The remains of a Georgia woman killed 46 years ago have been identified and confirmed as the victim Samuel Little, known as the deadliest serial killer in US history, authorities said Thursday.
Yvonne Place was about 20 when Little killed her in 1977, according to a news release from the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office and the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. She was dubbed “Macon’s Jane Doe” by the city’s The Telegraph newspaper.
small, who has died In December 2020, he admitted to killing two Macon women in 2018, prompting Georgia investigators to interview him in Texas in 2019. They were able to confirm that his confession matched the unsolved Macon cold case. They were able to notify the remaining family members of Fredonia Smith, another woman killed in 1982.
But Place’s remains have not been identified, so his family is not known. Last year, investigators used forensic genetic genealogy to identify Place’s remains and then identified a relative who connected them to his remaining family in Macon.
At the time of his death at nearly 80, Little admitted to killing 93 people between 1970 and 2005. Most of the killings took place in Florida and Southern California. Georgia authorities said eight of his victims were Georgia residents and the remains of a Tennessee woman were also found in Georgia.
Little, who has been out of prison for decades for burglary, assault, drug or other crimes, has denied killing anyone for years.
It wasn’t until Texas Ranger James Holland questioned him about a murder in 2018 that he began to divulge details. In nearly 700 hours of interviews, he recounted countless murders that only a murderer could know.
He said he started killing on New Year’s Eve in Miami in 1970.
“It was like drugs,” he told Holland. “I’ve come to like it.”
He said his last was in 2005 in Tupelo, Mississippi. He killed people in Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, Nevada, Arkansas and other states.
Little kills most of his victims by suffocation, usually after meeting them during a chance encounter.
His victims were almost all women, and he targeted people living on the fringes of society, such as prostitutes or drug addicts. They were people he believed would not be traced and would not leave much evidence for the police.
He wasn’t wrong—police around the country initially classified many deaths as accidents, drug overdoses, or the result of unknown causes.
Kentucky authorities finally caught up with him in 2012 after he was arrested on drug charges and his DNA linked him to three murders in California.
When he started talking about other murders, authorities were surprised at how much he remembered. His drawings, they say, indicate that he has a photographic memory.
“Nothing he said was ever proven to be wrong or false,” Holland told “60 Minutes” in 2019.
Before he died in 2020, Little spent nearly an hour answering questions from “60 Minutes” on the phone. He said that some of his crimes had probably innocent people in jail.
“There may be many people who have been convicted and sent for punishment on my behalf,” he said. “I say, ‘If I can help get somebody out of jail, you know, maybe God will smile on me a little more.'”
Little speaks mostly about his victims.
“They were broke and homeless and they ended up in my spider web,” he said.
Photo by FBI via Getty Images