When Killers Get Caught: A True Crime Podcast · Ransom Storytelling Studios LLC

Samuel Little: The Most Prolific Serial Killer in U.S. History and the 68 Women Still Nameless

March 12, 2026·30 min·10 clips

The episode opens with a woman getting into a stranger's car and never being seen again. It treats that silence as the start of a much larger pattern, not an isolated horror. Women vanish in Florida, Texas, California, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Their cases are often brushed aside, misclassified, or left with almost no follow-up. The show keeps returning to the same hard fact: the victims lived on society's edge, and that made them easier to overlook. Samuel Little moves from city to city and state to state, leaving a trail that investigators do not connect for years. The case only starts to tighten once the episode explains the rise of CODIS and the wider DNA infrastructure that later made a match possible. Little is arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2015 on narcotics charges. That arrest looks minor until his DNA links him to three unsolved Los Angeles murders. The episode traces how those murders had stayed open for decades, even though the victims had been strangled in a way that now fits a wider pattern. It then follows the 2014 extradition to California and the 2018 conviction that resulted in life without parole. But the conviction is not treated as an ending. Instead, it becomes the point where investigators start asking how many other deaths might belong to the same man. Texas Ranger James Holland emerges as one of the people pushing that question forward. The episode uses that pursuit to show how geography, timing, and bias can hide a serial offender in plain sight. It also leaves room for the uncomfortable reality that the people most at risk were the ones least likely to receive sustained attention. The final movement widens the frame again, returning to the women whose names were lost for decades. The narration argues that predators rely not only on violence but on silence, indifference, and the assumption that some lives matter less. That argument gives the episode its shape and its force. It ends by returning to the possibility that another pattern is still waiting to be seen.

As heard by us

A grim, careful look at how overlooked victims and late DNA finally exposed Samuel Little.

Samuel Little's crimes come into focus as a long failure of attention. He moved across states, his victims were isolated and often dismissed, and the pattern stayed hidden until DNA linked him to unsolved murders in Los Angeles.

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Why you'd press play

You want the pattern behind a killer who moved city to city, state to state, for decades.

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