Credit: Wise County Jail & Alamy
The Old Man In This Photo Is The ‘Most Prolific Serial Killer In US History’
The old man in this photo is actually the most prolific serial killer in American history.
He looks like someone’s grandfather and has the kind of face you might pass in a grocery store without a second glance.
But the man in these booking photos holds a horrifying distinction: he is the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
His victims were vulnerable women, s** workers, drug addicts, people living on society’s margins, whose disappearances often went unreported and whose deaths were frequently misattributed to overdoses or accidents.
He knew exactly what he was doing, and for years, he believed he would never be caught.
The killer confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005, primarily strangling his victims.
What makes this case particularly chilling is that many of his victims’ deaths were originally ruled overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never found.
A former boxer who lived a nomadic lifestyle, he moved from city to city targeting vulnerable women.
His pattern was methodical and calculating. He would meet women in bars, on street corners, or in transient areas. He would offer them rides, sometimes spending days with them before striking.
Then he would drive them to remote locations, dirt roads near cornfields, hilltops in Kentucky, swamps in the Everglades, steep slopes outside Las Vegas, where he would strangle them and leave their bodies.
FBI confirms 50 murders across multiple states
The geographic spread of his crimes is staggering. From Florida to California, from Georgia to Nevada, he killed across the country.
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program has confirmed at least 50 of his confessions as credible, with many more pending final confirmation, per NBC.
His ability to evade justice for so long stemmed from several factors – limitations of DNA evidence and his nomadic lifestyle helped him escape detection.
But perhaps most significantly, he targeted women whose lives were already precarious, people whose disappearances might not be immediately reported, whose deaths might not be thoroughly investigated.
As one FBI analyst observed, he believed no one was accounting for his victims.
2012 arrest and DNA match led to 2014 conviction
The breakthrough came in an unexpected way.
After being arrested in Kentucky in 2012 and extradited to California on a narcotics charge, the Los Angeles Police Department connected his DNA to three murders committed between 1987 and 1989.
Though he maintained his innocence at the time, he was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to three life sentences.
But the full scope of his crimes only emerged later.
A Texas Ranger named James Holland flew to California to speak with him and is credited with getting him to confess to 90 additional murders, per the FBI.
Nearly 18 months after the Texas Ranger began eliciting confessions, the FBI confirmed him to be the most prolific serial killer in US history.
His victim count surpasses that of Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), who was convicted of 49 murders, as well as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, who each murdered upwards of 30 people.
FBI releases sketches and video confessions
To aid in identifying remaining victims, he even drew portraits from memory, haunting sketches of the women whose lives he took.
The FBI released these drawings along with detailed confessions, hoping the public might help close the remaining cases.
His recollections included specific details: a woman named Ruth whose mother lived in North Little Rock, a transgender woman called Marianne he met at a Miami bar, a woman in a ‘pretty dress with buttons’ attending a birthday party in New Orleans.
As FBI crime analyst Christie Palazzolo stated: “Even though he is already in prison, the FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim—to close every case possible.”
The elderly man in the photo is Samuel Little.
He died at age 80 on December 30, 2020, at an outside hospital, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
His decades-long killing spree represents not just the crimes of one man, but a systemic failure to protect society’s most vulnerable members.
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