Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Sentenced to life in jail for 3 murders, Samuel Little then confessed to a total of 90 victims, which would make him... America’s worst
police are facing the tricky question of whether to prosecute Little further, as he is already serving life – and spending millions of dollars of taxpayer cash on new convictions would not increase his sentence.
As they look into his past, they have begun piecing together the killer’s movements.
Born in July 1940 in Georgia, he was raised by his grandmother in Ohio.
At 16 Little picked up his first charge for breaking and entering.
Between then and 1975 he was arrested 26 times in 11 states on charges ranging from shoplifting to aggravated assault on a police officer. His first known attack on a woman was in 1976 when St Louis drug addict Pamela Kay Smith was found pleading for help, stripped from
IN REPORT ON LITTLE
the waist down with her hands tied behind her back with electrical cord.
Smith told police a man had picked her up, strangled her then beat and raped her before she managed to escape. Police arrested Little in a car matching the victim’s description and found her clothes inside. “I only beat her,” he told them.
Remarkably, he only got three months in jail after being convicted of assault with the intent to ravish-rape in December 1976.
Little was emboldened and was regularly arrested or suspected of violent attacks on women over the next five decades.
Incredibly, a lack of communication between police forces meant he always managed to get off relatively lightly – and often scot-free. In 1982, as police probed the murder of Melinda Lapree in Pascagoula, Mississippi, two prostitutes came forward to claim Little had attacked them.
He was arrested for the murder and the two assaults but a grand jury failed to indict him.
Later that same year, Little was charged with the murder of Patricia M d a
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