Inmate confessing to 90 slayings

Nearly every day for weeks, a white-haired man in a wheelchair, his body ravaged by diabetes and heart disease, has been escorted under heavy guard from a Texas jail cell to an interview room to speak about evil.

Day by day, authorities say, he has recounted details of long-ago murders: faces, places, the layouts of small towns. He has described how he picked up vulnerable women from bars, nightclubs and along streets and strangled them to death in the back seat of his car.

The man, Samuel Little, 78, has confessed to more than 90 murders, investigators say, stretching back almost half a century. Little already is serving three life sentences for the murders of three Los Angeles women during the 1980s, but authorities suspect him of killing women in at least 14 states. Investigators say they have established Little’s ties to about 30 of the murders so far, and have little reason to doubt his confessions.

“By the time we are done, we anticipate that Samuel Little will be confirmed as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history,” said Bobby Bland, district attorney of Ector County, Texas, where Little is being held after a grand jury indicted him this summer for a 1994 killing.

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of 49 murders in Washington state during the 1980s and 1990s, the highest number of murder convictions for an American serial killer.

How a serial murderer could go on killing for years, apparently without anyone noticing a pattern, seems perplexing. But even the most effective police departments solve only about threequarters of homicides, meaning that thousands of people get away with murder each year. Also, the killings Little is said to have admitted to occurred in a wide range of counties and states. Many of the women whom Little is believed to have killed were poor and addicts — a group of people who often are not reported missing for weeks and sometimes receive fewer investigative resources.