Original subtitles

This is the first time

I've been back here in a year.

It's the first crime scene

I went and visited.

I didn't see it at night

the first time.

It's a lot spookier and more threatening

and more confusing at night.

I feel like these places have memories

and have sounds and smells.

It's really important for me

to walk in the victim's shoes

when I'm trying to tell a story.

Carol Alford was an African American woman.

She was 41 years old.

On the night of July 12, 1987,

she met Sam Little,

and they spent a few hours together,

and by the morning, she was dead.

She had been strangled, dragged,

beaten.

He killed her here,

and she was left in this alley

with the trash.

And I know because

he told me that.

The FBI calls Samuel Little.

America's most prolific serial killer.

Now, if you want me to tell my secrets to you,

come down here and look me in my eye while I do.

My deal with the devil is,

"You will not die alone if you tell me the truth."

I'm not going to admit to those girls.

I don't believe you,

so you tell me the truth right now.

Little strangled 93 victims

between 1970 and 2005.

He was tried and got off

again and again and again.

Investigators believe that Samuel Little

killed more people than serial killers Ted Bundy,

John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffery Dahmer combined.

If you weren't locked up,

I'd probably be dead by now.

You're right.

I am Jillian Lauren.

I'm an author and a true-crime journalist.

I am writing a book about a serial killer

Samuel Little.

Samuel Little was convicted of three murders

in Los Angeles in 2014,

murders he vehemently denied.

But I suspect

that he killed so many more women across the country.

I think that I can safely say

I have written every day of my life since I was eight.

What storytelling does for me is that it gives me a framework

to make sense of the world.

It instilled a curiosity in me

and a desire to

look into the more shadowy corners

of humanity.

In 2017, I was researching a mystery novel

when I scored an interview

with a veteran homicide detective.

My name is Mitzi Roberts.

I'm a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department,

Robbery-Homicide Division.

And I've been on the job, it's coming up on 25 years now.

15-80, 61

I love working homicides.

It's that ultimate puzzle.

You have to be very tenacious.

During my interview with Mitzi,

I asked, "What cases are you the most proud of?"

And she said, "Well, I'm proud of them all,

but I did catch this serial killer once."

Mitzi told me that there had been this serial killer

who was active in Los Angeles in the '80s

and that she had been

the lead investigator on the case.

He had been convicted of three murders,

but she suspected there were many, many more murders

across the country.

And she started to tell me the story.

In the early 2000s,

when I was working in the Cold Case Unit,

DNA was a newer technology,

but it was having such major successes

in solving violent crimes.

Mitzi and I were assigned to work together.

We knew we had probably 10,000

unsolved murders going back to 1960.

It's mind-boggling.

In the '80s, the crack-cocaine epidemic

was out of control.

There was a lot of prostitution,

and a large portion of it was focused

in the South Central portion of Los Angeles.

Prostitutes often times,

drug users

the wayward souls

quite often, they were victimized,

whether they were just raped and beat

or murdered.

Now we know there were multiple serial killers

in the area at the time,

and that was their hunting ground.

Audrey Nelson was found

on August 14, 1989

in a trash dumpster behind a Chinese-food restaurant

in the central downtown area of Los Angeles.

Audrey had an extensive arrest record

for drug and prostitution related crimes.

She was also a mother of a young child.

And the cause of death was manual strangulation.

Approximately three weeks later,

the body of Guadalupe Apodaca was found

on September 3, 1989.

She was found in an abandoned auto-body shop.

Her body was shoved into a corner

on an old discarded mattress.

Guadalupe Apodaca was Hispanic.

She had prior offenses

for drug related crimes and prostitution.

She had two sons at the time.

On July 13, 1987,

the body of Carol Alford, a Black female mother,

was found discarded

in an alleyway.

Not a prostitute,

but known to occasionally drink and...

And possibly had some issues with narcotics.

All of these women were beaten

and manually strangled to death.

And all of these murder locations

were in a few miles of each other.

As many times as you see the MO,

it's still shocking to look at a woman's body

discarded with trash

and dumped by the side of the road.

These three women,

their homicides went unsolved for decades.

And then in 2012,

I got a hit, a DNA hit,

on the case of Audrey Nelson

and Guadalupe Apodaca

and then Carol Alford.

They have a link basically to the same suspect.

Forensic analysis confirms

that these three different cases matched

with the same person's DNA.

And that person was Samuel Little,

AKA Samuel McDowell.

At the time, he was 71 years old.

So, once I get that name, I'm off to the races.

In 2012, Detective Roberts came to me

because of the experience that I had handling,

you know, half a dozen or so serial killers.

I am Beth Silverman.

I'm a deputy district attorney

with the LA County District Attorney's Office,

assigned to the Major Crimes Division.

One of the first things we did, obviously,

was look at Sam Little's rap sheet.

It's shocking

not only the level of violence

against women,

but how long of a rap sheet it was.

It went back all the way until when he was a teenager.

What was amazing was that he had been arrested,

I think it was in 24 different states.

Just arrest after arrest after arrest,

many for assault, sexual assaults,

murder.

But he wasn't spending a lot of time in jail.

Holy crap.

So that's disturbing

because the potential that he's still doing

violent crimes against women is likely.

Mitzi began to suspect

that he might commit more murders,

sexually motivated serial murders

across the country.

She knew she had to get this guy into custody,

so she began to track him.

Basically I was following him

wherever he left a digital or written trace

of being somewhere.

I'm actively tracking him, trying to find him,

but he was on the move,

and I was always one step behind him,

three days behind him.

Until somebody identifies him or his license plate,

I'm stuck kind of only knowing the last place he went.

And then Mitzi learned

that Sam Little was receiving

some type of disability benefits out of state,

and so she was able to track those benefits

to Louisville, Kentucky.

And I'm like, "Bam, I-I got you."

So I immediately call the U.S. Marshals.

I want to say within no more than three hours,

I get a call, and he's in custody.

I said, "Bingo, they got him."

On September 2, 2014,

Little was found guilty of all three counts

of first-degree murder.

A serial killer has learned his fate.

74-year-old Samuel Little was sentenced today

for killing three women in South Los Angeles

in the 1980s.

Crimes involved great violence, cruelty, and viciousness.

Shackled to the sides of his wheelchair,

Samuel Little was not interested in apologizing.

This conviction was brought on by lies

and liars coached by liars.

Throughout the entire trial,

Sam Little vehemently denied committing these murders

again and again and again.

Today the 74-year-old was sentenced

to three consecutive life terms

without the possibility of parole.

He's off the streets.

They managed to put him away.

But it always nagged at me

because I knew... I knew he was a serial killer.

I knew he was good for more.

I knew there was unsolveds out there.

And I can't get anybody interested in it, in the story.

Mitzi felt that these had been under reported cases,

in large part because Samuel Little's victims

were in marginalized populations

women of color, drug addicts, prostitutes,

women who were considered

unimportant.

"This phenomenon has been referred to as being

"'less dead.'

"Marginalized homicide victims historically

"are not as thoroughly investigated

"as their wealthier, whiter,

"and perhaps more sober counterparts.

"Pretty, white college students are the 'most dead.'

Black hookers are the 'least dead.'"

The idea that there were so many women out there,

potentially so many victims

who had been brutalized and forgotten

is not acceptable to me.

And when I learned he was a strangler,

that was what planted the seed in me

to start pursuing this story,

because I was a victim, too,

somebody who was lucky enough

to have survived.

When I was 20 years old,

I went to Mills College,

which is a women's college in Oakland, California.

I eventually was introduced

to heroin.

The first time I tried heroin, I

was just like...

"This is the way I've been waiting to feel."

Really, it was just like breathing.

It was like I finally took a full breath.

And that was it.

I decided I liked heroin better than I liked college.

I was in a pretty dark place at that time.

I was really lost.

I wound up meeting this guy

who became my boyfriend,

and he was really explosive,

and he was really bright and so exciting,

and, um, you know,

and-and was also a heroin addict.

And we were living together at the time.

It was a-a while before he

became violent.

And then he started shoving me up against a wall.

Then he started, um,

barricading me in the house for days.

He was emotionally abusive as well,

and my friends started to get really concerned.

And they said, you know, like,

"We're worried. You have to get out.

We're worried for your safety. He is very dangerous."

So I got a storage space,

and I made a plan to move to Los Angeles.

Shit.

Just give me a second, okay?

And I didn't tell him,

and I was packing my stuff one day

when he came home.

I remember I was in the kitchen.

I was placing each one of my glasses in a box.

And he was, like, two feet from me,

and he was just crying and crying.

I kept packing the glasses, and, um

like, the next thing I knew, I was on the floor,

and he was on top of me,

and his hands were around my neck.

And I was coming to,

and, and it was like

I thought that I... I might be dead.

I looked up at him, and he had his hands like this.

He just looked so exhilarated,

and I couldn't tell if he was exhilarated

because he had finally tried to kill me

or because he had stopped himself.

I felt very confused.

And then there was this undercurrent

of pain and shame.

After that, he stood up,

and he reached his hand out to me

to lift me off the floor.

And he pulled me up,

and

it's still the moment I most regret.

I just wish I hadn't let him pull me up.

I just wish I had gotten back onto my feet by myself, but.

I did eventually.

When you've had a painful past,

it can create a sense of empathy.

That's why I care about these victims.

I want to understand

violence against women in this culture.

And this is the part I can play in this

to bring some sort of voice, story,

justice, humanity to these victims

who are dehumanized

by being ignored.

An essential part of the story

is obviously Samuel Little.

So I started reaching out to him.

I-I-I wrote him a letter.

I told him I was interested in his story.

I was scared of him in the beginning.

I remember the first letter I opened of his,

I wore gloves.

You know, like, I wore rubber gloves.

I was so grossed out.

And we exchanged letters.

Then I applied to visit him in prison,

and I got approved.

I'll tell you one thing about Jillian,

when she gets an idea in her head

that she wants to do something, it is gonna happen.

I am Scott G. Shriner,

husband of Jillian Lauren,

father of Tariku and Jovanni Shriner.

My husband is the bassist

of the band Weezer.

And he is a shredder. And he's awesome.

Wait, what about this one?

What do you think about this one?

Who's that?

- Well, that's Mommy. - Wait, that's you?

That doesn't look like you at all.

I told my husband, "I'm gonna pursue this.

It's about these victims. It's about these women."

And I believe

there are many more victims out there

whose cases are unsolved.

What do you... what do you think of

when you look at this picture?

Dad looks pretty handsome in that picture.

I was reluctant.

I was like, "I don't know about, you know",

"getting friendly with the guy."

"I mean, he's a vicious killer."

You know, "Are you gonna be safe?

What's this what is this gonna do to you emotionally?"

I got to kind of watch out for my well-being

and our kids, too.

And, we talked about it.

It-it did seem important,

and it seemed like it meant a lot to her.

These victims' stories need to be told,

and the importance of it outweighed my reluctance.

My husband was like, "I support you."

And I said, "I'm going in there."

"I'm going in there,

and I'm gonna talk to Sam Little."

When I drove up to the guard station,

I had a panic attack.

It's pretty nerve-racking.

He is a vicious killer.

But I just thought,

"I'm just gonna not be afraid."

That's what he feeds off of,

is women's fear.

When I walked inside...

It's one of the largest prisons in the country.

It was truly terrifying

to walk into that giant cage.

And it is very hot.

It really-it really is hell.

My knees were actually, like, knocking together.

When I finally entered.

B Block visiting room,

I-I made it, and I got in, and I sat there,

and I waited, and I was watching a door

in the other side of the room,

and Sam came out of the other door.

By the time I noticed he was there,

he was, like, right here.

There was this serial killer four inches from my face.

And he said, "You.

You."

And I was like, "What's gonna happen now?"

He said, "You"

"are my angel come to visit me from Heaven.

What do you want to know?"

It was almost like I couldn't move.

I'm processing the fact that I, you know,

I've really never sat in front of a murderer before.

And the first thing that struck me was his eyes.

And what I see is, like, there's nothing behind them.

There's nothing.

I said, "You know, I'm a writer"

"who is-is curious about violent crime.

I'm wondering if you might be able to help me."

And that whole first day,

he just fed me a line of shit.

"You know, I was framed."

He maintained his innocence.

You know, "DNA is bullshit."

"All that proves is that you were somewhere.

"I have just been in the wrong place

at the wrong time."

I knew that he was lying.

And then I said goodbye,

and I went home.

I was feeling pretty despondent.

But it lit a fire in me

and made me determined

to look deeper into Sam's past.

These are two

of the 27 notebooks of research

I have on this case,

and this is really where it started.

I started looking at the public records,

calling local jurisdictions,

and I

couldn't believe what I was finding.

I read his rap sheet,

which was

astounding.

Samuel Little had a rap sheet over 100 pages long,

everything from petty theft

to assault to rape

to murder.

There have been a lot

of sexual assault victims.

He was tried and got off again and again and again.

I thought, "This can't be true.

This is outrageous."

I was furious.

And when I find something hard to believe,

I'm not gonna take it at face value.

I'm gonna go in

and really do the investigative work

and confirm it,

because I thought, "There's no way this is true.

There must've been something else going on."

And if there wasn't,

why?

Like, why did he get away with this for so long?

And how?

So, in 2018,

I went to Pascagoula, Mississippi,

to meet Hilda Nelson.

Hilda Nelson is one

of Sam's surviving victims.

She was attacked by Sam Little

in July 1980,

but somehow survived.

When I went to Pascagoula,

it was my first real fieldwork

around the Sam Little case.

This is my little recorder.

When I do research, I, you know,

when given permission, always record any conversation.

Um, so this is my audio of Hilda Nelson,

who I hoped could give me a window

unto a world

in which Sam operated...

Carver Village.

What was it like? Describe it to me.

What were the clubs like?

Were they bars? Was there dancing?

Before the incident happened with Sam,

was there ever any violence?

Hilda was just like,

"I don't count on this justice system

"to bring any kind of accountability

or justice to me."

She said the only reason anyone cared

that a Black prostitute in Mississippi was attacked

was when a white girl went missing

two years later.

And that girl was Melinda LaPree.

My sister, Mindy,

she went missing in September of 1982.

Her boyfriend called my father

to tell him that, you know, Mindy's missing.

I was really worried, obviously.

Her boyfriend, he had been told

by some of her friends that she had gotten

into a car with a man and never saw her again.

I was certainly very, concerned

that something terrible had happened.

That's when I started to get in contact

with the authorities.

Melinda LaPree was a white female.

She's 22 years old.

She was a prostitute.

She's been missing. She's not come home.

Their initial reaction was,

"Well, we don't really have any reason

"to think there has been foul play,

"and so she may have just moved on

and not told anybody."

It had only been a couple of hours,

and the officer at the front desk

basically told him, "Come back in the morning

if she hasn't returned," which was typical in that day,

for prostitutes to leave for days sometimes,

only to come back and not really be missing.

I suspect that Sam Little

got away with this for so long

because he was operating

in communities he knew were ignored

places where he was confident

he wouldn't get caught

because he felt his victims were invisible.

Judson Brooks was

one of the original investigators

on the Melinda LaPree case in 1982.

You remember this old paper?

Yes, I do.

It said, "Here's a female"

"who was a witness that Melinda LaPree

"getting into a-to a brown Pinto station wagon

"with an Alabama tag

the night of September the 15th."

Right.

Investigators that were working the case back then,

they start interviewing some people that actually saw

what car she got into and the-the driver behind the car.

They watched her get in,

and they seen him come back without her.

Yeah.

Well, that's not a whole lot to start with.

The driver behind the car was a Black male.

There were other prostitutes that saw her

get into a station wagon with wood-grain panels

and an Alabama tag.

And that's what law enforcement began looking for.

When I heard that Mindy was missing,

I was really worried.

And then, you know,

one week became two weeks

and then three weeks

and more.

Here she is when she was just a cute little girl.

She was a happy child. Mindy would, you know,

wake up and be in her crib in the morning,

and she would be singing.

Taught herself to play the flute.

She played wonderful music,

both flute and piano and...

We had a piano in the house.

2:001:00 or 2:00 in the morning,

3:00 in the morning, all of a sudden,

you hear Beethoven,

or it could be "Stairway to Heaven."

She could play by ear.

She was really smart.

She could sleep through class and get A's.

And she did.

It was an idyllic time, I think.

It's kind of bittersweet to look at it.

Our father was rather, emotionally cold

and often quite violent.

Yeah, he beat all of us,

and Melinda and I took, I think, the brunt of it.

Mindy suffered pretty heavily.

We're talking some serious beatings here.

Melinda started acting out

and-and-and being rebellious.

You know, she was living kind of a raw lifestyle,

on-the-edge kind of living.

Sold drugs. Took drugs, sold drugs.

And she sold herself as a sex worker.

In August 1982,

Mindy called to say

she was having a baby.

And she was very...

Very upbeat and very happy about it.

Mindy had her son, Will,

in August 1982.

And then she disappeared

just three weeks later.

Almost a month later,

a body is found

in a ditch in a cemetery

in our sister city, Gautier, Mississippi.

When we found the body,

she was in a state of decomposition.

She's already been out in the elements

for almost a month.

She was discarded like a bag of garbage.

The autopsy report, it showed strangulation,

manual strangulation.

We knew it was a homicide.

I think I went into shock.

And I stayed that way for, you know, weeks.

I mean, guilt,

anger, rage.

We were raised Catholic.

She had a Catholic burial.

I remember coming out of the church,

lighting up a cigarette

taking a couple puffs off of it,

and putting it out in my hand

just to feel something.

It took me out.

There's no other way to describe it.

Two months after Melinda's murder,

it's November, and we catch a break.

A car is stopped

two cities from us for shoplifting.

It's a station wagon with a wood-grain panel

and Alabama tag.

It's the same car that Melinda was seen getting into.

And then we have our suspect,

and his name he gives is Sam McDowell.

And, ultimately, we found out that Sam McDowell

is actually Sam Little.

So the investigators working the case,

they're interviewing Sam Little.

Sam is denying everything. "I wasn't here."

"I don't know what you're talking about.

I ain't killed nobody."

Just denial, denial, denial.

But investigators found receipts in the car

that shows him at a hotel here.

So he says he wasn't here,

but we got motel receipts says he was.

Melinda LaPree was killed

during the time that he was here,

so, you know, we're-we're building a case.

But, unfortunately, because of Melinda's body

being out in the elements for so long,

we didn't have any evidence to support

that, Sam killed her.

We didn't have any evidence

of her in the car that they-they found.

We're gonna have challenges

in trying to get the evidence needed

to-to get this thing in court.

But I talked to the D.A. about holding him,

but he said, "You can't hold him.

You have nothing to hold him on."

I said, "Well, maybe can I hold him on vagrancy?"

He said, "No, I don't think so."

You were trying to do whatever you could to keep him...

Everything I could do to keep him here,

but like I said, all this, what is in here

is all that we had.

Every chance that we tried to use

did not hold water according to the D.A.,

and, of course, he was right.

When they couldn't get him on the murder,

what investigators did is they were trying

to put something together

so they could get Sam Little off of, off the streets

and be sure he didn't kill anybody else.

And so that's when investigators found out

there's two other prostitutes,

two other victims that have survived

similar attacks in Pascagoula

on previous dates.

They fought back,

and-and they were able to survive the attack

Leila McClain

and Hilda Nelson.

Hilda and Leila,

both these women come to the station,

and they pick Sam Little out of a lineup.

And they positively ID'd him

as strangling them and trying to kill them.

These two women,

they were the strongest case we had against Sam Little

at the time, even though we suspected him

of killing Melinda LaPree.

But these were prostitutes.

You're gonna have a difficult time

trying to get credibility up with a jury.

They'd been arrested, probably numerous times,

and, "How can you believe them?"

But we had to try.

I believe it was an enormous act of courage

and faith

on the part of these women

who were Black prostitutes,

and they still came to testify against him.

They walked for miles to the courthouse,

and Hilda was pregnant

at the time.

When they walked in and Hilda saw Sam,

she was so frightened, she urinated.

Hilda talks about being on the stand

and actually being so upset and nervous.

And, I think that's where things kind of went bad.

Something happened.

For some reason, we could not even get an indictment

against Sam Little,

which means that there were gonna be no charges.

Hilda and, Leila,

we failed them, in my opinion.

There was such a miscarriage of justice

in the cases of Leila McClain

and Hilda Nelson

and also in the murder of Melinda LaPree.

That's what really, really eats at me.

Sam Little, he was in custody,

but they said that they couldn't prosecute

because, the, the only witnesses

were

I remember them saying "junkies and whores,"

but it was words to that effect,

because that's the sort of,

witness that, you know, gets shredded

by defense attorneys and that sort of thing.

You know, it really angered me deeply.

I don't know.

I don't know if it was because of,

her occupation.

I don't know if it was because of the color of her skin.

I'd hate to think that, because I don't think

we're that kind of town or community.

I don't know. It's just one of those...

It's kind of hard to believe that, you know

that these things actually happen.

I mean, really,

Leila McClain summed it up to a T

when she said, "Ain't nobody gonna believe"

"a Black prostitute in Pascagoula, Mississippi,

in 1982."

And I can't say it any better than that,

'cause it's exactly the truth.

I was pretty devastated by that first conversation

with Sam Little in prison.

It's pretty nerve-racking.

It has a physical effect on you.

I was feeling pretty sick of him

and his lies.

I decided, "I'm gonna visit him"

"in prison again

because these victims' stories are too important."

And I was determined to get Sam to admit the truth.

I talked to Hilda, who testified at your trial.

Did she?

Did she really lie?

I knew that he was lying.

I decided,

"If he lies to me again,

I'm done, I'm out."

I'm like, I'm not gonna sit there

and listen to him bullshit

about these crimes and murders I know he committed.

You tell me the truth right now.

You did not hit Hilda?

Sam Little is a psychopath,

so every interaction he has

is transactional, right?

It means, like, "I'll give you something,

you give me something."

And he started trying to work me,

and, um, you know, "I want this, I want that.

I want canteen money. I want a TV."

And I said,

"I-I-I-I want things, too, Sam."

It was just this moment

where we were, like, frozen

and eyes locked,

and I know that he knew that I was out

if he didn't start talking.

And he was like,

"Okay, you got me.

What do you want to know for your book, little miss?"

Yeah, I want you to tell me a little story.

It took me a minute to realize

he's confessing.

So you didn't mean to kill her?

"With that, he began to tell me

"about the women he had killed.

"With astonishing detail

"and near photographic recall,

"he took me back through his past,

"when the road was his home

"and the back alleys and underbelly bars

"in city after city across the country

offered a feast of low-hanging fruit."

When Sam first started confessing to me,

then it was like the floodgates opened,

and he told me about another one,

and another one

another one

another one.

He told me about 13 murders that day.

Just to sit there a foot from this person

who is talking about this so dismissively,

I felt a rage

unlike anything I've ever felt.

I wasn't shocked because

I'm not shocked

that there's this, like

casual and vicious violence

against women.

I've seen it.

I know it.

I want to know why.

Why? Why, and how?

Once she started visiting Sam in prison,

that really awoke a lot

of different kind of demons in her.

There was just no way of telling

what the story was gonna grow into

and-and the effect it would have on us

and how immense

the power and destruction of this man was

when we started.

I feel connected to these women's stories.

I can imagine the last moments

of these women's lives

and that they were dismissed and invisible

for all of these years.

And Samuel Little

was the only one who held these stories.

And I was like, "You are not entitled to this."

Like, "You don't get to have this."

And there are many more unidentified victims

out there.

We go to the sheriff office,

and he tells us,

"Well, you know, if-if y'all want to find out

"who killed her so bad,

why don't y'all just go find out?"

I don't feel

that she was important enough

to them to investigate.

It broke my heart.

My mother was taken from us from an evil person

who shouldn't even be living.

After my sister was murdered,

it just started eating me alive.

I came very close

to taking my own life.

We have limited time.

Sam Little, he's an old man. He's not well.

And when he dies,

many of these unsolved cases will die with him.

I will never rest

until I can restore the names

of these victims.

How many women have you killed?

I want the truth.

I think that...