Samuel Little

Appearance Samuel Littles 1966 to 1996

Samuel Little (aka Samuel McDowell ; born June 7, 1940 in Reynolds , Georgia - † December 30, 2020 in Lancaster , California ) was an American serial killer . On September 25, 2014, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of three women between 1987 and 1989 in Californiasentenced. After his conviction, the California authorities initially assumed that Little could have killed people in nine states from 1982 onwards. The following investigations led to the presumption that he could have committed 34 murders. Little himself claimed to have killed at least 90 people. By 2019, the police were able to assign him 50 murders between 1970 and 2005. That made Little the highest-casualty serial killer in United States history.

Life

Childhood and youth

Little was born while his mother was in prison, according to unsecured information. He himself said that his mother was a "lady of the night". Soon after he was born, his family moved to Ohio . He grew up in Lorain and was mainly raised by his grandmother. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School, where he was already socially conspicuous. In 1956, Little was arrested and sentenced for the first time while still in school for a break-in in Omaha , Nebraska. In the late 1960s, Little moved to Florida where he lived with his mother. He worked as a paramedic and as a cemetery clerk. The very strong Little took part in boxing training while in prison. After high school, he dropped out of college, spent most of his time on the streets, living off petty thefts and doing odd jobs.

crime

In 1961 Little was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain. He was released in 1964, left Ohio, and for the years that followed lived primarily on robbery and theft in various US states.

By 1975, Little had been arrested 26 times in 11 states, including charges of theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on police officers. In 1982 he was arrested in Pascagoula , Mississippi, and remanded for the murder of 22-year-old prostitute Melinda LaPree. LaPree was reported missing in September 1982. However, a grand jury declined to indict Little for the murder of LaPree. During the investigation, Little was transferred to Florida to be tried for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Mount, whose body was found in the fall of 1982. Witnesses identified Little as the person who had been with Mount the night before her disappearance. Because witnesses became involved in contradictions, Little was acquitted of Mount's murder in January 1984. A little later he moved to California, where he was staying near San Diego . In October 1984 Little was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for assaulting and beating two prostitutes. He was released in February 1987 and soon moved to Los Angeles, where he committed several murders.

On September 5, 2012, Little was arrested at a homeless shelter in Louisville , Kentucky, after authorities tested DNA and found him implicated in the July 13, 1987 murder of Carol Elford. The same applied to the murders of Audrey Nelson, killed on August 14, 1989, and of Guadalupe Abodacha, killed on September 3, 1987. Little was extradited to Los Angeles, where he was charged on January 7, 2013. A few months later, police reported that they were investigating whether Little could have committed dozen more murders in the 1980s. The case of the LaPree murder, in which Little was acquitted, has resumed. In the end, a total of 60 murders of women in different US states were checked for possible involvement by Little.

The amateur boxer Little knocked his victims unconscious before strangling them. As a result, it was not always immediately apparent that the dead were murder victims. During the follow-up examination of individual cases it became apparent that wrong causes of death had often been determined (drug overdose, accidental death, etc.). The victims were mostly African-American women with socially problematic backgrounds who often worked as prostitutes or were addicted to drugs. Little could not remember the names of his victims or the timing of the murders. In some cases, however, he remembered individual precise details and also made detailed drawings of individual victims, with which the FBI went public in order to further investigate the series of murders.

death

On December 30, 2020, Samuel Little died in a hospital.

See also

• List of serial killers

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürgen Schmieder: In the intoxication of confession. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 5, 2018.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Samuel Little: FBI confirms 'most prolific' US serial killer. BBC News, October 8, 2019, accessed October 8, 2019 . 
3. ↑ How Samuel could kill Little for decades. October 10, 2019, accessed April 5, 2020 . 
4. ↑ 93-time murderer Samuel Little is dead. 20 minutes , December 31, 2020, accessed December 31, 2020 .