Samuel Little, America’s most ferocious serial killer, has died: he confessed 93 murders – Corriere.it



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Samuel Little died in the United States at the age of 80, serving a life sentence for the murder of three women, but had confessed to killing 93 between 1970 and 2005. The causes of death have not yet been revealed. All the victims were vulnerable people, many prostitutes or drug addicts. A former competitive boxer, Little allegedly knocked out his victims by punching them before strangling them: As a result, many deaths have been wrongly classified as due to overdoses or accidental and have never been investigated. Some bodies were never found, the FBI said. Little’s confessions were deemed “credible” by analysts who also released images of the victims drawn by Little himself while in prison. We propose you the portrait of the serial killer published on our website on December 2.

His first murder, Samuel Little, was committed in Florida in the late 1970s., in a secluded siding on Route 27, the highway that goes from Miami back to the United States to Fort Wayne, Indiana. The victim, Mary Brosley, whom he had met a few hours before in a bar, was a tiny and fragile woman: she was 33 years old, had two children in Massachusetts, problems with anorexia and alcoholism, walked with a cane after a hip operation and a phalanx of his left little finger was missing, which he lost in the kitchen. “She was the kind of woman who could disappear from the face of the earth without attracting too much attention”, explains the Washington Post in a lengthy article that reconstructs the career of America’s most prolific serial killer, who revealed that he has killed 93 people since he was arrested and convicted in 2014.

“I had a great desire… to strangle her. I think I just lost control, ”he explained to the police himself 40 years later. In fact, starting in May 2018, Little started telling stories, and has never stopped.: spoke for over 700 hours, confessing 93 murders in videotaped interrogations completed over 30 years and in 30 states. He is now 80 years old, he is locked up in a Californian prison where he is serving several life sentences, but he has an iron memory and a refined artistic talent in prison that allowed him to draw the portraits of dozens of his victims, almost all women, all strangled deaths. . “With the enthusiasm of an old man who remembers the exploits of youth”wrote the SendLittle gave police the exact details of all his murders, allowing them to identify more than 50 victims.

And so, For two years, agents have been using this information. – who they believe is 100% reliable – to reopen unsolved cases across the country in an attempt to at least offer an explanation to the families of the victims, some of which have disappeared into thin air without leaving a trace. The last murder, he said, was committed in 2005 in Tupelo, Mississippi. “If Little hadn’t confessed, none of these cases would have been solved”Angela Williamson, a Justice Department official who followed the investigation, told the Washington newspaper. Some cases remain pending because agents have not traced murders to match those described by the serial killer, others because the victim was an anonymous “Jane Doe” for whom no family member has come forward.

Some of the portraits of Little's victims drawn by the killer while in prison
Some of the portraits of Little’s victims drawn by the killer while in prison

In addition to the identity of his victims, however, Little’s confessions uncovered a “fragmented and indifferent” criminal justice system, as described by the capital newspaper, which allowed him to kill without fear of being captured, hitting people on the margins of society: drug addicts, prostitutes, runaway women whose deaths would not have attracted much attention or, in some cases, would have even gone unnoticed. The first, Mary Brosley, was white, but at least 68 of Little’s victims were black, three Hispanics and one Native American. Many had mental problems, one was transgender. “They were succulent fruits that he could enjoy without risk of penalty,” Little himself would have said during an interrogation in Ohio.

In his most prolific years, Little went on strike repeatedly in the same cities, avoiding choosing people whose disappearance would have attracted attention. “I would never have gone to a white neighborhood to kill a teenage girl”he said, revealing a strategy that allowed him to evade justice, even embarrass her. “If these women had been rich, white, worldly, this would have been the most important case in the history of the United States. Instead, he was aiming elsewhere, ”explained criminologist Scott Bonn. In this way, Little has ensured decades of impunity what, clarifies the Send, highlight the stark reality of American criminal justice.

Born in a small town in Georgia in 1940 to an African American family, abandoned by his teenage mother while still a baby, Little, who had moved to Ohio, had already developed a desire to strangle someone at the age of 7 or 8 years: he was obsessed with his teacher and wanted to kill a girl he knew. At the age of 13, he was caught stealing a bicycle and sent to a reformatory; two years later he was arrested for a robbery in Omaha, Nebraska; At just sixteen, he was sentenced to two years for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain, Ohio. Thereafter, his criminal record became increasingly full of arrests, at least 34: For assault in Denver, for luring a prostitute in Bakersfield, for robbery in Portland and Philadelphia, for driving while intoxicated in Los Angeles, for robbing a store in Phoenix.

Sometimes he spent months or years in jail, other times he was acquitted, but when he was on the loose, he resumed the slaughter of women without being discovered. He supported himself with some robberies and odd jobs, and in the meantime he chose his victims: at 35 he had already committed a dozen murders, which Often the police could not even recognize them as such.. Brosley’s body was discovered, decomposed, after three weeks: the agents considered it a suspicious death, but could not establish that it was a murder. A dynamic that has been repeated dozens of times. In 1977, for example, investigations found that Mary Ann Jenkins, a 22-year-old black woman from Illinois, found naked with some jewelry, had been killed by lightning. In 1994, the death of Jolanda Jones in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was classified as an overdose.

However, twenty-five years later, Pine Bluff police receive a call from the FBI.. Little had confessed to the murder of a woman there, a 26-year-old mother of two, who was found in an abandoned house with a crack pipe: along with the details, the serial killer had also provided a portrait of the woman. “It seemed like he was there with us when we found the body,” he told the Send Terry Hopson, former deputy chief of local police. Even the case of Brosley, the first victim, it was only classified as murder in 1982Twelve years later, when he still had no name: it took him another 35 years, plus a national database and a dental impression, to discover his identity.

Then in 2018, nearly fifty years after Brosley died in a parking lot on Route 27, Miami-Dade County Detective David Denmark receives a call from James Holland, a Texas ranger: A serial killer confessed to strangling a woman in South Florida. Searching the files of unsolved cases, detectives found two names. One was from Brosley, the other was Angela Chapman, a mentally disabled white prostitute who died in 1976 at the age of 25. They were both killed by Little, who confessed everything to Detective Denmark in exchange for a promise: I would never ask for a death sentence.

December 31, 2020 (change December 31, 2020 | 11:39 am)

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