Serial killer who confessed to 90 killings draws two unidentified victims from Texas
A man who confessed to more than 90 homicides in more than three decades has drawn at least 16 portraits of unidentified victims — two of whom are from Texas.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released the sketches made by Samuel Little earlier this week.
The drawings give details on how the woman wore their hair, what their eyes looked like and even the color of their lipstick.
Little told agents that one of the sketches is of a black woman between the ages of 25 and 28 that he murdered in Houston sometime between 1976 and 1979.
The other sketch is of a woman Little says he killed in Wichita Falls in either 1976 or 1977. He told agents that he left her remains somewhere outside of the city.
In November, the 78-year-old who was held in a Texas prison confessed to more than 90 murders, according to the Texas Rangers.
The woman were killed in states from California to Florida between 1970 and 2005.
“Little’s run-ins with the law date back to 1956, and there are clear signs of a dark, violent streak among his many shoplifting, fraud, drug, solicitation, and breaking and entering charges,” the FBI said. “But law enforcement has only recently begun unraveling the true extent of his crimes.”
The portrait of a serial killer began to unfold after Little was arrested in Kentucky and extradited to California on a narcotics warrant. Los Angeles police obtained his DNA and matched it with three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989, the FBI said.
The women had been beaten and then strangled, their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster, and a garage.
Then, Texas authorities got involved.
“We found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time,” said ViCAP Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo, who worked on the cases with Department of Justice Senior Policy Advisory and ViCAP Liaison Angela Williamson. “We sent that lead out to the Texas Rangers, who were eager to follow up on the long-cold case.”
In an interview with Texas authorities in May, Little confessed to killings in Mississippi, Ohio, Arizona and Nevada.
Of the 90 murders Little has confessed to, investigators have confirmed at least 34.
A map of the homicides and more sketches can be found here.
This story was originally published February 14, 2019 at 11:09 AM.
