At first glance, he looks like an ordinary elderly man — the kind of face you might pass in a grocery store or see sitting quietly on a park bench. But behind that calm exterior lies a staggering truth: this man is Samuel Little, the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
His victims were the forgotten — women living on society’s margins, including sex workers, addicts, and the homeless. For decades, their disappearances went largely unnoticed, their deaths often ruled as overdoses, accidents, or left unsolved altogether. Little knew exactly who he was targeting — people the world wasn’t watching — and he used that invisibility to kill with chilling precision for more than 35 years.
Between 1970 and 2005, Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders, most of them by strangulation. A former boxer with powerful hands and a transient lifestyle, he traveled from state to state, leaving a trail of death across the country. He often met his victims in bars, motels, or on the streets — charming them just long enough to gain their trust before driving them to remote areas. There, he would take their lives and abandon their bodies in fields, swamps, and dirt roads, confident that no one would come looking.
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) has confirmed at least 50 of his confessions as credible, with others still being investigated. From Florida to California, from Georgia to Ohio, his crimes spanned nearly every corner of the nation — a pattern so vast that investigators now refer to him as the most geographically wide-ranging killer in U.S. history.
Little evaded capture for decades due to the nature of his victims, the lack of DNA technology at the time, and the scattered geography of his crimes. Each murder looked like an isolated tragedy — until 2012, when his past finally caught up with him.
That year, Little was arrested in Kentucky on a drug charge and extradited to California. When the Los Angeles Police Department ran his DNA, it matched three unsolved murders from the late 1980s. He was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, but the real shock came later.
In 2018, Texas Ranger James Holland flew to California and began a series of interviews with Little — conversations that would reveal one of the darkest criminal legacies in American history. Over months of questioning, Little began confessing in detail to murders no one had ever connected to him. He described the victims’ faces, the clothes they wore, and even the roads where he left their bodies.
The FBI verified many of these confessions and, for the remaining cases, released his hand-drawn portraits of unidentified victims — haunting sketches drawn entirely from memory. Some of these drawings, paired with Little’s detailed recollections, helped authorities close cold cases that had remained unsolved for decades.
Little described women like “Ruth,” whose mother lived in North Little Rock, Arkansas, and “Marianne,” a transgender woman he met in a Miami bar. He remembered a woman in a “pretty dress with buttons” attending a party in New Orleans — details so vivid they gave investigators new leads in long-forgotten cases.
By the time the investigation concluded, Samuel Little had surpassed every known serial killer in U.S. history — eclipsing names like Gary Ridgway, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy.
Samuel Little died in December 2020 at age 80, in a California hospital while serving his life sentence. His death closed one chapter but left many stories unfinished — dozens of victims still unnamed, their families still waiting for closure.
As FBI 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 old man in the photo may look ordinary, but his crimes tell a far darker story — one that exposes how society’s most vulnerable were left unprotected for decades. Samuel Little’s legacy isn’t just about one man’s evil — it’s a reminder of the silent victims whose stories deserve to be remembered.