American Monsters: Samuel Little - featuring Anson Maddocks

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning, Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. I'm Zevan Odelberg, host of Kind of Murdery, a podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of Murdery. It's a very exciting day for Kind of Murdery because my friend and legendary artist Ansine Maddox is back with us today and I am beyond stoked that he's back.

0:52 Speaker 2: Hey, answer, how you do it?

0:54 Speaker 3: Well?

0:56 Speaker 2: You know, I'm thrilled to announce that going forward, ants and will be transitioning from storied guest of honor to co host, as we're going to be doing shows together regularly. Now, he won't be on every episode of Kind of Murdery, but we have so much fun hanging out together that I'm hoping to have him on at least once a month or essentially as often as he's willing. And I have to say that I am beyond excited to have a partner in crime, so to speak. To be clear, that's metaphorical, not literal.

1:28 Speaker 4: Crime, and not the partner part. Well, yeah, not the crime part. You know, we have the precautions we have to make.

1:41 Speaker 2: Exactly, we have to couch things carefully. I saw a news story recently about a there's some rapper who's facing various criminal charges, and the prosecution moved to introduce his rap songs as character evidence. And obviously rap music tends to be sort of this toxic male fantasy of crime and misogyny, et cetera. And that's just kind of what it often is. And so I was like, yikes, they're actually gonna take like a gangster rapper and say he said this, he said that, and that goes to the probability that he then did this and that.

2:20 Speaker 2: And that made me think, boy, maybe I need to throw some more disclaimers into into condmurdery here.

2:25 Speaker 3: I mean, what about hornymous bosh you know? Oh man, yeah, that would be that'd be quite a document of some serious crimes if he was you know, he actually did all the things.

2:36 Speaker 2: That he depicted, Oh my gosh. Yeah, if his paintings were auto biographical. Oh no, all right, all right, So today I want to kick off the show with a couple of pretty obvious observations, but answered if you'll bear with me, and hopefully the audience will bear with us, I've hopefully got a less obvious point to make ultimately, So you know, here we go obvious point number one. Kind of Murdery is a true crime podcast. Now, perhaps there's a few of you listening that aren't really true crime fans, but maybe you like the sound of my voice or the way I tell a story, or you like hearing Anson and I talk, so you're willing to trudge through the grim and grimy detail for the narrative and for the human drama.

3:18 Speaker 2: And if that's the case, thank you. Consider us flattered. But I imagine that most of you are like me. True crime fans is an odd word, I guess, but enthusiasts, shall we say, And you find criminal psychology, the occasional genius and the much more common lack thereof, to be fascinating. And I think that most of us who follow this world of human mal intent, if you will, would agree that serial killers, especially the most successful among them, are the elite of the murdery world.

3:48 Speaker 3: There.

3:49 Speaker 2: They're almost like pro athletes, if you will, like Anson. What are some if I say serial killer, what are some names that spring to mind for you?

3:56 Speaker 3: John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Just I kind of lump them all together as scum.

4:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, total scum. But you mentioned the killer clown and the lady killer. There's also, of course the Milwaukee Cannibal. That would be Jeffrey Dahmer. The point being that everybody listening true crime fan or not, when you say Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, these are household names. They're almost like pop culture brands. Now, all kinds of killers become celebrities, but in our pop culture consciousness, we'll call it the kind of murdery zeitgeist of America. In the world, it's serial killers who separate themselves from the freight.

4:37 Speaker 2: I think it's the mystery, the lurid details, the trophies, the lengths they go to evade capture, sometimes successfully for decades, until they're eventually brought down. There's an undeniable charisma. I think in a fascination with these all too human monsters, it's important to me to actually point out the human nature of serial killers and other people that do awful things, because too often, I think, in reporting and even in the way that we react to terrible crimes, we say things like that guy is not even human.

5:12 Speaker 3: That is is because no, this is somebody that shares many things with you. It's like that the most horrific thing about Hitler was that he was not a monster. He was a human being that you know, you could have fad. That's right. It was in common somewhere down the line, you know, in the past. And yeah, to call the monster doesn't really work, right.

5:35 Speaker 2: We want to call them monsters. We want to call them demons. We want to dehumanize them and make them inhuman so that we can divorce ourselves from their actions. But the truth is murdering, and especially something like psycho sexual serial murder, which a lot of these guys we just named engaged in, that is a uniquely human trait. If you go into the animal kingdom, you're not going to find a bunch of serial killing animals that are taking trophies and doing horrible things that some of us wouldn't even conceive of.

6:12 Speaker 2: That's something people do, and only people do it, and I think we should be honest about that. But there is an undeniable fascination, right and there is a charisma to the stature that these human monsters, if you will build, I mean, the stories of people who fall in love with them, are practically legion. Now. Of course, treating serial killers like superheroes or super villains archetypes that the public good or evil tends to adore. I mean, I think that's also manifestly the case. After all, what Star Wars character has more fans or stands, as the kids would say, than Darth Vader.

6:50 Speaker 2: With all due respect to Han Solo, I'd argue that they're none now actually treating serial killers the same way we do superheroes and villains, giving them origin stories, teasing out what makes them sympathetic. The Netflix series Dahmer is a great example of this kind of questionable recontextualizing. Presenting them as icons rather than horrific predators is deeply problematic for many reasons. I think I hope that we would all recognize that, but that's not really what we're here to talk about today.

7:22 Speaker 2: My point is, and I think it's another obvious one. I guess that serial killers, especially the most successful among them, are huge celebrities with massive fan bases. If they had social media accounts, they'd have millions of followers. If murder weren't immoral and illegal, they'd probably have a long running reality show about a family of psychotic murderers called Keeping Up with the kill Dashians or something.

7:46 Speaker 3: So maybe we could figure out a way to deplatform them.

7:49 Speaker 2: I'm still stuck on my dad pun keeping Up with the kill Dashians. Everybody puns, Please, somebody get me a pitch meeting. I'm pretty sure that show would be a hit. But in a certain sense, serial killers are beloved, or at least be fascinating, and many of them are, as we've been saying, household names, even outside of the true crime core, and one of the most predictable indicators of a serial murderer being an omnipresent brand, well, that would have to be And this is all very ghoulish, I know, but it's the truth that would be kill count I mean, John Wayne Gacy killed thirty three and arguably inspired the massively successful IT franchise.

8:33 Speaker 2: Ted Bundy had twenty confirmed kills, thirty confessed, and thirty nine suspected. His mo and work with the FBI as they were hunting the Green River Killer helped to inspire silence of the Lambs and the characters of both Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter. As for the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, well, he was once considered to be the most prolific serial killer in American history, having been convicted of forty nine murders and confessing to between seven and ninety. Granted, Ridgeway himself is not quite the household name that Bundy and Gaysey are, but I would argue that his nickname, the Green River Killer is at least close Bundy, the Lady Killer, John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown.

9:13 Speaker 2: And the point of our endless intro here is something that caught me completely by surprise, and that was that I had never heard of the subject of today's episode. Now had you heard of Samuel Little before we started talking about this week's episode of Anson?

9:32 Speaker 3: Oh?

9:32 Speaker 2: I mean either. Now, I'm sure that some of the hardercore true crime fans will scoff at me for saying that you never heard of Samuel Little. What do you even have a true crime show for But honestly, I'd rather admit to my deficiencies, my lack of knowledge, than be embarrassed by it. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. These other guys I've known about my entire life, Gaysey, Bundy, Dummer. But I found out about Samuel Little. You ready for the nickname answer? Samuel Little's like official nickname in the same sense as Milwaukee cannibal or lady killer or killer clown.

10:05 Speaker 2: He was. He passed away in twenty twenty. He was the choke and stroke killer. Charming not a joke, not a joke. It is exactly what it sounds like where I'm going with this. I found out about the choke and stroke killer Samuel Little this Monday. And here's why that's weird. Samuel Little is now and has been since roughly twenty eighteen, So I guess he's a bit of a Johnny cum lately in the all time serial killer rankings. But I mean not really. It's been five years. Five years is fifty years the way that media moves these days.

10:40 Speaker 2: Since twenty eighteen, he's been recognized by the FBI as the most prolific serial killer in American history. He was convicted of only four murders, but he confessed to ninety three. Ninety three and a lot of confessions are suspect, of course, but subsequent to those confessions, the FBI has been able to corroborate, through DNA and other evidence, at least sixty of those ninety three, which makes the remaining thirty three more than just a little bit probable and gives Little the statistically provable most kills in American history.

11:18 Speaker 2: So, yeah, that's what we're going to be talking about today. Samuel Little, the choke and stroke killer, all time American murder leader.

11:29 Speaker 3: Ah, just killing it.

11:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, God. Yes, some people say Barry Bods is the all type hope red leader. Some people say, I hate that steroid freak, it's Hank Aaron. But there's at this point, at least according to the FBI, and they ought to know, there's no argument that Samuel Little is the all time leading American serial killer. Yes, except for you know, the vampires that haven't been caught. Certainly you live a few hundred years, you can killers. The consumers aren't they interested? Well, I guess it depends on the vampire.

12:08 Speaker 2: But we digress. But yes, yes, potentially they're just you know, potentially, they're just we're just livestock, really, right, cattle ranchers. Yeah, exactly. So Samuel Little is a man who is still bizarrely but largely anonymous. But wait, there's more. So here's a really interesting point about the Little case. And we're going to get into the Little case sort of from the beginning in just a moment. But another reason that I'm really excited that Anson is here with us today is something specific both to Samuel Little and his case.

12:48 Speaker 2: He was known to or purported to have a photographic memory, and the vast majority of his victims were completely unknown, in part because he targeted specifically drug addicts and prostitutes of color in the ghetto, so they and Samuel Little was a African American man himself, so essentially, there was not nearly the official interest in the deaths of his victims that there may have been had he gone after a different demographic, either racially or economically. A lot of those deaths were chalked up to drug overdose or even natural causes and just not really investigated because there wasn't necessarily a family or a vocal powerful contingent that was worrying the authorities for this to solve these murders, most of his victims were unknown, and so when he confessed to some ninety killings, the FBI said, how are we going to a, you know, prove to ourselves and others that he's not making it up, and b figure out who they were in the first place, assuming he is telling the truth.

13:56 Speaker 2: And the answer to that was when they discovered that he had both a photographic memory and what is described as some artistic talent. They asked him to start painting his victims, and he did, and they used Samuel Little's paintings to track down the women that he killed. Anson, you're a painter of some renown at some point, and not quite yet, because I do kind of want to start from the beginning, but at some point I do want to talk to you about some of Samuel Little's morbid artwork and your thoughts on it.

14:31 Speaker 3: I have some things to say about it.

14:33 Speaker 2: I think we owe it to the narrative at this moment to get into the narrative, but I definitely and I think everybody wants to hear from you about that topic. A little bit later in the show. So if you are curious what Anson Maddox has to say about the art done by notorious serial killer Samuel Little, the most prolific murderer in the history of the United States, then please stay tuned because later on in the sho show we will get into that. And now, if you're ready, please join me and Anson as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may kind of murderies criminally underrated.

15:19 Speaker 2: The monstrous career of Samuel Little starts now. Samuel Little, the choke and stroke killer. Let's go ahead, let's let's let's play the cringe worthy game. If you had to guess, why do you think they called him the choke and stroke killer? Answer? Oh really, yeah, I'm gonna make you say it.

16:00 Speaker 3: I think he's probably sharing his private time with his victims.

16:05 Speaker 2: That is right. He was known to masturbate while strangling his victims. And rather than come up with any clever euphemism or anything to sort of, you know, take the squirm out of it a bit, which I guess I was just advocating for not taking the squirm out of things. So there you go, they just went with exactly what it was the guy masturbated while strangling. He's the choke and stroke killer. So Samuel Little, the choke and stroke Killer, was born on June seventh, nineteen forty. He hailed from Reynolds, Georgia, and according to Little, his mother was a teenage prostitute and abandoned him.

16:43 Speaker 2: In fact, authorities believe that Little's mother may have given birth to him while she was in jail. He was raised by his grandmother in Loraine, Ohio. He had a difficult time in high school and he eventually dropped out. Little began committing crimes in his teenage years, starting with theft. He was thrown into juvenile detention, and, as is sadly often the case, there was no real rehabilitation provided by the prison system. His crimes only got worse. Starting in the fifties, he moved from state to state, where he got arrested for fraud, dui assault, armed robbery, and rape, among other crimes.

17:20 Speaker 2: He made a point in his early years, you know, between the ages of born in a jail and twenty years old, of really making sure to round out his resume. Some callous I'd like those Ivy League serial killer universities really want to make sure that you demonstrate that you're multifaceted person. You know, so he's thought, I need to hit fraud, DUI, assault, armed robbery, and rape, among other things. Enough other crimes that I guess they don't have to be specified.

17:53 Speaker 3: He is a jack of all trades. You're saying, Oh no.

17:58 Speaker 2: Sorry yet, that's yep, you heard it, folks. The choke and stroke killer is a jack of all trades.

18:07 Speaker 3: Okay, sorry, don't spend them too much time with my life. She has the worst, the worst jokes.

18:16 Speaker 2: Oh no, we're gonna have to get her on here. I love that kind of stuff. Oh my gosh, all right, dead baby jokes go okay. My my best friend's mom growing up, she was a nurse. She could tell like she had she knew all the awful dead baby jokes. It was kind of shocking, you'd never expected.

18:36 Speaker 3: Did she develop an interest in these jokes before or after becoming a nurse?

18:40 Speaker 2: You know, I don't know the answer to that, but I do think, and this is also something I advocate for a lot on this show, that everybody deals with trauma in different ways. Some people choose humor and some people choose outrage and a lot of times, those different kinds of people don't necessarily get each other. So I obviously I try not to judge other people's the way that people choose to deal with trauma, and I obviously am someone who tends towards the black comedy side of reacting to awful things, and I think that both ways to react are legitimate.

19:14 Speaker 2: But it's important to remember that just because somebody laughs when you think they should cry, or cries when you think they should laugh, it doesn't mean they're a terrible person. It just means that they deal with trauma in a different way than you do, or I do, or we do. Anyway. That's my overlengthy apologist speech about dead baby jokes, which were just like a standard genre of jokes when I was growing up, believe it or not, but I feel like they still are, but now nobody will for good humor.

19:44 Speaker 2: Yes, garbage pail kids.

19:45 Speaker 3: Sure yeah.

19:47 Speaker 2: So so okay, before I alienate my co host and all of you listening, let's move on with the actual story. By nineteen seventy five, he had been arrested. This is Samuel Little twenty five times across eleven states. So he was born in nineteen forty and by thirty five years old, he had twenty five arrests across eleven states, and in total he served ten years for various offenses and escaped two murder convictions before he was finally convicted in twenty fourteen for the four murders that put him away for life.

20:22 Speaker 2: Now. Little says that he spent his years in prison learning how to box, and that he showed promise as a prize fighter, a career which he and this seems rather obvious, ended up not pursuing. So one of the main reasons that Little's murders went undetected for so long, and this is something I touched on a moment ago, was that many of his victims, alleged victims, were on the fringes of society. They were sex workers, homeless, people in drug addicts, and nearly all of them were women of color. So they had been socially and sort of legally judicially dualized already in many ways, which made society have less of invested interest, unfortunately, in pursuing justice on their behalf.

21:10 Speaker 2: I don't know if there's much to say about that without getting up on a soapbox, which is not really what I'm here for, So we'll just move on. In regards to his chosen victims, Little himself said he told The New York Times, he said, I never killed no senators or governors or fancy New York journalists, nothing like that. I stayed in the ghettos. Now, to this day, dozens of his victims remain unidentified, and many of their deaths were attributed to natural causes, drug overdoses, or accidents.

21:40 Speaker 3: I have a question when you say many of his victims remain unidentified, does that mean always assuming that he has that he was the killer of bodies that were found that weren't identified, or how does that work?

21:57 Speaker 2: You know. I don't have a perfect answer for that, but I believe what we're assuming is that they caught him for four murders. He confessed to ninety once he started painting his portraits of his victims. Through a combination, they were able through a combination of looking for those people and emerging DNA and other evidence, they were able to corroborate sixty more victims beyond the original four. So I think what the many remain unidentified means is that, well, if he wasn't lying about the next sixty, then the additional thirty ish are probably out there somewhere.

22:40 Speaker 3: Too, would you say, I mean, does it seem like he's proud of his number, Like he's not trying to hide it, and he's sort of blowing it beyond what they suspected he might be responsible for.

22:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I don't in my research, and perhaps I'm a poor reason searcher, but I didn't get too far into his psychology or motivations. I mean, I suppose that he could. He could either be proud of the number or at end of life somehow repentant and wanting to confess, or some combination of both, although having killed ninety some people, it's hard to believe that he felt terribly repentant.

23:28 Speaker 3: I noticed something about the pictures that I saw that he painted. They all look like portraits. They all look like poses that people make when they're being photographed for a portrait or for a you know, just a picture that they are kind of sitting for, And and made me wonder if if it's possible that you know, he what he's Does he have a photographic memory or does he have a memory for photographs? Did he look in the paper and see that you know, one of his victims, you know, showed up in the paper with the picture, and he remembered his picture and then that's his memory.

24:05 Speaker 3: Or is it possible that he was lying but he'd seen all these images, you know, in the paper of these missing people or murdered people, and he just sort of added those to his painting output.

24:19 Speaker 2: That is really that's a really interesting question. I don't know the answer to that, but it certainly it certainly raises some interesting issues and is something I hadn't thought about. Yeah, So just to just to fill everybody in a little bit on what happened with all of these portraits, and we'll be posting we'll be posting some of these portraits to kind of murdery his Instagram page if you'd like to check them out. I'll also link to them in the show notes. So what happened was in twenty fourteen, after a career, a murder career that spanned almost sixty five years, that's when Samuel Little was arrested for the murder of three women in California.

25:02 Speaker 2: And then in twenty eighteen, a Texas ranger named James Holland flew out to California to interview Little in prison because he suspected that Little might be connected to the nineteen ninety four murder of a sex worker in Odessa, Texas. In the process of talking too Little about that murder, Little started to talk about other murders that he had committed. Little told the Texas ranger that he had a photographic memory and also that he liked to paint, and so the ranger said, well, hey, let's see if you can help us find some of these victims, and he gave him art supplies and Little started to paint the faces that he allegedly remembered of his various victims, which goes to the question that answered you just posed.

25:46 Speaker 2: Were these the faces he remembered from committing the murder? Were they Jane Does whose pictures were printed in the paper later that he saw and committed to memory. It's pretty remarkable though, right, I mean, photographic memories almost like a superpower to those of us who don't have it. So are art skills for that matter, but the idea.

26:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, and memories are sort of embedded with adrenaline. Mm hmmm, so I hear, and yeah, if he's getting some gratification off of these acts that he's committing, then maybe that helps his photographic memory commit it.

26:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we know he was getting gratification and that's not metaphorical. He was the choking stroke killer, so we know, yeah, maybe he was committing things to memory. Gosh, it feels so wrong to do any kind of chuckling talking about this, but here I am boy, So let's see.

26:46 Speaker 3: But you know, I'm sitting across from you, you know, through the computer, scowling at you, like what are you doing? Laughing at this?

26:54 Speaker 2: Yeah? But what are we supposed to do? Right? I mean, certainly nobody listening to the PODCAS wants us to sit in silent consternation and weeping is probably bad. Rending our flesh and shaking our fists at the heaven does heavens doesn't really translate across the microphone.

27:13 Speaker 3: So I'm glad you said that. It makes me feel better.

27:16 Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like grim bileaguered chuckling is about all I can express. But it's a horrified chuckle. I assure you. A lot of these identifications were kicked off through Little's paintings. Now, granted, obviously they had other data points that helped them to triangulate these victims. Notably, Little had a hard time remembering specific years or specific places. In fact, his best guess would sometimes be up to ten years and or forty miles off. That's how long this how long, and how how prolifically this guy had been murdering for some sixty five plus years to the point where he would remember specific murders, but the location might be fifty miles off, and the timing might be even a decade off.

28:14 Speaker 2: So it was a really impressive amount of sort of forensic research that these law enforcement officers did to take all of these portraits that Little painted and then essentially pour through a decade's worth in a fifty mile radius of Little's best guess until they came across a photograph that resembled what he had painted and were able to pursue DNA and other evidence to confirm that that was in fact the murder.

28:49 Speaker 3: Jane Doe, I'd be interested to know if they compared the portraits that he painted with potentially any that ended up in the papers, no picture, so that if they had them in the papers.

29:02 Speaker 2: I would think so I would I would think they they must have I mean how how else would you do it?

29:08 Speaker 3: Maybe their ideas, you know.

29:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, that could be a too. Hey, if anybody knows more about Samuel Little than than we do, which admittedly is probably not that hard, feel free to reach out to the show kind of Murdery at gmail dot com, at kind of Murdery on all social media, or you could call eighty eight Murdery. That's eighty eight six eight seven three three seven nine. I don't know about you, answered, but I'm an enthusiast of a sort. Not that I'm enthusiastic about the uh, the horror of all of this, but the stories. I am an enthusiast.

29:42 Speaker 2: I'm not an expert. I don't hold myself up as an expert. So please be smarter and more informed than I am. All of you listening, and don't be afraid to reach out to the show.

29:54 Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I just didn't mean to throw a wrench in there in my fire.

29:57 Speaker 2: No no, no, no, you're not Oh you're no wretches, no ritches.

30:02 Speaker 3: My enthusiasm is trying to figure out my wife's fascination with this stuff.

30:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I mean, you know, sort of metaphorically speaking, not exactly the same, but kind of. My daughter is a voracious consumer of pop culture properties, like she started with the Teen Titans and then it's Naruto, and now we're watching the screen movies. But she loves all kinds of pop culture properties, and she tends to consume them with almost single minded focus until she's soaked up everything she can, and then she moves on. And I know other parents have this experience too, But as a parent, I want to be able to talk to her about what she's excited about, and so I have made myself into an anime fan and fans of other stuff that I wouldn't necessarily naturally be a fan of.

30:53 Speaker 2: But it's important to me to know what the heck my daughter is talking about when she wants to talk to me, because otherwise we'll just be talking past each other and it's hard to connect, which I think is what I've tried to say in my patented overly long way is I imagine? Is that a bit like pursuing Brenda's fascination with true crime so that you can know what the heck it is that makes her eyes light up?

31:18 Speaker 3: Yeah? I think so I would assume that what you're talking about is actually just a good example of good parenting. Also, you know, but it seems like you do it naturally. So that's great.

31:29 Speaker 2: That's nice of you to say, I don't. I certainly have my faults as a parent, But that's funny. Now you made me think of something else I saw on Instagram. This the sub guy posted, I realized today that when my kid wants to talk to me about Pokemon, he doesn't actually want to talk about Pokemon. He wants to share his excitement and knowledge and his love of something with his father, which is basically exactly what I just described. And then the guy goes, still, it's a hard no boy. I appreciate that perspective as well.

32:04 Speaker 3: But you know what, you know, a lot of people think I know all kinds of things about playing magic, and the fact is I just don't, and they'll talk to me about it and I'll be like, yeah, I just sort of contribute visuals.

32:20 Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like, I'm an artist, not a nerd.

32:23 Speaker 3: No, I love nerdsrds are great. I was adding, I know, I'm just kidding, but I probably didn't, you know.

32:31 Speaker 2: For anyone who might be listening who wasn't. The last time Anson was on. There is a very famous legendary card game, strategic card game called Magic the Gathering, which is essentially Dungeons and Dragons the card game. To greatly oversimplify it, but it's a card game enjoyed by millions of people around the world, including myself, and Anthematics is an absolutely legendary Magic the Gathering artist. He's my favorite artist from when I was a kid, and he is certainly in anybody's top three to five.

33:05 Speaker 2: And we can argue about who one R two is. It's probably a wrestling match between Anson and his childhood friend Mark to Dean if you ask me. But anyway, that's when we were referring to magic. That's what we're talking about. A lot of you probably have heard of it. And Anson is an extremely talented artist who does all kinds of great work. And yeah, just just a little context there speaking of Magic and your very good friend Mark to Dean Anson. Now, you guys grew up together, right, like from young young kid grew up together.

33:37 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we're about eight when we interacted for the first time on the playground. I think did I already tell this story?

33:44 Speaker 2: No?

33:44 Speaker 3: I don't think you did. I didn't tell the story about how he walked up to me with his long sleeve Star Trek T shirt.

33:50 Speaker 2: No please. So you were eight years old, so that's about what third grade maybe second grade, second grade, okay, and he walked up to you on the playground.

33:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, he said, Well that is one of his hands drawn up into his sleeve and he says, Answen, shoot my arm. And I was like, so, I made a gun shape with my hand and you know, pointing, pulled the trigger and he drops this handful of gravel and barker molt shout of his sleeve.

34:16 Speaker 2: You know, viscera from the arm to drop to the ground. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I can hang with this guy. Oh boy, I love it. I love it. This guy is my kind of guy.

34:32 Speaker 3: He's always always making me laugh. He's great.

34:36 Speaker 2: All right, we should probably.

34:37 Speaker 3: Didn't We have a Yeah, we had a thing we're doing here.

34:40 Speaker 2: That's right. You and Mark Deaden are far too kind and good of human beings to be talked about much alongside mister Samuel Little.

34:51 Speaker 3: Uh, we don't really hang in the same circle.

34:54 Speaker 2: Now. That's that speaks well of both of you, certainly, especially since you know mister Little passed away three years ago, so I have a stroke yet you know what, very probably he had chronic they had. I'm slow on the uptake there.

35:15 Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I wasn't gonna boy flesh, you know, flush it out or anything.

35:23 Speaker 2: He had chronic heart issues and diabetes and various other things that would contribute to mortality. That said, he lived to be eighty years old, so he had a fairly long and I'm not going to say illustrious but infamous life. But yeah, you wouldn't want to be hanging out with him now because that would mean you were robbing graves like some sort of evil da Vinci.

35:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't really have to do that anymore for artistic reasons. Oh about this Samuel little guy who wasn't wasn't really quite the artist that da Vinci was probably.

35:58 Speaker 2: No, Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that too. I wanted to ask you about your take on his art or his potential as an artist, given that he was untrained. What were your thoughts when you were looking at those those portraits that he painted. They look like their watercolor? Are they watercolor?

36:14 Speaker 3: I think there were probably whatever he was given to do it. I don't know if he had a whole lot of choice, but they could have been tempera or crylic. I didn't see it blown up version of it, so I couldn't get a real good look. But overall they I just couldn't. I couldn't get away from the fact that they all looked like portraits, like frame, you know, like close, you know, all kind of the same size. Yeah, I mean a lot of them were smiling, and I wouldn't imagine that would be something he'd remember much unless he looked at the photograph, and if he was responsible for their death, maybe he got some exhilaration from looking at the photograph, thinking yeah, that's one of my victims, you know, and then he just remembered it.

37:00 Speaker 3: Everything does appear much flatter when you work from a photograph. It's like you don't really have, you know, the binocular you know, advantage of seeing how the light is wrapping around the figure or the face and what you're interpreting is that makes sense so concrete when it's in a photograph, it's like it's giving you light and dark, light and.

37:21 Speaker 2: Dark because we see in three dimensions. But when you look at a photograph, that's like can't escape from its two dimensionality, you're actually limiting your sort of creative instruments ability to to to create something that feels alive.

37:34 Speaker 3: There is a lot of information to take in when you're looking at somebody in person, that the light is so much more dynamic than what is trapped on a photograph, which is just you know, there's a range there, but it's it doesn't shift or move. And when you're looking at somebody in real life there the light on them is changing. It's it's you know, it's kind of hard to describe, but it's what it's just this this tool that you develop as an artist when you're looking at something and you are transferring it from what you're looking at to another surface.

38:08 Speaker 3: It's the interpretation is if you if when you develop it, you start to notice it and it becomes an extremely fascinating thing, but it doesn't know, it doesn't really end up on the surface that you're working on because it's going on inside your head.

38:26 Speaker 2: Interesting. You think then that he saw pictures of his victims as Jane Do's in the newspaper or maybe on their driver's licenses or something, and that's what he was recreating in his paintings as opposed to recreating his actual memory. One thing we can say for Samuel Little as an artist is that whether he was working from photographs or from memory, he was able to produce portraits of his victims that looked recognizably enough like his victims that the FBI I was able to successfully track down many of them.

39:04 Speaker 2: And for somebody like me who has the artistic talent of one of the hot dog fingers, people from everything everywhere all at once, that's pretty impressive feet in and of itself. Whether or not one wants to hang his work on their walls or write about it in years to come is one thing. But the ability to sit down with prison art supplies and faithfully enough recreate the faces of these women that they could be found decades later, there's some modicum of talent in there.

39:37 Speaker 3: I would say, Yeah, I don't want to give them any positive reinforcement. I'm a human critic more than an art critic. What I would like to do now, just to kind of ground.

39:54 Speaker 2: This in reality a little bit. I have some of the actual transcript accounts we're taken by this Texas ranger from Little himself describing some of these previously unknown murders that he committed, and so in kind of a clinical manner, I'm just going to read. I'm going to read through some of these police accounts and then some of what Little himself described happening, and will just sort of reground ourselves in the reality of this story that way. But I mean, it will likely be somewhat harrowing.

40:31 Speaker 2: So let's talk about California murders from the late eighties here. So between January thirty first and February first of nineteen eighty seven, shortly out of getting out, shortly after getting out of prison and well on parole, Little met a black female wearing shorts near Central Avenue in Los Angeles, California. He went to a drug dealer's house, and the drug dealer, also a pimp, told the female to leave with Little. Little walk down Figaroa Avenue with the woman then turned left onto floor. He bought some dope with the female and then walked back down Figaroa to a vacant house located next to Florence.

41:06 Speaker 2: There was a gas station on the corner of Florence and Figueroa. There was a garage in front of the vacant house with only a hook on the door and a fence around the house. The house faced Figueroa Avenue, The garage had wooden doors on rollers, and the house had a driveway. There was a brick residence next to the door to the garage. So this is an interesting little window into Little's mind and how it worked, because although he sometimes struggled with exact locations, some of which were triangulated by law enforcement following his accounts, he struggled with exact locations and times right, but he was able to give these photographic memory incredibly precise details.

41:51 Speaker 2: In other ways, there was a fence around the house, the house faced Figueroa, the garage had a wooden door on rollers, and the house had a drive wway. I mean a hook on the door, right. I don't know about you, but if somebody asked me, I would be like, it was a house. I might remember the color, but the garage had a wooden door on rollers, those kind of things. It is pretty pretty amazing, I mean, and he was recounting this stuff, you know, forty years after the fact. So there was a brick residence next door to the garage.

42:23 Speaker 2: Little entered the garage with the female The garage contained sawhorses, wood planks, and paint. There was a wide lead shelf around the interior of the garage, approximately five feet off the ground and made of solid two by force. Little described the female as having a quote big unquote butt and being approximately twenty three to twenty four years old. She was dark skinned and stood approximately five feet tall and weighed approximately one hundred and forty pounds. He got onto the shelf with the woman.

42:51 Speaker 2: The woman began playing with her necklace, and Little then strangled her. They fought and both fell off the shelf onto the wide platform. He then strangled the woman to death while sitting on her back. The black female was left fully clothed, lying on the elevated board platform, laying on her stomach. Approximately two weeks later, Little walked past the garage and it had yellow police tape on it. He killed this woman a couple weeks after he got out of prison. He believed he'd killed the woman in the middle of February in nineteen eighty seven when he walked past the garage.

43:22 Speaker 2: Several months later, it had been torn down again. I mean, a horrible, horrible story, but you know it's funny and but not butt. But it's not horrible. That's not what I'm not going It's funny that I sort of prefaced this story by talking about the fact that murder, and especially serial murder, is uniquely human and how we're basically protecting ourselves in largely off base when we call these people monsters or inhuman because that which we call them in human four is actually a uniquely human thing.

43:57 Speaker 2: And you and I kind of agreed on that. But now as I read these accounts of the killings that were written from all of the specific details that Little gave, and I'll read another one in just a moment, it almost makes me doubt my conclusion because I start feeling like he's a terminator robot or something like he has sort of a heads up display that instantly recognizes everything it sees and commits it to a database. That's that's how this reads to me. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that answer.

44:33 Speaker 3: I was just thinking about. You know that whenever you remember something, the way that you are recalling it changes the way that you rere You know, you recommitted to memory, right, And I don't know if this is relevant, but there are things that I in the past, I've wanted to kind of get out of my head because they were you know, traumatic or something, and I would intentionally remember those things, but I would put like a checkerboard over it, and every time I remembered it, it was more difficult to make it out, you know, in my memory, because I would see this checkerboard and I would do put the checkerboard there every time to try to just you know, just fade it out.

45:22 Speaker 2: So you sort of proactively edited your own memories.

45:25 Speaker 3: I thought that's what I was doing, and it seemed to be effective. So I don't know what I was really doing because I'm not you know, I don't know the science or anything, but it was Wow, it's just like I mean, actually, I think I said something about about that in the previous episode that I was with you on where I was talking about the Spider. Yeah. Yeah, it's like I just I just do these little things to like sort of steer my head in the right direct.

45:50 Speaker 2: That's interesting. That's really interesting. Now I have to ask, just because I have to ask, are there any of those checkerboarded memories that you would be willing to share.

46:03 Speaker 3: Right now? I mean, I would I might want to like go through them and see if I can remember them well enough to.

46:11 Speaker 2: Sure that's of course, and that's a fine answer. And again I can edit everything. I just you know, as a as a listener as I'm listening to our episode in real time as it's happening. When you that that is extremely interesting to me. It's something I've never heard before. And when you tell me that you had traumatic memories that you check or boarded out of your mind, I'm like, first of all, like wow, what an what a sort of surreal and yet concrete way to address a memory Like I don't then maybe it speaks to also who you are and how you do your arc, but I it would never occur to me to address a traumatic memory in sort of an almost three dimensional sculptural way as a way to delete it.

46:56 Speaker 2: I think that's super interesting. Beyond that, of course, I think and want to know, like, well, what's the memory? You know?

47:03 Speaker 3: But well, there's like, for instance, one is of seeing my dog being run over by a car, and you know, it's not a human related thing, but it is something that is emotionally people can probably relate how traumatic that would be. And it's something that like whenever I thought about it, I would physically flinch and it would just completely derail me. So I had to, you know, do something to to make it less. You know, it's just really it was a horrible mine. Absolutely.

47:39 Speaker 2: Yeah.

47:40 Speaker 3: So that's an example of something that I would go out of my way to try to fix in my head because.

47:48 Speaker 2: You know, yeah, I understand. You know, it's interesting. I think something that you and I sort of have in common is I always feel like I feel things, and I'm assuming we have it in common because it's I'm deducing from what I hear you say and what I think it means, and so you feel free to correct me. I always feel like I feel things too much, that like everything's a little bit raw, that it's all like a little bit too bright and too loud and too sort of graphic. And it's funny because then somebody would say, well, then why the hell do you have a true crime podcast where you talk about these horrible things.

48:31 Speaker 2: And on the flip side, I've had people who hear me chuckling at the darkness of some of this stuff say, you know, arrive at the opposite sort of judgmental assumption that like, oh my god, are you a psychopath yourself? Do you not feel anything like, how can you be laughing hearing this horrible thing?

48:54 Speaker 3: Can I say something about that?

48:55 Speaker 2: Please? Please?

48:57 Speaker 3: To me, it just seems like you're obviously reassuring yourself that you are able to handle what you're the topic. You know, it's like a like, okay, maybe you've noticed like in videos, content creators or people are like laughing at points where you know they're not really amused by anything, or they're not like uncomfortable about something. They're laughing because it's part of the dialogue you or the style, and it just to me, as someone who's not that familiar with that way, it sounds so fake, right, And I don't think you can take somebody's laughter and use that to paint them in any particular way.

49:43 Speaker 3: It's just something that people do naturally to try to be more comfortable about something that is not comfortable. And whether it's for themselves or for other people or both, you know.

49:55 Speaker 2: It's yeah, yeah, yeah. When you described that when you would remember this awful moment of your dog getting ran over, that you would you would physically flinch, and so you felt like you had to check orboard it to kind of you know, make it through the day without like moments of a like a horrible, horrible emotion, but also like almost a physical tick, right, Yeah.

50:18 Speaker 3: I mean when you remember something like that, you get you get a you know, the chemistry of your body makes it so that you react to it, you know, in a way that it's like a muted version of how it was at the time.

50:29 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, But I also think that that is a hugely empathetic reaction, and unfortunately not everybody is that way, and trying to build more empathy is also something that I talk we talk about on this show pretty often. It's one of the reasons that I want people to share not just their kind of murdery stories with me, but if they're disabled, or if they struggle with addiction, or if they have other challenges that maybe you're not quote unquote typical. I want them to be willing to share those things if they feel that they can, because I feel like what's happened in our culture, it's become such an us and them thing that people who have a life that's very different from the life that we know sometimes become too much of another and we sort of stop and don't consider their humanity.

51:19 Speaker 2: A disabled person is like a disabled person, and they're in this box with all the other disabled people and someone else with this other identities in this box. But it's not me, it's not us, it's not our family. But I feel like if we share these stories of otherness, then people can learn that the others are just like us. And these people in all these other boxes, well, hey, they all listen to kind of murdery together. And I hope that we can build some empathy for each other in our different stories that way, because I think too often we tend to treat somebody like they're just an el for a fairy.

51:54 Speaker 2: It's like, oh, illegal immigrants are just actually they're not real to me. They're an l for a fairy or something. It's not something I have to deal with, you know. I mean, I just I threw that out as one example. But I want people to sort of recognize our common humanity, and I feel like stories of struggle are one way to do that.

52:13 Speaker 3: I think your obvious concern about those things and the attention that you draw to it in the way that you do that is a perfect offset to the you know, the horrific stories and accounts and stuff, and it's I don't know, it's a really strange, but I think it works really well. I think and when you go into this spiel about you know where people can get help if they need it or want it, and you know their ability to contact you, that that's just a really cool feature of you. And I think that's a yeah.

52:45 Speaker 3: I don't think you have to worry about anybody thinking that you are too amused or or anything by the content you're creating. I think it's like, hey, let's uh, let's get some of this off our you know, out of our heads.

52:58 Speaker 2: Well. I do appreciate that, And that is a perfect segue for me to say to everybody. First of all, if you would like to share a kind of Murdery story or a story of a particular challenge that you face in life, please don't hesitate to call eight eight eight Murdery. That's eight eight eight six eight seven three three seven nine. I would love to hear from you. I would love to share your story on the show if you're willing. You can also email us at Kindomurdery at gmail dot com or reach out on social media at kind of Murdery.

53:27 Speaker 2: And if you have a kind of murdery story to share that could inspire an episode.

53:31 Speaker 3: Of the show.

53:32 Speaker 2: And of course I want to remind everybody about the three digit lifeline number nine eight eight. Please program it into your phone right now, nine eight eight that you can call twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to receive immediate counseling for substance use, mental health or suicidal thoughts. So if you find yourself an acute crisis, please do call nine eight eight, and please do remember that you are loved and the world is a better place with you in it. If you're not an acute crisis, please don't reach out to me if things are really dire, because I'm not qualified to help you in that case.

54:07 Speaker 2: But if you're going through stuff and you just want to share, you just want to connect with someone, you can reach out in any of the ways just mentioned. Kind of Murdery at gmail dot com the hotline eighty eight Murdery, and you can connect with me there, and I would love to connect with you. Yeah, thank you for giving me the opening to talk about that anson. And let's jump right back into the darkness here. I want to share one more of these specific accounts then we'll maybe wrap up our conversation about Samuel a Little, which has not always been an easy one.

54:39 Speaker 2: He is really, really a bad, bad dude on this tip of empathy. And I'm not going to pitch empathy for serial killers here per se. But it is kind of you know, it's moving. It's sad a little bit how you can't forgive anything that he did. But my gosh, talk about starting out behind the eight ball, born to a sex worker mother while she was incarcerated in prison. You know, like, I'm not saying you're going to grow up to be in a serial killer, but man, that's a hard way to start life. That's a hard way to start life.

55:10 Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk about just in case we start feeling too bad for him, I've got another terrible story for you already as it.

55:17 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, go for it.

55:19 Speaker 2: Great, you want to read this one book? These are good, Okay, it's all right. This is also nineteen eighty seven. Samuel Little met a five foot six tall, one hundred and twenty pounds. Again, these are his details, folks, twenty five year old quote golden brown skinned black female at TAM's Hamburgers. Again on figueroa little stated that the woman had a girlfriend, so he gave the woman and her lesbian girlfriend, again Little's words, a ride. He made a date with the woman for the following day at four o'clock behind TAM's public service announcement, If anybody wants to make a date with you at four pm behind a hamburger joint, just just don't go, Just don't go.

56:02 Speaker 2: Little stated that the woman was wearing a black dress and was a blood as in a member of the gang the Bloods. He was driving a blue Cadillac, and all I was wrong. This was this the year for this was nineteen ninety six. So Little met the woman behind the burger joint. He choked her out and put her in the trunk. He quote took her out to a convenience store with a field right next to it. He left the woman in the field, laid her down on that field, and then he backed up onto the field, opened the trunk, and drug her up onto the grass, which is where he left her.

56:37 Speaker 2: I'm not quite understanding the physics of that. This is kind of redundant. So he left her in a field next to a convenience store. That's the gist of it. And then he drove all the way down Vermont Avenue somewhere, and the next day he drove by again and saw that the woman was well concealed by weeds. He then said, I know that they found her the next day. I didn't do anything special to conceal her, really, I just laid her down in a field next to the seven eleven. He described her as having medium, short, pretty hair, and said and specified that she was pretty.

57:06 Speaker 2: He then stated that he passed a horse ranch when he discarded the woman's body. He did not think he went all the way out to Hawthorne, but he may have. Hawthorne is a town near Los Angeles. He said he thought she was named Sheila. So all of these vehicles, pardon me, all of these details that are a little disjointed in the telling. For me right now, these are these sort of real time recollections of serial killer Samuel Little trying to help the authorities identify his victims. So he was kind of like, I left her in a field by a seven eleven.

57:37 Speaker 2: Oh, but it might have been out by Hawthorne. She was pretty, there was maybe there was a horse ranch nearby. It makes for poor telling on my part, but I think it's interesting if you consider it sort of as the pinball bouncing around in his brain as he tries to remember these murders, it makes a little more sense how the narrative is disjointed.

57:59 Speaker 3: That's a good comparison. I can imagine that the way he's telling it probably isn't that linear. It's kind of scattered and he's trying to put the pieces together as he's saying it.

58:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, So, as we already know, he was convicted in twenty fourteen of four murders of women in Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties, and then these other eighty some odd murders came to light as he confessed to them. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, not life like twenty five years to life, but natural life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was caught in twenty twelve, convicted in twenty fourteen, and then he died at the age of eighty in twenty twenty. And as we had previously mentioned, of the ninety some odd additional murders that he confessed to, so far the FBI and others have been able to confirm at least sixty of those victims through a combination of his detail, his paintings, and DNA and other evidence that has subsequently been found.

59:05 Speaker 2: Sad story, remarkable story, I mean, convicted of four murders. Certainly, if I was the FBI or I was a Texas ranger and some guy that we had, an eighty year old man that we had in prison for four murders told me that he'd killed ninety, I would think it was bravado. Tragically, in this case, it was not.

59:22 Speaker 3: It's weird to try to get yourself down understand that when you're looking at an older person they could be responsible for crimes that he would never assume.

59:31 Speaker 2: Right, I mean, we essentially know that by the time he was caught, he had a sixty five year murdering career. Whoa I mean, imagine if someone had a sixty five year football career, or a sixty five year like corporate Jack Welch career, or any other sort of career spanning sixty five years, you'd be like, what a fucking legend. Like look at the staying power of this guy. This is remarkable. Or when you see a restaurant that's like, we've been open since nineteen fifty you're like, oh my god, this little mom and pop restaurant has been open for sixty five years.

1:00:08 Speaker 2: They must really do something, right. I bet that Ruben is killer. Like I want to try to pastrami if.

1:00:16 Speaker 3: They what if they didn't advertise that at all, but they always really wanted to, Like I really want to tell people that that we've been open for you know, eighty years. But I think, you know, so you might have been sitting on that information for so long and wanting to tell his story and by the time he might have been It's just I just wish the world didn't have them.

1:00:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I know. That's that's the thing that's I mean, sixty five years of doing anything else is an incredible level of like success, acumen, excellence, expertise by any measure, and yet what we're talking about is horrific, horrific predatory psychosexual murders. It's like, it's really just mind blowing that that it could be going on for that long.

1:01:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, let's hope he was, you know, paranoid the entire time looking over his shoulder. I guess.

1:01:10 Speaker 2: I mean, boy, it doesn't sound like meet me behind the burger joint for a quick murdering doesn't sound overly paranoid to be I think tragically he was.

1:01:21 Speaker 3: Well, I was just thinking, and what about the uh, I mean he the pimp of that, you know, one of those earlier victims. You know, obviously the pimp wasn't going after him for you know, taking out one of his.

1:01:36 Speaker 2: Girls, right, you'd think. But from what I read, he usually just would leave town. He'd kill somebody and he'd get right in his car and leave town. So I don't think there was much of an opportunity to for retribution. And I mean, let's be honest, the guy was cynically very smart. With the social justice narratives in the world today, people would say, these people, these people, authorities don't care about them, they don't get a fair shake. Well, Samuel Little zeroed in on that immediately. He was like, I stayed in the ghetto.

1:02:09 Speaker 2: I chose sex workers and drug addicts, and they were all African American women. Like he basically stacked the scales against ever getting caught by more or less ensuring unfortunately that he was killing people that the authorities would never prioritize, also because they didn't have loved ones clamoring for assault.

1:02:29 Speaker 3: But there are those, you know, the associates and friends, and you know they're also out there on the street with them, and you know they have a mutual concern about, you know, not being a victim. I wonder if sure, I mean, maybe he picked situations or individuals as he knew that wouldn't be right. Well.

1:02:47 Speaker 2: I think it's worth noting too that he ultimately was arrested in twenty twelve for murders committed in the eighties and nineties. So when he started killing people in the era of American history that people started to care about the disenfranchised to be very much overly general then eventually got caught as that era continued to heighten. But he started killing in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies and all of those decades. I really I think that all of the groups that we just talked about were even more disenfranchised.

1:03:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean so yeah, smart, evil, disgusting, artistic, artistic. Yeah yeah, Now I see why you were pushing back against that so much. Because I looked at those things. I was like, hey, he's better than I thought he would be. And you're like, no, no, no, no, I.

1:03:41 Speaker 3: Don't even know what I've but I don't know what my point was with that.

1:03:44 Speaker 2: I was just sort of, yeah, all right, that was kind of murderies criminally underrated the monstrous career of Samuel Little. I hope you enjoyed it. I know that that story was a tough one. I think it was hard to just kind of navigate how awful this guy was, but I still had a great time doing it. Anson, thank you so much for being here. I look forward to the next time you're here. It's really a blast having a chance to spend some time with you and to share some of these hideously grim stories with the listeners.

1:04:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, this is fun. This is disturbingly fun, And thanks for having

1:04:22 Speaker 2: Awesome for Anson Maddox, I'm Zevan Odleberg, and this is kind of murdery.