EDITOR’S NOTE —On July 24, 1979, serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted by a jury in Miami of the murder of two sorority sisters in a rampage a year earlier. Three days later, Associated Press reporter Dan Sewell sat down with Bundy in the Dade County Jail for an exclusive interview. A serial rapist and serial killer is getting ready to be sentenced for first-degree murder on Friday, due in part to a confession he gave to FOX 13 investigative reporter Adam Herbets earlier this.
James Holland has heard confessions from many, many murderers. But now one is telling the Texas Ranger he's committed 93 murders himself, making him perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history. The race is on to identify all of the 93 people Samuel Little says he murdered, while the 79-year-old remains alive and continues to cooperate.
Holland tells Sharyn Alfonsi in his first television interview how he got Little to open up about his victims for a story to be broadcast on '60 Minutes' Sunday, October 6, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Information Holland has gathered from Little has led to 50 cold case murders being solved. There are more Little says he committed that if resolved would give victims' relatives answers and exonerate any innocent people who may have been wrongly convicted for the murders.
Holland says he broke through to Little by agreeing with him that he was not a rapist, but truly a killer. This tack seemed to unlock the place where he kept detailed, almost photographic memories of every woman he killed. Holland describes Little's process, 'There's indications of visualization, of when he's thinking about a crime scene. He'll start stroking his face. And as he's starting to picture a victim, you'll see him look out and up.'
'And you can tell he has this revolving carousel of victims, and it's just spinning, and he's waiting for it to stop at the one that he wants to talk about,' Holland says.
Little can count all of his victims, even still hear them, says Holland. A big aid in identifying victims has been Little's ability to sketch very close likenesses of the people. Holland shows Alfonsi a collection of Little's drawings, a collection he hopes will grow.
Serial killer Arthur Shawcross was born on June 6, 1945, and died on November 10, 2008 while serving a life sentence for the murder of 11 women. From his birthplace of Kittery, Maine, his family moved to Watertown, a small town near Lake Ontario in New York State, when he was still a child. Shawcross claims that his adolescence was turbulent, and cites a difficult relationship with both parents, particularly his domineering mother, for his later troubles. He says he also exhibited behavioral problems at an early age, including bed-wetting and bullying.
Shawcross also made extreme reports about his early sexuality. He claimed his aunt sexually molested him when he was 9, and that he had sexual relations with his younger sister. He also admitted to his first homosexual encounter at the age of 11, which he says was followed by experimentation with bestiality.
In contrast to these claims, however, his parents and siblings maintain that he had a normal childhood, and the described events were largely the product of his imagination. There is no way of knowing whose version represents the reality of his upbringing, but what became clear, later on, was that Shawcross would change his stories at will, as he was interviewed by various professionals in the course of their investigations.
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From school records it can be independently verified that he was an inveterate truant, with a particularly low IQ, a tendency to bullying and violence and that he came under suspicion for a series of juvenile arson attacks as well as burglaries. He dropped out of school after failing to pass the ninth grade, and the next few years were punctuated with violence and jail sentences. He received his first probationary sentence in December 1963 for smashing a shop window.