PASCAGOULA, MISSISSIPPI

SEPTEMBER 2018

The first time I drove through Biloxi was pre-Katrina. Scott and I got engaged in New Orleans and decided to drive the Gulf Coast, seeing road signs for Mobile and singing “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Miles of green rolled out on one side of us and miles of navy sea on the other. Famished and nearly out of gas, we stumbled upon a gas station where the owner’s mom fed us fried chicken she’d happened to just cook up, and when it was gone, it was gone.

“Is this chicken or is this cake?” asked Scott.

“Chicken cake!” I said.

“Chicken cake, baby!” the owner’s mom echoed. “That’s what we call it now! Next time y’all come visit, I’ll make you my famous chicken cake!”

I was love-drunk, and it all sparkled: the gulf, the chicken cake, the ring on my finger throwing points of light on the rental car’s ceiling like a disco ball.

I was the opposite of love-drunk the night I navigated the same stretch of I-90 Sam had driven hundreds of times: the thirty-two miles between Biloxi and Pascagoula. Malls turned to marshland. I saw road signs for Mobile, New Orleans.

Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, California…

Burglary, breaking and entering, assault and battery, assault with the intent to rob, assault with a firearm, armed robbery, assault on a police officer, solicitation of prostitution, driving under the influence, shoplifting, theft, grand theft, possession of marijuana, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, resisting arrest, battery, false imprisonment, assault with great bodily injury, robbery, rape, sodomy, murder, murder, murder…

I contemplated the string of events surrounding the bewildering dismissal of Sam’s crimes in the eighties. Hurricane Katrina had wiped out not just human beings, homes, businesses, and communities but also warehouses of evidence. Instead of hunting down nonexistent case files, I talked to detectives, family members. I ran the timeline in my head. It never failed to baffle.

On July 31, 1980, Samuel Little assaulted Hilda Nelson, a twenty-six-year-old Black woman. He drowned and strangled Nelson in her apartment in Carver Village. She survived due to the intervention of her best friend, Delores Hester. She was hospitalized at the Singing River Hospital for three days for her injuries. Because her mother didn’t know she was a prostitute and she was ashamed, she called it breaking and entering. The cops wouldn’t do anything either way, so why bother?

Nelson made a formal report about a year and a half later when detectives came to question her about the strangulation of a young white woman named Melinda LaPree. Her mother already knew by then.

On November 19, 1981, Leila McClain, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, known in the neighborhood as Bowlegs, was offered fifty dollars for sex and picked up by Sam Little in a brown, wood-paneled Pinto station wagon. She had a room at the village, but he insisted on going to the Shamrock Motel up the street, then passed it and turned off on a side road instead. Sam had oddly chosen poorly. That little bowlegged five-foot-two monument to survival reached over, turned the wheel, shoved her foot down on top of Sam’s on the gas pedal, and tried to drive the car into a brick wall. When that didn’t work, she boxed him. Of ninety-three, eighty-six, or eighty-four victims, she was the only one who fought her way out.

On August 16, 1982, the naked, badly decomposed body of Rosie Hill, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman, was found in a field near a hog pen in Marion County, Florida. Only a navy terry-cloth slipper was found in a tree nearby. The Pinto and the man last seen offering Rosie $100 for sex were both identified by eyewitnesses.

On September 12, 1982, the nude, strangled body of Patricia Mount, a twenty-six-year-old white woman, was found in a field in Alachua County, Florida. Eyewitnesses later identified Sam Little as the man last seen leaving Willie Mae’s Beer Tavern in Gainesville with her in his brown Pinto station wagon with wood paneling.

On October 4, 1982, the skeletal remains of twenty-two-year-old Melinda LaPree were found by a groundskeeper in the Gautier Family Cemetery, nearly a month after she had been reported missing by her boyfriend on September 17. A disarticulated hyoid bone and fractured cricoid cartilage indicated strangulation. Again, eyewitnesses identified Sam as the man with whom she had been seen getting into a brown Pinto station wagon.

When detectives from Marion and Alachua Counties had gotten together and figured out they had eyewitnesses on both the Hill and Mount cases with the same vehicle description, same description of the man last seen with the victims, and same MO, they put out a widely distributed BOLO (be on the lookout) with a composite sketch of the suspect and the vehicle. Detectives in Jackson County, Mississippi, recognized these descriptions as the same man seen picking up LaPree in front of the King William Hotel.

On November 24, 1982, Sam was arrested with Jean and Danny in the Pinto for shoplifting. The arresting officers recognized the car from the BOLO. The Pascagoula PD and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department arrested Sam for murder.

Hilda Nelson and Leila McClain were both subpoenaed to the grand jury hearing for the murder of Melinda LaPree. Neither had a car at the time, so they walked to the courthouse. Nelson was eight months pregnant, and the minute she saw Sam, she peed herself with fear. She was asked to leave, and the two women walked home without testifying.

The grand jury failed to indict due to lack of evidence.

Sam was almost on the loose again, but not quite. They extradited him from Jackson County, Mississippi, to Alachua County, Florida, where he was arrested for the murder of Patricia Mount on July 19, 1983. Hairs found on the victim were similar to Sam’s, and eyewitnesses identified both the car and Sam.

He admitted to being at the tavern at the night in question. A six-person jury found Sam not guilty due to the lack of definitive physical evidence.

It had almost happened again in Los Angeles in 2012. Cold case veteran Rick Jackson and Mitzi Roberts had built a methodical case, with strong pattern evidence. This time, they had secured powerful living witnesses. Hilda Nelson, Leila McClain, and Laurie Barros had all reluctantly agreed to testify. Solid as it may have been, they were left with the same problem: the only physical evidence was that one case-to-case hit. It wasn’t enough for the DA to indict.

Roberts had been one step behind Sam for months, and now she worried he was gaining ground. Armed with a DNA profile, a distinctive MO, an incomprehensible rap sheet, and Christie Palazzolo’s investigative leads matrix, Roberts and Jackson set off on a cross-country fact-finding mission. They planned to interview Sam’s living victims, meet with detectives across the country, and build their own case with pattern evidence while generating momentum for what they hoped would become a nationwide effort.

Jackson was known for solving complex homicides, but few knew his first job was working for AAA—employee of the month three times. He loved the veins and arteries of maps, treasures of invisible history buried between the lines. The partners drove from Memphis to Mobile, from Alachua to Pascagoula, from Pamela K. Smith to Melinda LaPree, in late October 2012.

On the morning of November 26, after seven months of playing a wild, half-blind game of Marco Polo, Roberts rubbed her chlorine-stung eyes.

She had gotten a third case-to-case hit on her suspect.

Through the CCSS screenings, Sam’s genetic material had been detected on the bra and shirt of forty-one-year-old Carol Alford, who’d been found strangled in a residential South Central LA alleyway in July 1987.

It was what they needed.

On January 7, 2013, assistant district attorney Beth Silverman filed three charges of murder with special circumstances against Samuel Little.

I followed in their footsteps, going to Pascagoula to interview two of the key trial witnesses, Hilda Nelson and Detective Lieutenant Darren Versiga, and to see the place for myself.

A river ran beside the road the Pascagoula, with small boats anchored to battered docks and seafood shacks with twinkle lights. I opened the window. It smelled like the end of summer.

A landlocked lighthouse caught my attention. Was it a theme restaurant? Why would a patch of grass next to a two-lane highway need a lighthouse? A sign beside it read:

WELCOME TO PASCAGOULA

A smaller plaque informed me this was the birthplace of Jimmy Buffett: singer, songwriter, and author.

Detective Darren Versiga worked the 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift. He preferred the quiet. Hard with a kid but less headache in general, and more time to work on his cold cases. Leila McClain had died of cancer six months before. I would be meeting with Versiga at the station that night around midnight and Hilda Nelson the following day.

Versiga was a husky, white-haired, ruddy-complected cop who greeted me with a handshake and an avuncular smile in the otherwise empty reception area. I followed him down a hall lined with vintage photos. I caught glimpses of what I think was a word processor? A fax machine? A picture of Jesus hung over Versiga’s desk, surrounded by those of a bazillion kids and grandkids.

Versiga was a cold case devotee who spent any blink of spare time pursuing leads. He’d been integral to the 2012 investigation that led to Sam Little’s conviction, finally, for the strangulation of three women in Los Angeles in 2014. I recognized a familiar obsessive intensity in him. What else would propel you through horror toward a solution?

Now, he was an inch from long-sought justice for Mindy LaPree. He passed me a photo of a feather-haired, apple-cheeked flower child playing the flute. Showed me another of Billy Hampton, LaPree’s boyfriend, who reported her missing in the morning, at least. Hampton was white, blue-eyed, long-haired, holding their one-year-old in his arms. He looked a lot like a Billy I once knew. He told his baby mama to go sit on the wall until she brought back money and drugs. “Would if I could, babe, but y’know, equal distribution of labor. It’s feminism.” Her skeletal remains were found nearly a month later.

“I was a reserve when it happened. Stood watch over the crime scene,” said Versiga.

LaPree’s remains were curious to me. She looked burned somehow, encased in a melted black garbage bag.

“She’s not exactly a skeleton.”

“Skeletal just means all that remains are bones, teeth, and hair for identification. I have one Jane Doe right now I’m looking at with a gold tooth. Also cracks and fractures. Childhood injuries. Signs of trauma. But no soft tissue.”

Only LaPree’s skull was clean bone.

“Is that because areas of trauma decompose faster?”

“Exactly. Head trauma. The bugs go to the open wounds first. Not just wounds, wet spots. Mouths, nostrils, vaginas…”

I stayed for another couple of hours before the jet lag hit me like a plank. As I headed back to the hotel, I repeated what I’d learned, obvious as it might have seemed.

Bugs go to the open wounds first.

I sat next to Hilda Nelson in one of the padded office chairs of the Hilton conference room, my recorder between us on the kidney-shaped table. Nelson pulled a pamphlet out of her purse and placed it on the table in front of Versiga. It was the program from Leila McClain’s funeral.

On the cover, McClain was all dolled up in a hot-pink dress, mink lashes, and a feather boa.

“Can I get a copy of this?” Versiga asked.

“Oh, that’s for you, honey.”

Nelson was sixty-four years old and going through her fourth round of chemo. She was nearly bald, but for a dusting of salt-and-pepper hair. She wore leggings and an oversize bedazzled T-shirt that read THINGS ARE HAPPENIN’ IN ATLANTA over an airbrushed Atlanta skyline. She wore a gold cross and chunky gold earrings.

She was game to talk, as long as she got out in time to take her granddaughter to get her nails done for homecoming.

“Used to always have my nails done. They’re too thin now with the chemo. They hurt.”

I asked Nelson about her background.

“I grew up middle class. We lived right there on Live Oak. My grandparents raised me. My grandfather worked on the railroad. My grandma, she worked for the Veneer Men… It’s one of these Pathco…”

Versiga said, “…with the milling.”

“Yeah, they still going. I got one brother, and it was just us. We grew up good. But then there was just this mystery about the Village. That was the name of the apartment complex, and across the street from the Village was nothing but clubs, juke joint, hit houses. And when we were kids, if anybody told my grandma they saw us down there, you know what that was, but as soon as I got grown, that’s the first place I went.”

“Must have sounded intriguing.”

“I was working at the shipyard, and I had two girls at the time. I started hustling, but like I said, the things I was doing, I didn’t have to do.”

“And what did you like to do when you were a kid? What were you into?”

“Booooys.” First hint of a gap-toothed smile. “How you think I got into this mess? I had my own car. Most of the boys, they didn’t have nothing. But I liked to read. I used to like to read and dress real sharp.”

Nelson placed one peeling fingernail on the photo of McClain on the table in front of us. “See how she dressed? We probably was on our way to the club that night because that’s how we lived in that glamour life. Or so I thought. Because it was good as well as bad. Then, after this thing happened with this man, I backed up a little bit.”

“When you say backed up a little bit, you mean…”

“Yeah, with the prostitution and the hustling and the men. I kind of got back. But Bowlegs? That’s what we called her. Bowlegs—even from the time we was in LA, it was three men called on her in one weekend! I said, ‘Girl, you still?’ She said, ‘Oh yeah!’”

Versiga shook his head. “She was something else. Y’all were alike in ways, but you’re definitely more laid-back.”

“I wanted to be a writer. I got two years of college. I went to JC, but like I said, once I got that twenty-one and I could leave my grandma’s house, I went. It’s just that I’m nosy, honey, and I like that fast life.”

“Tell me about the Village.”

“When I first moved there, I was still at the shipyard. I would walk on the Village side. I hadn’t moved over to the Front side yet. The people that I knew that would be over there, they be, ‘Hey, come over. Oh, you think you’re too good.’ You know how people are. And sooner or later, going in that shipyard cold, going in there hot. I had seen other ways to get money other than working in the shipyard. So that’s what I did.”

“What were the clubs like? Bars? Dancing? Gambling?”

“E-ve-ry-thing. We wouldn’t wake up until about maybe about this time because we would have been up all night. Get a shower. Get dressed. Eat. Between four and five, we hit the track and would just be out there drinking beer, dancing, turning tricks, doing whatever. You partied. Just getting down in the Highway Club, the Jump Club. We just, that was an average day and then we’d get out there to like I say four, five, or six when it’s cool. Jumping in and out cars and running around corners, going across the street and back, just handling business.”

“How many dates would you have a night?”

“Well, like, I’d say like from Thursday to Saturday, those were the good, good nights. You know, maybe seven or eight because I just sat there. If you came to me, good. If you didn’t, good. I wasn’t for all that hopping in cars and all that because I lived right across the street.”

“Leila would be the one,” said Versiga. “She would, as many as she could get under her belt.”

“I mean from sun down to sun up!”

They laughed.

“Her own words, I mean that’s her words. She just…” Versiga couldn’t say it.

“How’d she say it? I’m a whore!” laughed Nelson. “When she came to the Village, she was driving an Oldsmobile or something. She came from right over there in Franklin Creek, but she was a nice—to the day she died—she was a nice, nice, nice person. She didn’t know nothing about no prostituting then…or so she led us to believe. She was selling shoes out the trunk of her car. I’m nosy. What’s up? What’s going on over here? She say, ‘What size you wear?’ I said, ‘Girl, you ain’t got nothing in there that fit me. I’m a ten.’ She say, ‘Yes, I do,’ and she gave me a pair of shoes. And she started calling me her sister.”

“Do you remember your first date?”

“My friend Lois said, ‘Girl, you could make you some money.’ She say, ‘You look good, you dress nice, and you don’t fool with that riffraff.’ The first time I did was in Lois house. We walked across the street. They was fisherman and they gave us fifty dollars apiece then. And I said, ‘Damn, that was easy.’ As long as you don’t be fooling with no fools. Nobody want to act like they do with they wife. All that foreplay, ain’t none of that. You know what you want. Do it and get out of my house.”

We talked about our first times falling in love, how she met her oldest girl’s daddy at a record shop.

She told me about her seventeen-year-old granddaughter: cheerleader, volleyball, debate team, homecoming court, student council.

“She sounds like a good girl,” I said.

“Yeeeah. Right now, she is. But I see you know how that go.”

“Was the city pretty segregated at the time?”

Nelson laughed in my face.

“Were you addicted to drugs?”

“I used to smoke a little reefer during that time, but no, nothing heavy after I stopped turning tricks. I dibble and dabble a little bit in cocaine, crack, rock, whatever. Then when I got tired of doing that, what happened, I went to jail. I caught two cases. Possession with intent.”

“I actually worked the case. I worked it when we had an undercover unit!” said Versiga.

“Mm-hmm. That night I told them, I said, ‘It’s somebody in them bushes.’ They thinking I’m high and paranoid!”

“You remember where that was at?”

“On the dog pound.”

“That’s exactly where it was at. There was a guy in the bushes! Makes you feel any better, we had ticks. We were in them woods and there were so many ticks on us. When we got out of them woods, I kept saying, ‘What’s that crawling on us?’ Never went back.”

We talked about blackjack, chemo, Jesus.

“If you were going to pick five words to describe yourself, what would they be?”

“First one would be loving…fun. Sometimes mysterious. I don’t know. I’m not no bad person. I’m a darer.

“I didn’t want to go to no Los Angeles for no trial. I was about through with it, because I got to have closure somewhere. I felt sorry for that little old man in the wheelchair. I couldn’t believe he had done all that to me, but I knew what he had done. He looked up and I looked him in his face. Oh, I knew that was him. I had to just hold my mule, you know, get it over with. Everything we say he did, everything police say he did, his low-down ass did it. And for what? For what? He ain’t even rob us. He ain’t take our money or nothing. And the people he killed. What for?”

After the interview, Versiga gave me a tour of the town.

“Here we have what they call the Singing River,” he told me. “The story is, one of the Pascagoula Indians was sweet on a Biloxi Indian and they were warriors. We were bread makers. The bread maker Indians here and the warriors over there, and one of the bread makers decided to marry a warrior, and that did not go well. Story is, the Biloxi Indians were setting up for war, and instead, cowards that Pascagoula Indians were, they went into the river singing a chant and drowned theirselves. That was the end of the Pascagoula people. That’s why it’s called the Singing River. I never heard it, but there’s stories out there that you can hear like a chant or a hum. I guess it’s a folklore kind of thing.”

We stared out at the shipyard. It was a massive and baffling Erector Set of cranes and half-built aircraft carriers, framed by an expanse of deep blue sky, decorated with dollops of clouds that looked like roses on a wedding cake.

The town was a mix of neat suburban boxes, charming Victorians, and massive colonial beachfront houses, most rebuilt after the hurricane. What passion drives a person to keep sinking roots in land that faces inevitable catastrophic flooding? Versiga himself had decided to wait out Katrina and wound up with the roof blown off his house and eight family members, including two infants, clinging to a single Jet Ski.

We visited the Longfellow House, one of the few left standing after the hurricane. All I could remember of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the Paul Revere poem:

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be.

Longfellow’s greatest achievement, however, is considered to be his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Over seven centuries later, Inferno remains ubiquitous in popular culture. Hell.

“It’s about an author who gets a VIP tour of hell from a poet in a toga,” I told Versiga.

“Coincidoinks!” he replied. He swung around the corner. “There was the old Steak and Eggs, where we’d all go after the night shift.”

I imagined early mornings decades before when off-duty cops scarfed down greasy after-work breakfast plates, sitting on counter stools next to whores equally as famished and exhausted.

“This was the old entrance to Carver Village,” he said and turned right onto a seemingly endless two-lane blacktop that stretched as far as the eye could see.

On either side of the road was pretty much nothing.

To the left, the Village side, were wide manicured fields, a few saplings planted ten feet apart. A circular driveway led to a lone assisted-care facility.

It was hard to imagine the operation that had razed all those buildings to the ground, grinding a storied Black neighborhood from history, leaving only saplings and a nursing home.

To the right, where the Front had been, there were still meager remnants. The one standing structure was an abandoned cinder-block church with no windows. Weeds and brush had mostly obscured the hints of the wall the girls used to wait on, but you could still see the footprint of the King William Hotel.

“All the way back then, it was as punishment,” Versiga said.

“What was as punishment?”

“A rookie would get in trouble with the department, if we wrecked the car or anything, you had to walk Carver Village. They would throw things at you and holler, ‘blue, blue, blue, blue, blue.’ Lucky in the old days, I could run pretty fast!”

A tour of a ghost town.

“Let me bring the picture up. Okay. We’re on this road. Here’s the railroad. That foundation? This is the King William Hotel right here. Club after club after club all the way down as far as you could go both directions. This was called Liberty Street. Dunbar. Carver. That’s gonna bring back memories.”

Versiga pointed out where Leila McClain had been picked up as well as the location of the old Shamrock Motel. We drove the route Sam had taken with her.

“Up here, Auto Zone was not there. Grass growing up. And there was a trail that you could walk all the way down to the back of King William. Here’s where she got attacked. She ran this way right across that busy highway, fell down in the bushes, and that’s where Smokey Joe was taking a pee.”

“Wait. Here to…” I looked back to the aerial. “It’s so far.”

“Oh yeah, it’s far.”

“That’s a really busy road.”

“Oh yeah, it is.”

You don’t get that from the maps. I stood there and looked at the route, the nonstop traffic. It was such a long way to run.

“I wasn’t messing,” said Versiga. “She was something.”

Our final stop was the historic Gautier cemetery, dating back to 1847, where Sam had dumped the body of Melinda LaPree. I’d heard the story of LaPree’s murder several times from Sam. He’d carried her down a small slope, laid her on the flowers atop a fresh grave. He described the proximity from the street. Something wasn’t right.

“Was this fence here then?”

“No.”

I saw it. Exactly as Sam had described. I placed a stone, as Jews do for remembrance.

My final night in Pascagoula, cicadas haunted my dreams. A man fished by the river in surgical gloves. I hadn’t slept much and was ready to put my purse under my head and curl up in a corner of the Biloxi airport while rain pelted the windows—the tail end of Hurricane Florence. I settled in for what I imagined would be a delayed flight, another drive in the dark to another motel. Next stop: Sam’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio.

I was nearly asleep when the phone in the bag under my head buzzed. I fumbled to grab it. The space cowboy. Really now?

“What should I call you, sir?” I asked Texas Ranger James Holland, casting about for a rapport with him. “What do your friends call you?”

Names are important, as Jimmy had demonstrated by cementing his rapport with Sammy. I didn’t have the key to unlock the ranger on my particular key ring.

“You can call me Jim.”

“Well, Jim…”

I wheedled, cajoled, cited precedents of famous embedded journalists. I asked him to let me come to Wise County for the confessions. There are only so many ways you can beg. I’m not proud; I’ll invent a few more, but he was a wash. There would be no mixing it up gonzo style with the cowboy.

“Yell at ya soon. Gotta jump for my kid’s game.”

I still want an interview, I texted him.

Talk to the DA. I’m just the guy with the gun, was his response.

On the plane, I scribbled pages of notes of stories filled with characters with names like Dinky and Stanky and Sea Dog and Big Rob. It turned out the landlocked lighthouse that puzzled me upon arrival in Pascagoula is a restoration of the historic Round Island Lighthouse, built in 1859, ravaged by hurricanes, brought to the mainland, and restored in 2010.

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm…

Lighthouses warn of rocky shores but also promise harbor, somewhere beyond the edges of the floodlight.