A serial killer who admitted to two long-ago slayings in Cincinnati entered a guilty plea in those cases, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters has said.
The FBI calls Samuel Little one of America’s most prolific serial killers. He has confessed to murdering more than 90 women across the country between 1970 and 2005, though authorities have not confirmed all of those murders.
Among the killings they have confirmed is the 1981 slaying of Annie Lee Stewart in Cincinnati. Little says he killed Stewart via strangulation in October of that year, then drove her to a Columbus suburb to dump the body.
Little has also indicated he killed another woman in Cincinnati, though that victim has not been identified.
Prosecutors held an arraignment after which Little is pleaded guilty to those killings.
That court hearing will be held via teleconference, since Little, now almost 80 years old, is too frail to leave California, where he is serving three consecutive life sentences for three murders committed between 1987 and 1989.
Little says he killed the women in Cincinnati while living in a halfway house in Northern Kentucky.
Prosecutors say they are working with the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office reviewing autopsy records to determine if a body matching that description turned up in the area at that time.
Little faces 15 years to life in prison. Little agreed to plead guilty as long as prosecutors don’t seek the death penalty.
Deters says that Little will “die in prison.” Should he ever get out of jail in California, prosecutors want the option to bring him to Ohio. Little is linked to deaths in at least 16 states.
He also faces other charges in Ohio. Cuyahoga County Prosecutors brought indictments for two of three murders Little says he committed in Cleveland. One occurred in 1984 when Little left a Cleveland bar with a 21-year-old woman named Mary Jo Peyton, took her to a nearby factory, strangled her and threw her body down a stairwell. Employees from a nearby business discovered her two days later. Little says he killed again in Cleveland in 1991, when he picked up a 32-year-old woman named Rose Evans. He took her to a vacant lot, strangled her and covered her with two tires. A passerby found her body later that day.
Among the other Ohio women Little says he killed are a woman he met in Columbus, killed and dumped in Northern Kentucky in 1984.
Little, a one-time boxer who beat and strangled his victims, did more than just tell authorities about those murders. He drew disturbingly-detailed portraits of each victim.
Little drifted from state to state for years after dropping out of high school in Lorain, Ohio. He had numerous brushes with the law during that time, including stints in prison.
Authorities charged Little with the 1982 murders of two women in Mississippi and Florida, but he was acquitted. He moved to California, where he was arrested and convicted in 1984 of beating and kidnapping two women who survived their encounters with him. He served roughly two-and-a-half years in prison for those crimes and was released in 1987.
Little’s luck ran out in 2012 when he was arrested at a shelter for those experiencing homelessness in Louisville, Kentucky and extradited to California, where the FBI says he was wanted on a narcotics charge. Authorities then began matching up his DNA with unsolved murder cases. That is how the Los Angeles Police were able to pin him to three murders there between 1987 and 1989.
That led to other connections, including a killing in Texas for which Little was later convicted. When agents from the FBI, Department of Justice and Texas Rangers went to interview Little about that killing in 2018, he was hoping to move from the prison he was at in California to a different facility. That, authorities say, got him talking.
“He went through city and state and gave Ranger (James) Holland the number of people he killed in each place,” FBI Crime Analyst Christina Palazzo said in a news release. “Jackson, Mississippi — one; Cincinnati, Ohio — one; Phoenix, Arizona — three; Las Vegas, Nevada — one.”
All these years later, it is unclear what Little’s motive was for the murders. Of the 90 killings Little has confessed to, authorities have been able to link him conclusively to 34. Others remain uncorroborated.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Little made them up, authorities say.
Little often targeted vulnerable women engaged in sex work or struggling with addiction problems, law enforcement officials point out. Sometimes, bodies believed to belong to his victims went unidentified and their killings uninvestigated.
This article appears in Aug 21-28, 2019.