CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

DECEMBER 2018

In Sam’s version of the world, he loves.

When he wanted to feel human during our interviews, he’d wax sentimental about the girlfriends he’d kept alive: Ninah, Lucy, Barbara.

He circled back again and again to Jean, the best woman he ever knew. Everyone had loved Jean. Tina Turner came over when she was in town to shoot the shit and see if Jean had that Sergio Valente jumpsuit in a size eight.

Jean was also the only woman Sam admitted to beating within an inch of her life, over and over, during their over fifteen years together.

Jean gave Sam Little an airtight alibi for the evening Patricia Mount was murdered. During his San Diego trial, she sat behind him prim as a Sunday school teacher, Bible in her lap. Jean told Sam she’d die and go to hell with him. She didn’t just take him back every time; she tracked him down. When he left her, she’d have him arrested for stealing her car, then go bail him out. She’d call his parents or his cousins and leave word where to find her.

Jean was a sharp and industrious woman, accustomed to extreme violence. Jean had girlfriends too. It didn’t seem to matter—she supported them, dressed them, cooked for them, bought their cars, protected them. She did it all.

There was an oddly feminine quality about Sam, although it wasn’t immediately apparent. Maybe both he and Jean hated the femininity in themselves, the weakness it represented. When Sam went on the hunt, Jean stayed in the motel and crocheted doll cozies for empty bottles—Coke, Pepsi, vodka, whiskey, didn’t matter. For Easter, she crocheted bunny ears on the dolls. She displayed them next to the victims’ earrings in the trunk of her car when she pulled over in Anytown, USA, to shill her wares. Once in a blue moon, she even sold one.

I believe she knew.

Pure speculation. Most detectives I talk to disagree. Sam disagreed with me. No way she knew. I could be wrong.

Jean was invisible to a world she scammed too easily. Sam was the shadow who did the dirty work of killing her symbolically while she slithered across the floor of Saks to support them. It wasn’t her shit in the car. It was left there by a filthy whore in hot pants: the thing she could neither have nor be. She scrubbed the back floorboard so often, the smell of bleach in the car never went away, always made their eyes water.

I asked Sam if he felt bad, walking out of the hospital after she died and leaving her remains for her family in St Louis.

“About that? Oh, no. Not about anything, really. The minute you ask for forgiveness, you are forgiven. I asked God for forgiveness and I was forgiven. You know about the apostle Paul?”

“Betwixt the stirrup and the ground, he something lost and something found?”

“How you know that, Jew?”

“What if your babies didn’t see the ground coming?”

“If they didn’t forgive, I’d hate to see where they went.”

I could have strangled him myself sometimes. I could have strangled God himself.

“All sins are equal in the eyes of Jesus,” he said to me. “Stealing a cookie from the cookie jar is no worse or better than murder.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“Because you’re a sinner. It’s okay. I don’t hold it against you.” He held everything against me, but especially this.

“I’m a sinner, sure. I just don’t agree all sins are equal.”

“That is the Bible. That is Jesus. That is truth.”

“I think even in the Bible, there’s kind of a hierarchy, right?” I held up a finger. “One. Come on. We can do this. I’ll start: One, I am the Lord your God. You shall have no”—Fuckity fuck. Could I really not even get the first one? Okay, I got it—“other gods before me. Two? No? Two, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”

I was on a roll. I could have gone on. I knew not to embarrass any man, but most importantly, this one. God was not his shepherd. God was his apologist.

Jimmy called him Sammy. I called him Mr. Sam. That was what his girls called him.

“Mr. Sam,” I said, laying my palm on his forearm, hairless from being burned in a pile of hot ash as a child. “Which commandment is don’t steal the cookie from the cookie jar?”