Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I have to be honest
with you, looking at the stack of documents we
have on the desk today, the FBI VICAP reports,
the court transcripts from the early 80s, the
biography, I'm having a hard time reconciling
two things. Which two things? The sheer volume
of the violence we are about to discuss and the
silence, the total silence that surrounded it
for so long. We are looking at a subject today.
Who confessed to 93 murders. 93. 93. It's a number
that doesn't even feel real. It doesn't. And
usually when you hear a number like that or even
like a fraction of that number, you associate
it with immediate infamy. You think of Ted Bundy.
You think of Jeffrey Dahmer. Right. They take
up all the oxygen in the room. They do. They
become these like cultural caricatures almost
immediately. Yeah. Instantly recognizable. Exactly.
But the man we are talking about today, Samuel
Little, operated for 35 years. From 1970 all
the way to 2005. And for the vast majority of
that time, he was essentially invisible. To the
public, yeah. So the mission for this deep dive
isn't just to stare at the number 93 and be shocked.
It's to figure out the mechanism. The mechanism
is the right word. Yeah. Because this isn't a
ghost story. It's a mechanical failure. A failure
of the justice system. Right. How does a guy
drive across America? Killing essentially at
will, getting arrested repeatedly, and we're
talking arrests in nearly every region of the
country. Again and again. And yet never gets
stopped. How does he manage to slip through the
cracks time and time again? It's a valid question,
and I think the answer is it's really uncomfortable.
It's not that Samuel Little was some kind of
criminal mastermind. No. He wasn't digging tunnels.
He wasn't wearing elaborate disguises. And he
wasn't taunting the police with cryptic letters
like the Zodiac. He was actually quite brazen.
So the reason he succeeded for so long, it says
less about his genius. And more about the blind
spots in our society, in our systems. That's
the angle I want to really drill down into, the
systemic failure angle. Because when you look
at the sources, he wasn't hiding in a cabin in
the woods. He was in the system. He was. And
he even had aliases. He was known as the choke
and stroke killer in certain circles. Horrifying
name. Or on the other hand, simply Mr. Sam. Mr.
Sam. It sounds so deceptively neighborly, doesn't
it? It does. It sounds like the guy who runs
the corner store. Yeah. But then you have the
choke and stroke, which is just about as graphic
and disturbing an alias as I've ever heard. It's
descriptive, to say the least. It is. And understanding
the duality of those names, the brutality of
the act versus the, you know, the banality of
the man is really key to understanding this whole
case. So we have a lot to get through. We're
going to look at his biography, the specific
timeline of his crimes, the media coverage by
journalists like Jillian Lauren, who actually
sat down with him, and the eventual involvement
of the Texas Rangers. It's a huge timeline. It
is. But before we get to the arrest, we have
to start with the man himself. We have to understand
the hardware we're dealing with. So let's wind
the clock back to the very beginning. It starts
in Reynolds, Georgia, in 1940. Samuel Little
was born Samuel McDowell on June 7th. And right
from the jump, the stability just isn't there.
No. His mother, Bessie May, was very young. The
census records list her as a maid, but Little
himself, he later described her as a lady of
the night. Right. And there's this story he told
about his birth, or, uh... more accurately, the
days shortly after. This is the one that's hard
to verify. It is. He claims she abandoned him
on the side of a dirt road. Just left him there.
Wow. Now, we have to be careful with Little's
narration of his own life because serial killers
are notoriously unreliable narrators. Of course.
So whether that specific roadside detail is true
or a memory he invented to justify his anger
later on, the feeling of abandonment was real.
That trauma was the foundation. And he ends up
in Lorain, Ohio, right? Raised mainly by his
grandmother. Correct. And looking at the school
records on paper, he looks, well, regular. He
attends Hawthorne Junior High School. He's not
living in a cave. He's interacting with other
kids. He's functioning. He's functioning. He
has an exterior life that looks somewhat average.
But his interior life, that was already taking
a very dark turn. And this is where we see the
seed of the crimes, as psychologists might call
it. Exactly. Little gave an account of a specific
incident in kindergarten. This part stood out
to me as being so specific and yet so, so strange.
He's what, five or six years old? Right around
that age. Maybe even younger. And he talks about
a teacher touching her neck. Yes. For most children,
that is a non -event. A teacher adjusting her
collar, maybe checking her pulse, or just resting
her hand there in thought. A gesture you wouldn't
even notice. You wouldn't think twice. But for
Little, that visual, a woman's hand on her neck.
It triggered something. It wasn't just a memory.
It was a trigger. It triggered a sexual fantasy.
And it wasn't a benign fantasy. It was a fantasy
specifically about strangulation. Psychologists
call this imprinting. It's when a specific image
or action gets locked into the brain's arousal
center at a critical developmental stage. At
five years old, I mean, that seems incredibly
early for that kind of specific violent association.
It is early. But that's what makes him so dangerous
later on. Yeah. This wasn't a learned behavior
from a movie or something he saw on the street.
Not initially. It felt innate to him. It was
just there. It was there. And by the time he's
a teenager, the wiring is set. He's looking at
normal magazines. He's hunting down detective
magazines. Crime magazines. Yes. But he's not
reading the articles to solve the mystery. He
was specifically hunting for stories and illustrations
that depicted the strangulation of women. He
was feeding the fixation. He was curating a mental
library of violence long before he ever laid
a hand on a victim. So he's just reinforcing
those neural pathways. Every time he looks at
those images, he's strengthening the connection
between strangulation and gratification. Exactly.
And then he adds the physical component, the
boxing. This was the part that clicked for me
regarding how he got away with it for so long.
He wasn't just a brawler. He actually trained,
right? He did. In 1956, he's convicted of breaking
and entering in Omaha, Nebraska and sent to a
juvenile institution. It's in these institutions
and later in prisons that he takes up boxing.
He even called himself a former prize fighter
later in life. He did. He was part of his persona.
Was he actually a professional or was that just
talk? That's debatable. I think it's mostly talk.
But whether he was fighting for titles is totally
irrelevant. What matters is that he learned the
mechanics of the punch. He learned how to throw
a punch with enough leverage and accuracy to
knock someone out cold. And that detail, the
ability to knock someone out cold, is going to
explain so much about the crime scenes later.
Because if I get into a fight with someone and
we are struggling, there is going to be evidence.
There will be DNA under fingernails from scratching.
There will be defensive wounds on the arms. There
will be noise screaming, furniture breaking,
a whole mess. But if he walks up to someone and
knocks them unconscious with one clean shot?
They are dead weight. There is no struggle. No
defensive wounds. No screaming. And this brings
us right to the modus operandi. This specific
skill set allowed him to control the entire interaction
from the very first second. So we have the predator
built. We have the fantasy strangulation. We
have the skill set, the knockout punch. And we
have the lifestyle. He's transient. Moving from
Florida to Ohio to California. He's all over
the map. Now we have to look at the victims.
You mentioned earlier that he wasn't a genius,
but he was selective. He was ruthless in his
selection. Yeah. And deeply cynical. Little targeted
women who he believed society wouldn't miss.
He targeted sex workers, women struggling with
severe substance abuse, and homeless individuals.
He actually said that, didn't he? I recall reading
a quote where he said he thought they would leave
fewer clues. He did. He was very candid about
it after his confession. He said he believed
that because of their lifestyles, fewer people
would search for them and police wouldn't invest
the same resources. And this is the hardest pill
to swallow. He was technically correct. He was.
It's... Horrible, but he was right. That is the
tragedy of what criminologists call the less
dead. It's a horrible term, but it describes
how law enforcement and the media prioritize
victims. If a suburban mom goes missing or a
college student. It's a massive manhunt. It's
on the nightly news. Precisely. We see missing
posters everywhere. But if a sex worker goes
missing in 1982 in a rough part of town. It's
often written off. Police might assume she just
moved to another city or that she's laying low.
It becomes a file on a dusty desk rather than
a task force. And Little understood that bias
implicitly. He operated within that blind spot.
He did. And this brings us to the actual method.
The choke and stroke. We have to talk about the
physicality of it because it explains the lack
of forensic evidence that often baffled coroners.
Right. So step one is the punch. He would use
his size and his boxing skills to punch his victims,
usually in the jaw or temple. He would stun them
or knock them completely unconscious. So they
are incapacitated from the start. Instantly.
Once they were down, he would strangle them.
And the source material is very graphic here.
He would strangle them to death, sometimes letting
them regain consciousness only to strangle them
again. He described playing with their lives.
Yes. And the moniker choke and stroke implies
that he was engaging in sexual gratification,
likely masturbation, during the act of strangulation.
It's purely sadistic. It's about total control
over life and death. It is. But here is the forensic
problem. Because the method was strangulation,
often without a struggle, and the victims were
often people with high -risk lifestyles, coroners
would sometimes misclassify the deaths. How does
a coroner miss a murder? I mean, surely there
are marks on the neck. Not always. If he uses
a broad surface, like a forearm rather than fingers,
the bruising can be minimal. Or if the body is
found days later in a warm climate, decomposition
can hide the patitial hemorrhaging in the eyes.
So if they find the body with no bullet holes,
no stab wounds, and the person has a history
of drug use... They might just assume overdose.
Or natural causes heart failure brought on by
lifestyle. A lot of these were initially ruled
undetermined. So he knew that if he didn't use
a weapon, he wasn't leaving a murder weapon behind.
His hands were the weapon. And he dumped the
bodies in alleys, dumpsters, wooded areas, even
rivers like the Mississippi. He treated them
like refuse. He didn't bury them? No. He didn't
try to hide them meticulously because he didn't
think anyone would look close enough to catch
him. But he wasn't invisible. And this is the
part that makes you want to scream at the history
books. There were near misses. The 1980s. I mean,
looking at this timeline, the 1980s should have
been the end of Samuel Little's story. He was
caught. Multiple times. This is where the systemic
failure moves from theoretical to concrete. Let's
look at 1982 in Mississippi. He was arrested
for the murder of Melinda Roselupree. She had
gone missing in September of that year? Correct.
Little was a suspect. He was in custody. But
the grand jury declined to indict him. They didn't
feel there was enough evidence to go to trial?
Nope. They'll let him go. So he walks. But he
doesn't go underground. He doesn't flee the country.
He goes to Florida. And that same year, he is
charged with the murder of Patricia Ann Mount.
Now, in this case, they actually went to trial.
This wasn't just a grand jury dismissal. They
had him in court. Prosecution witnesses identified
Little. They placed him with her the night before
she disappeared. They had him. So paint the picture
for me. You're in that courtroom in Florida.
You have the guy who was last seen with the victim.
You have his violent history. Because by this
point, he has a rap sheet a mile long for assault
and theft. A very long rap sheet. How does a
jury look at that and say, not guilty? It comes
down to who the witnesses were. The prosecution
was relying on the testimony of women who moved
in the same circles as Little and the victim.
So likely other sex workers or people on the
margins. Exactly. So their credibility was on
trial. Right. Not just his guilt. The defense
strategy was classic dismantling. You attack
the character of the witness. Oh, you were high
that night. Oh, you have a record for solicitation.
Why should the jury believe you? They made the
jury doubt the source of the truth. So the truth
itself got discarded. That is, it's systemic
gaslighting. The jury sees a criminal testifying
against a criminal and decides it's a wash. And
the result was an acquittal in January 1984.
Mistrust of witness testimonies was the official
reason cited. So bias literally opened the jail
cell door and let a serial killer walk out. It
did. And the cost was catastrophic. Yeah. Because
just months later, he is in California. This
is the Lori Barrows case. And this one, I don't
know how this happens. Lori Barrows survived,
right? She did. She was kidnapped and strangled,
but she managed to survive. She identified him.
So you have a survivor, a living witness. And
not only that, when the police found him, he
was in his car. And what was in the back seat?
Another woman. Unconscious. Beaten and strangled.
In the exact same location where he had attacked
Burroughs. I mean, come on. That's a smoking
gun, a fingerprint, and a confession all wrapped
in one. He's got a body in the car. He has a
survivor pointing at him. You would think this
is the end of the line. Life in prison. Case
closed. But he served only two and a half years?
Two and a half years. I looked at that number
in the notes three times to make sure it wasn't
a typo. How? How is that possible? It's not a
typo. It reflects the plea bargain culture of
the justice system, especially in the 80s when
courts were overwhelmed. The prosecutors likely
looked at the victims, looked at the cost and
risk of a long trial, maybe fearing another acquittal
like in Florida. And they took the easy win.
They took the easy win. They likely allowed him
to plead to assault with great bodily injury
rather than attempted murder. They cleared the
docket. They got a conviction on paper. But they
released a monster. He was released in February
1987. And what did he do? Did he reform? Did
he retire? No. He immediately moved to Los Angeles.
And according to the records and his later confessions,
he committed at least 10 more murders right after
that release in L .A. alone. That is the tragedy
of the justice system right there. He was in
custody. They knew he was violent. And they let
him go to kill 10 more people in one city. It
also highlights the fragmentation of the system
in the pre -digital age. In the 80s, information
didn't travel like it does today. A conviction
in Florida or an arrest in Mississippi didn't
necessarily pop up on a computer screen in a
California patrol car. So he was exploiting the
linkage blindness between jurisdictions. Exactly.
He was moving and the information wasn't keeping
up. So he continues this spree for decades. Fast
forward to 2012, the fall of Mr. Sam. And like
so many of these guys, Bundy with the traffic
stop, Berkowitz with the parking ticket. He doesn't
get caught in a high -speed chase or a dramatic
standoff. No. It's the banality of evil again.
He was arrested at a homeless shelter, the Wayside
Christian Shelter in Louisville, Kentucky. And
what were the charges? Murder. Narcotics charges.
Just a routine drug bust. He was an old man by
then, staying in a shelter. Unbelievable. But
this time, something was different. The technology
had finally changed. DNA testing. That was the
turning point. When they arrested him in Kentucky,
they eventually extradited him to California
on those narcotics charges because of an outstanding
warrant. But once he was in custody in L .A.,
authorities did what they couldn't do in 1984.
They ran his DNA. They ran his DNA. And suddenly,
the ghosts of the 80s showed up. The cold cases.
Exactly. The DNA matched three cold cases from
Los Angeles. Carol Linda Alford. killed in 1987,
Audrey Nelson Everett, 1989, and Guadalupe Apodaca,
also in 1989. Let's talk about those cases for
a second to honor them. Carol Linda Alford. She
was found in a Los Angeles alley. DNA was recovered
from under her fingernails. This was one of the
rare cases where there was a struggle or perhaps
he slipped up. Okay. And Audrey Nelson Everett.
Found in a dumpster behind a nightclub. And Guadalupe
Apodaca. Found in an abandoned auto repair shop.
A boy kicking a soccer ball found her. These
poor women, they had been waiting for justice
for over 20 years. And finally, the science caught
up. The LAPD linked him to these three murders.
He was charged in January 2013. The trial happens
in 2014. And the prosecution strategy was interesting.
They didn't just use the DNA, did they? Yeah,
this was crucial. They brought in the survivors.
The women from the 80s? Yes, women who had survived
his attacks decades earlier, including women
from that Mississippi and Florida era. They used
their testimony to establish... Basically showing
the jury this is his blueprint. This is his pattern.
Exactly. The stun punch, the strangulation, the
sexual motive. It showed the jury that this wasn't
just random DNA found at a scene. This was a
specific predator with a specific ritual. It
corroborated the physical evidence with behavioral
evidence. And this time the jury believed them.
They did. On September 25, 2014, Samuel Little
was found guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment
without the possibility of parole. And his reaction,
what did he do? He screamed in court, I didn't
do it. He maintained his innocence right to the
bitter end of the trial. He played the victim.
So 2014, he's locked up, life sentence, case
closed, right? He's an old man in prison. He's
going to die there. You'd think so. But that's
not the end of the story. That's actually just
the beginning of the truth coming out. That's
right. For four years, he sits there. But then
in 2018, there's a shift. Little wants to transfer.
He wants to move. Why? He wanted to get out of
a Los Angeles County prison. He apparently didn't
like the environment there. It was too noisy
or he didn't like the cell. He wanted to be moved
to a different facility. So he was willing to
trade. He was willing to trade bodies for a better
cell. That is so transactional and cold. It is
psychopathic. The catalyst was a visit from Texas
Ranger James Holland. The source material mentions
him specifically regarding the murder of Denise
Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas. Denise Christie
Brothers. She was killed in 1994. Correct. Holland
is a skilled interviewer. He went there to talk
about the brothers' case, but he managed to build
a rapport. He played to Little's ego. And Little
started talking. He confessed to the brothers'
murder. But once he started talking, he didn't
stop. It was like a dam breaking. This is where
we get the 93 number. He starts listing them
off. one after another across 14 states and the
detail was the shocking part he wasn't just saying
i killed a woman in florida he knew details that
only the killer could know he knew about the
locations a specific dirt road a specific dumpster
he knew how the bodies were positioned the fbi
vicap team that's the violent criminal apprehension
program they got involved they started verifying
these confessions and they confirmed over 60
of them That is an incredibly high rate of verification
for cold cases going back 40 years. It speaks
to his memory. He had what some might call a
photographic memory for his crimes. He could
visualize the scenes perfectly. To him, these
weren't people. They were trophies. And he remembered
where he put every single trophy. And speaking
of visualizing. We have to talk about the sketches.
This is the most haunting part of the whole story
for me. It's unique in the annals of criminal
history, isn't it? It is. I've never seen anything
quite like it. Little didn't just confess with
words. He asked for art supplies. Pastels, pencils.
And he drew portraits of his victims. 26 of them.
And I've seen these drawings. They aren't stick
figures. They are portraits. They have colored
eyes, specific hairstyles, specific clothing.
You remember the shape of their faces. You remember
the earrings they were wearing. It's an incredible,
awful level of detail. It's terrifying. It's
like he kept a gallery in his head for decades.
But there is a silver lining here, if you can
call it that. The FBI used these sketches. They
did. They released them to the public. They hoped
that someone would recognize a mother, a sister,
a daughter who had gone missing. Because remember,
many of these victims were Jane Does. They had
never been identified. Never. And it worked in
some cases. It did. For example, in Memphis,
there was a victim known only as a Jane Doe.
Little provided a sketch. And in 2022, that sketch
helped identify her as Zena Marie Jones. Zena
Marie Jones. She was found in 1990, identified
in 2022. That's 32 years later because he drew
her face. It's a complex legacy. The killer himself
providing the key to restoring the identity of
the victim he destroyed. It's a final act of
control. in a way, but one that at least provided
closure for some families. Let's get specific
on the geography for a minute. We said he was
all over the place, but there were clusters.
Ohio was a big one. Ohio was home base in a way.
He grew up there and he killed there. Cleveland
specifically. Yes. He killed Mary Jo Payton in
1984. She remained unidentified until 1992. He
also killed Rose Evans in 1991. Both strangled,
both dumped. And Cincinnati. Annie Lee Stewart,
killed in 1981. Her body was dumped in Grove
City. And then there were others in Akron and
Columbus. He confessed to leaving a Jane Doe.
by a cigarette billboard. A cigarette billboard.
That's such a specific, mundane detail. It anchors
the crime in a specific time and place. It does.
It shows how the landscape of America was just
a backdrop for his violence. Then you have the
South. Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana. In Macon,
Georgia, he confessed to killing Fredonia Smith
in 1982 and Yvonne Pless way back in 1977. Mississippi
was a frequent hunting ground, too. Julia Crishfield,
thrown off a cliff in 1978. Nancy Carroll Stevens,
much later in 2005. That was one of his later
crimes. In Louisiana. Melissa Thomas in 1996.
Dorothy Richards in 1982. The list just goes
on and on. It's relentless. Prince George's County,
Maryland, West Memphis, Arkansas. It really shows
how he used the interstate system. He was a shark.
Always moving. The highway was his habitat. And
every time he crossed the state line, he reset
the clock on the investigation. He knew that
the police in Georgia weren't talking to the
police in Arkansas. I want to pivot to the media
aspect. Why? Because for a long time, nobody
was telling this story. But then Jillian Lauren
comes into the picture. This is a fascinating
intersection of journalism and investigation.
Jillian Lauren started out writing crime fiction,
but she became drawn to this story. She moved
to nonfiction to cover Little. She actually sat
down with him. For over 40 hours. She interviewed
him in prison. Can you imagine sitting across
from a man who has killed 93 women for 40 hours,
listening to him detail these things? It takes
a specific kind of fortitude. But she built a
rapport. The dynamics were strange. He sent her
drawings. He seemed to enjoy the attention. But
through that relationship... She got him to confess
to multiple murders that weren't previously solved.
So her work, the article in The Cut, the book
Behold the Monster, the docuseries, it really
helped bring the scale of this to the public
eye. She acted as a conduit. She amplified the
voices of the victims by getting the killer to
speak their names or at least describe them.
Now we have to touch on his personal life. Because
he wasn't always alone. He had a long -term girlfriend,
Aurelia Dorsey. This is another bizarre chapter.
Aurelia Dorsey. She was essentially his partner.
though not necessarily in the murders themselves,
but in life. She supported them both, largely
through shoplifting, according to the sources.
But the origin of their relationship is what
gets me. It's so strange. It is very strange.
Dorsey was cellmates with Little's previous girlfriend,
Lucy Madero. Okay, let me get this straight.
Little has a girlfriend, Lucy. Lucy gets arrested.
She's in a cell with Aurelia. Lucy tells Aurelia
she's going to testify against Little in a robbery
case. Correct. And Aurelia, the cellmate, takes
that information, goes to Little's defense team
and helps them prepare against Lucy's testimony.
She betrays her cellmate to help the boyfriend
and then steals the boyfriend. Essentially, she
helps him beat the rap and then she becomes his
girlfriend. And they stayed together until she
died in 1988. It's a twisted loyalty. But it
shows he could manipulate people. He could maintain
relationships. He wasn't a complete loner in
the sense that he couldn't talk to women. He
was charming when he wanted to be. He could normalize
himself. He could pass as a human being, which
made him all the more dangerous. So Aurelia dies
in 1988. He continues killing until 2005. Finally
arrested in 2012. Confesses in 2018. And then
the end comes. December 30, 2020. Samuel Little
died in a Los Angeles hospital. What was the
cause? He had health issues, diabetes, heart
problems. The official cause was undetermined
or natural causes. He was an old man. He died
an old man in a hospital bed, which is a lot
more peaceful than the way his victims died.
It is. There is no cosmic balance in the manner
of his death compared to his crimes. He got to
live a long life. So what does this all mean
when we look back at the legacy of Samuel Little
beyond just the horror of the number 93? We have
to acknowledge the magnitude. He is the most
prolific serial killer in U .S. history. by confirmed
victims. That is a dark historical fact. But
we also have to look at the mirror he holds up
to the justice system. The aha moment for me
is that he wasn't a ghost. He wasn't a phantom.
He was a man who drove a car, who got arrested
for shoplifting, who lived with a girlfriend.
He was right there. But he relied on the marginalization
of his victims. He relied on the fact that if
he killed a Jane Doe in a bad neighborhood, the
investigation would stall. He wasn't hiding.
We were looking away. That's the hard truth.
We were looking away. And even today, we are
still catching up. And that brings us to the
final thought. The sketches. Yes. Little drew
many women. We've identified Zena Marie Jones.
We've identified others. But there are still
sketches out there. Detailed portraits of women
who are still listed as Jane Does. Somewhere
out there, there are families who still don't
know what happened to their missing loved one.
They are waiting for an answer. And the answer
might be sitting in an FBI file, a sketch drawn
by the killer himself, waiting for a match. That
is a haunting thought to end on. If you want
to see those sketches, they are available on
the FBI's website. Maybe, just maybe, someone
listening can help close another case. It's possible.
The story isn't quite over yet. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive. It was a heavy
one, but an important one. We'll catch you on
the next one. Stay curious and stay safe. Welcome
to the debate. Today, we are looking directly
into... Well, one of the darkest corners of the
American justice system. We're dissecting the
case of Samuel Little. For anyone who follows
true crime, that name represents a number that
is, it's almost impossible to comprehend. 93
confessed murders. And between 1970 and 2005,
the FBI has confirmed over 60 of those. So officially,
that makes him the most prolific serial killer
in the history of the United States. He killed
everywhere, from Miami all the way to Los Angeles,
leaving this trail of bodies that just span the
entire continent. It's a case that forces us
to, you know, basically burn the traditional
profile of a serial killer. We talk about figures
like Bundy or Gacy, and we think of men living
these double lives, upstanding citizens by day,
monsters by night. But Samuel Little didn't have
a double life. He was a transient. He had a criminal
record a mile long. He was constantly in custody.
And yet he operated with absolute impunity for
35 years. And that really gets us to the central
question we need to tackle today. How does a
man who is constantly getting arrested, constantly
interacting with police, manage to murder nearly
100 women? Was Samuel Little some kind of criminal
mastermind, a genius of evasion? Or was his reign
of terror just the result of a justice system
that decided his victims didn't matter? Well,
I think the comfortable answer is to blame the
system. It lets us off the hook. It lets us believe
that if the police had just done their jobs,
he would have been stopped. But I think that
perspective is dangerous because it underestimates
the adversary. I'm going to argue that Samuel
Little had a terrifying predatory intelligence.
He used a specific methodology, a deep understanding
of forensic limits, and a manipulation of geography
to actively exploit the system's blind spots.
He wasn't just slipping through the cracks. He
was measuring them and prying them open himself.
See, I have to push back on this idea of intelligence
or genius right away. Because when you actually
look at the timeline, this was not some phantom
moving through the world unseen. This was a man
operating in broad daylight with a spotlight
on him. I mean, by 1975, Samuel Little had been
arrested 26 times in 11 different states. And
we're not talking about parking tickets. We're
talking about theft, assault, attempted rape,
fraud. He was a known entity. But being known
for assault and being caught for serial murder
are two very, very different things. But he was
caught for murder. The system had him in its
jaws repeatedly and just spat him out. Look at
the early 80s. In 1982, he's in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
He's arrested. He's charged with the murder of
Melinda Rose Lepree. The evidence is there, but
a grand jury declines to indict him. Later that
same year, he's extradited to Florida for the
murder of Patricia Ann Mount. Witnesses put him
with her the night she vanished. And yet, he
was acquitted. Okay, but you're listing legal
outcomes. You have to look at why those outcomes
happened. You say it's police apathy, but I see
Little's active hand at work there. He understood
the burden of proof. He knew that without a smoking
gun, he could walk. And he made sure there was
never a smoking gun. And this goes directly to
his method. You're talking about the strangulation?
I'm talking about the specific technique he called
the choke and stroke. It's a grotesque term,
but it was a calculated method of evasion. Little
was a former boxer. He called himself a prizefighter.
He understood anatomy. He didn't use knives.
He didn't use guns. So there were no shell casings,
no unique stab wounds a coroner could trace.
Sure, but strangulation still leaves evidence.
Bruising, petechia in the eyes. Not always. and
certainly not to the forensic standards of the
70s and 80s, especially in, you know, rural counties,
he would strangle a victim until they passed
out, let them revive, and then repeat it. And
the reason that's so relevant is because unlike
a sudden violent crushing of the windpipe, this
method often left the hyoid bone intact. So when
these bodies were found, there are no bullet
holes, no stab wounds, often very little external
trauma. To a coroner in a small town, looking
at a victim who maybe has a history of substance
abuse. It doesn't scream murder. It looks like
a heart attack. It looks like an overdose. He
was killing people in a way that mimicked natural
death. That is a forensic countermeasure. I acknowledge
the brutality of the method. I do. But I think
you're giving him credit for countermeasures
when he was really just relying on bias. He didn't
trick the coroners. The coroners just didn't
look hard enough because of who the victims were.
And this brings me to the core of my argument.
Victim selection. He didn't just choose a method.
He chose a specific demographic. He targeted
women he knew society would ignore. Sex workers,
women battling addiction, homeless or transient
women. He was certainly aware of their status.
Aware? He was counting on it. He told investigators
later, and I'm quoting, I'm not going to go over
there into the white neighborhood and pick out
a little teenage girl. He said, I'm going to
go to the bust -down neighborhood. He believed
these victims would leave fewer clues and, most
chillingly, leave fewer persons to search for
them. In that 1982 Florida acquittal, why didn't
the jury trust the witnesses? Well, because the
witnesses were from the same marginalized world
as the victim. The system decided their word
just wasn't worth a conviction. Little didn't
outsmart the jury. He relied on the jury's prejudice.
I don't disagree that the prejudice existed,
but I argue that Little's ability to identify
and exploit that prejudice is the genius. It's
a dark, predatory form of market research. He
knew exactly where the defenses were down, and
he didn't just rely on who they were. He relied
on where he put them. This is the geography component.
The cross -country travel. Exactly. She treated
the interstate highway system as his personal
hunting ground. He realized something that law
enforcement wouldn't admit for decades. Police
departments operate in silos. They don't talk
to each other. He could kill in Mississippi on
a Tuesday, dump the body in a swamp, and be in
California by Friday. But is driving a car really
genius, though? Or is it just having gas money?
It is when you use it to fragment an investigation.
He knew that a sheriff in Pascagoula isn't checking
missing persons reports in Los Angeles. He used
mobility as camouflage, and he was disciplined
about it. He never stayed in one place long enough
for a pattern to form. He also actively destroyed
the crime scene by using nature. He dumped Mary
Jo Payton in a basement in Cleveland. He put
Zena Marie Jones in the Mississippi River. He
was managing the crime scene long after he left
it. I want to accept that theory. I really do.
This idea of him as a ghost who just vanished.
But then we have to talk about San Diego, 1984.
This is the case that, for me, just destroys
the mastermind theory and proves the system is
fundamentally broken. The Lori Barrows case.
Yes. October 1984. Little attacks a 22 -year
-old woman named Lori Barrows. Miraculously,
she survives. She plays dead. He dumps her. She
escapes. Little is arrested a month later. And
when the police find him, he's in the backseat
of his car. But he isn't alone. There is another
unconscious woman in the car with him. He is
literally caught with a pile of victims. It's
a smoking gun. It's a smoking cannon. And what
happens? Does the genius talk his way out of
it? No. He gets convicted. But the system...
The judges, the prosecutors, they look at this
man with a rap sheet from here to the moon, caught
with two strangled women, and they give him two
and a half years. It's an appalling sentence.
It's not just appalling. It's an invitation.
He served his two years. He was released in February
of 1987. And what did he do? He moved to LA and
immediately killed at least 10 more women. That
is not a man outsmarting the police. That is
a revolving door. The system knew who he was,
knew what he did, and let him out to do it again.
If that sentence had been appropriate, 20 years,
life, dozens of women would be alive today. I
agree the sentencing was a catastrophic failure,
but I think you're glossing over how he managed
to secure such light sentences throughout his
career. It wasn't just luck. He treated the courtroom
like another arena to manipulate. He had accomplices.
We have to talk about Aurelia Dorsey. Right,
his longtime girlfriend. Well, more than a girlfriend.
I mean, she was effectively his intelligence
officer. This is where the criminal enterprise
aspect comes in. Go back to 1971. Little was
facing robbery charges in Cleveland. Looked bad.
The prosecution had a solid witness. But Aurelia
Dorsey gets herself thrown into the same holding
cell as the prosecution's key witness, a woman
named Lucy Madero. Dorsey spends days befriending
her, getting her to talk, finding the holes in
her story. She was a spy. She was an operative.
She fed that information back to Little's defense
attorney, who used it to just... destroy the
witness on the stand. They got an acquittal.
He wasn't just sitting in his cell hoping for
the best. He was running counter -ops. He manipulated
people. He knew how to present himself as this
aging prize fighter who just got into a few scrapes,
not a sexual sadist. That is a high -level manipulation
of human psychology. I see the manipulation there.
I do. But let's fast forward to how this actually
ended. For 40 years, he operates, he kills, he
moves, he gets arrested for petty crimes, he
gets out. How was he finally caught? Is it a
brilliant profiler? A detective who connects
the dots across state lines? No, it wasn't. Exactly.
He's arrested at a homeless shelter in Louisville,
Kentucky in 2012. Not for murder, for a narcotics
charge. A routine drug bust. And the only reason
they catch him for the murders is because they
extradite him to California and run a routine
DNA swab. The database caught him. A computer
caught him. The DNA matched the cold cases of
Carol Alford, Audrey Everett, and Guadalupe Apodikea
from the late 80s. If DNA technology hadn't advanced
to that point, Samuel Little would have died
a free man. It wasn't human intelligence. It
was data processing cleaning up a 40 -year mess
of human incompetence. He was right under their
noses, living in shelters, getting arrested,
and nobody put it together until a machine did
it for them. I'm not so sure it's that cut and
dry. Yes, DNA links him to three murders, but
we are talking about 93. The DNA didn't solve
the other 90 cases. Samuel Little did. Because
he wanted a prison transfer. Because he viewed
it as a transaction. Even in defeat, he was negotiating
terms. In 2018, he's serving life. He's in L
.A. He hates it there. So he starts talking to
a Texas Ranger, James Holland. He confesses to
a murder in Odessa. But he doesn't stop there.
He opens the floodgates. A deluge of confessions.
And this brings us back to his mind. The detail
he provided was photographic. He didn't just
say, I killed a woman in 1982. He described the
shape of their eyes. He described their hairstyles.
He remembered the specific intersection where
he met them. He was correcting the police files.
The detectives would say, we found the body in
1988, and Little would say, no, that was 1987,
and she was wearing a yellow shirt. It is deeply
disturbing that he held onto those memories with
such clarity. It's more than disturbing. It's
proof of his dominance. And then there are the
sketches. This is the part that truly separates
him from just some chaotic drifter. He drew them.
He asked for pastels and paper, and he produced
these detailed color portraits of his victims,
26 of them. I've seen them. They are haunting.
The eyes just look right at you. They are the
only record that some of these women ever existed.
And that's the supreme irony here. The justice
system had to rely on the killer's art to identify
the victims it had forgotten. He was the archivist
of his own crimes. Without his roadmap, women
like Zena Marie Jones would still be Jane Doe's.
I mean, she wasn't identified until 2022, two
years after Little died, purely based on his
sketch. He was leading the investigation from
the grave. But doesn't that just reinforce my
point about the less dead? The fact that the
police needed the killer to tell them a murder
had even occurred proves they weren't looking.
He confessed to a murder in Prince George's County,
Maryland. That victim was one of only two unidentified
homicide victims in that entire county. How do
you not connect that? The body was there. The
killer was there. But nobody cared enough to
put the pieces together until the killer handed
them the solution. I think we have to distinguish
between not caring and not seeing. The system
is fractured. It's a collection of silos. Little
understood that better than the people running
the silos. He knew that if he killed a woman
in Cincinnati and left her by a cigarette billboard,
which he did, the Cincinnati police would treat
it as a local overdose. They wouldn't call Cleveland.
They wouldn't call Kentucky. He exploited the
bureaucracy. It's a failure of information sharing,
absolutely. But it's also a failure of empathy.
I mean, if 93 college students had vanished from
Ivy League campuses, the FBI would have connected
the dots in six months. But 93 marginalized women
vanish over 35 years, and it takes a computer
algorithm in 2012 to finally ring the alarm bell?
That is a systematic indictment that goes way
beyond bureaucracy. I agree that it is, but I
still maintain that if he had targeted Ivy League
students, he would have just changed his tactics.
That's the terrifying part of his intelligence.
He was an adaptive predator, a chameleon. He
looked like the background noise of the city.
He used his invisibility as a weapon. And that
brings us to the tragedy of the timeline. He
died in a hospital in 2020. He was 80 years old.
He spent the vast majority of those 80 years
free. He lived a full life. He ate what he wanted,
he drove where he wanted, and he robbed 93 women
of everything. He saw himself as a winner. He
called himself a prizefighter to the very end.
He believed he had beaten the house. And in a
very grim technical sense, he did. So where does
that leave us? Was he a genius or was the system
just that broken? I think the synthesis is the
most terrifying option. He was a predatory genius
specifically suited for a broken system. He was
the perfect pathogen for a weak immune system.
If the police had been better... Maybe he would
have been caught earlier. But if he hadn't been
so skilled at manipulation and methodology, he
wouldn't have lasted past that first arrest.
I can agree with that. He was a man who had a
specific, terrible set of skills, operating in
a world that refused to value the lives he took.
It was a perfect storm of malice and negligence.
And the storm hasn't fully passed. The FBI has
confirmed 60 murders, but he confessed to 93.
That means there are still over 30 families out
there with no answers. The sketches are still
on the FBI website. And that is the final takeaway.
This case isn't closed just because Samuel Little
is dead. We encourage our listeners to look at
those sketches in the FBI's VCAT program. Because
the system failed them once, we shouldn't fail
them again by forgetting they exist. Indeed.
Understanding how he operated is the only way
to ensure the next prize fighter doesn't get
a 35 -year career. Thank you for joining the
debate. Until next time.