Roberts had recently heard through the grapevine that Little, who was 78, was in poor health. She thought maybe it was because Little preyed on the “less dead,” people who live on the margins of society and whose murders have historically tended to be not as thoroughly investigated as those of their wealthier, whiter, and perhaps more sober counterparts. Roberts told me she suspected him of many more killings across the country, and after she got him, she figured other police departments would start connecting him to their own unsolved murders. Samuel McDowell, had been convicted in Los Angeles in 2014 for strangling three women to death in the late 1980s. I’d gone home and learned that Samuel Little, a.k.a. “I’m proud of them all,” she said, “but I did catch a serial killer named Sam Little once. Nearly ten months before, I’d interviewed LAPD Homicide detective Mitzi Roberts - the model for the Michael Connelly character Renée Ballard - and asked her what case she’d been most proud of in her career. “Gnaw that shit out,” said one of the other visitors watching me in the bathroom. I wound up having to pry the underwire out of my bra with my teeth because there were no sharp objects available. On the morning of August 18, 2018, after waiting seven hours for my number to come up, I faced the prison’s iron security gates, but I kept setting off the metal detector. In the middle of a summer day, when temperatures regularly reach 105 degrees in the shade, and the desert wind blows so hot it feels like it could sear the eyebrows off your face, the landscape conveys an almost biblical feeling of punishment. The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where more than 3,000 men live sandwiched between the sunbaked terrain and a wide, unforgiving sky.
Little’s drawings of his victims, made in prison.Ĭalifornia State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located roughly 70 miles northeast of the palm tree-lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it may as well be 70 million.
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