Nearly every day for weeks, a white-haired man in a wheelchair, his body ravaged by diabetes and heart disease, has been escorted under heavy guard from a Texas jail cell to an interview room to speak about evil.
Day by day, the authorities say, he has recounted details of long-ago murders: faces, places, the layouts of small towns. He has described how he picked up vulnerable women from bars, nightclubs and along streets and strangled them to death in the back seat of his car.
The man, Samuel Little, 78, has confessed to more than 90 murders, investigators say, stretching back almost half a century. Mr. Little already is serving three life sentences for the murders of three Los Angeles women during the 1980s, but the authorities suspect him of killing women in at least 14 states. Investigators say they have established Mr. Little’s ties to about 30 of the murders so far, and have little reason to doubt his confessions.
“By the time we are done, we anticipate that Samuel Little will be confirmed as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history,” said Bobby Bland, the district attorney of Ector County, Tex., where Mr. Little is being held after a grand jury indicted him this summer for a 1994 killing.
If found guilty of all 90 murder claims, Samuel Little will replace Gary Ridgeway, The Green River Killer, as most prolific serial killer in the United States by a nearly doubled body count.
"Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was convicted of 49 murders in Washington State during the 1980s and 1990s, the highest number of murder convictions for an American serial killer."
How a serial murderer could go on killing for years, apparently without anyone noticing a pattern, seems perplexing. But even the most effective police departments solve only about three-quarters of homicides, meaning that thousands of people get away with murder each year. Also, the killings Mr. Little is said to have admitted to occurred in a wide range of counties and states. Many of the women whom Mr. Little is believed to have killed were poor and addicted to drugs, alcohol, or both — a group of people that often are not reported missing for weeks and sometimes receive fewer investigative resources than others.
Then, this year, a Texas Ranger named James Holland visited Mr. Little in a Los Angeles County prison and succeeded in winning his confidence, the authorities said. The stories began to tumble out, setting off a transfer to Texas and a frenzy of visits from investigators with cold cases from all over the nation.
Part of Mr. Little’s impetus for talking now, investigators say, is that he seems to prefer the Ector County jail to the noisy, often chaotic environment of a Los Angeles County prison. Investigators who have spoken to him say he also appears to enjoy the attention he is receiving as he recites details only a killer would know, after decades of discussing them with no one.
Officials in Texas said Mr. Little would not be made available for an interview for this article, and a public defender who recently represented him declined to comment.
