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Samuel Little: The Most Prolific Serial Killer in U.S. History and the 68 Women Still Nameless · When Killers Get Caught with Brittany Ransom

• 0:04
  The night was quiet, the kind of quiet that makes every small
• 0:08
  sound feel louder than it should.
• 0:10
  Somewhere in America, sometime in the 1970s, a woman got into a
• 0:15
  car with a stranger. Not exactly a new concept.
• 0:20
  Maybe she thought it was just another trip.
• 0:22
  Maybe she needed money. Maybe she just trusted the wrong
• 0:26
  person. For a few minutes, no gunshots,
• 0:30
  no screams. Anyone could hear.
• 0:32
  No witnesses. Just a pair of hands around her
• 0:35
  throat. And then silence.
• 0:40
  At first, it looked like an isolated tragedy, a woman lost
• 0:43
  somewhere on the margins of society.
• 0:45
  But then it happened again and again.
• 0:48
  For decades, women disappeared like this across the United
• 0:51
  States. Florida, Texas, California,
• 0:53
  Mississippi, Arkansas. Women who lived on the edge of
• 0:57
  society. Women whose disappearances were
• 0:59
  often dismissed, misclassified, or barely investigated at all.
• 1:04
  Women whose names many people never even learned.
• 1:07
  The cases were scattered across different cities, different
• 1:10
  decades, and different police departments that never realized
• 1:13
  they were all chasing the same man because the man responsible
• 1:17
  kept moving city to city, state to state, decade to decade.
• 1:22
  And for years, no one saw the pattern.
• 1:25
  Not because the clues weren't there, but because the victims
• 1:27
  were the kind of people society often forgets.
• 1:31
  By the time the investigators finally stopped him, he had been
• 1:35
  killing for more than 30 years. And when he finally began to
• 1:38
  talk, he didn't confess to a handful of murders.
• 1:42
  He confessed to 93, making him the most prolific serial killer
• 1:48
  in American history. I'm Brittany Ransom, and this is
• 1:53
  When Killers Get Caught, the podcast where we examine the
• 1:56
  lives, behaviors and psychology become the most extreme acts of
• 2:00
  violence. And what happens when the truth
• 2:02
  finally catches up. You've been asking me to cover
• 2:05
  this case since 2020, so tonight we're finally diving in.
• 2:11
  This is the story of Samuel Little, the man who strangled
• 2:14
  dozens of women across America while their cases slipped
• 2:17
  quietly into forgotten police files.
• 2:22
  Samuel Little was born on June 7th, 1940 in Reynolds, Georgia.
• 2:26
  His early life was marked by instability and hardship that
• 2:28
  could follow him well into adulthood.
• 2:31
  Little's mother, who was believed to have been involved
• 2:33
  in sex work, was frequently absent during his childhood.
• 2:36
  Because of this, he was raised primarily by his grandmother in
• 2:39
  Lorain, OH. While his grandmother provided a
• 2:42
  home for him, Little's upbringing was far from stable,
• 2:45
  and many who later studied his life pointed to these early
• 2:48
  years as the beginning of a long pattern of behavioral problems.
• 2:52
  As a child, Little reportedly struggled in school.
• 2:55
  He had difficulty fitting in socially.
• 2:57
  Teachers and classmates described him as disruptive,
• 2:59
  prone to getting in trouble. Some reports suggest that he
• 3:02
  experienced bullying in isolation, which may have
• 3:05
  contributed to his growing anger and resentment toward other
• 3:08
  people during his youth. Little also claimed to have
• 3:11
  suffered a serious head injury, something investigators and
• 3:14
  psychologists later took note of while examining his behavior.
• 3:17
  The details of the incident, however, remain uncertain.
• 3:20
  According to Little's own account, he was struck in the
• 3:22
  head by another student during a fight at school and was knocked
• 3:25
  unconscious. He later told doctors
• 3:27
  investigators that he remained unconscious for several hours
• 3:30
  and that the incident occurred when he was in still in
• 3:33
  elementary school. Well, the story may sound
• 3:35
  dramatic. Injuries like this are not
• 3:37
  unheard of. In fact, cases of children
• 3:39
  suffering severe or even fatal head trauma from school fights
• 3:42
  have occurred recently. So the scenario itself is not
• 3:45
  impossible. However, it's important to be
• 3:47
  transparent about the source of this claim.
• 3:50
  There are no publicly confirmed medical records that document
• 3:52
  this injury. The only information about it
• 3:55
  comes from statements Little made during interviews after his
• 3:58
  arrest, particularly in conversations with Texas Ranger
• 4:01
  James Holland. While it is impossible to say
• 4:04
  exactly how much this injury influences later actions, head
• 4:08
  trauma has often been associated with impulse control problems
• 4:11
  and aggressive behavior. By the time Little reached his
• 4:15
  teenage years, he'd already begun developing a pattern of
• 4:18
  criminal activity. His first arrest came as a
• 4:20
  teenager, primarily for theft. Petty crimes will begin as minor
• 4:23
  offenses quickly escalated into more serious acts of violence.
• 4:27
  Records show that he frequently got into fights and displayed
• 4:29
  increasingly aggressive behavior toward others.
• 4:32
  These early run insurance with the loss of the stage.
• 4:33
  For a lifetime spent cycling in and out of the criminal justice
• 4:36
  system, Little's adult life became defined by constant
• 4:40
  movement and a repeated arrest across multiple states.
• 4:43
  Throughout the 60s and 70s, he was arrested numerous times for
• 4:46
  crimes including theft, fraud, assault, and driving under the
• 4:49
  influence. One of his earliest known
• 4:51
  violent crimes occurred in 1975. He was arrested for beating and
• 4:55
  strangling a woman in Florida. Although the victim survived and
• 4:59
  Little served time for the attack, the incident
• 5:01
  foreshadowed the method he would later use in the majority of his
• 5:04
  murders. Over the course of his life,
• 5:07
  Samuel Little spent decades behind bars for a variety of
• 5:11
  offenses. Investigators estimate that he
• 5:13
  spent roughly half of his adult life in prison or jail.
• 5:18
  However, because many of his sentences were for relatively
• 5:20
  short periods of time, he was repeatedly released back into
• 5:23
  society. Each release allowed him to
• 5:25
  travel to new cities and states, making it extremely difficult
• 5:28
  for law enforcement to connect crimes that occurred hundreds or
• 5:30
  even thousands of miles apart. This constant cycle of arrest,
• 5:34
  incarceration, and release create a situation where little
• 5:37
  was frequently on the radar of police, but rarely held long
• 5:40
  enough to stop his escalating violence.
• 5:42
  His criminal history was extensive, but because his
• 5:45
  offenses were so scattered, no single department ever really
• 5:49
  got a complete picture of the threat he possessed.
• 5:53
  By the time investigators would finally uncover the full scope
• 5:55
  of his crimes decades later, became clear that the troubled
• 5:58
  boy from Reynolds, Georgia, had grown into one of the most
• 6:01
  prolific serial killers in American history.
• 6:03
  That early life, marked by instability, violence, and
• 6:06
  repeated contact with the criminal justice system, had
• 6:09
  been the beginning of a trajectory that would ultimately
• 6:11
  leave dozens of victims across the United States.
• 6:16
  By the early 1970s, investigators believed that
• 6:19
  Samuel Little had already begun. The pattern of violence would
• 6:21
  eventually make him have the most confirmed kills in American
• 6:25
  history. While many of the exact dates
• 6:27
  are difficult to determine, law enforcement now believe his
• 6:29
  earliest murders likely began during this period, the early
• 6:32
  1970s. At the time, however, no one
• 6:34
  realized that a serial predator was operating.
• 6:37
  Little's victims are almost always women who did not really
• 6:40
  exist in regular society. They were sex workers, women
• 6:43
  struggling with addiction, people experiencing poverty and
• 6:46
  unstable housing. These are people whose lives
• 6:49
  were already complicated, and they were often invisible to the
• 6:51
  systems meant to protect them. When they disappeared.
• 6:54
  They were often few people even advocating for them, and some
• 6:58
  cases missing persons reports were delayed or never filed at
• 7:01
  all. This vulnerability made them
• 7:03
  easier targets for someone like Little, who frequently
• 7:07
  encountered these women in areas where they were seeking rides,
• 7:09
  money, or some kind of assistance.
• 7:11
  His method of killing also helped him evade detection.
• 7:14
  For decades, Little typically murdered his victims through
• 7:16
  strangulation. His hands were his weapon.
• 7:19
  Because strangulation requires no gun, no knife, and leaves
• 7:22
  behind far less trace evidence. There was no Ballistics to
• 7:25
  trace, no murder women for investigators to recover.
• 7:27
  And some cases, particularly when a victim had a history of
• 7:30
  substance abuse or when the body was discovered long after it
• 7:33
  death, the cause of death was even misinterpreted.
• 7:36
  They didn't even know that the person had been strangled.
• 7:40
  After killing his victims, Liville often disposed of their
• 7:43
  bodies in very remote areas. Empty fields, wooded areas,
• 7:47
  abandoned buildings along highways.
• 7:49
  Sometimes these bodies weren't discovered for months or even
• 7:52
  years. In other cases, the remains were
• 7:54
  found, but the victim was never even reported missing.
• 7:59
  We'd never gotten chance to identify them.
• 8:01
  And without that identification, investigators had virtually
• 8:04
  nothing to work with. It became extremely difficult to
• 8:07
  determine where the victim had last been seen, who she had been
• 8:10
  seen with, or what circumstances even led to her death in the 1st
• 8:13
  place. Another major factor that
• 8:16
  allowed Little to operate undetected was his own transient
• 8:19
  lifestyle. He wasn't just killing other
• 8:22
  transient people, he lived that too.
• 8:24
  He moved constantly, traveling from different state to
• 8:28
  different state all throughout the Seventies, 80s and 90s.
• 8:31
  This was Florida, Texas, California, Mississippi,
• 8:34
  Arkansas. Sometimes the crimes will be
• 8:37
  committed thousands of miles apart and during that time
• 8:40
  period police departments didn't have the centralized databases
• 8:43
  or communication systems that we have today.
• 8:46
  Crimes committed in different jurisdictions were often never
• 8:49
  compared and information sharing between departments was almost
• 8:54
  non existent and definitely inconsistent.
• 8:57
  Investigators also face challenges because some victims
• 9:00
  were initially believed to have died from other causes.
• 9:02
  When a body was discovered and the victim had a Clear History
• 9:05
  of drug use or unstable living conditions, that death could be
• 9:10
  assumed to be an overdose, assumed to be an accident.
• 9:13
  A lot of the original victims were deemed to have died from
• 9:16
  exposure instead of homicide. Essentially, the cops went well,
• 9:20
  this person got high and fell asleep somewhere they weren't
• 9:23
  supposed to and died because it was too cold outside, or died
• 9:26
  because it was too hot outside. Outside.
• 9:29
  These assumptions sometimes delayed investigations or just
• 9:33
  limit the amount of resources that were devoted to the case.
• 9:37
  Jurisdictional barriers are still a problem in the United
• 9:41
  States, honestly, even though we do have these national databases
• 9:45
  now. Every Police Department is
• 9:47
  ultimately responsible for investigating the crimes within
• 9:50
  their own city or county. And without any clear evidence
• 9:53
  that links the cases together, detectives don't really have a
• 9:57
  reason to suspect that a similar death in a different state would
• 10:01
  be connected to one happening in their jurisdiction.
• 10:05
  Unless there is clear DNA evidence through the CODIS
• 10:08
  system or the crime is so sensational and out there that
• 10:12
  it's just, oh, that weird case happened in California and we're
• 10:17
  over here in Florida. Unless it's something like that,
• 10:20
  they really have no reason to think that they need to overstep
• 10:24
  their boundaries, and most of them don't really want to.
• 10:27
  I mean, a lot of police departments across the country
• 10:30
  right now are underfunded and understaffed.
• 10:34
  It's not really this awesome high profile job that people
• 10:40
  love for you to be a cop. Combining all these factors and
• 10:46
  adding in that the marginalization of the victims.
• 10:49
  And honestly, there wasn't really a lot of advocacy
• 10:52
  networks back then either. These cases just never received
• 10:56
  much of A sustained investigation.
• 11:00
  All this together created the perfect conditions for someone
• 11:03
  like Samuel Little to operate completely undetected,
• 11:06
  vulnerable victims, no evidence left behind, and the crimes so
• 11:12
  scattered using our own disjointed justice system
• 11:15
  against us. And as a result, all these
• 11:18
  murders remained isolated incidents for decades, almost 40
• 11:22
  years, completely invisible case files set on shelves, victims
• 11:30
  when unidentified. And the connections between them
• 11:32
  remained hidden. Well, until 2012, when what
• 11:37
  first appeared to be a routine arrest at a homeless shelter in
• 11:40
  Louisville, KY, would expose the true scale of Samuel Little's
• 11:44
  crimes. Now I have to give you some back
• 11:52
  story here because now the CODIS system is called the Combined
• 11:56
  DNA Index System and it was created in 1990 as a pilot
• 11:59
  software project by the FBI to connect 14 state and local
• 12:03
  laboratories was formally established on a national level.
• 12:06
  They called the NDIS following the DNA Identification Act of
• 12:10
  1994, and then the national database became operational in
• 12:14
  October of 1998, linking all 50 states.
• 12:18
  And so that's why we didn't have the information to catch someone
• 12:23
  like Samuel Little until he got caught for the first time in
• 12:27
  decades, September 5th, 2015. He got arrested at a homeless
• 12:33
  shelter in Louisville, KY on narcotics charges.
• 12:37
  At first, the arrest seemed relatively minor compared to the
• 12:41
  long list of other offenses on his record.
• 12:44
  But when they took him into custody, they ran his
• 12:47
  information through the national CODIS database and they
• 12:50
  discovered something that will completely shift the
• 12:52
  investigation. His DNA matched evidence that
• 12:56
  was collected from three unsolved murders in Los Angeles.
• 13:01
  Those murders had taken place decades earlier and involved
• 13:04
  women who had been strangled. The DNA evidence allowed
• 13:07
  investigators to link little directly to the crimes,
• 13:09
  something that had never been possible when it originally
• 13:12
  occurred. And in 2014, he was extradited
• 13:15
  to California to stand trial, and by 2018, he was convicted of
• 13:19
  three murders and sentenced to life in prison without the
• 13:22
  possibility of parole. Even after circuit hearing
• 13:25
  conviction, though, investigators suspected that
• 13:27
  this case was far from over because the detectives that were
• 13:30
  reviewing Little's criminal history and travel patterns
• 13:33
  started to notice something scary.
• 13:35
  For decades, every time he moved from one state to another, there
• 13:39
  were numerous unsolved murders involving strangulating women
• 13:43
  and places specifically that Little lived or had traveled
• 13:47
  through. Some investigators suspected
• 13:50
  they were looking at a serial killer whose crimes had never
• 13:52
  been fully uncovered. That suspicion eventually peaked
• 13:56
  the interest of Texas Ranger James Holland, and James Holland
• 14:00
  began interviewing Little while he was serving his life
• 14:03
  sentence. Holland was working these cold
• 14:05
  cases in Texas, and he believed that Little was responsible for
• 14:10
  several of the unsolved murders that he was looking into.
• 14:13
  So in 2018, he traveled to California to speak with him,
• 14:16
  hoping that he could just get some information about that
• 14:19
  case. At first the conversation was
• 14:22
  slow, very cautious, but over time, Little began to trust him
• 14:26
  and began to talk. And what followed would become
• 14:30
  one of the most significant confession series in modern
• 14:33
  criminal investigations. During multiple interviews,
• 14:36
  Little would describe murders that had occurred across the
• 14:39
  country over several decades. He provided details about the
• 14:42
  victims, location, circumstances, recalling events
• 14:45
  from the 70s and 80s with unbelievable clarity.
• 14:49
  During one interview, Holland asked him how he chose his
• 14:51
  victims, and Little reportedly said, I don't pick them, I let
• 14:55
  them pick me. He claimed that many of the
• 14:58
  women approached him first, asking for a ride or for some
• 15:02
  assistance, and his mind that meant that they had chosen to
• 15:05
  have this encounter with him. Investigators later noted that
• 15:08
  this framing was a way for Little to psychologically
• 15:11
  distance himself from responsibility.
• 15:13
  Even though he knew he was the one who ultimately attacked and
• 15:16
  killed these women, He had to give himself some kind of
• 15:19
  rationale. In another moment that disturbed
• 15:22
  investigators, Little was asked why he chose strangulation
• 15:24
  rather than a weapon, and according to interview notes, he
• 15:27
  simply raised his hands and said you don't need a gun, all you
• 15:30
  need is these. Holland later recalled that
• 15:33
  Little often spoke about the murders with little emotion,
• 15:35
  sometimes even smiling as he described events that took place
• 15:39
  decades before. Investigators also noticed
• 15:43
  something unusual about the way Little's memory worked.
• 15:46
  He struggled to remember basic timeline details, such as exact
• 15:48
  year, city or even what name he had been using while he was
• 15:51
  driving through that area. But when he was asked about the
• 15:55
  women themselves, his recollection was remarkably
• 15:59
  precise. He could describe the victim's
• 16:02
  appearance in vivid detail, her hair color, height, clothing,
• 16:06
  the smallest physical feature like a freckle scar or gap in
• 16:09
  her tooth. And some cases he even remember
• 16:12
  the way she laughed or the final word she spoke before he
• 16:15
  attacked her. Holland later said that Little
• 16:18
  seemed to remember the crimes visually, almost as if he were
• 16:21
  replaying these scenes from a movie in his mind.
• 16:24
  That ability LED investigators to ask him to draw the women he
• 16:27
  remembered, and Little began sketching portraits of victims
• 16:30
  from memory, recalling their faces from the crimes that he
• 16:33
  committed 30 some years before. The drawings were detailed
• 16:37
  enough that the FBI eventually released them to the public in
• 16:41
  hopes that someone would recognize these women, who have
• 16:44
  remained unidentified now for decades.
• 16:46
  Perhaps the most disturbing detail Little shared during
• 16:49
  these interviews was what stayed with him the longest.
• 16:51
  He said the moment he remembered most clearly was not the act of
• 16:55
  killing those women, but the moment just before it happened,
• 16:58
  the moment when his victim realized she was in mortal
• 17:01
  danger. Eventually, Little confessed to
• 17:05
  killing 93 women. The number stunned
• 17:08
  investigators. If this was accurate, it would
• 17:10
  make him the most prolific serial killer in American
• 17:12
  history. As detectives began reviewing
• 17:14
  the information, many of the descriptions matched unsolved
• 17:18
  cases, some that were still open.
• 17:21
  Some details, he recalled, were so specific that investigators
• 17:25
  were able to connect them directly to existing case files.
• 17:28
  The portraits he drew also proved significant.
• 17:31
  In several cases, families and friends recognize the women in
• 17:35
  the sketches and contacted authorities, helping
• 17:38
  investigators finally identify missing persons victims who had
• 17:42
  been unknown for decades. By the time the interviews
• 17:45
  concluded, investigators had started the long process of
• 17:48
  verifying Little's claims and matching them to unsolved
• 17:50
  murders across the country. Dozens of cases have already
• 17:54
  been have already been confirmed, and investigators
• 17:57
  believe more may eventually be linked to him.
• 17:59
  What began as a simple drug arrest in Kentucky revealed a
• 18:02
  criminal career that had remained hidden.
• 18:06
  Now, one of the most important parts of the story isn't the man
• 18:08
  who committed these crimes. It's the women whose lives were
• 18:12
  taken and whose names were ignored and forgotten for many
• 18:15
  years. The victims connected to Samuel
• 18:17
  Little were treated as anonymous statistics.
• 18:20
  Many were sex workers, women struggling with addiction,
• 18:22
  people living on that side of society we don't like to think
• 18:25
  about. And when they disappeared, their
• 18:28
  cases were often not investigated.
• 18:30
  This with the same urgency given other victims.
• 18:32
  Some were listed as identified Gene Doe's.
• 18:34
  Others were simply filed away as missing people who were never
• 18:37
  found. But as investigators worked
• 18:39
  slowly through Little's confessions and the portraits he
• 18:41
  drew from memory, something began to change.
• 18:44
  Slowly, these women started to get their names back.
• 18:47
  So for a moment, we're going to stop talking about the killer
• 18:51
  and say their names. Melinda Lapre.
• 18:57
  Guadalupe Apodaca. Carol.
• 19:00
  Linda Alford. Gwendolyn Moore.
• 19:03
  Audrey Nelson Everett. Evelyn Weston.
• 19:07
  Yvonne Hill, Daisy McGuire, Xena Marie Jones, Annie Lee Stewart
• 19:15
  Rose Evans, Margaret Peggy Phelps, Denise Brothers, Linda
• 19:21
  Jackson, Joanne Gay, Nancy Carol Stevens, Mary Jo Payton, Barbara
• 19:29
  Barrow, Rosetta Bishop, Deborah Jackson, who for nearly 40 years
• 19:36
  had been known only as Orange Socks and most recently Yvonne
• 19:40
  Plus, was identified in 2023 after decades being known as
• 19:46
  Macon Jane Doe. Unfortunately, investigators
• 19:50
  believe there are still many victims connected to Little who
• 19:52
  remain unidentified. The FBI has linked him to
• 19:55
  multiple Jane Doe cases across the United States, but because
• 19:58
  many of these women were never even reported missing in the
• 20:00
  first place. And records from the 1970s and
• 20:03
  80s are incomplete. Their identities may never be
• 20:06
  known. Each of these names represent a
• 20:09
  person who had a life became Each of these names represents a
• 20:14
  person who had a life before they became part of a police
• 20:18
  file. They had families, friends,
• 20:20
  childhood memories, and futures that were stolen from them for
• 20:24
  decades. Many of these women were
• 20:26
  dismissed or overlooked because of their circumstances, but the
• 20:29
  work of investigators, forensic scientists, and families who
• 20:32
  never stopped searching has helped restore some of their
• 20:35
  identities. And there are still many more
• 20:38
  victims whose names we may never actually know.
• 20:43
  But telling their stories and saying their names ensures that
• 20:46
  they are no longer invisible. Because while Samuel Little may
• 20:50
  be remembered for the number of murders he committed, the real
• 20:53
  story is about the women whose lives mattered even when the
• 20:56
  world failed to notice them. One of the most difficult truths
• 21:09
  revealed by the crimes of Samuel Little is not just how long he
• 21:12
  was able to kill, but why it took so long for anyone to
• 21:16
  realize what was happening. His case exposed something
• 21:20
  deeply uncomfortable about the way the society, and sometimes
• 21:23
  the criminal justice system, values certain victims more than
• 21:26
  it values others. Many of Little's victims were
• 21:29
  transient women. Some were sex workers, addicts,
• 21:34
  homeless, living in unstable situations, women of color.
• 21:39
  And these circumstances made them especially vulnerable, but
• 21:42
  only to violence, but being overlooked after their
• 21:45
  disappearances. In the United States, there are
• 21:47
  long documented disparities in how homicide victims are
• 21:50
  investigated and reported, depending on race, economic
• 21:53
  status, and social circumstances.
• 21:56
  Studies have shown that cases involving white victims,
• 21:59
  particularly white women, tend to receive more media attention
• 22:02
  and in many cases, more investigative resources.
• 22:05
  Meanwhile, cases involving Black victims, Indigenous victims, and
• 22:08
  people living in poverty also receive far less coverage and
• 22:11
  urgency. This imbalance has sometimes
• 22:13
  been referred to by journalists and researchers as the Missing
• 22:16
  White Woman Syndrome, highlighting how media and
• 22:19
  public attention are not always distributed equally.
• 22:22
  Even in my own journey as a true crime researcher and
• 22:24
  commentator, I have seen this imbalance play out in real life.
• 22:27
  My first national case fell under what people would
• 22:29
  recognize as Missing White Woman syndrome.
• 22:32
  I was brought in to participate in a 2020 documentary about the
• 22:35
  disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito, and while she
• 22:38
  absolutely deserved to be found and her killer exposed, the
• 22:41
  urgency around her disappearance had a distinctive fervor because
• 22:44
  she was young, beautiful, and yes, white.
• 22:48
  Meanwhile, so many missing women and girls appear on my news
• 22:51
  tracker every single day, and they receive one article, if
• 22:54
  they're lucky, maybe 1 Amber Alert.
• 22:57
  And then I never hear about them ever again.
• 22:59
  I look up their names and it just never tells me whether this
• 23:03
  person was found. Their stories disappear from the
• 23:06
  news cycle almost as quickly as they appear, and honestly, it
• 23:09
  just feels unfair. In cases like Samuel Little's,
• 23:13
  these disparities create the perfect environment for someone
• 23:17
  who operates without drawing widespread alarm.
• 23:20
  Many of his victims were people whose lives were already
• 23:24
  complicated, so complicated by poverty, addiction and unstable
• 23:28
  housing. When individuals in these
• 23:30
  situations disappear, their absences are often just
• 23:34
  explained away. Well, they assume she just
• 23:38
  moved, she left town, maybe she became even more of an addict
• 23:42
  than she already was. This delays missing persons
• 23:46
  reports. It slows down investigations
• 23:48
  before they can ever begin. Within the criminal justice
• 23:51
  system, these assumptions can sometimes influence how cases
• 23:54
  are initially approached. When the victim is perceived as
• 23:57
  being involved in risky behavior like sex work, there's an
• 24:01
  unspoken tendency to treat that death as less urgent and less
• 24:04
  solvable. In some cases, the death might
• 24:07
  be misclassified entirely. If you're an addict, a lot of
• 24:10
  things that don't seem to make much sense get classified as an
• 24:14
  overdose or an accident or exposure.
• 24:17
  Even though if you just spent a little bit more time
• 24:20
  investigating this crime scene, it would be very obvious that
• 24:22
  this person did not die from an overdose.
• 24:26
  This lack of urgency does not necessarily come from malice on
• 24:28
  the part of investigators. Often it reflects systemic
• 24:31
  limitations, heavy caseloads, the assumptions that exist
• 24:35
  within society as a whole. But the impact is still so real.
• 24:39
  When victims are seen as problematic or disposable, and
• 24:43
  fewer resources are devoted to finding the answers, that means
• 24:47
  that people get away with murder.
• 24:49
  And for the families of these victims, the lack of empathy is
• 24:53
  devastating. Many people spend years trying
• 24:56
  to convince authorities that their loved ones matter and
• 24:59
  their disappearances deserve some kind of attention.
• 25:03
  In some of these cases, they waited decades before receiving
• 25:07
  confirmation of what they had assumed already happened.
• 25:11
  The investigation into Samuel Little ultimately forced many
• 25:14
  agencies to re examine cases long forgotten.
• 25:17
  It highlighted how easily violence remains hidden when it
• 25:21
  targets people whose lives are already marginalized.
• 25:24
  The lesson from this case is not about one man's crime, but also
• 25:28
  the need for equal urgency, equal compassion, and equal
• 25:30
  investigation for every victim regardless of their race,
• 25:34
  income, or their circumstance. Samuel Little died December
• 25:40
  30th, 2020 at the age of 80 years old while serving multiple
• 25:44
  life sentences in California State Prison.
• 25:47
  At the time of his death, he was being held at California State
• 25:50
  Prison, Los Angeles County, where he had been transferred
• 25:52
  after his conviction for those 3 murders in Los Angeles.
• 25:56
  According to the California Department of Corrections and
• 25:58
  Rehabilitation, Little died of natural causes after several
• 26:01
  years of declining health. By the time he died, Samuel
• 26:04
  Little had already confessed to killing 93 women across the US,
• 26:07
  those murders spanning from the early 1970s into the mid 2000s.
• 26:11
  Investigators from the FBI and multiple law enforcement
• 26:14
  agencies have spent years working to verify these claims
• 26:17
  through a combination of DA evidence.
• 26:19
  Through a combination of DNA evidence, case records and
• 26:22
  details only the killer could know, authorities have been able
• 26:25
  to confirm many of the murders he described.
• 26:28
  As of the most recent updates from the FBI, investigators have
• 26:31
  confirmed at least 60 of Little's victims.
• 26:34
  That number alone makes him the most prolific.
• 26:37
  However, his own statement suggests that number is higher.
• 26:41
  If Little's confessions are accurate, there are still 33
• 26:43
  women whose deaths remain unconfirmed and whose identities
• 26:46
  have not been discovered in the years leading up to his death.
• 26:50
  He continued to cooperate with investigators after those
• 26:52
  initial interviews with the Texas Ranger in 2018, law
• 26:56
  enforcement officials from all across the country started
• 26:59
  flying to California to speak with him about their own
• 27:02
  unsolved murders that matched his known patterns.
• 27:05
  And these interviews did result in additional confessions and
• 27:08
  new leads in cold cases that were dormant for decades, even
• 27:13
  as hell. Even as his health declined,
• 27:15
  investigators continued reviewing the statements,
• 27:17
  comparing them with old case files, missing persons reports,
• 27:21
  forensic evidence. In some cases, the details he
• 27:23
  provided reopen investigations. However, Little ultimately died
• 27:28
  before every confession could be fully investigated, and today
• 27:32
  dozens of his alleged victims remain unidentified.
• 27:35
  Several cases he described have yet to be matched to a specific
• 27:39
  missing person or any recovered remains.
• 27:42
  The work of identifying those victims is ongoing.
• 27:45
  Law enforcement agencies, forensic genealogists and
• 27:48
  families of missing people continue to review the evidence
• 27:51
  Little left behind, including his confessions and the
• 27:54
  portraits he drew from memory. Even after his death, the
• 27:57
  investigation into Samuel Little's crimes continue as
• 28:00
  authorities work to uncover the names and stories of the women
• 28:03
  who have yet to be found. The most disturbing part of this
• 28:07
  story is not just what Samuel Little did, it's how long he was
• 28:11
  able to do it. Almost 40 years.
• 28:15
  Women disappeared across the US. No one realized the pattern.
• 28:19
  The victims were poor. They were struggling with
• 28:21
  addiction. They were sex workers.
• 28:24
  They were women of color. They were exactly the kind of
• 28:27
  people society tries to forget. Former FBI profiler Robert
• 28:31
  Ressler once said serial killers hunt where the vulnerable live.
• 28:35
  If no one notices the victims are missing, the killer can keep
• 28:38
  hunting. Samuel Little used that.
• 28:42
  And the uncomfortable truth is that the conditions that allowed
• 28:44
  him to kill for 40 years did not disappear when he died.
• 28:48
  Every year in the United States, thousands of people are reported
• 28:52
  missing. Some are found, many are not.
• 28:56
  And when the victims are poor, homeless, addicted, living on
• 28:59
  the street, those cases still receive little attention.
• 29:04
  Their stories still disappear from the headlines, and their
• 29:07
  names fame from public memory. Which means somewhere in America
• 29:11
  tonight, another missing person report is being filed.
• 29:14
  Another case file is being opened.
• 29:16
  And there's always the possibility that another pattern
• 29:19
  is forming, one that no one has noticed yet.
• 29:22
  Because predators don't just rely on violence.
• 29:26
  They rely on silence. They rely on indifference.
• 29:29
  They rely on the assumption that some people matter less than
• 29:33
  others. But eventually, the truth
• 29:35
  catches up. And when it does, it always
• 29:38
  leaves something behind. A name, a case file, a trail.
• 29:43
  And if someone is willing to follow it long enough, the truth
• 29:47
  always leaves a trail. For the women whose names were
• 29:51
  lost for decades, that trail finally LED back to them.
• 29:56
  My name is Brittany Ransom, and this has been when killers get
• 29:59
  caught. See you next week.