The journalist met a convicted murderer and their friendship saw him confess to being America’s worst serial killer.
Jillian Lauren, 48, a journalist, met Sam Little, then 78, for the first time at California State Prison, Los Angeles County in August 2018. As she wrote for The Cut, she learned of the murderer from a friend and decided to go to the prison in order to meet the man and chase the story.
Born in 1940 to a mother he claimed was a prostitute, Little struggled with discipline throughout school and in junior high began having sexual fantasies about strangling women. By the time he turned 35, he had been arrested 26 times in 11 states for crimes including fraud, theft, assault, and attempted rape.
In 2012, he was arrested in Kentucky on a drugs charge and extradited to California, where officers carried out DNA testing that linked him to the murders of Carol Ilene Elford, 41, Guadalupe Duarte Apodaca, 46, and Audrey Nelson Everett, 35.
Between 1987 and 1989, the victims had been strangled, their cases were never solved. Little was eventually convicted of their murders in 2014, aged 74, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Lauren told The Sun that she decided to start writing and ask Little for a visit, she said: “I told him I was writing about violent crime and was interested in his story and that I thought he was very important.”
Lauren said that without any expectation, the letters came back and each letter had little drawings that he did himself, a monstrous caricature that was either crying or happy.
If he was crying it means he was angry with you, she said that they exchanged letters for a couple of months before she got the clearance to visit. She said: “I almost had a heart attack when he was wheeled up behind me. When he grabbed me, I could feel his strength. It made my skin crawl. Those hands had strangled so many victims.”
She continued, recalling him staring at her and grasping: “You’re my angel from God. He sent you to me,” however, Lauren said that “there was nothing behind his eyes.”
Lauren made Little an offer: “If you tell me your story as truthfully as you can, I will not desert you. You won’t have to die alone. I’ll be your friend until the end of your life.” Lauren said that he insisted on his innocence at first, but then the confession poured out.
Lauren explained: “On that one day, he told me details about 13 women he’d killed. The next weekend, he told me about 25 more. I had to call law enforcement to share what he was telling me.”
“The confessions never stopped, but despite the horrors of what Little has revealed, we developed a kind of friendship. I felt disgusted at what he’d done and hated him for it, but during the times we were talking about ordinary things, he could be good-humored,” she added.
Over the course of their visits, the murderer and the journalist developed the unlikeliest of friendships. Indeed, the two developed something approaching mutual respect for each other.
According to Lauren’s The Cut article, Little was kind, jovial, friendly, and even slightly deferential to his new friend, often addressing her as “Little Miss”.
Lauren added: “Sometimes he’d get wistful and say: “If only I’d met a woman like you,” and I’d say: “If you’d met a woman like me, you would have killed me,” and he would say: “Yeah, probably.”
Shockingly, despite being arrested and jailed several times over five decades, Little had been able to continue killing because he chose victims who were on the margins of society, preying on prostitutes and addicts, who were discriminated against by the American justice system.
Lauren and law enforcement’s success at pinning numerous unsolved murders on Little, based on his own testimonials, does suggest that, in many respects, he was telling the truth.
Little ended up confessing to 93 murders, at least 50 of which were then verified by the FBI, making him the worst serial killer in US history.
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