‘They all belong to you’
A Texas Ranger has spent years gaining the trust of a prolific serial killer, said journalist Del Quentin Wilber in the The goal: To find and identify his 93 victims.
TEXAS RANGER JAMES Holland each day enters his windowless, cricket-infested office, flips on fluorescent lights, and is confronted by spectral visages staring back at him. Holland lined the walls with dozens of haunting portraits of women, rendered from memory by their killer. The women appear in vibrant colors, with unique features—a bob haircut, lush lips, narrow nose, mournful eyes. Some pictures carry inscriptions: “Tampa Dope Girl,” “New Orleans Sarah Left in Field 1973 April,” “Akron Left in Woods 1990.” Recently, the portraits have taken on a more haunting purpose, reminders that Holland is running out of time to put names to more of their faces. He’s already found justice for some. Where a string of detectives had failed to crack Samuel Little, a pugilistic California prison inmate serving a life sentence for three brutal homicides in Los Angeles, the soft-spoken Holland managed to unlock a killer’s darkest secrets. In 650 hours of interviews over 16 months, Little confided to the detective that he had strangled 93 women and transgender women during a 40-year nomadic rampage from Florida to California, a tally that ranks him as the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history. Holland, who wears a Stetson and cowboy boots and carries an ivory-handled .45-caliber pistol, concedes their talks weren’t so much interrogations as meandering conversations over grits, Dr. Pepper, and Braum’s milkshakes. He has said whatever was required to keep Little talking.
“You are giving me a heart attack today,” Holland told Little last September when the killer seemed likely to quit confessing. “I still love you, brother.” “Thank you, Jimmy.” “Sammy, brother, for the record, me and you have been through hell over the last five and a half months.”
“We ain’t giving up, Jimmy.”
Then, as he often does, Holland played to Little’s ego, letting him think he was the one in control. “I know you are a powerful man,” Holland said, “a powerful man in the mind.”
“If you think so,” Little said, laughing. Blue-eyed and square-jawed, with the tall and lean body of the college football player he once was, Holland grew up in suburban Chicago. In 1995, he became a state trooper with the Texas Department of Public
Safety. Twelve years later, he joined the Texas Rangers, a storied agency of about 130 detectives.
Holland first heard about Little in December 2017 while he was teaching interrogation techniques at a police conference in Tampa and was approached by a Florida detective who wanted tips on how to interrogate Little, whom he suspected in one of his cases. Little was convicted in 2014 of strangling three women in Los Angeles in the 1980s and sentenced to life in prison. L.A. officials speculated that Little might have killed as many as 40 people, and police nationwide were searching for his potential victims. With the blessing of the Florida detective, whose case would turn out not to be connected to Little, Holland began digging into the killer.
Holland sought help from analysts at the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. They said that Little, whose real name was Samuel McDowell, had a lengthy criminal record and had spent significant time in Texas. They’d found 12 potential victims there. One, in particular, seemed to have the most potential: a prostitute slain in 1994 in Odessa. Like Little’s L.A. victims, she had been strangled and left partially clothed. Police records showed Little had been in the area around the time of the killing.
THERE IS A maxim about serial killers—they only talk when they are ready. Perhaps Little was ready, thought Holland. Little had run out of appeals and was battling a heart problem and diabetes. Immutable life sentences and one’s mortality are among the strongest of motivations to confess.
In May 2018, Holland and FBI analysts Christie Palazzolo and Angela Williamson flew to California. They first met with L.A. homicide detectives, who impressed Holland with their thorough work on the investigation. The detectives said that Little despised them, and Holland was free to use that to his advantage.
The detectives also said that Little hated being called a rapist, though his semen was found on the clothing of two victims and prosecutors labeled him a sexual predator. That was something he might be able to work with.
At 10:21 a.m. on May 17, with the FBI analysts listening in from another room at the prison in Lancaster, Little was rolled in a wheelchair into a cinder-block office and took a seat across a table from Holland. With a gray beanie covering his bald head, Little had a pockmarked face and deepset eyes. He looked worn out, though he maintained the outlines of the street boxer he once was. One feature immediately drew Holland’s focus: Little’s hands, his weapons, were the size of shovels.
Holland introduced himself. Little immediately demanded to know what the detective wanted. “Just to visit for a little bit,” Holland said. Little shook his head, saying he would never help law enforcement because he had been convicted “on lies and fake evidence.” Holland said he didn’t think Little was a rapist, which seemed to please the killer. Trying to build rapport, Holland said he had heard Little was an artist (a 1976 newspaper story described him painting a mural in jail) and a boxer. Holland brought up college football. But Little just wanted to rag on L.A. police.
Then, a connection. What, Holland asked, should he call him? Most people called him Sam, Little said, but his mother and sister had called him “Sammy.” Holland said he was James to most people, but his mother called him “Jimmy.” Soon they were Sammy and Jimmy.