In a disturbing interview, America’s most prolific serial killer Samuel Little confessed to how he murdered a woman. Video / 60 Minutes
WARNING: Disturbing.
This week the FBI named a 79-year-old man as the most prolific serial killer in US history.
Samuel Little has so far confessed to 93 murders, which span over decades and across numerous states.
It has been nearly 18 months since Little started confessing to the murders from inside a California jail, describing each victim and kill in great detail.
The FBI have released a series of interviews with the 79-year-old in which he describes his crimes in the hope that someone may recognise the victim.
The murders took place between 1970 and 2005, with Little saying he strangled all of the victims, except for one woman.
Dressed in his blue prison clothes and a grey beanie, Little described a woman he met in Louisiana in 1982 to Texas ranger James Holland.
"She was pretty. Light skinned, brown, honey-coloured skin. And she was tall for a woman. About 5'8," 5'9." And beautiful shape. And uh, friendly," he said in the confession video.
"She had a beautiful body on her, a beautiful 150. Well put together."
Little strangled all his other victims, except for this woman. Photo / FBI
He said the woman was about 30 and remembers her wearing a pretty dress with buttons on the front.
He met her at a nightclub in New Orleans while she was out celebrating her youngest sister's birthday.
"Her sister was dancing with this guy on the floor. And when I come in, the girl that I was with offered to dance with me,' Little said.
"And while we're dancing, she says, 'You want to go riding after this, you know, after this party's over?' We walked outside and she looked and seen my car, that Lincoln. She said, 'Woo, that's a beautiful car, too.'"
The pair got in the car and he drove the woman to an exit off the highway called Little Woods that led them down a dirt road next to a canal that was being dredged.
Little parked the car and that is when he attacked her.
"I grabbed her by the legs and pulled her to the water. That's the only one that I ever killed by drowning," he said.
Investigators say they have established Samuel Little's ties to dozens of murders. Photo / AP
"I left her with her head still there in the water. Half her body under water and the thighs and legs on the bank."
This woman is just one of many victims yet to be identified, with Little believed to be responsible for more killings than Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer combined.
THOUGHT HE WOULD NEVER BE CAUGHT
He often preyed on prostitutes and drug addicts, with many of his victims being black like himself, and for decades he believed he would never be caught.
His method of killing combined with his choice of victims made it difficult to link Little to the crimes.
The former boxer would often deliver a knockout punch to women and then strangle them while masturbating.
He would then dump their bodies and leave town soon after.
In 2012 he was arrested and extradited to California on a narcotics charge. Los Angeles Police Department obtained DNA that connected Little to three unsolved homicides that occurred in 1987 and 1989.
In 2014 he was charged with three counts of murder and sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole.
After being linked to the three murders, a full background investigation found an alarming pattern that linked him to dozens more.
Samuel Little openly laughed about how some of his victims looked while he was killing them. Photo / 60 Minutes
But it wasn't until May 2018 when Ranger Holland travelled from Texas to interview Little in California that he started to confess.
At the time Little was looking to be transferred to different jail, so in exchange for him talking he was moved to a jail in Texas, where Holland continued to conduct almost daily interviews.
He claimed to have killed in 19 states. The biggest concentrations of killings were in Florida and California, he said, with about 20 in Los Angeles alone.
Little's case recently featured on US 60 Minutes, where he was shown laughing while describing one of his kills in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
"(She) had buck teeth. Had a gap between her teeth, that's what it was," Little said as he smiled and chucked.
"You know that she's fighting for her life, and I'm fighting for my pleasure."
He also claimed the woman was laughing as he strangled her.
It wasn't the only time Little broke into a smile when talking about his victims, in another interview he seemed to smirk when Holland asked him about a woman named Marianne.
"She was what nowadays you call a transgender," Little said.
He said he met Marianne at a bar in Florida and offered to take her to the store before driving her down a highway and strangling her on someone's driveway.
Some of his other confessions included picking up a 25-year-old "hippie type" girl outside a Kentucky strip club in 1984.
Some of Samuel Little's many victims.
He described driving her up a dirt road to a hill where he strangled her in the back of his car.
And in a case from Florida in the 1970s, Little remembered the flowered sundress and necklace the victim wore, and how he played with it before he choked her to death.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Holland said he could tell when Little was visualising a particular crime.
"With Sammy, there's indications of visualisation, of when he's thinking about a crime scene," Holland said.
"He'll start stroking his face. And as he's starting to picture a victim, you'll see him look out and up.
"And you can tell he has this revolving carousel of victims, and it's just spinning, and he's waiting for it to stop at the one that he wants to talk about."
Little is now wheelchair bound and suffers from diabetes and heart disease and spends his days recounting his crimes.
