Book of the week
See the sample
By Jillian Lauren (Robinson £16.99, 512pp)
Sam Little didn’t look like a serial killer on the surface, let alone America’s most prolific serial killer, guilty of 93 murders in three decades.
A petite, charming 78-year-old with twinkling eyes, a heart condition, diabetes and an amputated toe, he stumbled into the visiting room of California State Prison in his wheelchair.
His first words to his new visitor Jillian Lauren were, “You! You, my angel, come to visit me from heaven. God knew I was lonely and he sent me you.’ Thus began the weirdest and creepiest two years any investigative journalist and novelist could expect in their working life.
Sam Little didn’t look like a serial killer on the surface, let alone America’s most prolific serial killer, guilty of 93 murders in three decades. Pictured: Jillian Lauren and Sam Little
After getting away with murder for far too long, Little was finally sentenced to four life sentences with no chance of parole, later increased to six.
From her first visit in 2018, Jillian visited him every weekend. For two years, as she gently flattered him, showered him with candy and soda, and put him at ease, he described, in mouth-watering (to him) detail, 86 of the murders he had committed, often including drawings of the women made. he had killed.
Lauren was not intended as a conduit for the detailed confessions of America’s most prolific killer.
She was just trying to write a novel and in the course of her investigation happened to run into a cold case detective who told that she had once caught a serial killer named Sam Little, and that there may have been other victims of his. there which was never identified.
Lauren, who admits to being obsessed with true crimes, was intrigued and longed to meet Little and get him to talk.
After her first few visits, during which he went on to talk about how much he loved boxing and drawing, asking her to sing him songs and make kissing noises, she thought, “If I can’t make a dent in this bull** **, it’s not worth the miles.’
But then, very gradually, beginning with a vivid description of his first strangulation of a woman in Miami in 1969, he began an incantation of his murders. As she writes, “He imagined himself to be some kind of angel of mercy, with divine orders to euthanize.”
The friendship Little had developed with Lauren was so strong that he called her his immediate family. He died in 2020 and she keeps his ashes in her garage
His trademark, in many American states, was breaking the necks of his victims (mostly prostitutes) during the intercourse they voluntarily initiated in his car.
“They died in sexual pleasure, not hate, you see,” he explained to Lauren. “I’m not like this, what do you call that? Murderous sexual maniacs.”
No, it isn’t, I thought as I read these self-justifying statements by a psychopath. You are much worse.
You lured these already marginalized women to their deaths and you were smart because you knew how to pick the right women.
“If there was one thing he mastered,” writes Lauren, “it was becoming the black man no one saw, and finding the black woman no one would miss.”
The America of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was one in which (as Leila Mae McClain, one of the few women to escape his murderous clutches, said in court years later), “They don’t care about a black prostitute. in Pascagoula, Mississippi. No madam.’
When Leila arrived at the nearest hospital, half-naked, bruised and utterly distraught, barely able to speak after the near strangulation, no one asked her how it happened and she didn’t think it was worth telling them.
“And how did it feel to kill women?” Lauren asked Little. “Ooooooo, it felt like heaven,” he replied. “It felt like I was in bed with Marilyn Monroe. It felt like I was in love.’
These are stomach cramping things. He told her he loved that moment when the terrified women looked him in the eye and realized they had underestimated him.
This was about power and property, but also about sexual satisfaction. Little believed he “possessed the souls of all his ‘babies’.”
In her effort to understand his mindset, Lauren spoke to a psychologist, who added the theory of “everyday sadism” to the usual triad of empathetic evil: Antisocial Personality Disorder, Machiavellianism, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Lauren drove off after her conversations with Little, sometimes stopping the car and screaming
It is shocking how little interest the police had in the disappearance of those women. Only once, early in his murderous decades, did Little bother to bury a body. But he thought it was too much work, so from then on he just dumped the bodies under brush on the side of a highway or in a garbage can, knowing that no one would bother to follow up on the crime.
Lauren has a lurid fantasy. With her dark novelistic instinct, which switches back and forth in time, she gives us reconstructions of the lead-up to some murders, sometimes from the perspective of the victim, sometimes from Little’s disgustingly sexualized perspective.
She writes in film-noir, salacious American prose so you feel like you’re in the self-penned backstreets of the Rust Belt, about to get into Little’s car. He ran his tongue over the scar on his bottom lip as his ragged Cadillac slid through puddles of streetlight.
He stalked fresh meat through the bright light from the windshield.’ Since Lauren was not allowed to bring writing materials into prison, she drove off after her conversations with Little, sometimes stopping the car and screaming. Then she rushed into a restaurant and wrote down what he had told her.
She met no-nonsense Texan ranger James Holland, who had helped put together the final case that would ultimately convict Little, along with three living victims and a behavior pattern match to bolster his case.
He had also managed to get Little to confess the basic facts, using the accepted method of minimizing the seriousness of his crimes through false sympathy, normalization, and possible moral justifications.
His trademark, in many American states, was breaking the necks of his victims (mostly prostitutes) during the intercourse they voluntarily engaged in in his car.
Holland was kind of right when he told him, “Man, secrets are cool. But they’re only really cool if you can tell someone.’
And because he had nothing to lose for the last two years of his life, Little told someone—and that person was Lauren, and once he started, he couldn’t stop.
At one point, with Little on the phone showing her the way, she retraced his steps to the exact spot in Long Beach, Los Angeles, where he had dumped a body in 1991.
Then she found the simultaneous news reports of a missing woman in that area. With this information, the police linked the location to the unsolved murder of a prostitute named Alice Duvall.
So Lauren became a detective. She found Alice’s sister and told her what had happened.
The friendship Little had developed with Lauren was so strong that he called her his immediate family. He died in 2020 and she keeps his ashes in her garage.
On her already tattooed skin she has added new chest inks of flying swallows, in memory of the victims whose moments of death she brought about in this very pleasant, self-righteous embodiment of evil.