America’s deadliest serial killer, Samuel Little, who admitted to strangling 93 people, died in California at the age of 80, with the identities of nearly half of his victims still unknown.
Little said he targeted underprivileged and mostly black women, including sex workers, in the belief that it would draw less attention from a segregated law enforcement system that had little apparent interest in such victims – a calculation that was very accurate. His death means that families of many of the victims can never be closed.
He served three consecutive life sentences for the murder of three women in Los Angeles County in the late 1980s, crimes to which he was linked through DNA matches. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a Los Angeles jury on September 25, 2014, and began serving his sentence about two months later.
According to the FBI, Little began confessing to additional murders of a Texas Ranger who interrogated him in his California prison cell in 2018 and eventually admitted to killing 93 people across the country through strangulation between 1970 and 2005.
The FBI said investigators have since verified 50 of the confessions, with many more pending final confirmation, making Little the deadliest U.S. killer on the record.
Authorities said he appeared to be targeting mostly vulnerable young black women, many of them sex workers, or drug addicts, whose deaths were not yet well known at the time and in some cases were not recorded as murders.
In describing how he killed unpunished for years, Little praised the investigators for avoiding ‘people who would be missed immediately’, in an interview obtained by the Washington Post, in which Little’s repeated failures were captured. “I will sometimes go back to the same city and pick another grape for myself,” he said. ‘How many grapes do you all have here on the vine? I’m not going to go there the white neighborhood and pick out a little teenage girl. ‘
Many of his murders were initially recorded as overdose or attributed to accidental or indeterminate causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to an FBI profile of the killer.
Prior to his 2014 conviction, Little was linked to at least eight sexual assaults, attempted murders or murders, but he repeatedly escaped severe punishment.
Little has served two previous sentences in a California state prison, including a four-year term that ended in 1987 for assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, and a period of about 14 months that ended in April 2014. .
According to FBI video footage of his confessions in jail, Little is sitting in front of a wall of blocks in blue jail strips and a gray knitted cap, and he sometimes looks confused or smiling as he recounts the circumstances of the murder.
He was locked up in a state jail in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles, and died in an outside hospital early Wednesday morning, the Department of Corrections said. It is said that an official cause of death will be determined by the provincial medical investigating officer.
Reuters contributed to this report