LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 2017
One of LA’s most infamous murders is that of the Black Dahlia: twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth (Beth) Short, whose bisected, exsanguinated body was discovered on January 15, 1947, at the edge of a field in Leimert Park. The media went nuts for this baroque and brutal murder of a young white woman. Widely mythologized and never solved, the murder of the Black Dahlia fascinates to this day: the ultimate cold case.
In the fall of 2017, I was writing a mystery novel called How to Saw a Girl in Half, with references to Beth Short’s famous murder. Every cold case in Los Angeles has a custodial detective. The Dahlia will never be solved, in spite of several competing ghost stories and an endless parade of TV miniseries. There is no physical evidence and no reason to prioritize the case beyond the insistence of its cultish following. Being the custodial detective of the Black Dahlia case means you’ll be inundated with tips, conspiracy theories, creeps, and kooks. Every detective knows that one is a dog.
Legendary Robbery Homicide Division Cold Case Special Section Detective Mitzi Roberts took the case. She couldn’t resist. Only she and her captain held the keys to the battered, gray filing cabinets stuffed with the original Dahlia archives. All sorts of rumors floated about what they held.
While researching the novel, I scored a much-coveted, rarely granted interview with Roberts. I hoped to gossip about Black Dahlia, but I was also hungry for any current leads I could charm out of Roberts: something no one else had done.
I’d been planning to write fiction, but truthfully, into the late hours of the night, after every baseball practice, after I got my two kids to bed and made the lunches, I dug deeper into the world of true crime. Was I obsessed? Not quite yet. I saw a glimmer of opportunity to make a meaningful change, bringing to light stories from which most people turned their heads. I had a strong stomach, insatiable curiosity, and the dead calm afforded me by PTSD. I was hooked.
When I first faced Detective Mitzi Roberts across a booth at Little Dom’s in Silver Lake on a warm October day in 2017, I felt only the faintest tug of the undertow that was about to drag me into far deeper waters than I’d planned.
The real person behind Michael Connelly’s wildly popular fictional Detective Renée Ballard was laid-back and hawkeyed, wearing a pin-striped suit and shiny badge.
“I envy that you get to go through people’s drawers,” I said to Roberts.
The waiter refilled our iced tea.
“So you’re weird and want to read people’s diaries and shit,” she said. “Okay, so how that works—when we’re at a search warrant, we have a protocol. You get there, you can’t touch anything until the photographer comes, so we can prove we didn’t jack up the house. I scope out the best-looking room with the good shit. I don’t want the kid’s room. Anyway, it’s mostly gross. Roaches and dirty chones and some cop always waving a dildo around. I more want to look through a murder book. I want to be the one to find that thing somebody didn’t. Find that nexus. Solve it. Go to these families. It’s true to some it didn’t mean anything. To a lot, it meant everything.”
I asked Roberts what case she was most proud of.
“I’m proud of them all.” She stirred the last watery remains of her drink while watching the parade of almost supermodels pushing strollers and Reiki healers headed to the cold-pressed juice bar.
“I did catch a serial killer named Sam Little once. That was pretty cool.”
“How did we skip that?”
“I’m not the one doing the questions.”
Roberts told me she suspected this killer of many more murders across the country. Little got away with it for decades by cherry-picking his victims—drug addicts and prostitutes on the fringes, largely women of color. “Less dead” homicide victims, a term credited to criminologist Steven Egger, have historically been not as thoroughly investigated as their wealthier, whiter, and perhaps more sober counterparts. Pretty white college students are the most dead. Black transgender hookers with addiction issues are the least dead.
A stone of recognition dropped into my gut. I knew the concept well. I had talked to cops who worked in the 1980s, when hooker after hooker turned up in dumpsters every morning in South LA.
The calls came in: “There’s 187 [a homicide] corner of Fifth and Main. NHI.”
NHI: No humans involved. Or simply a no one. “Body found in a dumpster on the corner of Fifty-Fifth and Central. It’s a no one.”
Roberts had tried to mobilize other police departments across the country to investigate their cold case files for possible connections to Little’s patterns, possible evidence that might still hold his DNA. To her frustration, not much happened. She’d recently heard seventy-eight-year-old Little, sitting in prison just miles away in Los Angeles, was in poor health.
“Who knows how many victims are out there? How many families will never know?”
My midnight dives into evolving forensic technology led me to believe in the possibility of leveling the playing field, restoring the names of unidentified victims from marginalized and often dismissed populations. Attitudes in law enforcement were changing, as were its demographics. And an intriguing detective had just dropped an underreported serial killer into my lap, with potentially many more victims to be identified.
What my research turned up that night set me down the path toward a years-long dialogue with a serial killer. In a wild stroke of luck, I landed in the middle of a current investigation. Little was about to spill his gruesome well of secrets to the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with a cocksure Texas Ranger in a tall hat at the helm, who would bring in hundreds of detectives from local jurisdictions. It was the story of a lifetime. Dozens of victims long lost in boxes of buried evidence might find justice, and their families would finally know the truth.
Samuel Little would eventually be identified as the most prolific serial killer ever to stalk America’s streets. I had no earthly idea about the scope of his crimes when I first wrote to Little, but I sensed an energy gathering behind the man, the monster.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
In 2014, Samuel Little was convicted for three murders committed in the late eighties in Los Angeles. I scrolled through mug shot after mug shot of this evasive drifter and smooth criminal, with a one-hundred-page rap sheet that spanned twenty-four states and included arrests for theft, battery, assault, rape, and even murder. For this sixty-year swath of crime he cut across the country, forty of those years involving murder, he’d served a combined total of approximately ten years before the triple life sentence he was serving when Roberts mentioned him to me.
I’d had my own run-ins with drugs and violent men and usually talked my way out. People want to talk to me. If I don’t feel like hearing anyone’s life story, I wear headphones in public. I’ve always imagined myself an undercover private detective, a member for life of the Nancy Drew Fan Club. I like asking the questions. What if I could get this guy talking? Think of the questions I could ask.
While the media might lead us to believe society is littered with serial killers, in reality, they are quite rare. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. I might be able to bring a little heat to the story, get law enforcement interested in these long-cold cases. I could make a difference.
Corny? Overreaching? Maybe. In any case, it was a hell of a story.
I pitched the story to my editor, Laurie Abraham, at New York magazine. She agreed the idea was intriguing.
“Keep at it. There’s something, but we’re not going to do another gruesome serial killer story. You need an angle.”
We agreed. I needed an angle. I wrote Samuel Little a letter.
The letter I received in return and those that followed didn’t disappoint—if I was looking for a spooky movie prop. He wrote voluminously on torn scraps of yellow legal pads, in handwriting that veered from careful cursive to serial killer ALL CAPS. He included doodles of what I think was either a monkey or just a man with enormous ears. When the monkey had a sad face and tears, you were in for a creepy letter. When the monkey had a happy face, it was worse.
He maintained his innocence and railed against the lies and injustices of his “upside-down case,” with the constant refrain that DNA just proved he was there, not that he did it.
I also did my homework on psychopaths. If all went well, I was about to talk to one. You don’t want to be underprepared. As many mistakes as I made, at least I knew not to underestimate a sexual serial killer.
Through a diagnostic lens, opinions differ as to whether psychopathy and sociopathy are the same. The American Psychiatric Association acknowledges neither as a clinical disorder. The clinical designation is antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD.
The Mayo Clinic website describes it as such, based on the psychopathic traits as laid out by Dr. Bob Hare, one of the early innovators in the field of antisocial behavior, in his classic psychopathy checklist.
Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental disorder in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to antagonize, manipulate or treat others harshly or with callous indifference. They show no guilt or remorse for their behavior.
Antisocial personality disorder signs and symptoms may include:
If you’re wringing your hands and wondering…breathe. The answer is almost certainly no.
I spent hours on the phone with my aunt, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University for forty years. She’s known for being an incisive diagnostician. I asked about her experience with ASPD. My father’s twin sister is a brilliant, odd beauty, with wild red hair. I loved her Cambridge condo as a kid. A sixties black-and-white photograph of her naked in a field of tall grass hung in the entryway. Her closet smelled of cloves, not Bounty.
My grandfather, their father, was a proctologist and also the family physician at Bamberger’s department store in Newark, New Jersey—when there was such a thing as Bamberger’s and family physicians. He was dismissive of the soft science of psychiatry, but the two still came up with names for the shingle they’d hang outside their shared practice:
Odds and Ends
Rears and Queers
Nuts and Bolts
Our clan came from Polish Ashkenazi stock who turned turnip carts into one of the biggest discount supermarket chains in the tristate area:
Why pay more? Shop at a ShopRite Store!
If you didn’t work for the company store, the only options were MD or the president of a local Hadassah chapter.
I grew up surrounded by brilliant and eccentric proctologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, teamsters, social climbers, Wall Street tightrope walkers, and Ponzi schemers who took holidays in the Caymans. Not much freaks me out.
The night before I faced Samuel Little, I freaked out.
I rubbed my neck and paced my upstairs hallway, demanding my psychiatrist aunt give me the magic key to unlock the mystery of this monster I was about to face.
“Psychos? Meh,” said my aunt. “Everyone wants to talk about psychopaths because they’re an aberration. If you’re almost anyone, psychos make you look good, feel good…in comparison. You didn’t bludgeon coeds to death in their beds? Hey! You’re okay! Any diagnosis is a moving target. I usually start with trauma and move from there.
“Psychopathy is like Jeopardy,” she continued. “All answers are questions, and don’t expect to win. Psychopaths have a way of being extraordinary liars while telling you exactly what they’re doing. I can tell you what it feels like to be around a psychopath. It works better than the questionnaire: He will steal the shirt off your back. He’ll tell you he’s stealing the shirt off your back. Still, you will be inexplicably compelled to give him the shirt off your back.”
“It’ll be an adventure,” I said.
“It will be what it will be. Don’t expect to tease the truth from the lies. He may not even know. This takes time. Don’t wear an underwire,” she concluded, sounding strangely sad. “You’ll set off the metal detectors.”