Portraits of Murder
The Most Prolific Serial Killer
Tara Luther, Promega
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He first met Marianne (or Mary Ann) at a bar known as The Pool near 17th Avenue in Miami in 1971 or 1972.
At just 18 years old, Marianne was an attractive transgender African-American woman, who was approximately 5’6” and 140 pounds. The details are a little fuzzy, but it was this fateful night that Marianne first met Samuel Little, the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
Marianne would return home that first night, but the next time they would meet, she wouldn’t be so lucky. Little saw Marianne a few days later at a bar in Overtown, and he offered to give her a ride home. True to his word, Little took Marianne home, but when her roommate asked the pair to go back out and purchase some shaving cream, he could constrain himself no longer. Little detoured north on Highway 27, and murdered Marianne in a driveway, possibly near a sugarcane field. He then dragged her body deep into the Everglades and left her in the thick, muddy water. To his knowledge, Marianne’s body was never found.
Samuel Little Photo Credit
Marianne is one of many who have fallen victim to Samuel Little and have never been identified. Little spent his life traveling around the United States, drifting through transient communities and poor neighborhoods. He has been arrested numerous times over the years for crimes such as armed robbery, rape, and kidnapping, but he never served more than 10 years in prison for his crimes.
In 2014, Little was convicted of strangling three women and sentenced to three life terms in a prison near California’s Mojave Desert. He was labeled a sexual predator, though he denied everything.
While at a law enforcement conference in Tampa, Florida, in 2017, Angela Williamson, a senior official at the Department of Justice, and liaison to the FBI unit for violent crimes was talking with Texas Ranger James Holland, a skilled interviewer who has convinced dozens of killers to confess throughout his career.
The two were approached by some local police officers who asked if they had heard of a man named Samuel Little. Though he was in jail for murdering three women, the officers suspected he was connected to crimes in Florida as well.
A few months later, Holland phoned Williamson and said they should meet with “this Little guy.” Williamson then turned to her colleague, Christie Palazzolo, part of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a national database created in the 1980s of solved and unsolved crimes, designed to improve information sharing across jurisdictions.
Agent Palazzolo is no stranger to crimes committed across states and jurisdictions. As an agent in the ViCAP program, she has noticed an increase in the number of bodies found along the side of the road. Many of the victims were truck-stop prostitutes and many of the suspects were long-haul truckers. Investigating Little and his string of transient murders is, unfortunately, familiar territory for Palazzolo.
When Williamson asked Agent Palazzolo if she had heard of Little, she replied that she was familiar, and suspected he was involved in a murder in Odessa, Texas.
The First Confession
It was this case in particular that bothered Ranger Holland. It was the cold case of Denise Brothers, a prostitute from Odessa, Texas who went missing in 1994. Though family members searched everywhere they could think of, there was no trace, until her body was found in the back of an abandoned parking lot a month later. Samuel Little had passed through West Texas around the time that Denise had gone missing, and instinct told Holland and Palazzolo that this was not coincidence.
In 2018, Ranger Holland, Agent Palazzolo, and Williamson traveled to California to follow their instinct. Little had always been hostile to law enforcement, but Holland believed that this time would be different. The first 30 minutes of the interview caused Little to rage that he had been wrongly accused of being a rapist, so Holland used a different word to define Little, and it was one that he didn’t object to: ‘killer’.
Agent Palazzolo and Angela Williamson were listening to the interview from across the hall. As Little started to describe three victims in Texas, they sprang into action and began going through their files and the FBI database to compare what they knew against what Little was saying. There was no question that it was Little who had murdered Denise Brothers and that he wasn’t done talking.
Secrets Revealed
Ranger Holland extradited Little to Texas with a letter from the district attorney promising him the death penalty would be waived. In the Wise County Jail, Holland would be able to talk to him around the clock and work to extract additional confessions. Over the course of 48 days, for hours on end, the two talked over pizza and Dr. Pepper, and an additional 65 murders were revealed.
As the murders were unveiled, additional homicide detectives from various jurisdictions were granted opportunities to meet with Little, hoping to solve decades-old cold cases. Ranger Holland gave them these instructions, “Keep him talking, don’t interrupt him, and no matter what, don’t ask why he killed his victims.”
The interviews were uncomfortable, with detectives sometimes needing to laugh with him or put up with his flirting, but after they were concluded, Little confessed to killing 93 women between 1970-2005.
A map showing Little's confirmed killings. Photo Credit
Though Williamson specializes in forensics, there was little or no DNA evidence available for these cases. Therefore, she has spent hours combing through crime databases, searching newspaper clippings, and contacting local police departments to connect Little’s confessions to specific victims.
According to the FBI, a number of factors led to Little escaping justice over the years, including his nomadic lifestyle. Investigators say he targeted marginalized women, including prostitutes and drug users. Most were African-American, and he often only knew their first names or nicknames. Many of these deaths had originally been ruled as overdoses or from accidental or unknown causes. In some cases, the women went missing and their bodies were never found, but their cases drew little attention.
As of October, 2019, the team has been able to corroborate 51 of the killings that Little has confessed to, with an additional 12 cases pending. “I don’t question his credibility at all. I think he really is responsible for all the cases he’s told us about, it’s just a matter of finding them,” according to Agent Palazzolo.
At 79 years of age, investigators fear that Little’s mind may begin to slip, so they are working tirelessly to obtain all the clues he has to offer.
Throughout the investigations, investigators discovered that Little enjoyed sketching. Ranger Holland provided him with art supplies, wondering if he might be able to sketch his victims. So far, Little has drawn dozens of detailed portraits of his victims, sketching them in pastel chalks.
A sampling of the portraits Little has created. Photo Credit
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” Christie Palazzolo said. “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 FBI has created a webpage devoted to identifying Little’s victims with updates on the case and drawings that he has produced.
Williamson adds, “He says he chose people who wouldn’t be missed, but he was wrong about that. The relatives are often overwhelmed to find out what happened. There are 240,000 unsolved cases in this country, and that’s too many. Everyone’s story deserves a happy ending.”