Samuel Little Is Dead, but LA Detectives Aren't Giving Up

The nation's most prolific serial killer died last year in a California prison at age 80, but as the Los Angeles Times explains, that hardly shuts the book on Samuel Little. He described having committed 93 murders, but in the case of 31 of them, authorities still haven't been able to match the description of the crime to an actual victim. Nearly half of those—16—Little claimed happened in Los Angeles or LA County, which has detectives there making a renewed push to try to solve some of them. As the Times explains, a new push that involved making details of the 16 alleged victims public on Tuesday was spurred both by Little's death and the lead investigator's looming January retirement. Those descriptions came from Little himself.

He gave eerily detailed descriptions of many of his victims; in a companion piece, the LAT details what he recalled about each of the 16, and the sketches he made of a number of them. For example, he described a heavyset Black prostitute called T-Money whom he bought a hamburger for in 1996 and then strangled, leaving her body covered by a mattress in an alley. But connecting those details to the thousands of unsolved murders that persist in LA is no small feat. While Little's details were vivid, his memory was also spotty (in one case, he specified the cross streets where the murder took place but couldn't recall if he committed it in 1987, 1993, or 1995) and some of the murder scenes may no longer exist, with what was a field decades ago now home to apartments and businesses. (Read the full story on the effort here.)