You’ve Never Heard Of The Most Prolific Serial Killer In U.S. History

Over 90 women were murdered over the course of 30 years, with 60 of them confirmed by the FBI. His attacks often included sexual assault, and his modus operandi was by strangulation. Up until he was extradited to California to face a narcotics charge, he went through life largely unnoticed and disregarded despite his string of other crimes. Thanks to the advancements in forensic technology, serial killer Samuel Little was put away, and he cooperated to resolve several cold cases. Numerous families were able to receive closure for the disappearance of their loved one. 

Little is nowhere near as infamous as Dahmer or Bundy, despite being the most prolific serial killer in United States history. Why is that?

Samuel Little’s Early Life

Samuel Little, né McDowell, was born on June 7, 1940, in Georgia, to a teenage mother who was reportedly a sex worker, although the census from 1940 said she was a maid. Judge Richard Bell, former assistant Cuyahoga county prosecutor, recalled Little talking about his mother, saying she had left him on a street corner when he was a toddler. From then on, he was raised primarily by his grandmother.

In kindergarten, Little developed a fascination for women’s necks after seeing his teacher touch her own. It would follow him throughout his life. As a teenager, he pinned to his wall a picture of a strangled young woman that he saw in a true crime magazine. In an interview with Texas Ranger James Holland, Little said he never killed anyone he loved, and those he did love, he made a conscious effort not to look at their necks.

According to author Jillian Lauren, who interviewed Little and his family, they said he was “nothing but trouble,” even before he was sent to reform school for stealing a bicycle as a child. After the incident, he was reportedly abused repeatedly and received 47 disciplinary infractions.

But bike stealing was just the beginning of his criminal career. From 1957 to 1975, he faced charges of shoplifting, assault, theft, rape, aggravated assault on a police officer, DUI, fraud, breaking and entering, and solicitation of a prostitute.

It was in 1970 that he would meet his longtime girlfriend Orelia “Jean” Dorsey. Dorsey was 30 years his senior and facilitated Little’s criminal activities. Together, until Dorsey’s death in 1988, they drove around the United States, making a living off shoplifting. Little worked by day in low-profile, non-committal jobs and as the driver to their criminal operation. Little said that Dorsey had no knowledge of the murders he was committing, only that he was seeking women out.

A Tragic String of Murders

According to Little, he victimized Mary Jo Brosley in late January 1970, becoming the first of a large series of murders. When asked the question, “Did you know you wanted to kill her?” he said, “Yeah, I had desires, strong desire to f*ck her and kill her.” He selected his victims on the basis of their neck and how attractive he found it. It appealed to him sexually and to his murderous desires. It’s believed he could have killed women prior to 1970, but Little maintained that he’d choke women during sex, but not go so far as to kill them.

According to Lauren, Little maintained that he loved women. In his mind, killing and sex were intertwined, and having that mix-up in his head was just the way God made him.

From 1970 to 2005, Little killed over 90 women. After being apprehended by authorities in the 2010s, he was able to provide sketches of his victims, many of which are just Jane Does. Rows and rows of “black female,” handfuls of “white female,” and a couple “Hispanic female.” Some have possible names: “Linda,” “Sheila,” “Alice,” “Sarah,” or “Donna.” Despite his confessions, Little was only convicted of three murders.

He stopped at age 65 on account of his weakened physique, marking an end to what was essentially a career in murder. In Little’s old age, there was a higher chance of a victim getting away or fighting him off.

For all those years, there were no investigations into these murders. Aside from selecting his victims on the basis of attraction to their necks, Little carefully targeted women on the fringes of society: primarily prostitutes, drug addicts, and those whose disappearance he thought wouldn’t bring forth a large investigation. In one case, he targeted a young white prostitute who was labeled in her file as “retarded or very slow.” Her name was Mary Jo Peyton, and she was discovered weeks after she left a bar with Little, where he raped and killed her before throwing her body at the bottom of a factory stairwell. When she was found, her body was decomposing and covered in maggots.

Little was only caught because of an extradition to California on a narcotics charge in 2012, where his DNA was collected and entered into a national database. He was convicted in 2014 of three murders in the 1980s: those of Carol Linda Alford, Audrey Nelson, and Guadalupe Apodaca. Little received three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Years later, he began confessing to additional murders of over 90 women. From 2018 to 2020, Little cooperated with law enforcement agencies all around the United States to corroborate his confessions. Alongside being able to provide details about the circumstances around the murders, like the kind of car he was driving and where he was, Little was also able to produce detailed drawings of them. Authorities were able to confirm 34 murders in the first year of Little’s cooperation.

Little died in prison aged 80 on December 30, 2020, with no specified cause of death. He suffered from diabetes and heart problems, among other health issues.

How Is Samuel Little Not a Household Name?

Despite confessing to killing nearly 100 women, Little remains relatively unknown, especially compared to murderers like Dahmer or Bundy.

Some would say it’s due to the nature of the murders. Strangulation is not as sensational as killing and eating someone, like in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer; with Ted Bundy, everyone assumed he was a genuinely good guy, with his charm and affability. Both killers also engaged in necrophilia.

Could it be that our culture is so hung up on sensationalism that to hear about a horrific and long career in killing just isn’t enough to produce sufficient interest and outrage to warrant a documentary or a miniseries on a platform as massive as Netflix? Is it not enough if the victims are all relatively unknown women, who existed on the outskirts of society? No matter someone’s choices that they make with their own life, they don’t deserve sexual assault, nor to suffer a horrific and undignified death, to then be discarded like garbage.

Viewing it through a radical feminist lens, you could say our culture hates women so much that having killed nearly 100 of them isn’t enough to be vilified. But then, you can’t apply that logic to Ted Bundy.

Viewing it through a race-critical lens, you could then say it’s because Little killed primarily black women, and our culture views them as unimportant. But then, shouldn’t there have been no convictions for the murder of any black woman? It could be that Little himself had particular disdain for black women and prostitutes, perhaps out of disdain for women resembling his mother in a general sense?

Still, many of the women whose cases were closed had family who remembered them and cared enough to investigate further when they saw resemblances between sketches and their memory or photographs of the victimized family member, or the cases were so gruesome that details were better recorded, as in the case of Mary Jo Peyton. The caring and determination of your family transcends race.

Finally, you could argue that Dahmer and Bundy were landmark cases. With Dahmer, it was the first series of publicized murders of its kind, with horrifying details that haunted the public. With Bundy, his case was among the first to be broadly televised. Little was only convicted of some of the murders in 2014, well into the start of the age of shortened attention spans and never remembering tragic events, in favor of whatever else is new and more horrific.

However, there are plenty of monsters that the mainstream media doesn’t let us forget: the Isla Vista killer, who killed six people in 2014 and injured 14 more, and the numerous shooters who are all firstly described as “white” before anything else. Although we live in an era of short, volatile memories, there are some things that we’re heavily urged to remember, and it’s important to ask ourselves what there is in common between all of them and what’s different about those that are never spoken about.

No matter what, this points to several failings: a failing of society to keep and protect its daughters from harm, and a failing of the justice system to do anything to keep a menace like Little away from people (remember, he had been convicted of assault and rape prior to and in between murders). Even still, there is a failure to be as open about discussing and shining a light on horrific moments in history. Dahmer and Bundy will live in infamy for a very long time to come. It’s been years since Little’s conviction and the start of his cooperation with authorities to resolve other murders. Will he come to live in the same degree of infamy as them?

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