Inmate, 78, guilty in Texas killing

DALLAS — A 78-yearold prisoner who claims to have killed about 90 people over nearly four decades as he moved around the country pleaded guilty to murder Thursday in the 1994 strangulation of a Texas woman.

Samuel Little entered his plea in the west Texas city of Odessa, where the body of Denise Christie Brothers was discovered in a vacant lot about a month after she disappeared. He received another life prison term, Ector County District Attorney Bobby Bland said.

Little was convicted in 2014 of killing three Los Angeles-area women in separate attacks in the late 1980s and was serving life sentences when authorities say he confessed this year to killing dozens more people in 20 states since 1970.

Those confessions, which often included a level of detail and recall that authorities say was uncanny, spurred investigators from Florida to California to review old murder cases.

An FBI spokesman said thus far, investigators have concluded that Little was the killer in 36 cases, including the killing of Brothers and the three in the Los Angeles-area that landed him in prison. But Bland said in his statement more than 40 cases have been confirmed. He later explained that he received that number from Texas Rangers, an elite investigative agency that has relayed details of Little’s confessions to law officers in other states. Little detailed the killings in a series of conversations with Ranger James Holland.

Little, who is in poor health and relies on a wheelchair, offered his confessions as a bargaining chip to be moved from the Los Angeles County prison where he was being held, the FBI said last month.