CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

MAY 17, 2018

Eventually I heard about the day Sammy and Jimmy met from both of them, many times. It became codified into a kind of mythology: the day Sammy boy finally met his match. A moment of reckoning, witnessed only through staticky audio wire, by the FBI and the DOJ in the next room.

This is the story.

Three months before our first phone call, Texas Ranger James B. Holland, Company B, sat on one side of a metal table on top of which sat a family-sized bag of peanut M&Ms and a three-inch-wide black binder with every scrap of information he and his team had pulled together on Samuel Little, a.k.a. Samuel McDowell, the man sitting across from him. Next to the binder was a letter from Bobby Bland, the district attorney of Ector County, Texas, promising he would not seek the death penalty against Sam for the murder of Denise Brothers, which occurred on approximately January 12, 1994, in the city of Odessa.

Talking to serial killers was an unexpected specialty for this affable guy wearing tan Wranglers and a double rig belt. One might more readily picture a serial killer whisperer as a slick FBI agent out of Mindhunter, with troubled eyes, a secret sex addiction, and a snazzy gray suit. Holland was more like the only popular jock from your high school who wasn’t a total douchebag. As far as I could glean from my conversations with Sam, Holland’s method consisted of equal parts confidence, persistence, and Vulcan mind meld. He’d squeezed William Reece, Donald Wright, Anthony Shore, Charles Hicks…

Holland’s neck tingled, right at the band of his hat. He knew he had a big fish in Sam. Maybe the biggest.

Holland had prepped the interview with the same rigor he applied to playing fullback at the University of Louisville, the same doggedness he brought to his master’s degree in business administration, before he’d hopped on the first train headed for a more exciting destination. According to the Texas Rangers website, Holland instructed thousands of state and local police officers as well as whatever a “vast number of foreign law enforcement and military leaders” means. Holland has also provided instruction to U.S. Military Special Forces personnel in “firearms and interview techniques.”

I boiled this down to a guy who liked adrenaline, uniforms, and the upper hand. He liked shady shit, secret clubs, shooting loud guns, and hiding in plain sight. You couldn’t miss him, but you would anyway.

Holland had interviewed the LAPD extensively, and Roberts schooled him on the ins and outs of the man the LAPD had referred to as the Choke and Stroke Killer, because his MO was to strangle women as he jerked off on them.

Holland soon understood the world according to Sam: He was misunderstood. He’d been railroaded by detectives and lying bitches. He loved women. He didn’t beat them, didn’t rape them. He didn’t have to. There was just that inconvenient part about not being able to maintain an erection unless he was strangling a woman to death. Sex and strangulation were one and the same for Samuel Little. He papered his walls with drawings of long-necked women.

Innocent, innocent, innocent.

Holland knew sexual predators. He knew day after day the man in front of him lay in his cell and jerked off to the macabre quilt of faces of dead women on his walls. Strangulation is a slow and painful death. Sam had been sure to make it as slow and painful as possible, because to him, the killing itself was the sex, and his babies were worth more than a quickie.

Everyone wants a witness. This killer had kept no trophies to display. Holland suspected the drawings were the trophies.

“You’re in control here,” said Holland straight off. “You’re never gonna do anything you don’t want to do.” He faced his palms outward in a gesture of surrender. “I’m just asking you for some help.”

From the gate, Sam didn’t even look down at the binder in front of him, opened to a blurry photograph of a shiny-cheeked, bright-eyed woman with Texas hair and sadness in the corners of her smile. Denise Brothers, murdered in Odessa, Texas, on January 12, 1994. Sam only wanted to rant about the trial that landed him in that dank cave in the first place. The same rant he repeated to his own wall a thousand times a day.

“Sure, yeah,” said Holland. “I know all about that. I know all about you. I’ve been studying you. And you know what? I admire you. I think they got you all wrong, calling you a rapist. You’re not a rapist, and I can prove it.”

Sam’s face came to life. He registered the tall hat, the shiny star.

“What in the hell is that on your head? You some kind of cowboy from Mars?”

Holland leaned his six-foot-three-inch frame back in his chair and crossed one ankle over a knee. Impatience was the enemy.

Texas Ranger James Holland first heard about Samuel Little at a homicide investigation conference in Florida. After Holland had delivered a lecture on how to interview psychopaths, a Florida cold case detective approached him about a murder he liked Sam for. Holland’s interest was piqued, but he needed a Texas case to pursue. He reached out to DOJ senior forensic policy advisor Dr. Angela Williamson and ViCAP crime analyst Christie Palazzolo.

Palazzolo’s first graduate degree was in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. She pursued a second in strategic intelligence from the National Defense Intelligence College while working a day job as a federal police officer. She decided counterterrorism wasn’t her bag. She liked facts, not lies. She also had an upcoming wedding to plan, kids to get busy having. When offered the ViCAP job as a data analyst, she jumped and in short order became one of the most widely respected in the field.

ViCAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—is both an FBI unit and an information-sharing database, begun in 1985. Prior to its inception, there was no central repository where state and local agencies could submit their violent crime cases and therefore no place they could go to search similar cases other than the library. The ViCAP database now enables local law enforcement to enter behaviorally focused data and search for potentially connected crimes across the country.

Advances in DNA science and corresponding federal and local databases have had phenomenal implications for the criminal justice system, but they also have limitations. To solve many cold cases, the process of locating the “traces of contact” can often resemble a more traditional investigative model.

ViCAP’s data focuses on serial killers, missing persons, and unidentified remains. Other offices in the FBI don’t have jurisdiction to work these cases unless there’s a federal crime involved, such as bank robbery or kidnapping across state lines. Behavior patterns are the sneak-around. The ViCAP division works under the umbrella of the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), as depicted in Mindhunter, Silence of the Lambs, and Criminal Minds. The BSU’s Robert Ressler came up with the term “serial killer.”

The original idea of the ViCAP program was to collect data about offenders and identify behavioral signatures to link and resolve unsolved cases. For it to work, enough data had to be entered to make these connections possible. The current estimation indicates ViCAP contains less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed in the United States each year.

In contrast, ViCLAS, Canada’s Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, was originally based on the ViCAP model, but its breadth has so far surpassed the U.S. database as to be nearly unrecognizable. It contains over half a million violent cases and has made connections between over seven thousand unsolved cases. The U.S. database would need to contain over four million cases to measure up on a per capita basis, but it has fewer than one hundred thousand.

Use of ViCLAS is mandatory. Participation in ViCAP, however, is voluntary. Data entry takes significant time and effort. Although ViCAP is considered the original model for linking unsolved cases, lack of engagement hinders its functionality.

Christie Palazzolo was in the dumps about it in December 2016, or maybe it was just the third pregnancy. She’d always carried well, but this one was already making her breathe hard.

Dr. Angela Williamson, the DOJ liaison, strode up to Palazzolo’s cubicle. The two had hit it off talking about The X-Files, but this five-foot-two Scully in a cheeky outfit, hailing from the cane fields of rural Australia, was still more than a little intimidating. Williamson held PhDs in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Queensland and had considered work on vaccines but liked forensics better. As director of case work at Bode Technology, she’d worked DNA on the Hurricane Katrina missing and unidentified, JonBenét Ramsey, the West Memphis Three, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Williamson liaised between ViCAP and the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI), a DOJ grant program that encourages large-scale reform of sexual assault investigations by funding a coordinated, multijurisdictional response, supporting increased testing of sexual assault kits. SAKI aims to link and close cold sexual assault cases.

Many in law enforcement would like to see both ViCAP and SAKI federally mandated, like CODIS and NamUs.

“Hey! Do you know anything about this guy Samuel Little?” Williamson asked.

The name was the quadruple espresso shot Palazzolo needed. “Do I?”

Williamson told her about a Texas Ranger—that’s right, hat and all—who talked to psychos. “Dade County homicide showed him some cases he liked Little for. He needs a Texas nexus in order to look at them.”

“A Texas nexus?” asked Palazzolo.

“A Texas nexus.”

A Texas nexus would be a specific cold case in Texas that Palazzolo could identify Sam as a strong suspect for, strong enough to get a DA to send Ranger Holland all the way to California to question the suspect. Williamson told Palazzolo this guy had some kind of superpowers. There was gossip at a recent homicide investigation conference that this Holland might push things kind of far sometimes. He was unconventional, his confidence inspiring a blush here and there, a wink at Texas justice. Then again, he threw in things like hypnosis. The cops at the conference had gossiped later at the bar—he’d throw in anything.

“You almost don’t want to talk to him,” said a detective with a comb-over and a sweaty upper lip.

“Makes you fucking sure you did something wrong. Helluva cop.”

“Helluva guy.”

Williamson had heard the gossip and seen the panels. She needed to get Holland in a room with this Samuel Little. All they needed was one Texas cold case—one they were pretty sure he was good for. With that, Williamson would have bet good money he could open the floodgates and give them more. An Australian never takes a sucker’s bet.

Palazzolo had done the original ViCAP workup on Sam for the LAPD during the manhunt that tracked him across the country. She turned to the computer without a word and went to the investigative leads matrix for Samuel Little: every arrest, every sentence served, every time his plate was run, known associates, known vehicles.

“Here he is.”

Georgia, Ohio, Florida, Ohio, Florida, Maryland, DC, Florida, Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, Georgia, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nebraska, California, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Florida, Georgia, California, Michigan, Nevada, Florida, California, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Florida, Ohio, Georgia, California, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, New Jersey, Missouri, Florida, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Alabama, Ohio, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, California, Ohio, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Florida, California, Georgia, Florida, California, Mississippi, Ohio, California, California…

Ford Mercury, Ford Fairlane, Pontiac Bonneville, Ford Fairlane, Ford Mercury, Ford, convertible Pontiac Bonneville, Buick Riviera, Buick Wildcat, Pontiac Bonneville, Oldsmobile Delta, Pontiac LeMans, Ford Thunderbird, Chrysler Imperial, Chevy Bel Air, Ford Galaxie, Ford Pinto, Lincoln Continental Mark III, Lincoln Continental Mark IV, Ford Thunderbird, Ford Mercury, Cadillac Eldorado, Ford F-150 bubble-top van, Cadillac Eldorado, Buick Riviera, Cadillac Fleetwood, Cadillac, Dodge motorhome, Chrysler, Cadillac, Nissan Maxima, Oldsmobile, Buick, Ford…

Even Williamson was taken aback by the mind-blowing pile of wreckage. There was arrest after arrest, and still he went free and killed again.

“How did this happen?”

“You can’t start with that question. Look here.”

Palazzolo pointed to an entry, buried deep in the initial investigative leads matrix she had worked up for Roberts. At the time, she had identified a baker’s dozen of homicides across the country that smelled like Sam.

She’d always remembered this one for some reason.

Denise Brothers, Odessa, Texas, 38 years old, white female. January 12, 1994.

Smack-dab in the middle of Texas. It was what the Texas Ranger would need to go and interview Sam.

A Texas nexus.

No one had even tried to get Sam to confess since the original conviction. Texas Ranger James Holland seemed about the right kind of crazy to pull something like this off. Palazzolo and Williamson dove into the Samuel Little investigation, hoping it would be a dramatic and newsworthy demonstration of ViCAP’s investigative potential.

Wouldn’t you know it? It actually worked. The Brothers case landed Williamson and Palazzolo in a California men’s maximum-security prison, fiddling with their recording equipment, while Holland interviewed a potentially prolific murderer. But how many, really? Would the old man in failing health remember anything useful? Would he agree to talk at all? It was a risky venture.

The two brainy, bookend brunettes leaned in, Palazzolo’s hands paused over her keys, ready to start clickety-clacking the minute the monster talked. Photos and notebooks were scattered across the table in front of them.

“I didn’t rape nobody. I never hit a woman with a closed fist in my life. I didn’t hurt them.”

“Nah, you didn’t need to do that,” Holland agreed.

“I never did that.”

“You never did that. You don’t need to take nothing from no one. Let me ask you something. How do you like it here?”

“Here?” Sam looked around. He laughed. “I fucking hate it here. I got things on my jacket I never even got arrested for. I should be a level three, and I’m a level four and I never did them things.”

“Now, here I can help. But you’re the captain of the boat. You’re the pilot of this plane. I want to hear about your life because this is what I do. And you’re important. I’ll tell you what I could do. If you tell me about a Texas case, I’m going to go present that to a grand jury, and if we can corroborate the facts and you get indicted, I can get you out of here. I’m going to fly out there on a special plane. It’s a really cool plane. I’m gonna pick you up, and you and me will go to Texas. But in order for that to happen, I would appreciate it if you would tell me about these things and that you tell me the truth.”

“LAPD say I’m a rapist. It was all over the TV. What is her fucking name? I can never remember. The lying whore detective.”

“Mitzi Roberts? Yeah…” Holland chewed an M&M and nodded thoughtfully. “She’s a fucking cunt. You can set the record straight right now.”

Sam threw his head back and laughed, then pointed at the cowboy. “What do they call you again?”

“People who don’t know me call me James,” said Holland. “People who know me a little call me Jim. My mom calls me Jimmy.”

“I’ll call you Jimmy.”

“Okay. I’ll call you Sammy.”

“No one calls me Sammy.”

“Well, no man calls me Jimmy.”

It was settled. They would be Jimmy and Sammy.

“You know the thing about secrets,” said Jimmy, “they feel pretty good. But you know what feels really good? Telling someone.”

Sammy boy had done this remarkable thing, and no one had properly asked him about it. Jimmy knew no one wanted to die alone, unseen, forgotten. Especially not a serial killer.

“Say, you ever been to Odessa?” asked Jimmy. Sammy’s eyes went poison green. Welcome to the show.