Going by the numbers alone, Samuel Little can easily be considered the most prolific serial killer in all of American history. If you want the stats, after his 2012 arrest for his connection to a few murders that took place in the 1980s, he ultimately confessed to well over 90 murders spanning from 1970 to 2005. With most of his victims being female minorities, sex workers, drug addicts, or others generally on the fringes of society, many of their cases were initially dismissed, though further investigations have confirmed that he’s responsible for 60 of those deaths.
But that’s still a lot of murders unsolved, and a lot of victims lost to history, especially with Little himself dying in late 2020. With that in mind, the FBI released a bunch of information to the public about a year later, including the details Little told them about his various victims. Those details are disturbingly specific, often including in-depth descriptions of what that victim was wearing, what they looked like, and how they were killed. Unfortunately, Little also had a lot of trouble recalling exactly when and where any of those murders took place, so the hope was that someone might recognize the details and come forward with more information.
And, as it turned out, in 2023, one of those victims was successfully identified using previously unsubmitted evidence: Yvonne Pless, Little’s earliest known victim, who was killed in 1977 in Macon, Georgia.
