Samuel Little was born on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia, to a mother he claimed was a prostitute.
In 1956, Little was convicted of breaking into a property in Omaha, Nebraska, Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders.
Little moved to Florida to live with his mother in the late 1960s, working at various times as a cemetery worker and an ambulance attendant (by his own account).
In 1961, Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in 1964.
In 1982, Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and charged with the murder of 22-year-old Melinda Rose LáPree, who had gone missing in September of that year.
Little was extradited to Florida and tried for the murder of 26-year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body was found in September 1982.
In October 1984, he was arrested for kidnapping, beating, and strangling 22-year-old Laurie Barros, who survived. One month later, he was found by police in the back seat of his car with an unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled, in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros.
Little was convicted in 2014 for the murder of the three women killed in Los Angeles in the 1980s, after he was extradited to California from Kentucky on a narcotics charge.
In 2018, while still in jail, Little opened up to Texas Ranger James Holland, who began to elicit from Little a breathtaking number of confessions. Holland interviewed Little for around 700 hours, during which Little provided details of several killings that had until then only been known to him. Known as an expert interrogator, Holland has described Little as both a genius and a sociopath.
In 2018, Little confessed to the murder of 93 women nationwide from the 1970s through 2005. The FBI says it believes all of his confessions are credible.
On November 13, 2018, Little was charged with the 1994 murder of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa, Texas after having confessed the crime to a Texas Ranger in May 2018. Little pleaded guilty to the murder of Brothers on December 13 and received another life sentence.
In October 2019, the FBI confirmed Little to be the “most prolific” serial killer in US history. The agency also said its analysts believed that all of the 93 confessions he had made until then were “credible”, and uploaded some of the confession videos on YouTube.
Little died on December 30, 2020, in a Los Angeles County area hospital.