Suspected serial killer confesses to 3 murders in Phoenix, FBI says

PHOENIX — A suspected serial killer who is behind bars for strangling three women in California has confessed to murdering three people in Phoenix, the FBI announced this week.

Samuel Little, 78, made the confessions during a May interview with investigators. Little has confessed to killing 90 people, but so far investigators have only confirmed 36 of the killings.

“Over the course of that interview in May, (Little) went through city and state and gave Ranger (James) Holland the number of people he killed in each place,” Violent Criminal Apprehension Program Crime Analyst Christina Palazzolo said.

“Jackson, Mississippi — one; Cincinnati, Ohio — one; Phoenix, Arizona — three; Las Vegas, Nevada — one.”

The agency said it has matched one of the Phoenix murders to Little, but did not disclose more information.

The other two Phoenix murders that he confessed to included a Hispanic female in her 40s who was killed in 1988 or 1996 and a white female who was killed in 1997.

The FBI said it is working with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance, Texas Rangers and multiple state and local agencies to match Little’s confessions with evidence from dead women in states from California to Florida between 1970 and 2005.

Little, who has been behind bars for four years, has had run-ins with the law that date back to 1956.

He was charged with killing women in Mississippi and Florida in the early 1980s, but escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida.

Little had also served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri and assaulting and falsely imprisoning of a woman in San Diego.

He was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter in September 2012 and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge. While he was in custody, Los Angeles police matched his DNA with victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989.

Little was charged, convicted and sentenced to the murders to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole in 2014.

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