Serial Killer Draws Portraits of His Murder Victims From Texas Jail Cell

A man who claims to have killed 90 women across the country has drawn sketches of women he says he's murdered. Samuel Little, who sits in a West Texas jail, has begun confessing to killings that took place between 1970 and 2005.

Texas Rangers and the FBI have started piecing together his confessions on killings — from Florida to California — with evidence from cold cases across the four decades.

This KHOU report states that Little was arrested in 2014 after his DNA ultimately connected him to three murdered women in California. Little was found guilty, and he was serving life without parole when he was extradited to Wise County, Texas—just west of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex—for a possible connection to a murder in the quiet, rural Texas county.

While Little was in the Wise County Jail, detectives from across the country looking for pieces to their puzzles descended to interrogate the killer about their respective cases.

WIse County Chief Deputy Craig Johnson said it was a little overwhelming, and he didn't realize Little could be one of the most dangerous men in American history.

"That's a scary number [90]. That's more than the BTK killer and the Green River killer," Johnson said. "It was a steady stream of investigators. We kept him in a cell by himself."

Wise County eventually deemed the killer wasn't connected to their case, and Little was taken west to Ector County to reside in a jail in Odessa, where he faced a murder charge of Denise Christie Brothers in 1994.

Little eventually confessed to that murder, strangling her in a field and leaving her there. Brothers was found a month after she disappeared.

During his time waiting in the Ector County Jail, Little has begun drawing portraits of women he said he killed during his lifetime. He's made a plea with law officials that he would give details about his other victims if they would let him live his days in the Ector County Jail instead of going to prison. Little, now 78, is bound by wheelchair.

The drawings of Little's alleged victims have varying skin tones, hair flow, emotions and colors. The FBI released 16 of Little's drawings to the public this week, with hopes of using some of them to solve potential cold cases in both this millennium and the last.

Little has gone by the name Samuel McDowell, and two of the potential cases in Texas happened in the Houston area in the 1970s and 80s.

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Scott McDonald is a Newsweek deputy night editor based in Cape Coral, Florida. His focus is assigning and writing stories ... Read more

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