On the morning of December 30, 2020, at 5:30 a.m., lieutenant something or other from California State Prison, Los Angeles County, called. I had been designated as the next of kin for inmate Samuel Little #AV22258, who had passed away at approximately 4:59 that morning from COVID-related complications. The voice on the other end of the line was sorry for my loss. I did not know what to say.
Alone in bed, I watched the pale light of dawn crawl in through the part in the curtains, my legs dissected by a stripe of sunlight. A mockingbird perched outside the window, its grating, shifting call precluding any further rest or even contemplation. How perfect. If Sam were a bird, he’d be that obnoxious.
Exactly two years, four months, and twelve days before he died, I faced Sam for the first time in person. During the intervening time, the FBI, LAPD, Texas Rangers, and local law enforcement across the country had worked tirelessly. The connections of his confessions to cold cases were far from done, and they had just lost their only witness. Luckily, the silent witness—emerging forensic DNA science—has allowed the investigations to continue.
Since the first day I talked to Sam, Sammy, Mr. Sam, I’d long since stopped turning off my phone. My life had become one of hypervigilance and gambler’s reinforcement. Days without even one much-coveted call were countered by days soaked in hours of mind-bending confessions. A cop or two actually called me back some days. I never knew what I was going to get. I took to carrying a cross-body purse around my own house with my recorder, my phone, my pen, and my notebook in it. No one liked me much.
Though my dreams were steeped in drowning, smothering, strangling, I knew I’d done a real thing. I’d helped solve murders. Sleep seemed a paltry sacrifice. I’d traveled from Pascagoula to Lorain and back, toured storage rooms of cold case files and evidence boxes.
I’d become adept with a handgun.
I wasn’t sure if I was wiser, but I was sharper.
By the time Sam died, I’d become so entangled in the investigation that I’d been served two subpoenas (ignored the first one—highly discourage this) for Sam’s San Bernardino homicide of Sonja Collette Austin. I refused to turn over my unpublished records or reveal my sources, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sent celebrity attorney Michael Dore, who rode a white horse all the way to a shithole in the middle of the desert in his Ferragamo shoes, in the middle of a pandemic, to keep me out of jail on a First Amendment basis.
I was supposed to be designated Little’s next of kin. I’d made arrangements to donate his brain to the top neuroscientists in the country, at both Stanford and UC Irvine, depending on the conditions under which the brain could be preserved.
Sam fucked up the paperwork.
I called lawyers, doctors, the LAPD, Jim Holland, UC Irvine, the FBI, Stanford. Nothing worked. In the end, Sam’s brain and its mysteries died with him.
Due to the overflow of bodies during the height of COVID-19 in LA, no autopsy was conducted on one of the most pernicious criminals in American history.
I talked to many of the detectives involved after Sam’s death. I talked to the family members I’d stayed in touch with. “Good riddance” was the most popular response. I wondered if that was shorthand for relief from the justifiable anger that the man who brutally tortured their loved ones lived to the end of his days with three hot meals, a cot, and a cell wall plastered with photos of women’s asses and drawings of victim’s faces. I now have those photos and drawings in my garage, next to the Tilex and the sponges.
Samuel Little, at the end of his life, got belligerent about squeezing me to put more money on his books, write him more letters, sing him more lullabies, do more anything. I sent him cookies. He said prettier girls were sending more…for tracings of his penis. For tracings of his hands. Those hands that murdered and murdered are worth a lot on eBay. Not everybody just goes ahead and murders, but they can place their hands in the outline of someone who most certainly did.
He was always running a hustle, even on me. One week, he had run out of paper. Could I send him just a few dollars?
He was starving. I had sent him ramen but no hot pot. What kind of a bitch was I anyway? Just like the rest of them?
He shucked and jived until his last breath.
Sometime after his death, I opened an envelope from the California Department of Corrections. He left me one thousand and ninety-seven dollars on his death.
He’d had plenty of money the whole time.
In the face of Samuel Little’s serial murders and thousands of other cold cases, law enforcement communities around the country struggle with dwindling resources. The cold case murder books of the ignored, dismissed, and marginalized often remain in stacks in dusty storage rooms.
There are also passionate scientists, dedicated members of law enforcement, community activists, and self-described web sleuths combining cutting-edge forensic technology with innovative ideas about information sharing.
Detective III Mitzi Roberts, officer in charge of the new Cold Case Homicide Unit at LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division, heads up just such an initiative. Similar programs being pioneered across the country may inch us closer to the ideal of Lady Justice wearing a true blindfold.
Nearly a year after Sam’s brain became worthless to science, I had turned in my final pages and was putting in that desperate catching up work you do when you almost ruined your life, but not quite.
Therapy. Decluttering. Shooting guns. Rereading Camus.
A captain from the coroner’s investigation office called.
“I understand that you originally had problems with the remains of Samuel Little, and I apologize for that. I’ve been assigned to the case. I worked up in Corcoran when Manson died, and what happened there was distasteful. Frankly, it was a disgrace. I thought we’d avoid the circus, and it seems that you might handle it respectfully.”
I thanked the captain and said I’d be right there.
My younger son was home sick from school the day I got the call to pick up Sam’s remains. I walked to the door of the LA County coroner’s office, holding my ten-year-old’s feverish hand. With the other, I shook the hand of the coroner and walked back to the car with the ashes of a two-hundred-pound serial killer tucked under my arm.
“Nice,” my son said when we hit the freeway.
“This is my job. Don’t like it? Get a job. McNuggets?”
He shrugged.
I still don’t know what to do with the ashes. They sit on a shelf in my garage, between the holiday lights and the party plates. The brown plastic box the coroner handed me is about nine inches by seven inches by five inches, and it reads:
Historic Union Cemetery, est. 1872
Crematory and Funeral Home
Samuel Little #21836
The plastic bag of tagged ashes in the container weighs 8.2 lbs. I thought about the weight of ash, the meaning of a pound of flesh, and how the words weight and worth can be synonymous.
I continue to work on Sam’s unsolved murders while adding my foibles and occasional successes to the amateur detective toolbox I carry forward to the next story.
As someone who marks significant moments of my life with tattoos, I chose a tattoo for Sam’s victims. In many traditions, birds travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. They are often messengers of the gods, or conversely, they carry the spirits of the dead to the next world. In the traditional tattoos of American sailors, swallows carry the souls of the drowned to heaven.
Audrey, Alice, Denise, Guadalupe…
I tattooed swallows on my chest to remind me that when you reach into the dark waters, turn your face to the sky.