[ad_1]
Convicted murderer Samuel Little, who confessed to strangling 93 people and was considered by the FBI to be the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, died Wednesday in a California hospital, the state’s department of corrections said. He was 80 years old.
Little had been serving three consecutive life sentences without parole for the murder of three women in Los Angeles County in the late 1980s, murders to which he was linked via DNA that matched samples found in the crime scenes.
He was convicted of first degree murder by a Los Angeles County jury on September 25, 2014, and began serving his prison sentence about two months later.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Little began confessing additional murders to a Texas Ranger who interviewed him in his California prison cell in 2018, eventually admitting to killing 93 people across the country by strangulation between 1970 and 2005.
The FBI said investigators have verified 50 of those confessions, with many more pending final confirmation, making him the deadliest American serial killer on record.
Authorities have said it appeared to have targeted mostly vulnerable black women, many of them prostitutes or drug addicts, whose deaths were not well publicized at the time and in some cases were not recorded as homicides.
Many of his victims’ deaths were originally ruled as overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, and some bodies were never recovered, according to a single FBI killer profile.
Little served two previous sentences in a California state prison, including a four-year sentence that ended in 1987 for assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment, and a stay of about 14 months that ended in April 2014.
FBI videotapes taken of his jail confessions showed Little, sitting in front of a cinder block wall in blue prison gowns and a gray wool hat, sometimes looking puzzled or smiling as he recounted the circumstances of the murders .
He had been incarcerated in a state prison in Lancaster, California, north of Los Angeles, but died early Wednesday morning at an outside hospital, the state department of corrections and rehabilitation said in a statement.
The agency said the county medical examiner’s office would determine the official cause of death.
Reuters
[ad_2]
