Samuel Little Is Most Prolific Serial Killer in U.S. History, F.B.I. Says

I have watched 3 or 4 of these videos but the interviewer doesn't ask the man what these women were doing while he drove them around. The killer doesn't mention that but I guess they kept it out. I don't quite have the understanding of our Creator that he has.

Against my best intentions I watched this story on 60 minutes thinking it would be about police procedural. Instead the focus was on a loser - a vile individual who did not deserve any such limelight (that's why I refuse to watch/read/listen to such accounts as it gives publicity to despicable cretins). Even worse, the John Waynish detective referred to this cretin as a genius. What hogwash - the man is not a genius, but a bottommost pit of society. The only reason he got away with the murders was his focus on the marginalised, the 'throwaways' of society that police care little about - very few miss them and very few report them missing; even then, police devote little to no resources to such cases (fair enough, most departments don't have the resources and are overworked). Further, the cretin moved from jurisdiction to jurisdiction - and owing to gaps in police collaboration across jurisdictions, no one put the pieces together. So, far from a genius, the man did not deserve a 60 minutes profile. Worse, the reporter did not challenge the assertion of genius (really, this loser is a genius). As for the Deputy, rather arrogantly, claiming to have special skills to elicit information from the cretin, overlooked the fact that the man is a braggart (possibly seeking to cleanse his soul now that he is aging into death). True, the Deputy followed good instincts in investigations, but no special talent was needed. And, most specially, this cretin did not warrant such a profile.

Noted: The government makes a major announcement about the cases a day before a well-known television program features them. The Times mentions the TV program in passing. C'mon Times, any reporter worth her salt would see a story behind the coordination. Where is it?

I am aware of the Times guidelines stating that men who are written about are to be referred to with the title "Mr." It's time for the Times to take some time to rethink this policy. This person Little does not deserve the respectful title of Mr.

This seemed to happen effortlessly because this country has a long history and still today of sexism and racism. His victims were considered second class citizens in which no one of authority seems to care about. This was also true for Jeffrey Dahmer where a fourteen year old Laotian gay male was returned to him by a police officer; who was later killed by Jeffery.

Sometimes I wonder how many police officers out there see this and privately cheer Sam Little and his fellow monsters on, celebrating the convenient slaughter of prostitutes, drug addicts, and other people they consider unworthy of life. Nothing else can explain the extraordinary apathy with which law enforcement has allowed this to happen.

It seems being a "second class citizen" in this country has worse consequences for female victims of deadly crimes if only in the number who may be assailed and killed. Mr. Little apparently was very aware of this probability and used it to select his victims, less for their jobs than for their ethnicity.

Supposedly, the likeness of these drawings to the actual women he murdered is uncanny. For him to go back almost 50 years into his memory to do this is strange indeed, and you can tell that many of the facial features are very detailed, making them almost like caricatures . He claims to have loved them---most likely not many people in these women's lives would have remembered their faces like this after so many years---I would not call it "love", but I would call it an unusual and abhorrently deviant version of it. It's awful awful stuff, but some brains are wired in ways that we can not even imagine. I am not putting this guy on an artistic pedestal, but it's good that these were released and that they weren't censored, like some people seem to think should have happened. Little could have been put away for a long time years ago for some very serious assaults, yet he only served a total of about 10 years supposedly, and he also had an acquittal . It's tragedy all around. But the eyes he drew on these women ARE haunting. You cannot doubt that. Some alive and vibrant; some sad and pensive. Just like any of us.

In his “Sixty Minutes” interview, the Texas ranger pointed out that he dealt straight-forward with Little and did not appeal to his sense of morality or mercy when discussing his killings. Little apparently has a photographic memory and has been able to offer likenesses of the women he murdered. Law enforcement authorities have been able to close some fifty cold cases. Little sits in a jail until he dies. We must ask how many more murderous sociopaths are loose in our country, going about killing people. Perhaps Little is the tip of an iceberg. There have been other cases of serial killers that were able to go undetected for years. Dennis Lynn Rader, the “BTK Strangler” is one of them. The Netflix series “Mind Hunter” explores the psychology of serial killers and other criminals as a new generation of FBI agents in the early 1970s sought to introduce new methods of detection and analysis to a hide-bound agency. We’ve come a long way since the days when J. Edgar Hoover and his agents went after gangsters with Tommy-guns. Yet, our criminal justice system still seems to struggle with profiling and finding people like Little and Rader. The yet unsolved “West Mesa” killings of 11 women and a fetus outside Albuquerque show that serial killers are still acting with impunity despite the best efforts of law enforcement to identify and apprehend them. Add to this all of the mass shootings and murder-suicides and we have an ongoing threat of our safety.

The use of 'prolific' in the headline provides a positive connotation to the extent of this man's evil and the horror he caused. The man was exceedingly murderous. We have a movie in theaters detailing a loner's descent into madness and murder; let's not further promote the idea of record-setting to other unsettled souls.

It is so easy to point to God as the rationale for just about all human evils. We need a better definition for what the word "God" should mean for those who justify so much of their lives on him, her or it.

How about most vile, or most horrible, instead of most prolific? I think the word prolific is better served elsewhere.

A whole list of crimes including rape early on, and hardly any time in prison. Imagine if women were valued, he'd have been in jail for a long time and many women would still be alive.

Just like "the iceman cometh" - proud of his handiwork. Sociopath. The iceman, the mafia hitman, justified it in terms of the victims saying or doing something that "made him angry". This guy just seems to think that these humans were put there for him to kill. That his perverse pleasure in their murder justifies everything. The world revolves around his murderous sadistic pleasure.

Can the media stop using terms like "most prolific" to describe this murderer? It makes it sound like he's a Guinness record holder. Maybe use murderous, deadliest, or even destructive.

Is the reason Mr. Little got away with this for long, because so many of his victims were African American women who poor or on the periphery of society?

“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” says the FBI representative. Well, he was right. It is striking that Little's murderous run coincided with the rise of the mass incarceration era. The system prioritized putting bodies--black and brown bodies-- in prison over actual justice for victims.

Was anyone else suspected, charged, and/or convicted of any of these murders? This is a tragedy for the victims, an indictment of the justice system and a game to Little. For various reasons, I wish his name and the magnitude of his crimes had never been mentioned.

I saw the interview on 60 Minutes Sunday. Little is remarkable in his lack of affect other than what appears to be self-laudatory. Let him have his moment of fame if it means that dozens of families will finally know what happened to their loved ones. Even the most marginalized of people have families who love them.

"For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims." Clearly he was right. That he was able to murder so many people over so many decades is less due to his own sickness and more a testament to ours. The fact that he was recognized by law enforcement as someone who committed rapes and kidnappings, and yet was able to kill almost 100 women and trans women of color is horrifying but also not surprising. Our larger culture is, I hope, changing in its recognition of the seriousness of rape, but we have a long way to go in valuing the lives of all people. Dehumanizing language and policies at any level contribute to this kind of violence continuing unchecked.

Everyone thought Henry Lee Lucas was a prolific serial killer -- until it turned out he hadn't committed the crime that placed him on Texas Death Row and that he couldn't have committed all the crimes he copped to because he couldn't have been in two places at one time. I will believe that Mr. Little is the most prolific serial killer ever when we have more than just his say-so coupled with the desire of police officers to close cold cases. And, no, the ability to draw pictures of the victims does not indelibly link him to the crime. We know from DNA exonerations that suggestible interrogation techniques do produce innocent defendants who in "confessions" described the crime scene and the victims (because interrogators fed them these details over the course of interrogation). There are real victim survivors behind these cases. They do deserve to have these cases closed, but they also deserve to have them closed with much more certainty than is being provided here.

I wish they had used a professional police sketch artist to "translate" these drawings so their likeness could be used in the efforts to identify the victims but we didn't have to glorify his image/memory of them.

Makes you realize how easy it was to get away with murder if the acts were committed even just a couple of decades ago. Modern technology and surveillance advances most likely mean that such a prolific serial killer (outside of war zones) will never arise again.

...and how many wrongful convictions are linked to these cases?

These crimes have no connection to my family or me, so I guess it's easier for me to say this - as horrific as this guy's crimes were, I don't think the government should be so all-powerful and intrusive as to have the power to decide whether we live or die. As some of us have noticed, it is possible for a bad government to take control and to make those live-or-die decisions based on some evil reasoning, such as acting on the racial whims of its leader. Prisons are not pleasant places. Although in some cases prison life is much better than what the prisoner may have had outside, such as more stable living conditions and guaranteed healthcare coverage, the prisoner is deprived of freedom, is unable to choose even what they eat for lunch in some prisons, must share a cell with some other evil person, is forced to stay away from family and is, best of all, NOT free to offend again. At least until he/she gets let loose by some well-meaning parole board. I hope three life terms are enough to run out this beast's days, and hope our government relinquishes the godlike role of shortening the lives of any more deadly beasts of a similar ilk, no matter how bloodthirsty.

What scares me most is that the guy does not in the least seem scary. Too easy to see how his victims had no idea what was coming.

The apparent complete lack of empathy for Little's victims is what is so disturbing to me. It is as if some part of his brain failed to develop, in order to fully understand the consequences of his actions.

With the emphasis on statistics, including the "record" of the Green River killer, this article reads at times like the profile of a sports hero. It is important to treat this subject, especially to raise the awareness of how little attention the disappearance of vulnerable people gets. However, the accent on the outstanding performance - how far ahead he is landing of the standing record holder in the arena of serial killers - is pretty repugnant.

Has anyone asked him WHY?

How can it be that Little was arrested dozens of times for robbery, rape and kidnapping, yet served less than 10 years in jail? It gives the lie to the notion that we are excessively incarcerating convicted criminals.

It is absolutely frightening to look at serial killer Samuel Little’s friendly old man’s face, the way he chuckles and laughs like a cuddly old wrinkled-up grandpa, and then to realize this kind looking old man had murdered-butchered nearly a hundred humans. That face! The only thing I could think of was Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know.” The book’s thesis: be careful of the strangers you talk to for you can never be certain of who they really are. Never! And I thought “The Joker” was scary.

Is there any reason to tout Mr. Little --life really is a comedy-- as some sort of murdery MVP? It reminds me of the old Eddie Izzard bit about the truly genocidal: "Well done!"

“God put me on Earth to do what I did. He made me.” If God is omnipotent and omniscient Samuel’s assertion is unanswerable.

In all of this, I keep searching for some understanding of Little's motives...does anyone ask this question of the killer? To me it is the most essential part of the story...

Some points on serial killers. First, they are psychopaths, they won't show remorse. Second, avg IQ is close to normal. The image of a diabolical genius is wrong, but occasionally a smart one will show up which can make things challenging. But one's that aren't so smart can get away with killings for years for a number of reasons --including the fact that stranger on stranger killings aren't easy to solve unless you catch someone in the act or obtain a confession or have their fingerprints/DNA on file and they leave those behind. They usually don't stop on their own. Interesting story. In 1884 a serial killer dubbed the "servant girl annihilator" by O'Hara, killed several people in Austin, Tx. A Malaysian cook was a suspect. He left town the next year & murders stopped. The cook worked on a ship that docked in London in 1888. People heard him boast he wanted to kill prostitutes. About that time the Ripper murders started. The cook wasn't seen again. Who knows if he was JR. But SK's can move. Occupations that allow freedom of movement, limited supervision are good. As is being single. A serial killer can operate within a given area and get away with many killings if he operates in different police jurisdictions that don't communicate. Serial killers are often bed wetters, torture animals & set fires as kids. This doesn't help much as it isn't usually known until after a SK is caught . Over a decade, U.S. has about 50k unsolved murders.

There are two monsters here. The second one is the society that considers these women as trash and cannot be bothered to seek any justice for their violent deaths. One victim who escaped fled screaming to the authorities, who found Little in his car with blood and signs of violence everywhere. He was sentenced to three months for assault, rape, and attempted murder. Three months.

If only he had stayed in prison the times he was caught, there wouldn’t have been so many victims.

"God put me on Earth to do what I did." I'm sorry Mr. Little. You didn't fulfill your purpose - you completely violated it. You're no robot - you made choices.

For years, the African American community would claim there are no black serial killers. I wonder if this prevented this man from being caught sooner. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201412/serial-killer-myth-6-they-are-all-white

After studying psychopathic murderers, I came to the conclusion that most of them are narcissistic cowards. This guy is no different. Don’t play into their vanity by titling them “most prolific.” Gary Ridgeway and Ted Bundy debated each other’s stats like it was a ball game. Murder isn’t a sport.

I was a prosecutor. I wonder how thick some of the files on the cold cases were. The victims were killed and I suspect because of who they were there was little investigation after the first 72 hours. The only way for the police to reach the conclusions they did in some of them is for basic police work not to have been done. Which says a whole lot about justice in this country.

I just changed my lifelong position as an anti-capital punishment defender. After all the names and information can be gleaned, do the humane thing. Society has suffered enough damage and shouldn't have to pay for his incarceration.

My condolences to all their families. It is a sad testament to our society that he correctly gauged that society would not make a big fuss about the disappearance of all these beautiful women.

So now we learn that many of his victims weren't just poor and black, but were also transgender. This is heartbreaking but sadly it's not surprising.

Serial killers are pretty common in the US, facilitated by the geographic spread of the country and the availability of weapons. What Mr. Little’s confessions show is that they are not the monsters of the popular imagination. They are ordinary people who choose violence as the way of life. Once the choice is made, violence becomes addictive because it gives them the sense of power. This said, once they get used to killing, they cannot stop and should be incarcerated forever or gotten rid of some other way. In the current climate of opposition to mass incarceration, its good to remember that some people belong in jail or in the grave due to their own lifestyle choices.

When I was a little girl, growing up in the 1950's, I overheard my mother telling a friend that black people are not serial killers. She said only "white people do that". I knew immediately that her belief was wrong. Serial killers are human beings and human behavior is not designated by race. A few years ago, I looked up black serial killers and discovered there were more than 60 and the first one convicted was way back in the 1940's, more than 10 years before I overheard my mother's conversation. There is still a strong belief among black people that serial killers do not exist in our community. I certainly hope the twisted confessions of Mr. Little will finally put this absurd notion to rest. May his many victims Rest in Peace.

Those of us who avoid the worst parts that inner cities etc. like Newark,the Bronx,Camden etc. are known for,are not shocked one man could kill that many women. Who was supposed to care about women on drugs,etc. after they had left their families or just sought a friend with a guy who seemed personable. There are others,very few,like Mr.Little that get away with it because even Police and the FBI have little to go on if nobody cared about the victims.The Golden State killer got away with it too long and he was Police. So,trust is eroding in our Police and Law Enforcement folks for good reasons.

I saw this on "Sixty Minutes". The man has an uncanny ability to almost photograph an image. Other than the killings (of course), is how many innocent people have been wrongfully convicted, which begs the question, executed?

“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims...” If someone kills 93 people over a period of years, that statement can't be far off. Now we have an art show by the killer. I understand it is being publicized to help identify victims, but this whole thing shows how vulnerable people are often treated. "She may have looked like this and, by the way, her killer really likes drawing her with shiny purple lipstick." May you poor souls rest in peace.

Can we agree to use a word other than "prolific" in this context?