- Louisiana serial killer of white women houma la full#
- Louisiana serial killer of white women houma la professional#
I wondered if the real answer was “victims.” “I can draw anything. I mean ladies,” he said, seeming to search for the term I’d find least offensive. He had learned to draw during his first prison stay - three years for robbing a furniture store in Ohio in his 20s - and it was still his preferred pastime. We talked about his late long-term girlfriend, Jean, who’d been a master shoplifter and supported them that way for years. We talked about his teenage mother abandoning him as an infant by the side of a dirt road. We talked that first day about our childhoods, about my kids, about his family tree, which he claimed includes Malcolm X. To understand him, I had to lean in and then lean in again, until I was approximately a foot from his face. He spoke in a soft, cryptic patois, a mash-up from his origins in Georgia and his years growing up in the Ohio steel town of Lorain. You want a story? Oooooeeeee, do I have stories.” God knew I was lonely and he sent me you. “You’re my angel come to visit me from Heaven. The sound of children, chatter, and vending machines bounced off the room’s cinder-block walls. I could still make out the strong cheekbones, pale-blue-green eyes, and handsome face that might once have put his victims at ease. But I could see the evidence of the man he once had been: a six-foot-three powerhouse with catcher’s mitts for hands.
Age spots discolored his skin, giving him the appearance of a molting lizard. He had a thinning pelt of white hair and a beard to match. The tail end of a baby-pink heart-surgery scar the size of an earthworm peeked out from the top of his tee. He wore standard prison-issue shapeless denim pants, a blue T-shirt with CDC printed on the back, and a pair of white orthopedic sneakers due to a toe amputation. Little was wheelchair-bound, suffering from diabetes and a heart condition. I put them on the table between us as I sat down.
Louisiana serial killer of white women houma la full#
That first day I went to see him, I brought only a clear plastic bag full of quarters, per prison rules, which I used to buy him Funyuns and a package of Little Debbie Honey Buns. While waiting for a visitor clearance, I exchanged letters with Little, throughout which he staunchly maintained his innocence. The two of us would end up converging on him just a few months apart. Unbeknownst to me, a Texas Ranger named James Holland, who was passionate about cold cases and had caught wind of this evasive drifter’s suspected killings, was also plotting to get Little to confess.
Louisiana serial killer of white women houma la professional#
“Who knows how many families will never know what happened,” she told me.įor reasons part professional and part personal - I’d had my own run-ins with drugs and violent men and felt lucky to have gotten away relatively unscathed - I decided I’d try to get Little talking. Roberts had recently heard through the grapevine that Little, who was 78, was in poor health. She thought maybe it was because Little preyed on the “less dead,” people who live on the margins of society and whose murders have historically tended to be not as thoroughly investigated as those of their wealthier, whiter, and perhaps more sober counterparts. Roberts told me she suspected him of many more killings across the country, and after she got him, she figured other police departments would start connecting him to their own unsolved murders. Samuel McDowell, had been convicted in Los Angeles in 2014 for strangling three women to death in the late 1980s. I’d gone home and learned that Samuel Little, a.k.a. “I’m proud of them all,” she said, “but I did catch a serial killer named Sam Little once. Nearly ten months before, I’d interviewed LAPD Homicide detective Mitzi Roberts - the model for the Michael Connelly character Renée Ballard - and asked her what case she’d been most proud of in her career. “Gnaw that shit out,” said one of the other visitors watching me in the bathroom. I wound up having to pry the underwire out of my bra with my teeth because there were no sharp objects available. On the morning of August 18, 2018, after waiting seven hours for my number to come up, I faced the prison’s iron security gates, but I kept setting off the metal detector. In the middle of a summer day, when temperatures regularly reach 105 degrees in the shade, and the desert wind blows so hot it feels like it could sear the eyebrows off your face, the landscape conveys an almost biblical feeling of punishment.
The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where more than 3,000 men live sandwiched between the sunbaked terrain and a wide, unforgiving sky. Little’s drawings of his victims, made in prison.Ĭalifornia State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located roughly 70 miles northeast of the palm tree-lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it may as well be 70 million.
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