Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders, of which the FBI verified 60, making him the most prolific confirmed serial killer in United States history.[1]
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Eighty-six years ago yesterday, on June 7, 1940, a boy was born in Reynolds, Georgia and registered under the name Samuel McDowell. In time, he would become known by a different name — Samuel Little — and that name would be recognized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as belonging to the most prolific confirmed serial killer in United States history.
That designation came from the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP, which spent years cross-referencing Little's confessions against unsolved case files from law enforcement agencies across the country. What the analysis revealed was a criminal career that spanned decades and crossed state lines — one that had largely gone undetected not because investigators were careless, but because the victims were women who existed at the edges of American society, whose deaths were often never recognized as murders at all.
Little operated across the United States from the late 1970s through the mid-2000s. His victims were primarily women living in poverty — sex workers, drug users, women without stable housing, many of them Black or Indigenous. He killed by strangulation, a method that left marks consistent with natural or accidental death. Medical examiners who encountered his victims frequently recorded causes of death as drug overdoses, cardiac events, or accidents. Cases that were never opened as homicides could not generate investigations. Jurisdictions that should have been connected never compared notes. A serial killer moved through America's shadow systems largely undisturbed.