NEW ORLEANS — New details have been released about a woman who 79-year-old convicted serial killer Samuel Little says he killed in New Orleans in 1982.
According to the FBI, Little gave them additional information about the killing in an interview. For months, he has been providing law enforcement agencies with accounts and sketches of his victims across the U.S.
He is currently serving multiple life sentences for the 1980s deaths of three California women.
According to Little, he met the woman around the fall of 1982 in New Orleans. He described her as a black woman, 30 to 40 years old, standing about five feet and nine inches, and weighing around 160 lbs.
She reportedly had "honey-colored" brown skin and medium-length straight hair. Little said she was wearing a dress with buttons on the front when he met her.
Little said they met in a club, where she was attending a birthday party with one of her two sisters and some friends. Little and the woman left the club in his Lincoln Continental Mark III.
He told investigators that he drove her to the Little Woods exit of the I-10 and pulled onto a dirt road along a canal, which was being dredged at the time. Little took the woman towards the canal, where he killed her and left her body before driving back to his motel in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
The woman reportedly told Little that she lived with her mother, who was sick and possibly an invalid, and gave him the keys to her house.
Little has confessed to 93 murders, and FBI crime analysts believe all of his confessions are credible. At least 50 of those confessions have been verified by law enforcement agencies around the country.
Because of the number of victims Little says he killed between 1970 and 2005, he is considered one of or perhaps the most prolific serial killer ever arrested in the U.S.
According to the FBI, many of the deaths were originally ruled as overdoses, accidental deaths or were from undetermined causes. Little says he strangled his victims.
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” said ViCAP Crime Analyst Christie Palazzolo in a statement. “Even though he is already in prison, the FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim—to close every case possible.”
Agents who have interviewed Little say he remembers his victims and the killings in great detail, including where he was and what car he was driving. But he could provide little help on dates, making it hard to verify the killings.
He has provided dozens of hand-drawn sketches of the people he killed, and the FBI has been releasing those sketches in the hope that somebody in the public will recognize a victim or a detail about one of the cases and come forward.
At least one other death in Louisiana has been confirmed to be related to Little's serial murders. A 24-year-old woman from Opelousas named Melissa Thomas was killed in January 1996. Until Little confessed to killing her, police had few leads in her murder investigation.