‘I knew she was mine’: Prolific serial killer who murdered Columbus woman dies in prison
Samuel Little, whose confessed murder of a woman here marked him one of at least four Columbus serial killers, has died in prison.
Called America’s most “prolific” serial killer because he claimed to have committed up to 93 homicides as he traveled across the country, the 80-year-old died Wednesday in California, where he was serving three consecutive life sentences for murders in Los Angeles.
Little in 2018 told investigators here that he killed 23-year-old Brenda Alexander after he took her from a Columbus dance club on Aug. 26, 1979. Her body was found the next day off a dirt road in in the 1700 block of 7th Street in Phenix City. All she had on was a Timex wristwatch.
When she and Little left the Columbus bar at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street called the Tap Room, she was wearing a black wig, a black disco shirt, a peach-colored skirt and wooden clog shoes, witnesses told police.
“I knew she was mine,” Little said when he confessed to the murder in an interview with Phenix City detectives.
Born in Reynolds, Ga., Little grew up in in Lorain, Ohio, before he became a drifter whose criminal history spanned 24 states in 56 years.
After he was convicted of killing three Los Angeles women in 2014, Little admitted to multiple murders from 1970 to 2005 in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio, California, Indiana, Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina.
1 of 4 serial killers here
Little’s confession to the homicide here made him one of at least four serial killers known to have been in Columbus in the 1970s and 1980s.
The others were:
- Carlton Gary, the Columbus “Stocking Strangler” convicted in three of seven ritual rapes and stranglings of older women from September 1977 through April 1978. After decades of appeals, he was executed by lethal injection in 2018.
- William Henry Hance, convicted and executed for two 1970s “Forces of Evil” killings contemporary to the Stocking Stranglings. Hance in letters to police claimed to be a gang of white vigilantes called “The Forces of Evil” that would kill a Black woman every 30 days until the “Stocking Stranglings” were solved.
- Curtis Grantham, who lived in Columbus, was convicted of killing three women whose bodies were found in Russell County, Alabama, in the 1980s. Two were buried in the woods near Seale. The other was a mother murdered in the presence of her 18-month-old son after Grantham broke into their home. He confessed in a plea deal to get a sentence of life in prison he currently is serving.
This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 11:58 PM.