SERIAL KILLER VICTIMS PICTURES SERIAL KILLER RESPONSIBLE

Serial Killer Victims Pictures Serial Killer Responsible

Before long, Mary Brosley had straddled his lap. Samuel Little guided his car to a stop in a secluded area off Route 27 near Miami and cut the engine. 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters was one of the numerous women held in an 18-wheeler equipped with a torture chamber in the back. The photo was taken in an abandoned Illinois barn, where Rhoades killed Walters after cutting off her hair and making her wear a black dress and heels.Edmund Emil Kemper III was the serial killer responsible for 10 grisly murders that terrorized Northern Californias sleepy city of Santa Cruz from 1964 to 1973.Hansen abducted women – many of them sex workers – in the wilderness just north of Anchorage when the city’s population boomed due to construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline.TEXAS WOMAN’S DISMEMBERED BODY STUFFED INSIDE CRATE, SON CHARGED WITH MURDERGlenn Flothe, a retired state trooper who helped apprehend Hansen, said during a 2008 interview that Hansen started to target sex workers when he learned that they were harder to track and less likely to be missed.Hansen was convicted in the deaths of four women but confessed to killing more.

To fill in the gaps, The Washington Post obtained and analyzed thousands of pages of law enforcement and court records — including a complete criminal history assembled in the early 2000s — and conducted interviews with dozens of police officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys and relatives of Little’s victims. Other cases remain in limbo, either because police have been unable to find a killing with circumstances to match Little’s description, or because the victim is an unclaimed “Jane Doe.”The FBI has pleaded with the public for assistance but has declined to release Little’s case file, saying each murder investigation is being led by local authorities. And, with the fervor of an old man recalling the exploits of his youth, he has provided police with precise details about their murders, invariably effected by strangulation.So far, officials say they have identified more than 50 victims. Over more than 700 hours of videotaped interviews with police that began in May 2018, Little, now 80, has confessed to killing 93 people, virtually all of them women, in a murderous rampage that spanned 19 states and more than 30 years.A gifted artist with an unnervingly accurate memory, Little has produced lifelike drawings of dozens of his victims. (Obtained by The Washington Post)By New Year’s Day 1971, Mary Brosley, 33, had become the first known victim of a man since recognized as the most prolific serial killer in U.S.

Advances in DNA technology and the rise of cold-case units eventually led to his arrest and conviction in 2014. He is locked up in a California state prison, serving multiple life sentences. But that’s not who he preyed upon,” said criminologist Scott Bonn, who has written extensively about serial killers.Little, who also went by the name Samuel McDowell, did not respond to letters from The Post requesting an interview. In many cases, authorities failed to identify them as murder victims, or conducted only cursory investigations.“If these women had been wealthy, White, female socialites, this would have been the biggest story in the history of the United States.

By the fifth grade, he was obsessed with a teacher who rubbed her neck in class, and was fantasizing about killing a little freckled girl he knew.At the time, Little was living with relatives in northeast Ohio. (Damian Dovarganes/AP) An early startBorn on June 7, 1940, in Reynolds, Ga., a small town about 100 miles south of Atlanta, Samuel Little has told police he was 7 or 8 years old the first time he got the urge to choke someone. He started confessing late in life, only after he was sent to prison for three Los Angeles murders. “The answer, of course, is yes.” Samuel Little, then 72, appears at Los Angeles Superior Court in March 2013. Criminal justice system: It is possible to get away with murder if you kill people whose lives are already devalued by society.“Could it happen again today?” said Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent who has worked on some of the bureau’s highest-profile cases.

A year after that, he was charged with breaking into a furniture store in Lorain, Ohio, and shipped to a juvenile detention center for two years.Thus began a lifetime of crime that ultimately would include dozens of arrests in cities across the country: Assault in Denver. Two years later, he was arrested in Omaha for burglary, according to a copy of his criminal history. Georgia officials declined to release Little’s birth certificate, so details of his birth could not be confirmed.At 13, Little was caught stealing — a bicycle, he has said — and sent to the Boys’ Industrial School, an Ohio reform school, according to a record released by the nonprofit Ohio History Connection.

There, he said, he painted portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. Given permission to paint a massive mural on the jailhouse wall featuring such historical figures as Betsy Ross, Sitting Bull and Benjamin Banneker, he was profiled by a reporter for the now-defunct Miami News.Then 35, Little told the reporter he had taken up drawing while jailed in Baltimore. But he always went back to a life of murder and aimless drifting, supported by shoplifting and the occasional odd job.By 1976, Little was being held in the Dade County, Fla., jail on charges including grand larceny and resisting arrest. Sometimes he beat the charges, winning acquittals on assault with a gun in Miami and armed robbery in suburban Cleveland. Theft in Philadelphia, DUI in Los Angeles and shoplifting in Phoenix.Sometimes he was locked up for months, or even years.

But Watts and other experts noted that this physical evidence decays with time and that Little killed his victims under circumstances likely to leave fewer telltale marks.A person impaired by drugs or alcohol is easier to suffocate without a struggle, for example younger people tend to have more-flexible hyoid bones and thyroid cartilage, making a fracture less likely. The medical examiner incorrectly estimated that she had been between 50 and 60 years old and in the ground for about two months.Strangulation almost always leaves physical signs such as bruising, pinpricks of under-the-skin bleeding in the face, or fractures of the hyoid bone in the neck, said Gary Watts, president of the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners. Police ran what remained of her fingerprints but found no matches.Authorities were stuck, unsure who the woman was or how she had died. Clad in a multicolored dress, underwear and a metal necklace, the dead woman was decayed beyond recognition and carried no ID. “The next time I’m out, it’s do or die.”Little told the reporter he had been jailed 16 times, though records suggest it was more like 34 at the time the article appeared under the headline “16-time loser finds himself.”By then, according to his recent confessions, Little had already killed more than a dozen women.Mary Brosley had been dead for three weeks when a man and his 15-year-old son, out hunting one Sunday afternoon, stumbled across a body in a shallow grave.

When they found her body, police told local reporters, it was covered in bruises an autopsy noted that her purse and jewelry were missing, that her stockings and underwear had been pulled down to her thighs, and that her dress and slip had been pulled up.Still, the autopsy found “no obvious cause of death.” Noting Cunningham’s history of seizures, local authorities told the Knoxville News-Sentinel that the death appeared to be from natural causes.Mary Brosley was found decayed beyond recognition with a multicolored dress, underwear and a metal necklace. … But you sort of have to get lucky.”In 1974, Martha Cunningham, a 34-year-old Black woman, disappeared in Knoxville, Tenn., on her way to a New Year’s Eve church service, according to her sister, Jessie Lane Downs. And there are detectives who do more than that. “You do the preliminary stuff, fingerprints and DNA.