Serial Killer Samuel Little Confesses To A 1982 Florida Strangling He Was Acquitted Of At The Time

A convicted murderer ⁠⁠and possibly the most prolific serial killer ⁠in American history has admitted to strangling a woman to death decades after he was acquitted in her death.

Samuel Little, 79, has spent the last few years assisting investigators in closing cases he is connected to and identifying victims. He told federal authorities in 2018 that he'd committed nearly 100 murders in 14 different states across the country from 1970 to 2005. Most of his victims were strangled.

Little has confessed to 93 murders in total and analysts believe all of his confessions are credible, according to the FBI.

Little had previously been convicted in 2014 of strangling three women in Los Angeles during the 1980s and had been serving a life sentence, but confessed to other murders in exchange for a prison transfer, NBC News reported in 2018. Since then, investigators have been working to verify his claims and identify his previously unnamed victims.

Among his many confessions, Little has pleaded guilty to four murders in Ohio and another in Texas. He admitted to two Indiana cases in March. He also admitted to killing a Florida woman in 1982, Ocala.com reported in 2018. Now, he’s admitted to killing another Florida woman that same year, one he was actually charged with killing back in the 1980s.

Little now tells officials that he met Patricia Ann Mount, 26, at a bar in Gainesville before driving her to a pasture where he strangled her to death, The Gainesville Sun reported. A witness said he saw Little leaving the scene. While Little was arrested at the time and charged with murder, he was never convicted. Jurors acquitted him after less than half an hour of deliberation.

“He just had a preference for strangling younger prostitutes and street people,” Alachua County sheriff’s cold case detective Kevin Allen told The Gainesville Sun on Thursday. “He got away with it for decades. We were the first agency to arrest him for homicide in 1982.”

Many of Little’s victims had been previously deemed overdose or accidental deaths over the years because of who he chose to target.

“Little chose to kill marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs,” the FBI stated in 2018. “Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated."