TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY, WISE COUNTY, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 2018
The Texas Department of Public Safety is located in a redbrick building with lots of straight lines. I was wrong about my first trip to Decatur being my last. I visited Sam in Wise County once more before he went to Odessa for his sentencing. The second time, I was meant to meet Holland at his DPS office. He was hours late again. His text yanked me around on my way out of town and would likely make me late for my flight.
When I arrived at DPS, I asked Holland how nice a bottle of whiskey it took to bribe the county sheriff to babysit. I’d spent the last hour at the coffee shop with Sheriff Akin. He’d bought me an iced tea, charmed me with local stories. He had come to the conclusion his high school sweetheart wife would have a thing or two to say to me about how I spoil my boys. She sounded like a pip. He tipped his hat on the way out.
While we were talking, the Ector County DA’s office issued a press release about the Brothers case in which they said the FBI believed Samuel Little to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. Ziggity boom, the media was on it.
“You saw the story broke,” said Holland. “Crazy day.”
I followed him through a fluorescent labyrinth. He wore his college sweatshirt, with a few stray dog hairs on it. I guessed golden Lab. No double belt or endangered animals that day.
He wore no hat, but one white and one black hung on the wall over his kingly maroon padded desk chair. If it was consciously symbolic, it was a little on the nose. Maybe it was as simple as white hats were daywear and black hats were for formal occasions, like Garth Brooks concerts.
I meant to ask him about the hats, but you never get to everything. Beneath them were Sam’s portraits in a haphazard configuration, printouts of newspaper articles. The floor was a minefield of papers and folders. Stacks of binders two feet high leaned against the wall.
Holland sat, folded his hands across his chest, and apologized for both his lateness and appearance. His mother had fallen and broken her wrist, pins in it and everything, and he came straight from the hospital. I picked my way around the papers on the industrial grade carpet, sat in a hard-backed chair facing him.
“I’m a Texan, so I was worried I’d been impolite and you’d feel unwelcome.”
It was the same thing he’d said before. This time, he had a five-o’clock shadow and I believed him. He’d been up all night.
I decided to skip the warm-up. I wasn’t leaving, but I wasn’t about playing with his time.
I wanted my who, what, when, where, why of the confessions and the matching process before everyone else descended to pick at the leftovers. Sure, I wanted to talk psycho with the wizard of psychos, but that got moved to the bucket list. Sam was being extradited the following day to Ector County Jail.
“Are you done with your part in this? Will you see him again?”
“He’s off to Odessa. I talked to him Sunday and he was pretty good. I don’t know if he’s mad at me or what. I’ll go back, but not for a while. I guess it was forty-nine days I spent with him. It got better, like training for a marathon.”
“He gave you all of them now, right? Ninety, you said?”
“Ninety-three is what we’re at. It’s a lot of detective work. I think based on the definitive matches, we’re probably right about sixty right now.”
“Sixty definitive?”
“No. No, so definitive I think is somewhere around thirty.”
“Thirty-four.”
“We’re right at the edge of getting most of them. Now it’s a lot of days of emails and phone calls and sorting through the stuff that fell through the cracks: agencies and case reports, of matching them up, but the thing that…”
“…makes it challenging is?”
“Well now, here’s the little reporter all of a sudden. Nice to meet you. Nothing’s challenging once you figure out how it works.”
“You said, ‘all murder is sexual.’ Can you clarify?”
“There’s some type of sexual undertone in criminal everything.”
“Criminal everything? Or serial killing everything?”
“You walk into a convenience store, and the clerk fights you. You don’t mean to shoot him, but in the scuffle, the gun goes off. I don’t know that there’s anything sexual about that. When you start planning things out, when you have that sociopathic or psychopathic mindset, I think, yeah. There’s always some type of sexual element.”
He cut me off before I even started the next question.
“You know what? You’re never going to get there. If you think you know what you’re doing and what he’s going to bite on, you’re wrong. Opinions are fine, but only if I can use them to understand people. How do we understand someone who lacks remorse? Okay, were his crimes spontaneous? I think some were, but for the most part, he planned what he was going to do and he knew. ‘I didn’t kill that university student. I didn’t kill that nurse or that lawyer or anything like that.’ Because he knew that would get him caught. He talked about how stupid Bundy was because he’s killing…”
“College girls.”
“Exactly, college girls. We had college girls I never even put in front of him. He went into great detail about, ‘No, I wouldn’t do that. I’d get caught right away.’ He’s very intelligent. He’s manipulative. But the sociopathic side of that is that he doesn’t ever succeed. I mean, his achievement is the fact that he was able to kill ninety women and not get caught. Could he have gone to college? Could he have gotten a job? Yeah. Could he have been a professional boxer? Absolutely, but he didn’t do that. That’s the sociopath. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have a heart attack. Everything for me is how to understand them, to open them. You know. You know how to get them to confess.”
“Thank you?”
“You sit in the room with this person who’s a machine, and he’s always looking for the weakness. He’s always trying to manipulate and control you and to get you to move into a light that he wants you or a light he wants you to see him in. Bundy is successful, he gets into law school, and he’s got that false charm. You sit down with Little, he also has that charm. Is he abducting women? Women are getting in his vehicle. Granted a lot of those women are prostitutes and they’re going to get into the vehicle no matter what. But he’s putting them at ease enough that they’re getting in there, and he’s taking them to dinner, maybe getting them a dress or doing things for them, before he kills them.”
“What light does he want you to see him in?”
“As the killer. He’s not the rapist, not the woman beater. He’s the killer. He doesn’t have to take anything from anyone. Now, he’s got that back kind of curve to him, in which he’s saying they’re all wanting to die. He let up on that. I think he read me and knew I thought that was bullshit and decided to be seen by me as a killer. He wants to be seen as a normal guy but his vice for whatever reason is strangulation.”
“What’s your vice?”
“I don’t know, probably my personality. Ask my wife.”
“Fair enough. What’s your takeaway from the Little investigation? Was it just one more case? Was it particularly meaningful?”
“I would have to sit back and judge it up at the end of the day.”
“There isn’t an end of the day though.”
“Do you hear the silence?”
“I’m not scared of silence.”
“You don’t judge things up when you’re in the middle of a game. I’m doing what I need to do to get through this and prove up what I can prove up. It’s a job and you get through it. I’m trying to get to the finish line. When I get there, I’ll definitely turn around and look back and I’ll have some thoughts.”
“What would you dream those thoughts might be?”
“I don’t dream of those thoughts.”
“You don’t say, ‘At the end of the game, I want to win’?”
“Well, have we won or have we lost? I’m not at the finish line.”
“I don’t know. I mean, yes, no, and there is no winning or losing, there are…just a lot of dead women.”
“Well, if that’s how you want to look at it. Then how do you win?”
“I don’t, usually.”
I looked at the group photo of the Texas Rangers, stacked three rows high. I counted one and a half Black men and I think one woman.
“You in here?”
“Somewhere. I always go to the top. That beautiful picture of me there. I think they do that photoshop if you close your eyes. Makes you look like Mr. Magoo.”
“Do you happen to have any photos lying around? Case files? Just whatever’s around real quick.”
“No. No, that’s not… Jillian, stop asking me that like I didn’t already say no a dozen times. No. It’s boxes and boxes.”
“In that room?”
“I said no.”
“How many notebooks do you think there are on Sam here?”
“No. And there’s a couple more up front that the secretaries are still putting together, ten or fifteen four-inch, three-ringed binders. That’s since I started my stuff. What else is out there? I don’t know yet. Go on and find out for yourself.”
I scrolled through the news on the plane. On November 27, the FBI announced they’d matched thirty of Sam Little’s ninety-three jailhouse confessions. The closed cases—meaning the court had either dismissed them or there was a completed sentence, whether by arrest or exceptional means—were a bit of a mystery.
There was no list per se. As the weeks went on, I formally requested the publicly available records on the closed cases but got few responses. Most of the ones I did get said the cases were still open, the coroners’ reports unavailable. I sometimes had better luck calling the detectives myself, sometimes not. I know that among the first thirty confirmed cases were the following:
Jane Doe, 20–25, Prince George’s County, Maryland, 1972
Agatha White Buffalo, 34, South Omaha, Nebraska, 1973
Miriam “Angela” Chapman, 25, Miami, Florida, 1976
Julia Critchfield, 36, Saucier, Mississippi, 1978
Brenda Alexander, 23, Phenix City, Alabama, 1979
Linda Sue Boards, 23, Smiths Grove, Kentucky, 1981
Patricia Parker (then a Jane Doe), 30, Dade County, Georgia, 1981
Dorothy Richards, 55, Houma, Louisiana, 1982
Patricia Mount, 26, Forest Grove, Florida, 1982
Rosie Hill, 20, Marion County, Florida, 1982
Fredonia Smith, 18, Macon, Georgia, 1982
Melinda LaPree, 22, Pascagoula, Mississippi, 1982
Hannah Mae Bonner, 23, Mobile, Alabama, 1984
Ida Mae Campbell, 34, Mobile, Alabama, 1984
Carol Alford, 41, Los Angeles, California, 1987
Audrey Nelson, 35, Los Angeles, California, 1989
Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, Los Angeles, California, 1989
Denise Christie Brothers, 38, Odessa, Texas, 1994
Daisy McGuire, 40, Houma, Louisiana, 1996
Melissa Thomas, 24, Opelousas, Louisiana, 1996
Nancy Carol Stevens, 46, Tupelo, Mississippi, 2005
On December 13, 2018, in the Ector County Courthouse, Samuel Little entered a plea of guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Denise Brothers. They gave him a choice of where he wanted to go from there.
On January 1, 2019, they extradited that snake back to California State Prison, Los Angeles County, because he decided he liked it better here after all.
I couldn’t believe it. They were sending him back to me.