Samuel Little, a man who admitted to being one of America’s worst serial killers, confessed to at least four murders in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Little, who died in custody in December of 2020 at age 80, said he killed 93 people between 1970 and 2005. Police have confirmed at least 60 of those deaths, and his confessions are helping families find answers to old cases.
Little traveled all over the country, targeting women he thought no one would miss--like sex workers, drug users, or homeless people. He strangled them, which often made their deaths look like accidents or overdoses instead of murders.
In 2018, after a Texas Ranger got him to talk, police started matching his confessions and creepy drawings to crimes that had gone cold.
In Arkansas, Samuel Little said he killed at least two women, and two cases are now tied to him.
Zena Marie Jones was 30 years old when she was murdered in 1990. l Little confessed to picking her up in Memphis,, strangling her, and then disposing of her body on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River.
Her body was discovered by a fisherman near the riverbank. Little provided a sketch of her in 2018, and she was identified in April 2022 after her family recognized the drawing. Forensic evidence supported his confession, confirming her as one of his victims.
Little also described a 1992-93 killing a heavyset African American woman he believed was named “Ruth” in North Little Rock.
He said she had honey-colored skin, buck teeth, and was about 5’7” tall, weighing around 170-200 pounds.
He met her at a crack house, spent a few days with her shoplifting at stores like Kroger and Sears, and then strangled her, leaving her body in a cornfield near Bentonville.
Despite his detailed memory--including an arrest for shoplifting at a Kroger in 1994--no matching case has been confirmed, and her identity remains unknown.
(You can see his confession to that murder by clicking this link: Samuel Little Confession: North Little Rock, Arkansas, 1992/1993 — FBI
Jolanda Jones was 26 years old when she died in 1994.
. Her death was initially classified as an “unexplained death” by Pine Bluff police, with little evidence to suggest foul play at the time.
Little later confessed to strangling her and dumping her body. His account matched the circumstances of the case, and police have since linked him to her killing.
In Oklahoma, Little admitted to killing a young Black woman, about 25 years old, in Tulsa. He said he picked her up near a bar, strangled her, and left her body in a wooded area outside the city.
While this confession matches some missing persons reports from that time, Tulsa police and the FBI have not yet identified her or connected the case to a specific victim. Little’s sketches and descriptions are still being reviewed to find a match.
Samuel Little’s crimes went way beyond Arkansas and Oklahoma--he killed people in at least 14 states. He got away with it for so long because he moved around a lot and picked victims people didn’t notice were gone.
On September 25, 2014, a Los Angeles County jury convicted Samuel Little of three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of three women--Carol Ilene Elford, Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca, and Audrey Nelson Everett--in the late 1980s (1987 and 1989).
These murders took place in Los Angeles County, and DNA evidence linked him to the crimes after his arrest in 2012 on a drug charge.
In 2018, he pleaded guilty to murdering Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas, in 1994. He got another life sentence without parole for this crime on December 13, 2018.
In total, Samuel Little was sentenced to four life sentences without parole. Since they were consecutive (one after the other), he was locked up for life with no chance of release.
Little died in a California prison on December 30, 2020, at the age of 80 from heart-related issues.
The FBI is asking anyone with information to speak up, even if it’s something small. “He went after people who were forgotten, but we want to make sure they’re not,” an FBI worker said. Even though Samuel Little is dead, the police keep working to find out everything he did and give his victims some justice.
