Samuel Little, named the most prolific killer in the US history after confessing to have murdered at least 93 people, died on Wednesday in California due to multiple health complications. He was 80.
California corrections department spokeswoman Vicky Waters said there was no sign of foul play, and his cause of death will be determined by a coroner. He was serving a three consecutive life-without-parole sentences from Los Angeles for the deaths of three women that occurred in the late 1980s.
The FBI said Samuel Little had confessed to 93 other murders, and that his admissions were “credible “. During approximately 700 hours of interviews, Little provided details of scores of slayings only the killer would know.
His gruesome trail of murders was disclosed in a report released in November 2018 by the FBI. The agency that said his named popped up in their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, in connection with a series of unsolved murders across the country.
Almost all of Little’s victims were women, many of them prostitutes, drug addicts or poor people living on the edges of society. They were individuals, he said he believed, who would leave few people behind to look for them and not much evidence for police to follow.
In October 2019, the law enforcement agency was able to verify 50 confessions, with many more pending final confirmation.
The prolific serial killer was arrested in September 2012 in a Kentucky homeless shelter. He was then extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge. Once in custody, Los Angeles Police Department detectives obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989.
The victims, all women, had been beaten and then strangled, and their bodies were dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage, the FBI said. He drowned one, a woman he met at a nightclub in 1982.
He pleaded his innocence but was convicted in 2014, the FBI said.
Samuel Little’s last killing was in 2005 in Tupelo, Mississippi. He also killed people in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, Nevada, Arkansas and other states.
Little revealed few details about his own life other than that he was raised in Lorain, Ohio, by his grandmother. Authorities said he often went by the name Samuel McDowell.
