ST. LOUIS — The man who has confessed to 90 murders from coast to coast says he committed two of the crimes in the St. Louis area.
Samuel Little is suspected in dozens of deaths. The 78-year-old is sitting in a Texas jail and has confessed to 90 murders so far, according to the Texas Rangers.
The FBI is working with law enforcement agencies all over the U.S. in an attempt to match up his confessions with actual cases. Little said his murder spree started in the 1970 and didn’t stop until 2005.
Two of the murders he confessed to are in the Metro East area—in East St. Louis and Granite City, Illinois.
Little said between 1976 and 1979 he met a 26-year-old woman in St. Louis. Her name might have been “Jo” he told FBI agents. Little said he killed her in Granite City.
Little said he also killed another woman during that three-year span. Again, he said he met her in St. Louis, but killed her across the river in East St. Louis.
So far, law enforcement agencies have not been able to verify either of these confessions.
The FBI did confirm, however, that Little served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri, but didn't specify when he was imprisoned in the state or for how long.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Samuel Little, convicted in 2014 of three killings, confessed to 90 murders dating back to 1970 in exchange for moving to a new prison.
Authorities have corroborated 34 of the killings with several others awaiting confirmation, according to a statement from the FBI. If all his confessions are confirmed, he could be among the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history.
"Law enforcement has only recently begun unraveling the true extent of his crimes," said the FBI's statement.
The FBI is working with Texas Rangers, the Department of Justice, and multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to corroborate Little's confessions.
Little, 78, was arrested in 2012 in a shelter in Kentucky, then extradited to California on a narcotics charge. Los Angeles police obtained a DNA match to Little on three unsolved murders in the area in 1987 and 1989 and was charged with three counts of murder. In 2014, he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without parole.
As Little was awaiting trial in Los Angeles, authorities in at least nine other states began scouring cold case files to see if Little may be connected.
According to the FBI's statement, Little confessed to killings in 16 states — including Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana and Mississippi — during an interview in May with Texas Ranger James Holland.
"He went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi — one; Cincinnati, Ohio — one; Phoenix, Arizona — three; Las Vegas, Nevada, — one," said Christina Palazzolo, a crime analyst with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, in a statement released Tuesday.
USA Today contributed to this report.
