ACROSS THE UNITED STATES
2018–2020
By the fall of 2019, nearly two years had passed since I first heard the name Sam Little. It had been a year since his extradition to Texas and back again. The FBI had made a few major media pushes, seeding national and local media outlets with Sam’s drawings of the unmatched confessions in hopes tips from the public might help identify the victims.
“He’s hard not to like,” said a law enforcement officer. “He’s like Bill Cosby, before.” Before what? Before we knew. But with Sam, we already knew, in elaborate and mind-numbing detail. In spite of this, he is indeed hard not to like.
In my professional estimation, likability is an indicator of exactly nothing.
Holland coached the law enforcement teams—detectives and prosecutors—who still filed in to talk to Sam: no rape, no beating. He’s a killer. Don’t start talking about remorse. He’ll get bored. Just let him go off on tangents if he wants to.
“He might flirt with you,” Holland told the female detectives. “Let it happen.”
There was a nuance to Sam’s confessions. I’m sure Holland caught it, but no one else seemed to.
I listened to his sordid tales, time and time again. Sam would flirt with the women around him, but what really got him off was talking to the men about the murders. They listened raptly to his sexual fantasies. He talked nonstop about pussy and titties and big thighs. He’d mock women, get the cops to egg him on.
No shit. Really, man?
It excited him to have men lean in and swallow hard.
Local newscasters offered ten cent psychoanalysis: deep down he hated women. He hated his mother.
Big whoop. Him and everyone else.
Sexual predation and serial murder are like a nesting doll: reason upon reason, until you finally reach the center and find it ultimately inscrutable. Somewhere in the shadows, a rough beast you can’t understand is at play. Count yourself lucky that you cannot ultimately solve this puzzle.
As for me… What reckless and over-eager writer develops a deeply personal and complex relationship with a sexual strangler just to get a jump on a story? Who seeds interviews with a hateful and vicious killer, with nicknames and in-jokes, and special songs? My office walls were lined with pinned maps and ghastly portraits. What drove me to pursue this story at the expense of other, healthier aspects of my life?
There was nothing remotely sexual in our rapport. Our Big Daddy and his little kitty cat routine was a vaudeville act. We held currency for one another. I wanted my book. He begrudged me nothing at all. He wanted canteen money, he wanted his “sugar,” which was warm fuzzies and kissy noises and songs. He bragged about me to the guards and inmates. He had a well-put-together white lady in a skirt visiting him, hanging on his every word. I made him “famous.”
Was the way I worked him morally reprehensible? Revenge porn meets amateur detective work? Good journalism? Shape-shifting? Plain shifty?
The product of my efforts will be tried by a jury of my peers.
On one of my last visits to the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, a female deputy I’d nicknamed Nurse Ratched pulled me into what was essentially a closet with a desk and a chair. It was the room where they check you with a wand if you have a pacemaker or a medical device.
“Take a seat.”
A dozen deputies closed ranks behind her.
“Suspend her!” came a peppy male voice from the back of the mob. What? For what?
Standing beside Nurse Ratched was a deputy I’d nicknamed Li’l Danger—the one I always hoped would call my number. About 115 pounds wet, wire-rimmed glasses, no makeup, never a hint of expression, never a hint of gratuitous shade. I was nearly perfect with my protocols by then. A few of the female deputies still found imaginary reasons to bust my balls because I was there for Sam, and Sam was all over the news. He was a monster. They worked at a men’s maximum-security correctional facility. You punish monsters. I didn’t look much like punishment.
“Well, wait now,” said Li’l Danger.
Nurse Ratched narrowed her eyes, “I watch you on nineteen cameras.”
It was kinda kinky. The only thing harder than getting into trouble is getting out. All the characters are sexy in my world-leader, pretend-disco life remix. How was I going to talk my way out of a genuinely scary situation if I was busy writing a novel in real time?
I pulled myself to the present by playing my fives. Five famous sheriffs, real or fictional. Five saints. Five synonyms for screwed.
Ratched held up two pictures I had brought with me. You’re allowed ten photographs, and the guidelines are basically no porn, no gang stuff, and no maps.
These particular photos were given to me by a woman named Bobbi with whom I’d become friendly.
She was a self-styled citizen sleuth, investigating her own rape and assault. The photos were of her around 1979 in Key West. I was almost sure her attacker wasn’t Sam from MO alone, but after dozens of women had reached out to me, only two remained possibilities, and Bobbi was one. There were too many holes in the story, and the MO diverged, but I couldn’t definitively say no based on the facts. She’d gone the route of both local and federal law enforcement, with no conclusive result. It wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the detectives or the feds. It probably wasn’t his case, and even if it was, it would have been impossible to prove.
Bobbi was sure she had recognized Sam in the paper. This was not an uncommon call for me to get. Many were sure it was him who attacked them, and most were wrong. They weren’t liars. They had been waiting for a desperately long time to learn who had hurt them while they did the unthinkable—survived, built lives and families.
The plasticity of memory is widely studied by some of the most brilliant minds in the world, and we’re still only piecing together a cursory understanding of how it works. Particularly important is the relationship between memory and veracity in a criminal justice context. Eyewitness testimony is a tricky thing, as illuminated by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus in her landmark studies that dismantled the “Satanic panic” of the eighties as well as its foundational psychological tenet: “repressed memories.”
We’re all suggestible. We’re all vulnerable.
When I received these calls, I could almost always rule out Sam quickly. For instance, he never drove an eighteen-wheeler, or he was in jail at the time, or he was killing someone else clear across the country on that same night. I always listened to the whole story, responded with whatever information I had that was a matter of public record, often shared a personal story to mitigate the shame that inevitably comes after you spill—the buyer’s remorse of confession. I told them it was not their fault and referred them to victims’ advocacy organizations and support services.
Bobbi asked me if I would please put her pictures in front of him. See if they sparked anything.
The deputy held up the photos. “Who is this?”
“A friend.”
“She hesitated!” shouted a voice from the mob—okay, a small mob, but in tactical gear.
“She’s lying!”
“Suspend her!”
The colosseum was giving me the thumbs-down?
“Okay, okay, let’s just,” said Li’l Danger, making a “bring it down” motion with her hands.
Li’l Danger had a light touch. She brought the slightest hint of shame to her otherwise unremarkable de-escalation tactics. Like, what is wrong with you hysterical-ass little girls bullying this woman?
“Do you know? That he gets off on these photos of women? We don’t want him to have these. These are sick. These are perverted. You don’t know the kind of person you’re dealing with.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Thank you very much for explaining that to me. I can see now that you’re right. I won’t let it happen again.”
I have no idea what else I said as I stood and edged sideways along the filing cabinets toward the door.
The mob disbanded, bummed. I waved and sort of bowed, walking backward. I learned that from a prince who literally made women bow and walk out of a room backward. Who knew it would come in handy?
“Always so impressed by how you all handle this stressful work. Keep up the good work! Thanks again!”
I still took almost daily calls from the prison. The years of conversation, plus the fact that I never knew how long he was going to last, made me bolder. I’d heard the same reinventions, justifications, and sociopathic garbage for years. There was a limit to how far I could push him before he angered, but he wasn’t getting any younger. When I asked what he wanted the world to know about him, he waxed poetic about how much he loved women.
“Stop boring me with this already. I live up to my side of the bargain. You gotta give me something good. What does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to kill people? What’s the weirdest one you ever did? What’s the worst? Don’t bullshit me. Do it.”
“But I’d tell the world something good. I’d tell them I wish I was a lawyer.”
“Okay, fine, you wish you were a lawyer. Why?”
“I could help people move big cases.”
“Yeah, well, no one likes being a lawyer. Do better.”
“Shut your damn mouth. I’ll tell you what I want people to know. Something good is that I met you and I love you. You’re so pretty and good. I’ll tell all the world I love you.”
“I love you too. Who do you think you’re talking to? You know what no one is going to pay me for? A book about how pretty and good I am. They’re going to pay me for a book about how awful you are.”
The automated voice that interrupted the calls every five minutes to advise that the call was being recorded said, “You have ten seconds remaining.”
Fuck.
The LAPD was slammed with the #MeToo task force, though still combing for the Little cases on their off moments. Trying to match these confessions obtained by a Texas Ranger who didn’t know Los Angeles at all, out of the mouth of someone on so much crack by the eighties he barely knew north from south, didn’t provide much hope. Tensions built between different jurisdictions.
Static crackled between Holland and me, between lawyers and agents I didn’t even know I had, between increasing demands from both family and work.
The FBI and DOJ were still hung up on an angry email I’d sent a year back but apparently never got old.
“Hoooeee!” Holland laughed. “Dug this up and haven’t laughed so hard since the first time I read it.”
I had called to follow up on a lead.
“Still? Snore! I was angry. They lied to me. I apologized!”
“I’ll give you all that.”
“If you don’t blow your stack with this story at some point,” I said, “I have a handy-dandy questionnaire for you right here. One, do you display excess glibness or superficial charm?”
While the oven heated to a blistering five hundred degrees, I towel-dried, trussed, and seasoned a chicken in a cast iron pan.
“What you got?” he asked.
“Some leads,” I told him. “Nothing terrific.”
“Shoot.”
“Now, why would I do that? Every time I have a perfectly good relationship with a local jurisdiction, you tell them I told the DOJ to fuck off.”
I aggressively chopped brussels sprouts in quarters, grabbed the ingredients for a quick corn bread.
“True or not true?” he asked.
“False! I told them to go get fucked.”
“I say the exact same thing I say to your face, Jillian. How could anyone stay mad at you?”
“People manage.”
“You give me a headache. That describes it the best. You sure you want to get into that right now? Question: were you hitting up some shrooms when you wrote that note?”
“Question: were you born eighty years old? First of all, you don’t ‘hit up’ shrooms. Second of all… No, of course not. Or, I don’t think so.”
“You told the federal government to get fucked, Jillian. You cannot tell the federal government to get fucked. They take that shit personal.”
“Who in the federal fuck cares about me? This sounds like your doing.”
Holland laughed so hard he choked on his whiskey. “No, you can’t blame it on me. No, no, no, no, not me. Not this one. This is one hundred and fifty percent you, young lady. Got a little less boring around here at least, I’ll tell ya.”
I minced garlic to pulp, scraped it into a satisfying pyramid. My oldest dog, Calvin, lay on his side panting. He had always been close to the food. He made it over for the smell of the chicken but couldn’t stay on his feet. I tripped over him as I maneuvered around the island and almost dropped the whole pan.
Each day, Calvin was starting to lose his legs from under him and not get back up. Our dog was dying.
“I’m nice when I talk about you,” said Holland. “I say you’re an incredibly intelligent person. I say you’re very driven, and I say you’re slightly out there. Maybe I say you’re pretty far out there.”
“That’s not a compliment. It’s a warning.”
“What now?”
“I’m crazy but smart? That’s like saying I’m ugly but interesting.”
“I never called you interesting.”
In early October 2019, the FBI announced they had verified fifty of Samuel Little’s ninety-three confessions, including the original three in Los Angeles. Sam had topped Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, with a confirmed forty-nine, to officially become the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States.
Suddenly everyone remembered that birthday party to which I showed up late because I was at the prison. They texted: Is this your guy?!?
The FBI released five-minute-long, carefully crafted segments of interviews with Holland leading Sam through the facts of five different confessions that had yet to be solved:
Every case was a rabbit hole, lined with red tape.
I could recite the Los Angeles victims in order by nickname: Mobile Home Girl, 1984; Granny, 1987; Skinny Girl, 1987; 7-Eleven Fence Girl, 1987; Shelf Girl, 1987; Hollywood Hills Girl, 1987; Griffith Park Girl, 1987; Alice, 1991; Bald Head Hill Girl, 1991–1992; Turban Riot Girl, 1992; Observatory Girl, 1992–1993; Helicopter Girl, 1992–1993; Bathtub Girl, 1996; Sheila Sweater Girl, 1996; Truck Girl, 1996; T-Money, 1996.
I wrote, spent days at a time on the phone, and organized art, letters, phone calls, law enforcement contacts, the ever-growing forty-five-page timeline, the confessions, the press, the victims, the interviews.
Time became as slippery as Sam himself. The circles under my eyes were a mixture of puce and lavender. I assembled chapters but not quickly enough for anyone. I was way past my deadline, trying to finish a book while standing smack in the middle of the story. Furthermore, it was a world upended, as the COVID-19 virus waged its ruthless early attack. I couldn’t make the face-to-face contact I relied on to get information from people. Our dining room turned into a makeshift classroom, and suddenly it was as if Scott and I both had four impossible jobs, and the pay sucked.
A job playing live music is awesome…until the world shuts down. It lit a fire under my ass. I sat down in front of a database one day and furiously began to look beyond the boundaries of LA County for articles to match details in the stack of the sixteen Los Angeles confessions in front of me. Without being able to move around much, the crime rates in the city leapt. Widespread protests broke out in the streets against institutionalized racism. Protestors butted heads with MAGA yahoos in paramilitary gear.
I turned my attention to the whys and hows and wheres and whens and cars and scars and bars rather than God and sexual nightmares and listening to Sam mimic his mommy. I witnessed, listened, wrote, made connections. While I hadn’t started with the intention of any real investigative work beyond ferreting out the story, I caught the bug along the way. Billy Jensen’s book Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders provides an excellent blueprint for embarking on a civilian murder investigation in an ethical and effective way.
All of Sam’s Los Angeles melted into the pulsing center of South LA as he talked about different strolls interchangeably: Manchester and Figueroa Street (Sam called it Figaro Street), the Tam’s Burgers at Central and Fifty-First, the Tam’s on Century. Florence and Figueroa, the heart of the ho stroll. He remembered his girlfriend’s houses: Sixty-Second and Vermont, then Eighty-First and Vermont, Eighty-First and Figueroa, Fifty-First between McKinley and Avalon.
He remembered he dumped that body off San Pedro, off Fig, off Main, way out Central to the country, up into the Hollywood Hills, into Griffith Park.
The Million Dollar Hotel with the glowing neon heart (now the Rosslyn). South Park and pool halls and juke joints. Fletcher’s bar on Central—everyone went to Fletcher’s. Everyone stuck around Central.
Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Central Avenue north of Slauson clear to downtown was known as just “the Avenue.” It was the West Coast hub of jazz music and culture. Famous jazz and blues musicians came out of Jefferson High onto the national stage. It was a middle-class neighborhood by day, until the streetlights came on and the respectable folk locked their doors. Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Charles Mingus all played the Avenue. Jelly Roll Morton had a hotel there he used to pimp women out of while he went and played the Avenue. Out-of-town jazz musicians all stayed at the Dunbar Hotel, where Ellington’s band popped corks and twirled the starry-eyed local girls every time the jukebox played their version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).”
By the late eighties, when Sam made LA his hub for the next decade, the Avenue had turned to just Central, fractured into corners with chop shops and dollar stores. The famous serial killers of Los Angeles picked their way through the wreckage. The Dunbar turned to a single room occupancy (SRO) facility. Residents of SROs have government assistance. Those in the downtown and South LA areas are often converted, crumbling art deco hotels.
The distorted lens of crack cocaine blurred the edges between the victims, the years, the hills, the graffiti, the dumpsters, the elephant grass.
I sometimes located the places he described, such as the liquor store at Manchester and San Pedro where he picked up T-Money. I found a restaurant and the health clinic on the corner of Slauson and San Pedro where he said he dumped her body in an alley. Except the clinic was down the block, on another corner, and there was no alley where he described it.
Sam had set his coordinates for opportunity. The names of the streets shifted, as did the years.
The LAPD was having many of the same frustrations. With an offender who leaves few or no rape kits, in a city where six or seven serial predators were operating at the same time, it’s hard to work backward from a confession. The original CCSS started with the evidence and followed the trail to a suspect. There was no CCSS anymore, and even if there were, the Little case involved working backward while mobilizing a department to put coveted resources toward a guy who was no longer an imminent threat.
Tim Marcia and Mitzi Roberts had gone to see Sam the previous week and days later had him in the car for a ride-along. He had called me the next day, proud of himself for helping the police but confused. His memories of LA were part drug-addled delusion to begin with, but everything had also physically changed. Facing those same streets looked like a funhouse mirror version of the world he once prowled. Marcia and Roberts walked away with five front-runners for case files but scant actionable information.
“That wasn’t LA,” he told me later, sounding letdown. He’d wanted to help them and get a pat on the head. He felt he had disappointed the cops, disappointed me. He wanted to relive the past, only to find he never understood it in the first place.
“I’m soft,” he’d said to Marcia. Like any confused old man. “I’m soft on it. I don’t know nothin’ here.”
Marcia said, bottom line, they didn’t have it unless they had a strong enough case to present to Beth Silverman. Silverman had prosecuted Sam Little, the Southside Slayer, Blake Leibel, Harold Holman. She prosecuted the Grim Sleeper, twice.
Marcia told me, “You don’t just go dig up eighteen cases that match pretty much what he’s saying. He’s good on certain aspects of the female or location…date and time ain’t gonna be there. Repetitive details across confessions, something is always right and something is wrong—how do you tease that apart? Finding these cases isn’t as easy in LA. It’s not Odessa.”
My attention kept turning to a victim named Alice. I had a detailed confession, a drawing, and—most unusual for Sam—a name. I circled it.
Alice.