds. Most of the women who were into sex work weren't in contact with their families. They weren't reported missing by friends because their circles were all pretty transient themselves in distrusting of the police. L.A. had the fourth most recorded homicides in the U.S. in 1987.

And there were five other serial killers operating in the area at that time. No way. You're kidding me. No. Louis Crane, the South Side Slayer, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the Grim Sleeper, Gerald Parker,

Philip Carl Jablonski and Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, altogether they killed no less than 56 people between them, almost certainly more. And that's not even counting Samuel Little's victims.

Living in Los Angeles, especially for a sex worker, was like walking into a live war zone on a float decked out in strobe lights. There is no demographic more targeted than women in the sex industry. And if you happen to be black, well, you can double those statistics. It's dark, it's unpleasant, but it's the truth.

and exactly Little's preferred victim profile.

Actually, Little wasn't too picky and the two demographics are very close to each other. It's estimated that 40 % of his victims were white and 60 % were black. The reason it feels like he focused on African-American women more is because those women were the ones who couldn't be identified or they were never reported missing. So you've been hearing the word unidentified black woman a lot more than the others.

Another one of those sad realities where poverty is greater. So too are the invisible people who are born within those circumstances. And in this case, as in the case all over the US, African-American women are more likely to be targeted for violent attacks and they're more likely to go unreported when they go missing. But let's go back to 87. We're getting a little sidetracked here.

So, we were last in 87. Littles out and he's already killed 4 women in the span of 2 months. He quickly added another unnamed woman to that list as well as... Carol Linda Alford.

Kirill had skin under her fingernails and semen on her underwear that were both bagged and stored but the case went cold almost as soon as she was found. Little says that 87 and 88 were a bit of a blur and that he might have killed others but he couldn't be sure. This lapse in memory was probably as a result of emotional upheaval because Jean Dorsey finally kicked the bucket in 88.

Sadly, she didn't die on the electric chair as she should've. This corrupt piece of work died of natural causes, specifically a brain hemorrhage. It's better than nothing, I guess.

But now, Little hasn't got someone to give him an alibi anymore, and his main source of income's gone. I can't stress how talented a shoplifter Jean was, if you can call that talent. She stole designer clothes, jewelry, all sorts of stuff that equated to thousands of dollars every month. With that loot, they paid for housing, kept Little's car filled up, drank and bought drugs. We've already known that Little was into illicit substances,

But he was never a huge user.

Before he could go weeks without getting cocaine, his drug of choice, if he had to.

If anything, he was a bigger drinker than he was a drug addict. But now the gene, his stolen goods, and social security check was six feet underground, was barely scraping by. He ditched his car and got a rust bucket to replace it and switched from coke to the much cheaper crack cocaine. And here is where you see Little's mugshot showing him in increasing states of crustiness.

He'd always been a handsome man,

But now he's pushing 50 and was looking worse for wear thanks greatly to years of living it rough and now with a terrible crack habit

to speed up the process. His memory wasn't that great anymore, his later confessions painted a crystal clear memory of his victims, where he killed them, dates, and even names. That goes out the window when he starts using crack cocaine. His accounts after this point become increasingly fragmented and all that we can definitively say is that he stayed in LA for a while

where he killed Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca in September of 89

and an unidentified black woman a month later. Audrey Nelson, a 35 year old sex worker and one more unidentified woman of South American descent.

Guadalupe and Audrey's bodies had some much needed evidence on them.

Guadalupe had been very badly beaten and assaulted, so much so that her death gained attention among the police. They were deeply concerned about the level of violence she'd been subjected to. There was semen found inside the body, which was stored. Audrey Nelson, on the other hand, had put up a good fight before succumbing to Little's assault. She managed to scratch her assailant, leaving her nails covered with skin, blood, and enough DNA to build a profile.

So until they had a suspect run it against those samples remained in storage. 1990 dawned and Samuel Little was now officially the USA's most prolific serial killer, with an estimated 70 victims under his belt and still no one knew he even existed. We know of three victims in 1990. Zena Marie Jones and two more unidentified women. Little was now

almost always assaulting the woman after death. Necrophilia was no longer just an experiment, it was part of his MO. He also liked playing with their hair, kiss them, and spend some time talking to the corpses before leaving. In 91, Little started leaving LA on occasion, but he was never gone for long. First, he killed Alice Duvall, then another Jane Doe in LA.

Then he went off to Ohio to kill Rose Evans

and Roberta Tandrick. 92 saw little looking grayer and more disheveled than ever. He was now using whatever drugs he could get his hands on or what he could afford

and was living permanently out of his car. The only thing that had integrated was his need to kill. Three unidentified women, two black and one Hispanic, were added to the count in quick succession in Los Angeles. Then in Arkansas, Little hooked up with a 20-something year old girl that he'd met outside of a drug den. They hung around together for a few days,

shoplifting and doing drugs together. In Little Rock, Little was arrested for shoplifting and he was in holding for a few days. The girl who he thought was named Ruth slept in his car during this time right outside the store that Little stole from.

She said that her boyfriend had the keys when he was locked up, so she couldn't leave the car unlocked and unattended with all their possessions inside. So just because he wanted to get her and the crusty old car out of his parking lot, the shop owner dropped the charges and little got off scot-free yet again. no, he's got himself another gene. Nope.

This one wasn't repaid for her loyalty the same way Jean was. Or maybe she couldn't make a gumbo as good as the old lady could, because he drove out that same day and strangled Ruth in a cornfield. Man, that is cold. In December, he met Alice Taylor at a bar, lured her out with drugs, and after he'd killed her, he went back to the same bar and picked up Tracy Johnson, whom he also killed.

rounding off 92 with approximately nine victims. Little was starting to unravel and the confessions of 93 are even more fractured than the year before. All we know for sure is that he killed Ruby Lane, Bobby Ann Fields Wilson, and another unidentified black female somewhere in Vegas. Here's why most people think he killed more than 93 victims that he confessed to.

The previous years he's killed eight or more women, sometimes as much as 15 in a single year. It's not like he hid those murders. He openly confessed to them. But in 93, he can only remember three. There's no way a guy like this suddenly slows down. The years of hard drug abuse were affecting his brain structurally and just not remembering them anymore. And he's what?

53 years old now, he's been living this way since he was a teenager. It's got to catch up to you eventually. In 1994, he killed Denise Brothers in Texas. She was a prostitute and longtime addict, well known to the police. For once, police did not just discard this murder as another druggy dead in the alley, like all of the other police departments we've heard about so far. Brothers was working to get her life back.

she was starting to see her daughter again for the first time in years. Her family were very optimistic about her recovery. So when she went missing, they were at the police station every day wanting updates on the case. Police put out a statewide bolo. At first, they had high hopes because Denise's boyfriend had seen little and could give a vague description of the car. This was a predictable dead end.

They had no license plate, no DNA, and not even a name.

But they put in a lot more resources into this than we've seen so far from most departments. So we can give them that. They did try. And besides another unidentified woman in California, he couldn't remember much of 1994. And in 1995, he killed Jolanda Jones, Daisy McGuire, and Melissa Thomas. He ran into Melissa as she was walking to the store.

He just happened to see her walking and when she cut through the cemetery, he jumped her in broad daylight. He later said that her death was a waste because he couldn't take his time with her. But she was just there and he was itching for a kill. So he took his shot while he had it.

Just because she was there? Seems like it. Didn't we say he was deteriorating? The rest of 95 is muggy. He did say he might have killed two more women, but he couldn't be sure. In 1996, now 56 years old and driving a blue Cadillac, Little killed five women in Los Angeles. One of them only described as a white woman in her 20s whom he killed inside an abandoned house.

He tried to violate the body after she died, but he couldn't get the soldier up. This was the sort of serious cognitive decline for Little. He's getting old. From 97 onwards, Little got weaker and more decrepit. He just couldn't keep up with the younger women anymore, and he realized that it would be too risky to even try. So he stepped back in a big way. He was still shoplifting to fund his drug habit, getting by well enough to eat at least.

But other than that, he completely stepped away from killing or as he referred to it, he retired from killing like it was some sort of a profession. Just like that cold turkey. There are some mentions of a woman sometime between 97 and 99, but nothing that I can verify. Little just sort of fizzled away in the background getting by on shoplifting. And if it weren't for a bit of luck later,

America's most prolific killer would have simply died of old age, having killed no less than 93 women as far as we can tell. But let's face it, it's probably more than that. If that happened, we wouldn't have been any wiser about what this now unassuming old homeless man and what a beast he really was.

But brought a sudden shift in the Los Angeles Police Department. They set up an entire department devoted to working through the colossal backlog of cases that they had piled up over the years, specifically focusing on robberies, sexual assaults, and homicides. You guys aren't going to believe the hundreds of thousands of unsolved cases they had to work with. There were over 10,000 untested rape kits to go through alone.

Untested? And that's just the rape kits. 11,000 homicides and more assaults, rapes, and robberies than I care to mention. Why now? From what we've heard about police work so far, I'm surprised they didn't just throw the whole lot into a fire and pretend they didn't exist.

just like they conveniently pretended that a hundred prostitutes didn't exist. Hey, I get it. The injustice of how these victims were forgotten about. But they were doing it now. No matter how enormous the mountain they'd allowed to build up was, CODIS was no longer just an idea running in the background. The database was substantial enough that the repeat offenders could be caught with it.

Programs that helped investigators search by victim profile, manner of death, and all sorts of specifics were actually working and producing results. DNA testing wasn't this horribly expensive, time-consuming thing anymore. It could be done effectively, efficiently, and most importantly, accurately. But before we get all too excited, this is a years-long process and little still-out-there breathing air that he doesn't deserve.

It's still going to be a few more years before all those victims get the justice they deserve. And before they do, he's going to add one more victim to that count. Oh, man. How old was he? In 2005, he was 65 and he hadn't killed since he was in his late 50s. Little started talking to a woman named Carol Ann Stevens from Decatur, Alabama.

She was a single mom of a son who'd just graduated college and just a regular lady hoping to go on a date with the tall 65-year-old who was so charming.

They went on a 200 mile road trip for some reason, though Little said this was completely voluntary on her part. He even said that he liked her well enough and never intended to kill her at all. But when they stopped at Walmart somewhere along the way, they got into a fight. Little just saw Red and he strangled her in his car right there in the parking lot. After all the years, the monster crawled out of its cave to rob another child of his mother.

Four more years went by with no activity from Little in much more progress at the LA branch of cold case detectives slowly working through the pile of DNA samples, rape kits, and murders.

It wasn't until 2009 that Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca's file was picked up. She was Little's victim back in 1989, the one who had semen on her shirt. The DNA was run and saved in the system. Next came Audrey Nelson, also in 89. She'd scratched Little up so well that there was skin and bits of hair under her fingernails. Funny tangent here, the detective on the case

Mitzi Roberts also worked on the Black Dahlia case during her time on the backlog task force. The task force was set up to go over murders and assaults and the Black Dahlia was obviously amongst those files. It's thanks to her that we got any semblance of order in that case, despite the corrupt LA police force back in 47 when the Dahlia was killed and their habit of making files and evidence disappear.

Mitzi Roberts is greatly responsible for stitching it all back together. She's a bit of a superhero, to be honest. Anyway, Detective Roberts discovered that the two samples matched and she ran it through previous arrests.

Can I say it now? Go ahead. Bingo, baby. We got it. Bingo indeed. Remember that Little was tried for a few assaults and murders in his day. And back then they took his DNA, even if it couldn't exactly use it yet. Luckily, it was added to the system sometime throughout the years.

But now Roberts had a problem. Little had no credit card, no cell phone, no family, no electronic footprint.

He lived in his car if the arrest records across 27 states was anything to go by. This guy could be anywhere. Hell, he could be dead for all they knew. She was able to stitch together his arrest record after she realized that he was going under both his father's surname, McDowell, and his mother's little. When they discovered that he'd been tried and acquitted for so many murders and assaults, she and the entire department went into overdrive.

They didn't want to just find Samuel Little. They wanted him burning on a pyre. Look, we've been hating on the police throughout this case. Don't get me wrong. They deserved every bit of criticism we've thrown at them. But Detective Roberts and her team are why I love the police too. That fire for justice, once it ignites, is second to none. Lieutenant Roberts and her team went old school with this one.

since little himself was old school.

cell phone and credit card tracking wasn't going to cut it. By focusing on the places they knew he liked to return, she put out a BOLO for Samuel Little or McDowell, aged 65, driving an unspecified car that probably wasn't even registered to him. It was a pretty thin description, but surprisingly, she did get leads out of this.

In the three years it took them to find Little, dozens of traffic officers pulled him over but ended up letting the old man go, only to realize later who they'd stopped. Little kept slipping by, simply because he was such an unassuming old man. Luckily, Roberts kept updating the Bolo's every single week. She never allowed anyone to forget about Samuel Little. I give it to this woman. When Roberts has her teeth dug in, she doesn't let go.

She even tied Little to another victim by his DNA while she was waiting for a hit. Carol Linda Alford, a victim from 1987 who'd had DNA under her nails and on her underwear came back matching Little during this three-year search. Then on September 3rd, 2012, a police officer accosted Little at a homeless shelter in Louisiana.

He was with a few women known to be prostitutes and he had a crack pipe in his pocket. Why Little wasn't arrested for having drug paraphernalia on him is anyone's guess,

But the policeman at least ran Little's Walmart card because he didn't have an ID on him and later checked the name on the system where he discovered that he'd just let a wanted man go. Too late, Little was long gone by then, but Roberts went after him nonetheless, hoping he hadn't gone too far. The Walmart card ended up being like a beacon.

Every time Little stopped at a Walmart to buy food or more often booze, they got a ping on him. After tracking him for just two days, they found him on September the 5th outside a Wayside Christian Mission shelter in Louisville, Kentucky. Samuel Little was arrested at the age of 72, though he wasn't arrested for any murders at the shelter. Don't do this to us again. Come on.

No, no, relax. They didn't want him to disappear into the wind again. The officers who arrested him brought him in for a minor drug charge that he'd skipped out on a few years earlier, just so that Roberts and her team could get their ducks in a row. They needed to get everything they had on him through a judge to make sure that an arrest would stick. They couldn't risk this perpetual drifter getting out on bail or allowing him to get off on some technicality.

She was determined to cut Little's lifelong lucky drip off. Roberts was sure of three murders and three more attempted murders, but she was sure that there were more. She understood that she might never get the opportunity to get him for everything he'd done, but she was going to make damn sure that he was gonna die behind bars at the very least.

Roberts brought in everyone she could get her hands on that had ever crossed Little's path. First, our tough little fighter, Layla McClain, who nearly punched Little out, was brought in, as were the other survivors. Holden Nelson, whose attack was interrupted by a tenant of the apartment building where she lived,

and Laurie Beros, who played dead to save a life.

All three women didn't hesitate to testify when Roberts reached out to them. Roberts couldn't find Tonya Jackson though, but she did bring in the two police officers who'd interrupted Little's attack on her. Now they had five witnesses and Little's DNA on three separate murder victims.

The witnesses were treated horribly when they were brought in for the trial. Layla, Hilda, and Laurie had all turned their lives around and quite frankly went on to rise from the ashes like the fighters that they are. Yet the police stuffed them in a grimy motel off the side of the beaten track. The place was crawling with roaches, drug addicts, and prostitutes.

They were literally thrown into the most dangerous hellhole the city had. Layla, always a Spitfire, made no secret how terribly authorities had treated them.

Luckily, the women had a champion in the department. Lieutenant Roberts raised all sorts of hell when she got wind of their living conditions and she forced the DA to apologize to them and move them to a much more appropriate apartment. Despite their extremely stressful time on the stand, the three women did a phenomenal job. They'd come a long way since their days in the throes of addiction and their testimony was detailed and pretty hard to listen to.

I don't know how they kept it together with their attackers sitting right in front of them.

Samuel Little, if he had any chance of getting off this time, blew his shot to hell when he audibly giggled when each woman got to the point of their testimony when he had his hands around their throats and that they thought that they were going to die. He's so sick. I think he realized long before they got into the courtroom that he was done for. He was just...

claiming innocence because that's what he'd always done, and it was sort of a habit by now.

Nevertheless, he was found guilty of the murders of Carole Alford, Guadalupe Apodaca.

and Audrey Nelson and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on the 25th of September 2014. Little sat through the statements from the victim's families with no expression on his face and when it was his turn to speak his final words he vowed to appeal this verdict.

He called it legal lynching and told the court that they'd labeled him a serial killer without a shred of evidence.

So DNA is just empty air then? What the hell was he talking about? Well, he sat on the Declaration of Innocence for four whole years, never budging. Roberts could only trudge the rest of the piled up cases and hope that more DNA turned up. Little stood in his cell for all that time, and no one bothered to give him a minute of their time.

I want people to be investigating all the women that he killed, but I'm also kind of glad that he just sat there, rotting, and no one's bothered to listen to him at all. It probably ate at him, knowing that he wasn't important enough to warrant anyone wasting their time on him.

I think he realized that he wasn't going to get any recognition for the atrocities he'd committed. I mean, he was pushing 78 in 2018, he was getting weaker and sicker, little by now permanently in a wheelchair, and on a steady drip of heart and diabetes meds to keep him alive. I'm actually surprised he managed to make it to 78 given what kind of lifestyle he'd lived.

If he was ever going to get his name in the record books, there wasn't much time left to do it. While he stood it all over, Little picked up a pencil again for the first time since he was in his early twenties. I forgot about that. He learned how to draw in prison, right? Yes, he did, and he was pretty good at it too. Using the colored pencils that the prison supplied, Little started drawing scarily accurate portraits of his victims.

But he wasn't drawing them in preparation for confessions just yet.

He

was drawing them so that he could relive his glory days, see the fear in their eyes.

no, don't tell me he's using those drawings for what I think he is. yes. Let's put it this way. I'm surprised the pages didn't stick together when they finally came to light. That's pretty gross.

It gets worse. He drew the women with red spots in their eyes.

As you might know, Petechial hemorrhaging is common in victims of strangulation. Okay, that is worse. Good lord. His portraits were incredibly accurate, as we briefly mentioned it in part one, but you guys at home really need to go look it up. When you put the real photos of the victims next to it, it's identical. Down the scars, birthmarks, a gap in someone's teeth.

and as rudimentary as the portraits look at first glance, there's nothing amateur about them. It's better than what most professional sketch artists can come up with.

Between 2014 and 2018, Little kept adding to the pile of portraits until a Texas Ranger, James Holland, came to see Little in that year. He came under the guise of investigating Christie Brothers' murder in 1994.

There was no DNA, but if you remember, her boyfriend at the time did see the man that she left with and described the car as similar to one that little was driving at the time. But in truth, the FBI were listening in on the interview and they chosen Holland specifically because he'd worked the brother's case back then and he had a knack for getting a confession out of people.

So the feds were thinking the same thing that Robert was, that Little killed a lot more people than the three they got him for. They'd been working on that for the past four years, going over every case that fell in the states and cities that Little liked to hop around, looking over missing persons and victims that fit Little's M.O. They came with photo binders full of suspected victims. And when you hear this interrogation with Holland, the guy really is amazing.

He got little to start confessing in 10 minutes.

He spoke his language, big, guy talk. He wasn't coming to little to grovel or give in to demands. Little respected him and he sang like the caged canary he was.

He admitted to the murder of Denise Brothers and alluded to a few others, but he didn't say enough to pursue any convictions besides the Brothers murder. Holland didn't push it further, afraid that he'd scare Little back into his cave of silence again. Then a pretty reporter got wind of Samuel Little. He'd been doing the rounds on social media and internet sleuths were already trying to pin Little to the murders and disappearances.

It was by no means a media storm or anything, just a few whispers here and there.

Her name was Jillian Lauren, and she'd been writing back and forth with Little for the past year, slowly building up a relationship. Just after Holland got the confession for Denise Brothers, Lauren managed to arrange a meeting with Little at the California State Prison. And I'm not sure how I feel about Jillian, but I'll be honest with you, her body of work is impressive, and she obviously knows what she's doing. Like, she's really good at her job, but...

The pictures they took together just are very awkward to me.

Little has got his arm around her shoulder and they're just smiling like it's a family reunion and it just doesn't sit well.

wow, you guys at home can't see this, but it's really very disturbing. Wholesome if you have no contacts, but deeply frightened if you know that the killer of a hundred women is holding the hand of a girl in a floral dress who looks like she can be his granddaughter. That gives me chills too. How did the prison even allow this to take place? Isn't the whole point of locking him up to deny little any contact with women? It's another you moment for me.

Lauren wore dresses that were low-cut and fishnet stockings because she knew Little liked them. Holland commanded respect, but Lauren gave Little a taste of the things he liked the most. Admiration and skin.

However badly that picture and her methods ruffled me, Lauren apparently knew what she was doing because she got little to admit to the death of Mary Jo Brosley and even told her that he thought he'd killed around 86 people in his lifetime. But he still wasn't naming any names. A few months later, he was on trial for the Brothers case and he called up Holland, the Texas Ranger that he liked so much and told him that he'd like to make some confessions if

Holland had the time for it. Well, that's awful plight of him, isn't it? Holland was put in charge of the entire Samuel Little case immediately. What about Lieutenant Roberts? She's the one who blew this all up in the first place. I mean, that doesn't seem fair. Little liked Holland, that's why. He'd never have respected a woman. Roberts would never have gotten answers out of him. It had to be Holland.

Holland got the reporter, Jillian Lauren, back in and together they played a game of tag.

Holland drove him around to murder sites and got him McDonald's as they went. Appealing to Little's lifelong liking for road trips, no doubt. And Lauren stroked his ego. They spoke on the phone every single day and it's suspected that Little thought of her as his girlfriend or super fan or something of that sort. That must have messed with her mind though. mean, imagine having to put up

that face.

Imagine having to put up with that face every single day in the hopes of identifying more victims. It gives you a creepy, crawly feeling, but I'm guessing it can't have been easy for Lauren to keep up the charade. Jillian Lauren's done as much as Holland to identify Little's drawings. Like I said, she's amazing at what she does. I just hate that she had to get so close to him to give him some sense of joy or hope or whatever in his last days.

But without her, we'd never have the names we do today. Lauren's a much braver woman than I could ever be,

and stronger, getting that close and with the obsessive fixation he had on her, it would have driven me insane. I don't know how she kept it together. In just a month, the FBI were able to confirm that 33 of the 86 murders Little had told Lorne about matched the murders that they'd been referring to, names, descriptions, portraits, and conditions of bodies.

It was clear that Samuel Little had somewhat of an idactic memory. The amount of detail he remembered was astounding. The next two and a half years led to the murders of Anne Lee Stewart in 89, Zena Marie Jones in 1990, and Rose Evans from 91. None of them had DNA linking Little to the crimes, but the unusual places where they were dumped, his portraits and

Obviously, his confessions were sufficient. Bring the total of solved murders that actually went through the courts to seven. By the end, Holland and Loren were able to coach Little through his entire life, with the last years being the most fragmented. They settled on 93 victims that Little could pull from his recollections, that he'd killed in over 19 states.

with at least 20 of them being in the Los Angeles area alone.

It's almost certain there were more. Police were able to confirm around 60 of them and exonerated two men who had been arrested for Littles crimes in the past. But it was too little too late. One man had already spent 22 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit by the time he was set free.

The other, still unidentified women are lost to the swamps or were just simply never found and named. not that it stopped Jillian Lauren from trying to find and identify them, as well as a whole army of internet sleuths combing through missing persons reports and matching them to Little's eerily accurate portraits.

On December the 30th, 2020, Samuel Little died of COVID in the prison's infirmary at the age of 80. There was no one to mourn him when they lowered his simple pine coffin into the ground. But there were plenty of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers who breathed a sigh of relief that the man who'd robbed them of their daughters was finally dead. Can I get a hallelujah? But

Sit back real quick and think about it. 93 people, probably more than 100. How the hell does it get to this? For the same reason we've been saying all along, he was a ghost. No home, no credit code, no family. Nothing. When you have no one who knows you, there's no one to notice anything suspicious. Just the time

alone made it possible to disappear. You didn't have to have a credit card or an address to get by like you do today.

He stopped killing just before CCTV cameras and connected computer networks became commonplace enough to raise any alert and then there's the victims. Equally invisible and unconnected.

And the few that weren't were so random that there was just no trail to follow. But what about the why?

He checks all the boxes, abandonment, no real sense of belonging, and certainly not a lot of warmth and love growing up. And just as he goes into the most crucial teen years, Little's placed in juvie where staff abuse him and the other kids assault him. Then the same thing happens in prison. It's a lot of trauma for someone who's got no support system. If he didn't switch...

off all emotion and reaction to the world, he would have gone mad. Don't get me wrong, I think there was probably already a piece missing from inside of him from the get-go. But if he was going to survive at all, he needed to squash whatever emotion or heart he had left in him. And if you do that for long enough, eventually all that hate, the anger, the trauma, all of it just goes boiling over into the world. What

Ix me out is the unorganized methods and lack of planning of it all. Like there's no rhyme or reason, no specific MO or preferred victim. It's just all over the place. I've never really heard of a killer that operated with this level of disorganization.

I think he never had any sense of order in his life anyway, nothing, since both had any sense of structure to it. Hell, never even had anyone expect him to brush his teeth in the morning. Everything he did was done when he felt like it. How he wanted it and whatever came up tomorrow could be handled when it arrived. He had no one.

Nothing was ever expected of him and he just lived for the next day and the next woman who was unlucky enough to cross his path. Mindlessly living and mindlessly killing. That's all Little was made of. Nothing else mattered. This is definitely a case of both nature and nurture that led to the thing, the beast that Samuel Little became.

But I'm not going to blame anyone for being furious with the authorities. There is no doubt that they failed these women. They didn't give them the time or concern that every single human being on this planet deserves to have. Just because of their problems, their professions, they were not important enough to spend the resources on. And that's just the truth. There is no use in sugarcoating it here.

I'd like to think that times have changed, or maybe I just need to believe that if I'm going to be able to sleep soundly at all. Prejudices, assumptions, and sometimes just plain laziness have caused victims of all backgrounds to disappear into the growing piles of missing and murdered files. We've seen too many cases like this one to deny that it's true. Let's just hope that the standards they claim to uphold now are true. I do need to add one more thing though.

I wish we could have given each victim their own segment. I really do. I tried to at least give names where I could. These women had their lives and humanity stolen from them for so long that I wanted to give them back their identities as much as possible.

Unfortunately, Little has so many victims that I couldn't go into the backgrounds of the ones we did have names for. We'd have been here for months, but I hope that by giving them a name when we could, that they at least got some of that back.

And for those 33 who remain unnamed and still missing, I hope that one day we can give them back their identities as well. I've got a lot of faith in Julian Lauren, Lieutenant Roberts, and the amazing sleuth and amateur investigators out there. They've been doing amazing work so far. Maybe next time we can take on something a little lighter. Samuel Little was a hard one to get through.

And let's be honest, Dad needs a palate cleanser. He's got so worked up, I was starting to worry about him after a while there. don't think we've ever had one this frustrating or this outrageously cruel and senseless. Little was truly and completely evil. There's just no other word for it. To everyone who was on this ride with us from beginning to end, thank you.

Thank you for joining me and my PICs. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we will see you next time with more True Crime.