Behold the Monster covers almost four years of research that took me across the country and back, in pursuit of what I clocked as a career-maker of a story. I’d nabbed an interview with an underreported serial killer named Samuel Little, who was already behind bars.
What was meant to be my first eight-thousand-word stab at classic true crime reportage morphed into the unwieldy book-length hybrid of memoir, journalism, true crime, and audacious invention you now hold.
In hindsight, I watch myself first enter California State Prison Los Angeles with half-covered eyes, as if watching that first dummy in a slasher film edge her toe toward the basement stairs.
Is every horror movie a magical universe in which no one has ever seen a horror movie?
Don’t go down to the basement, dumbass!
Many of the events on these pages were recounted to me by a liar, a thief, and a murderer. He always tried not to leave witnesses and was therefore often my only source. My only source was not just unreliable. He was terrifying.
Proceed with caution. Don’t go down to the basement, dumbass. Or follow me, and we’ll feel our way through the darkness together.
I corroborated Little’s stories with any public documents I could get my hands on, sending blank checks to coroner’s departments in places with names like Pascagoula, Escatawpa, Plaquemine. I talked to everyone and anyone I could find who knew him, hunted him, survived him, or grieved the ruin in his wake. I overpaid the vendors selling wilted carnations at the gates of cemeteries.
There were moments of thrilling discovery along the way. Still, for every unlikely solved murder, another dark star hung silent in the sky, a life folded into history on a vicious whim.
When people learn I interviewed a serial killer at length, they ask, inevitably:
How many?
They want a number of victims at which to gasp. I have that number. I have several. I don’t believe we’ll ever know the answer with exactitude. The number changes as cases close and new information arises. There is no official comprehensive record of Samuel Little’s victims.
The oft-quoted number of confessions is 93. As of today, the official FBI number of confirmed cases is 60, surpassing Gary Gilmore’s previous 49, to make Sam the most prolific serial killer in American history, of record.
There is no easy list. The sources are vast and conflicting,
Like bodies insufficiently weighted down, checkable facts bob to the surface of the murky waters of Sam’s confessions, enabling cold case detectives from across the country to slowly close the gap between the two numbers.
You can find a partial list of cleared cases, as well as confessions still unmatched, at the end of this book. Some of their names, their lives and deaths, will likely remain forever hidden.
You may also ask, how could I have possibly know what was in the minds of Little’s victims in their final moments. I didn’t. Those are not checkable facts. I knew what I could piece together from the stories of others, fragments, love letters, old Polaroids floating around in dresser drawers, a box of hand-sewn costumes in the attic.
Did I dare try to speak from their perspective? One particularly difficult writing night I stood barefoot on my front lawn and looked to the clear midnight sky, its vast spread of stars the only thing that seemed to echo the sheer scope of the carnage I faced. I asked Sam Little’s victims for permission to walk in their shoes, to enter their worlds, to do my best to give them back their voices and their names.
This book is a work of both fact and imagination. This is my best effort at the truth.