With a 100-page rap sheet detailing crimes in 24 states spanning 56 years, detectives admitted it was incredible Samuel Little had served less than 10 years in prison.
Between his spells in jail for assault, burglary, armed robbery, shoplifting and drug offences, the nomadic 6ft 3in loner made his money as a bare-knuckle prizefighter.
But now, police across America have discovered Little loved to indulge in violence outside of the ring too.
The 72-year-old has confessed to more than 90 murders – and if his claim is true, it makes him one of the world’s biggest serial killers.
Four years ago, Little was convicted in LA of the killings of three women between 1987 and 1989, after being linked to them by DNA evidence.
While serving his three life sentences, the former ambulance attendant was last summer linked with the unsolved 1994 murder of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas.
He was extradited to the Lone Star State and struck up a rapport with Texas Ranger James Holland.
Despite previously pleading innocence, Little began opening up. Then, two weeks ago, he finally confessed to having killed scores of women.
He is now connected to more than 30 cases as police across 14 states review all unsolved cases that fit Little’s travelling timeline. Some unsolved murders dating back 40 years have already been closed.
They include that of Julia Critchfield, left, in Saucier, Mississippi, in 1978, the 1982 killing of Rosie Hill in Marion County, Florida, and the riddle of Melissa Thomas – whose body was found in a cemetery in Opelousas, Louisana, in 1996.
All three cases had baffled police. Over the years, cold case detectives would try to unearth new information but each time it proved fruitless. But murder squad detectives across the US have been handed new details by Little they say only the killer would know.
So far, we don’t have any false information coming from him,” said Ector County District Attorney Bobby Bland.
"If all of these are confirmed, he’ll be the most prolific serial killer, with confirmed killings, in American history. People for years have been trying to get a confession out of him and James Holland is the one who finally got him.”
Police say Little often delivered a knockout punch to the prostitutes, drug addicts and troubled women he preyed on before strangling them while performing a sex act on himself. He would dump the bodies and then leave town.
“We see a pattern and the pattern matches what he’s got away with in the past,” said LAPD Detective Mitzi Roberts, who made the first breakthrough in the case.
Authorities have already confirmed his role in at least nine cases, including Critchfield, Hill and Thomas, as detectives from across the country visit his jail cell in the hope of getting answers.
But police are facing the tricky question of whether to prosecute Little further, as he is already serving life – and spending millions of dollars of taxpayer cash on new convictions would not increase his sentence.
As they look into his past, they have begun piecing together the killer’s movements.
Born in July 1940 in Georgia, he was raised by his grandmother in Ohio.
At 16, Little picked up his first charge, for breaking and entering.
Between then and 1975, he was arrested 26 times in 11 states on charges ranging from shoplifting to aggravated assault on a police officer. His first known attack on a woman was in 1976, when St Louis drug addict Pamela Kay Smith was found pleading for help, stripped from the waist down with her hands tied behind her back with electrical cord.
Smith told police a man had picked her up, strangled her, then beat and raped her before she managed to escape. Police arrested Little in a car matching the victim’s description and found her clothes inside. “I only beat her,” he told them.
Remarkably, he only got three months in jail after being convicted of assault with the intent to ravish-rape in December 1976.
Little was emboldened and was regularly arrested or suspected of violent attacks on women over the next five decades.
Incredibly, a lack of communication between police forces meant he always managed to get off relatively lightly – and often scot-free. In 1982, as police probed the murder of Melinda LaPree in Pascagoula, Mississippi, two prostitutes came forward to claim Little had attacked them.
He was arrested for the murder and the two assaults but a grand jury failed to indict him.
Later that same year, Little was charged with the murder of Patricia Mount in Forest Grove, Florida. But despite being charged, he was acquitted in 1984.
Months later, in October 1984, he was charged with attacking a woman in San Diego. Little avoided a more serious charge when he agreed to plead guilty to assault and false imprisonment and served two and a half years.
On his release, he moved to southern California – where, in 1987, Carol Alford was found murdered and Audrey Nelson found dumped in a skip two years later.
Guadalupe Apodaca’s body also turned up in an abandoned building in the state in 1989.
All three cases went cold until April 2012, when Roberts put DNA evidence found on the bodies into a national database. The results linked to Little – who was finally traced to a Christian shelter in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 2014, he was put on trial and convicted of murder.
“This is a man … who believes he can take whatever he wants from women,” prosecutor Beth Silverman told the Los Angeles jury.
Now crippled by poor health and using a wheelchair, Bland speculates that Little has finally confessed after the appeals to his life sentence in California were rejected and he no longer has any reason to hide his guilt.
However, police warn that any hope relatives of his victims have that he is showing some remorse for his crimes is sorely misplaced.
As one detective who recently interviewed the killer said in their report, Little “advised that God put him on this Earth to do what he was doing”.
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