AN author who sat down with America’s most prolific serial killer for hundreds of hours has revealed his chilling cannibalistic threat.
During a horrifying three-decade reign of terror, Samuel Little criss-crossed America searching for prey.
GettySerial killer Samuel Little seen in multiple mugshots from 1966 to 1995[/caption]
APBy the time Samuel Little was finished killing, he claimed he had killed 93 women[/caption]
EPAAn image released by the FBI shows 30 drawings of some of Samuel Little’s victims[/caption]
Jillian Lauren/InstagramAuthor Jillian Lauren spent hundreds of hours interviewing Little[/caption]
By the time Little was finished killing, he estimated he had murdered 93 times between 1970 and 2005.
The phantom killer cruised highways and byways looking for victims – mostly poor black women struggling with drug addiction and working the sex trade to feed their habits.
“They was broke and homeless and they walked right into my spider web,” Little later said.
“I didn’t pick on motherf***ers that would be missed…. there weren’t no women nurses and teachers.
“That’s the reason I didn’t get busted a long time ago.”
Little’s list of victims, if confirmed, would take his body count to more than double that of notorious killer Ted Bundy.
Cops have confirmed 63 of the brutal murders – in part thanks to the serial killer’s photographic memory.
And the FBI branded Little the “most prolific serial killer in US history”.
Author Jillian Lauren spent hundreds of hours interviewing Little in the California State Prison for her new book – Behold the Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.
He talked almost non-stop until he died on December 20, 2020 at the age of 80.
The writer told A&E True Crime that more unsolved murders will likely be linked to Little in the years ahead.
Lauren said: “I believe that he was ready to confess. He was at the end of his life.
“He didn’t want to slide into the darkness, unknown for what he considered his greatest accomplishment, which was the number of murders he committed.
“I wanted the truth, and I wanted him to need and trust me. Therefore, I showed up with his snacks and I listened.
“I was there for him. In exchange, I believe he did his best to tell me the truth.”
But Lauren revealed that conversations with the serial killer could be chilling.
“I was used to hearing him talk about women’s last words — and he threatened to crawl through the phone and eat my lips off my face if I didn’t shut my mouth,” she said.
“But [then we’d] talk about [how] he believed he was forgiven every time that he murdered somebody just by the fact that he asked for forgiveness.
“I said, ‘Do you believe that your victims should have forgiven you at that moment that you were killing them and asking for forgiveness?’
“He said, ‘I’d hate to see where they went if they didn’t.’ I could have crawled across the table and killed him myself.”
Lauren admitted bringing Little chicken wings and would flatter him – and she believes he told her the truth.
“I believe he did his best to be truthful in most of his confessions,” Lauren said.
“Toward the end of his 30-year murdering spree, he was on a lot of drugs. As he aged, his memories became less vivid.
“I know that he wasn’t 100 per cent accurate [because] I figured out [times when] he was wrong.
“He’d forgotten that he often drove many more miles than he remembered. He often got his years wrong.”
I believe he did his best to be truthful in most of his confessions
Jillian Lauren
For decades, Little got away with his heinous crimes because of who his victims were.
Lauren believes that because his victims were considered disposable, it emboldened Little to escalate his sinister crimes.
She said: “Law officials in Mississippi in the ’80s didn’t believe it was possible to commit a crime against a black prostitute.
“In a tradition of many serial killers before him… he chose to dispose of victims society already thought were trash.
“A judge in Missouri thought three months was an appropriate sentence [for Little] for rape and assault.”
And like his victims, Little was anonymous.
Mary Jo Brosley ditched her seven-year-old son in Massachusetts on June 12, 1970, and vanished into the darkest depths of America.
The alcoholic mum was reported missing two weeks later. Her family would never see her alive again.
Fifty years later, her sister revealed she was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and anorexia – and “would take rides with anyone who would provide her with alcohol”.
On New Year’s Eve at a watering hole in Miami, she met Little.
Decades later, he told detectives she was wearing a flowered sundress and a chain necklace.
Little — 30 at the time — said he even played with the necklace, just before he strangled Mary to death.
By the end of Little’s life, he was serving three life sentences in California for murdering Linda Alford, Guadalupe Apodaca and Audrey Everett.
But when the Texas Rangers flew him to the Lone Star State for inquiries into a series of unsolved murders, he bonded with the detective and began singing like a canary.
While the prodigious monster had a staggering memory — offering cops and writers information only the killer could know — his memory was fading by the time he began confessing in 2018.
But he was no Henry Lee Lucas — the notorious serial killer who claimed he had butchered hundreds of men and women — whose homicidal CV was largely bogus.
Getty.Samuel Little, right, appears unfazed after being convicted on three counts of first degree murder in 2014[/caption]
AP:Associated PressPearl Nelson, left, holds a photo of her mum Audrey Nelson, a victim of Samuel Little, with Mary Louise Frias, goddaughter of victim Guadalupe Apodaca Zambrano[/caption]
AP:Associated PressSherri Nelson holds a picture of her sister Audrey Nelson, who was murdered by Little[/caption]
Macon Police DepartmentLittle mostly targeted poor black women and those working the sex trade[/caption]
Once investigators realised what they had in Little, cold case detectives flooded into Texas from across the country hoping the killer could clear some of their most vexing cold case slayings.
Little even drew 16 chilling portraits of some of his victims scattered around the country who had never been identified.
Names, not so much, but the details he recalled of what they looked like and what they were wearing at the time of their deaths was staggering.
He boasted how he made the murders as “long and slow as possible” — sometimes letting the women slip in and out of consciousness — with him getting sexual pleasure from the death.
“I live in my mind now,” Little told Lauren.
“With my babies. In my drawings.”
Born Samuel McDowell in Reynolds, Georgia in 1940, the killer always maintained that his mother, Bessie Mae, was a teen prostitute who had abandoned him.
Not long after his birth, the family moved to Lorain, Ohio, just west of Cleveland on Lake Erie where he was raised by his grandmother.
Little later confessed he began having violent sexual fantasies when he was a child with a penchant for choking.
He began drifting in his teens and getting into trouble, landing in jail for petty crimes.
In the late 1960s, he moved in with his mother in Florida and worked in a cemetery.
In Florida, he began his murderous career.
“He served time for kidnapping, assault, theft… everything but murders he actually committed,” Lauren said.
“They had him a couple of times, and he was acquitted [due to] lack of evidence. There was a failure to indict by a grand jury because the eyewitnesses were not credible.
“One [victim] actually showed up in court in San Diego, whom he had left for dead.
“He served 18 months on a four-year sentence for that and drove to LA the next day and killed two women on the same night.”
Experts believe the kid glove approach with Little emboldened him with rape evolving into murder.
“People like to look at law enforcement and say they were not prioritising the deaths of prostitutes, marginalised victims, women of colour,” Lauren said.
The FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim — to close every case possible
Christie Palazzolo
And Little was almost always on the move.
He murdered in Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, California, Arizona and Nevada.
Typical of his victims was Linda Bennett, who was finally identified in 2022.
Little recalled that he picked up the 38-year-old outside a Columbus, Ohio strip joint.
He added that she had looked like a “hippie”.
Her body was found in May 1988 in Owenton, Kentucky – and like the others, Bennett had been strangled to death.
Lauren believes that in spite of Little’s soothing statements, he remained unrepentant for the horrors he had unleashed.
“In his statements at several of his trials, he said, ‘I’m very sorry to the family, to the victim.’ He wasn’t sorry,” Lauren said.
“He was sorry that, in his words, ‘God made me how I was. I didn’t wanna be made like this.. but God gave me this twisted idea of sex and death. I feel sorry for myself.’
“That was Sam’s perspective on remorse.”
In May, cops in Bibb County, Georgia, revealed they had identified the remains of a 1977 Jane Doe.
Her name was Yvonne Pless and she was yet one more of Little’s victims.
At the end of his life, Little seemed to understand his singular evil.
“I don’t think there was another person that did what I liked to do. I think I’m the only one in the world. That’s not an honour. That’s a curse,” he said.
After Little’s death, the FBI posted a series of chilling videos of his confessions.
Detectives are still trying to connect him to dozens of murders to which he had confessed.
Christie Palazzolo, a crime analyst with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, said: “For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims.
“The FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim — to close every case possible.”