Samuel Little, the country’s most prolific serial killer, who confessed to having committed more than 90 murders, died. He was 80 years old.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he died Wednesday morning in a hospital. The Los Angeles County coroner must determine the official cause of death.
Little spent weeks interviewing the Texas Ranger James Holland, divulging details about the murders and offering supporting evidence. He also made portraits of more than 30 of the victims, describing where he found them, what they wore, how they killed them and where they hid their bodies.
He told investigators that he strangled them all. His first murder was in 1970 and the last in 2005. The crimes occurred in 19 states, with the majority of their victims in California and Florida.
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The FBI called Little “the most prolific serial killer in US history” last year, and his analysts believe all of his confessions are credible, although some of the deaths were originally accidents or overdoses. Some victims were never found.
He was a former boxer, and investigators said they believed he knocked out his victims with a punch before strangling them while masturbating. The victims were mainly prostitutes, drug addicts and women who lived on the margins of society. At least one was transgender.
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Before he was caught for the deaths, he went in and out of prison. California officials said he served four years for assault with a deadly weapon in the mid-1980s and received parole in 2012 for possession of a controlled substance.
DNA samples collected while he was in custody related him to three unsolved homicide cases dating from the 1980s. In 2014, he was sentenced to three life sentences without parole.
The FBI posted some of Little’s confessions in his own words on YouTube. In 1984, he said he met a 25-year-old “hippie”-looking woman outside a strip club who asked him for a ride from Cincinnati to Miami.
He took her to Kentucky and killed her there, leaving the body on a hill.
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“I saw a small frog going up the hill, and there was vegetation up there – there was no house or anything,” he confessed on video. “And then I parked there and hid the car in that little vegetation up there.”
In a 2018 interview with The Cut, a subsidiary of the web-based New York magazine, he said that killing his victims “felt like paradise”.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.