FBI: Serial killer may have links to Phoenix
3 murders among more than 90 Little detailed
A 78-year-old man who has confessed to killing more than 90 people during a decades-long spree may have killed three women in Phoenix, FBI officials said Wednesday.
In a statement, the FBI said its crime analysts believe Samuel Little, who is being held in a Texas prison on homicide charges, may join the list of the most infamous U.S. serial killers.
Little is awaiting trial after being convicted in 2014 of killing three people in California in the 1980s. He’s serving three consecutive life sentences for those crimes.
The Naples Daily News reported on Wednesday that in interviews with Texas authorities, Little is detailing killings he said he committed across the country from 1970 to 2005. Little has said he killed nearly two dozen more women after the California killings.
The unsolved killings that Little has confessed to include three in Phoenix,
according to the FBI.
An online FBI map shows the states and victim descriptions that Little provided them, but the FBI has not corroborated the Phoenix killings.
According to the FBI, one of the Phoenix victims may have been a Hispanic woman in her 40s whom Little may have killed in 1988 or 1996 in Phoenix.
The other possible victim may have been killed in 1997 and is described as a white woman, possibly named Ann.
The description of the third victim is not detailed in a map of the killings published by the FBI.
Phoenix police Sgt. Armando Carbajal said Wednesday that the agency is helping the FBI investigate the claims.
Since May, officials have confirmed 34 killings. Many more await confirmation; some are uncorroborated.
The Naples Daily News reported that federal and state authorities began interviewing Little in the spring. And Little, hoping for better prison conditions, began detailing killings, mostly of black women in their 20s.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Little told authorities he is responsible for the unsolved killings of at least 17 women in Los Angeles in the mid- to late 1980s.
Beth Silverman, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who investigated the three California killings for which Little was convicted, said Little also claimed to have killed a woman in Flagstaff.
Flagstaff police Sgt. Cory Runge said Monday that he had never heard of Little.
“This person is not listed in connection with any crimes with the Flagstaff Police Department that we are aware of,” Runge said.
The majority of Little’s victims were “marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs,” the FBI read.
Little was a former competitive boxer who was known to knock out his victims with a punch before strangling them, the FBI said.
An absence of DNA technology in 1970s and 1980s hindered law enforcement’s ability to link Little to any of the killing at the time, as did his method of killing them, officials said.
Little was arrested in 2012 in Kentucky and extradited to California for a narcotics charge, the FBI said.
After that conviction, Los Angeles prosecutors found DNA evidence linking him to killings in California.
The FBI is asking anyone with information on the case to call the agency at 800-634-4097.