Possible Las Vegas murder by prolific serial killer still unverified

The recent death of Samuel Little, the nation’s most prolific serial killer, will have little to no effect on investigative efforts by Las Vegas police in connection with a possible killing in the early 1990s.

As of this week, more than two years after Little first admitted to killing 93 people between 1970 and 2005, the Metropolitan Police Department still had not matched the man’s Las Vegas murder confession to any missing persons case or unsolved killing.

“There has never been a case associated with his confession, therefore there is no case to keep open or closed. In the case that somebody does find a body, we will open a case if it matches everything he stated,” Metro spokesman Aden OcampoGomez said.

Little has said he was driving through Las Vegas in a yellow Cadillac Eldorado in 1993 when he met a woman in her 40s in the Historic Westside.

“She was out there hustling. I think she was a drunk addict because she wouldn’t have been out there,” Little told an investigator during a recorded interview, which the FBI released in 2019, when it announced Little was considered to be the most prolific serial murderer in U.S. history.

Ted Bundy confessed to 30 homicides from about 1974 to 1978. John Wayne Gacy killed at least 33 boys and young men in the 1970s.

Little said he encountered the woman on either Owens Avenue or Jackson Avenue, near H Street, while on his way to Los Angeles. He described her as a thin, 5-foot-5, dark-skinned woman weighing between 110 and 120 pounds.

The woman briefly introduced Little to her adult son, he said, before he took her to a motel. There, he said, he strangled her and then placed her body in the trunk of his 1978 Cadillac Eldorado.

He drove to the outskirts of Las Vegas, he said, on the road “going toward Searchlight,” until he pulled over near some brush and disposed of her naked body.

“I heard a secondary road noise that meant she was still rolling,” Little told the investigator, his hands mimicking the movement of her body rolling down the slope.

The FBI believes him.

“It is highly likely that her body was never found,” the agency has said.

Along with his confessions, Little had sketched portraits of his victims for the FBI. The portrait of the possible Las Vegas victim shows a woman in a green shirt, with long, brown hair and full lips.

At the time of Little’s death on Wednesday, at the age of 80, he was serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences for the deaths of three women in the late 1980s in Los Angeles. He died at a Southern California hospital, according to the California Department of Corrections.

His autopsy had not been conducted as of Monday afternoon, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office.

At least 50 of Little’s confessions, which he offered up in early 2018 while trying to obtain a prison transfer, have been corroborated by the FBI and law enforcement agencies across the country. Anyone with information about the possible Las Vegas victim may contact Metro’s homicide section at 702-838-3531 or the FBI at 800-CALL-FBI.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.