Law enforcement have corroborated nearly three dozen murders – so far – committed by a 78-year-old man who is currently in a Texas prison, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said yesterday.
The alleged killer, Samuel Little, confessed to killing 90 women, the FBI had previously said in early November.
Little’s “nomadic lifestyle” and long criminal history have sent investigators looking across 36 cities and 16 states at his alleged crimes.
Little was convicted of three murders in California in 2014, for which he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
“The biggest lesson in this case is the power of information sharing,” said Kevin Fitzsimmons, a supervisory crime analyst with the FBI’s violent criminal apprehension programme. “These connections all started in our database of violent crime.”
Little’s known crimes began as early as 1956, as he crisscrossed the country shoplifting, soliciting prostitutes, committing fraud and burglary.
The FBI described him as having a “dark, violent streak”.
The earliest murders released to the public began in the 1970s, before the science of DNA matching was widely available to law enforcement, and continued until 2005.
He escaped prosecution and conviction more than once, even as several women escaped him.
Christina Palazzolo, a crime analyst with the FBI, said that when Little did have run-ins with police, they often simply shooed him out of town.
The FBI said the killer preyed on women who were sex workers or addicted to drugs, and whose “bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated”.
In the early 1980s, Little was charged with killing more than one woman in Mississippi and Florida.
However, he escaped indictment in Mississippi, and was not convicted in Florida.
He spent time in jail for assaulting a woman in Missouri and for holding a woman against her will in California.
Little was finally arrested in 2012 in a Kentucky homeless shelter, wanted on drug charges in California.
He was sent to Los Angeles, where police tested his DNA.
He was connected to three unsolved murders between 1987 and 1989 and convicted of those crimes in 2014.
Then Los Angeles police reached out to the FBI, asking agents to build a profile on the killer.
The FBI found several possible cases involving Little, the strongest of which was in Odessa, Texas.
In May, Texas Ranger James B Holland joined Palazzolo to interview Little.
Little confessed to 90 murders, and Palazzolo sat down the hall, “combing through data”.
Little, Palazzolo said, “went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi – one; Cincinnati, Ohio – one; Phoenix, Arizona – three; Las Vegas, Nevada – one.”
The remainder of Little’s confessions remain uncorroborated, and many of the victims remain unidentified.
Investigators said that Little remembers his victims well, but not when he killed them, making cases difficult to confirm.
Little is in poor health, and the FBI said they are working with him to identify victims before his almost certain death in prison.