Nearly every day for weeks, a white-haired man in a wheelchair, his body ravaged by diabetes and heart disease, has been escorted under heavy guard from a Texas jail cell to an interview room to speak about evil.
Day by day, the authorities say, he has recounted details of long-ago murders: faces, places, the layouts of small towns. He has described how he picked up vulnerable women from bars, nightclubs and along streets and strangled them to death in the back seat of his car
Investigators say they have established Mr. Little’s ties to about 30 of the murders so far, and have little reason to doubt his confessions.
“By the time we are done, we anticipate that Samuel Little will be confirmed as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history,”
said Bobby Bland, the district attorney of Ector County, Tex., where Mr. Little is being held after a grand jury indicted him this summer for a 1994 killing.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of 49 murders in Washington State during the 1980s and 1990s, the highest number of murder convictions for an American serial killer.
Many of the women whom Mr. Little is believed to have killed were poor and addicted to drugs, alcohol, or both — a group of people that often are not reported missing for weeks and sometimes receive fewer investigative resources than others.
Part of Mr. Little’s impetus for talking now, investigators say, is that he seems to prefer the Ector County jail to the noisy, often chaotic environment of a Los Angeles County prison. Investigators who have spoken to him say he also appears to enjoy the attention he is receiving as he recites details only a killer would know, after decades of discussing them with no one.
The authorities say Mr. Little displays no sign of remorse while discussing the killings. He is exacting with certain details, they say, including where he left the women’s bodies years ago: A dumpster, near a hog pit, under a pecan tree. The investigators say he is matter-of-fact about his actions, and sometimes even chuckles about them; other times, they said, he speaks so quickly, with such excitement, that they struggle to understand his words.
“Believe it or not, you only see evil a few times in your career,” said Tim Marcia, a cold case detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, who dealt with Mr. Little on the three killings he was convicted of there. “Looking into his eyes, I would say that was pure evil.”
“The way he gets sexual gratification is during the strangulation,” Ms. Silverman said.
During his interrogation of Mr. Little in October, Sgt. Michael Mongeluzzo, a detective in Marion County, Fla. — where Mr. Little has confessed to killing 20-year-old Rosie Hill in 1982 — said he had been astonished by Mr. Little’s ability to recall various specific details about the 36-year-old crime.
nytimes.com/2018/11/26/us/samuel-little-serial-killer-murderer.html
“It’s scary the clarity he has about certain things after all this time,” Sergeant Mongeluzzo said. “He remembers names and faces.”
Mr. Little, detectives say, is a charismatic psychopath who would brutally beat his victims before strangling them. A former boxer, he punched with such force that when he struck one of his victims in the abdomen he broke her spine, according to the autopsy report
Mr. Little has told investigators that his mother had been — in his words — “a lady of the night.”
Toward the end of the interview, Sergeant LeBlanc said she asked about Mr. Little’s religious beliefs. They spoke about the nature of sin. He told her he had no need to fear God.
“He said God made him this way, so why should he ask for forgiveness?” she said. “He said God knew everything he did.”
nytimes.com/2018/11/26/us/samuel-little-serial-killer-murderer.html
