The Washington Post dug up a 1976 feature story about Little from the archives of the old Miami News. It’s not the first time his artistic endeavors have made the news. And Little, serving a life sentence in California, has sketched portraits - unnervingly accurate - of many of his victims. Much of what we now know about Samuel Little’s crimes has to do with his weird genius for remembering long-ago details about circumstances and victims (disclosed as part of his deal to avoid the death penalty). Like Little, he committed his depravities in dreary, poverty-ridden places where the extent of his horrific crimes was obscured by police indifference. The illiterate Fort Lauderdale junk dealer had managed to sustain a rape and homicide spree - killing two dozen women, raping 60 others - from 1971 to 1987.
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Townsend, who would have confessed to any unsolved crime suggested by his shameless police interrogators, spent 22 years in prison before DNA evidence undid his shoddy convictions.ĭNA tied two other murders attributed to Townsend to yet another serial killer, Eddie Lee Mosley. Her killing had been among six wrongful murder convictions police in Broward and Miami-Dade counties had hung on a mentally deficient carnival worker named Jerry Frank Townsend in 1979. Last month, Miami-Dade police, who had already tied two local homicides to Little, added two more, including the strangulation of Dorothy Gibson, a 17-year-old runaway whose body was dumped behind a downtown Miami hotel in 1977. That is, if they showed up for the trial. The survivors, often sex workers, were reluctant witnesses with their own criminal histories for defense attorneys to exploit. Police believe Toole was responsible for the murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh, kidnapped from a Hollywood mall in 1981.)Ī Washington Post examination of 80-year-old Little’s long criminal history found that police and prosecutors, even when they were sure that he was guilty of violent rape, even murder, had difficulty assembling a case that would convince jurors. (Little’s trail of mayhem from Florida along the Gulf Coast to Texas, before he finally went on to California, paralleled the same I-10 corridor haunted by the nomadic serial-killer duo Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole in the 1970s and early ’80s. But in the days before DNA tracing and high-tech crime-fighting tools, it was a daunting challenge to catch a random killer with no previous ties to his victims or the communities where they died, an untethered transient, aimlessly drifting from one police jurisdiction to the next, from one state to another. During his depraved wanderings through 19 states, police detectives occasionally suspected they had encountered a criminal of far-reaching evil. The horror of Samuel Little was Ted Bundy times three. His victims weren’t the kind of promising young women, college students or young professionals, whose killings made Ted Bundy a synonym for serial killer. His murders weren’t likely to generate headlines or community outrage. In some respect, they were already missing persons when they encountered Little, exiled from mainstream society, adrift in a squalid netherworld where no one was likely to alert police if a woman disappeared from her regular street corner or her downtown flophouse.
Most of his victims were prostitutes or runaway teens or women whose troubled circumstances were exacerbated by drugs and alcohol. Notoriety eludes him for the same reason he was able to elude justice during four decades of killings that began, he told police, with a woman he met in a North Miami bar in 1971. Yet, I doubt Samuel Little’s name rings a bell. A dozen of his victims were killed in Florida. Police verified enough of his gruesome recollections - more than 50 - to secure him an ignominious distinction as the nation’s most prolific serial killer.
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