America’s deadliest serial killer, Samuel Little, who confessed to strangling 93 people, died in California at the age of 80, with the identity of almost half of his victims still unknown.
Little said he targeted disadvantaged women, mostly black, including sex workers, in the belief that it would draw less attention from a disjointed law enforcement system that had little apparent interest in such victims – a calculation that has been shown to be severely right. His death means that the families of many of the victims may never be closed.
He was serving three consecutive life sentences without parole for the murder of three women in Los Angeles County in the late 1980s, crimes to which he was linked through DNA testing. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a Los Angeles County jury on September 25, 2014 and began serving his prison sentence about two months later.
According to the FBI, Little began to confess further murders to a Texas Ranger who interviewed him in his California prison cell in 2018 and finally admitted to killing 93 people across the country by strangulation between 1970 and 2005.
The FBI said investigators checked 50 of those confessions, with many others pending final confirmation, making Little the most deadly American serial killer on record.
Authorities said he appears to have targeted mainly vulnerable young black women, many of them sex workers or drug addicts, whose deaths were not well publicized at the time and, in some cases, were not registered as homicides.
Describing how he killed with impunity for years, Little bragged to investigators to avoid “people they would miss” in an interview acquired by the Washington Post, which examined repeated failures to catch Little. “I would go back to the same city sometimes and pick another grape for myself,” he said. “How many grapes do you have on the vine here? I am not going to go into the white neighborhood and choose a teenager. “
Many of his murders were initially recorded as overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to an FBI profile of the killer.
Before his convictions in 2014, Little was linked to at least eight sexual assaults, assassination attempts or homicide, but several times he escaped severe punishment.
Little served two previous sentences in a California state prison, including a four-year sentence that ended in 1987 for assault with a deadly weapon and a false prison sentence, and a 14-month sentence that ended in April 2014.
The FBI video recordings of his prison confessions showed Little sitting in front of a concrete block wall in a blue prison uniform and a gray mesh cap, sometimes looking surprised or smiling as he recounted the circumstances of the murders.
He was incarcerated in a state prison in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles, and died on Wednesday morning in an outside hospital, the state corrections department said. He said an official cause of death would be determined by the county coroner’s office.
Reuters contributed to this report