Samuel Little, deadliest US serial killer, dies at 80 with many victims unknown

America’s deadliest serial killer, Samuel Little, who confessed to strangling 93 people, has died in California aged 80 with the identity of almost half of his victims still unknown.

Little said he targeted disadvantaged and mostly black women, including sex workers, in the belief that this would draw less attention from a disjointed law enforcement system that had little apparent interest in such victims – a calculation that proved grimly correct. His death means families of many of the victims may never have closure.

He was serving three consecutive sentences of life without parole for the killing of three women in Los Angeles County during the late 1980s, crimes to which he was linked through DNA matches. He was convicted of first-degree murder by a Los Angeles County jury on 25 September 2014 and began serving his prison sentence about two months later.

According to the FBI, Little began confessing to additional murders to a Texas Ranger who interviewed him in his California prison cell in 2018, and ultimately admitted to killing 93 people across the country by strangulation between 1970 and 2005.

The FBI said investigators had since verified 50 of those confessions, with many more pending final confirmation, making Little the deadliest US serial killer on record.

Authorities have said he appears to have targeted mostly vulnerable young black women, many of them sex workers or addicted to drugs, whose deaths were not well publicised at the time and in some cases were not recorded as homicides.

Describing how he killed with impunity for years, Little boasted to investigators of avoiding “people who would be immediately missed”, in an interview acquired by the Washington Post, which examined the repeated failures to catch Little. “I’d go back to the same city sometimes and pluck me another grape,” he said. “How many grapes do you all got on the vine here? I’m not going to go over there into the white neighbourhood and pick out a little teenage girl.”

Many of his killings were initially recorded as overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to an FBI profile of the killer.

Before his convictions in 2014, Little was linked to at least eight sexual assaults, attempted murders or killings, but he repeatedly escaped serious punishment.

Little served two prior sentences in a California state prison, including a four-year term ending in 1987 for assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, and a stint of about 14 months ending in April 2014.

FBI video recordings of his jailhouse confessions showed Little sitting in front of a cinder-block wall in blue prison scrubs and a grey knit cap, sometimes appearing bemused or smiling as he recounted the circumstances of the killings.

He was incarcerated at a state prison in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles, and died early on Wednesday morning at an outside hospital, the state department of corrections said. It said an official cause of death would be determined by the county medical examiner’s office.

Reuters contributed to this report