An inmate who claims to have killed more than 90 women across the U.S. is now considered the serial killer with the highest number of victims in the country’s history, the FBI reported.
Samuel Little, who has been in prison since 2012, told investigators last year that he had killed about 90 people across the country between 1970 and 2005.
The FBI said in a statement Sunday that federal analysts have reason to believe that all his confessions are credible, and so far the authorities have been able to corroborate 50 of them.
Little, 79, is serving several life sentences in California. He said he strangled his 93 victims, almost all of them female.
Some of the victims were social outcasts. Originally, many of the cases were determined as overdose, or attributed to accidents or causes not determined. Some of the bodies were never recovered.
The FBI spread 90 portraits of some of its victims, color portraits that Little himself drew in prison. They are scary images, mostly of black women.
The agency also released videos of some interviews in prison with Little. He described how he strangled a woman in 1993, and how he threw her down a slope in a desolate road.
In another of the videos, Little described a victim from New Orleans. “She was pretty. Light brown skin, ”he said with a small smile. “She was tall to be a woman. In abeautiful ways. And, uh, friendly. ”
It was in 1982 and they met at a nightclub. They left the place and she got into Little’s car, a Lincoln, and parked next to a marsh.
“It was the only one I killed by drowning her,” he confessed.
Researchers across the country are still trying to link confessions with unidentified remains and unsolved cases of recent decades. Last August, Little pleaded guilty to killing four women in Ohio. He was convicted in California in 2012 for three homicides and last year pleaded guilty to another murder in Texas.
Authorities in Knox County, Tennessee, said Sunday that it is possible that a woman named Martha Cunningham was one of Little’s victims.