Man Confesses to Committing 90 Murders

“Believe it or not, you only see evil a few times in your career. Looking into his eyes, I would say that was pure evil.”

LAPD detective Tim Marcia was describing seventy-eight-year-old Samuel Little, a convicted killer who was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of three women in 2014. Carol Elford, Audrey Nelson, and Guadalupe Abodacha were all beaten and strangled to death between 1986 and 1989 in Southern California, and now the list has become larger.

Little recently confessed to ninety other murders he claims to have committed between 1970 and 2005 across the country, thirty-four of which have been definitively linked to him so far.

Back in 2012, Little was extradited from Kentucky to California and arrested on an outstanding narcotics charge. DNA obtained from his arrest was later linked to three unsolved homicides from the 80s. Two years later, Little was convicted of his crimes.

Prior to his 2012 arrest, Little was no stranger to law enforcement. His record dated all the way back to 1956, including charges and prison time for shoplifting, fraud, assault, and breaking and entering. He had also been charged with several murders but was never convicted due to lack of evidence.

During the time between his arrest and conviction, ViCAP had been doing a full background report. They noticed Little’s movements coincided with several other unsolved murders across the country, including one in Odessa, Texas, which he was later charged with in July of 2018.

This past May, Texas Ranger James Holland and two ViCAP investigators, Christina Palazzolo and Angela Williamson, flew out to California to question Little. He seemed to be in the bargaining mood and requested a prison transfer to Texas in exchange for information.

“Over the course of that interview in May, he went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place,” Palazzolo said.

But how did Little get away with it for so long? According to the FBI, many of the cases he has now been linked to were, admittedly, barely investigated at the time.

If the FBI can link him to as many murders as he claims to have committed, he’ll become the most prolific serial killer of all time, surpassing Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” who was convicted of forty-two murders and confessed to about twenty more.