Here’s what it’s like to be pen pals with a serial killer: ‘The ultimate psychopath’

On Aug. 8, 2018, author Jillian Lauren entered B Block at the maximum security California State Prison in Los Angeles to meet Samuel Little, a serial killer thought to have murdered as many 93 women across 14 states between 1970 and 2005.

Wheelchair-bound and suffering from diabetes and a heart condition, the 77-year-old inmate took Lauren by surprise. 

“You want a story for your book?” he asked. 

 “Oooooeeeee, do I have a story.” 

In “Behold The Monster: Confronting America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer” (Sourcebooks), Lauren not only recounts her dealings with Samuel Little but also examines the lives of his many victims. 

Her interest in Little began when LAPD homicide detective Mitzi Roberts told Lauren about her part in Little’s capture, adding that she knew that the number of murders he had committed was far greater than the three he had been imprisoned for.

Sensing a story, Lauren spent months writing to Little in jail.

His replies, often written in “serial killer ALL CAPS,” were very revealing. “He included doodles of what I think was either a monkey or just a man with enormous ears,” she writes. “When the monkey had a sad face and tears, you were in for a creepy letter. When the monkey had a happy face, it was worse.”

Over the course of hundreds of hours of interviews, Little admitted to scores of other murders.

“He remembered eighty-six, give or take a couple,” writes Lauren. 

Lauren also learned what motivated Little to commit his gruesome crimes. 

“Sam believed God himself gently placed neck after willing neck, still pulsing with life, into his hungry hands,” she writes.

“He imagined himself as some kind of angel of mercy, divinely commissioned to euthanize.”

She also discovered how Little managed to get away with so many murders for so long, “cherry-picking his victims — drug addicts and prostitutes on the fringes, largely women of color” knowing that they would never be investigated as thoroughly as other murders. 

These victims, writes Lauren, were the “low-hanging fruit, women whose eyes were half-dead already, women who Sam believed in his heart had only been waiting for him to show up and finish the job.”

Remarkably, Little was already well known to police forces across the United States, having been arrested on numerous occasions, from California to Connecticut, for a wide range of crimes including assault with a firearm, assaulting a police officer and solicitation of prostitution. 

In September 1976, he was arrested in Sunset Hill, Mo., for the rape, sodomy, assault and robbery of Pamela Smith, but was convicted of the lesser charge of assault with attempt to ravish and served just three months in prison.

Years later, in October 1984, Little was even caught by uniformed patrol officers in San Diego CA in the act of beating and strangling Tonya Jackson in the back seat of his black Thunderbird. Charged with rape, assault with great bodily injury, and sexual battery, he served only eighteen months of a four-year sentence and was paroled on Feb. 1, 1987.

Free to kill again, Little went on to murder more than 30 more women before he was arrested, in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 5, 2012, this time on drugs charges.

It was only when they tested Little’s DNA, that police could finally establish that he was involved in the murders of Linda Alford and Guadalupe Apodaca in 1987 and Audrey Everett in 1989, all of whom were found dead in Los Angeles.

In 2014, Samuel Little was convicted for the three murders and sentenced to life, without the chance of parole. 

Five years later, in October 2019, the FBI announced they had verified 50 of Samuel Little’s 93 confessions, eclipsing the 49 victims of Gary Ridgway — otherwise known as the Green River Killer — and making him the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States. 

Samuel Little died on Dec. 30, 2020, due to complications from COVID-19. He was 80. 

In the two years, four months and 12 days since she first met him, Jillian Lauren had helped to solve many of Little’s murders. She also developed a close but intense relationship with the man she refers to as “the ultimate psychopath.”

Little left her $1047.99 in his will, and Lauren also was left with all 8.2 pounds of his ashes, which now sit on a shelf in her garage.

Lauren was also meant to be his designated next of kin and had made arrangements to donate Little’s brain to the country’s leading neuroscientists, but “Sam f–ks up the paperwork,” she writes.

“In the end, Sam’s brain and its mysteries died with him.”