Samuel Little, Deadliest Serial Killer In US History, Dies At 80

Samuel Little, the deadliest serial killer in American history, died Wednesday at the age of 80, with police around the country still searching for his victims.

Little, who admitted late in life to killing 93 people across 19 states, evaded justice for more than four decades, preying on women at the margins of society. He targeted sex workers, drug users, and poor, mostly Black women whose murders authorities repeatedly failed to solve or struggled to prosecute.

Officials acknowledge that the vast majority of murders attributed to Little would never have been solved if he did not begin confessing in 2018 while serving multiple life sentences in a California prison.

Police have spent more than two years using that information to reopen cold-case investigations, with uneven results. Nearly half of Little's confessed victims remain unidentified, and his death could set back efforts to bring families long-denied closure.

Little was pronounced dead early Wednesday morning at a hospital, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was convicted of three murders in 2014 with the help of DNA evidence, but maintained his innocence until he 2018, when he began detailing decades of crimes to a Texas Ranger, boasting to investigators of avoiding "people who would be immediately missed."

"I'd go back to the same city sometimes and pluck me another grape. How many grapes do you all got on the vine here?" he said in an interview obtained by The Post in its three-part investigation of law enforcement's failure to catch Little. Little said: "I'm not going to go over there into the White neighborhood and pick out a little teenage girl."

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