She was out in a club, at a birthday party with a group of friends, when she made the mistake of asking him to dance.
Decades later, Samuel Little could still remember the buttons down the front of the dress she was wearing, and the intimate details she told him about her life: that her mother was sick, that she was one of three sisters. But the one thing he couldn’t conjure up was a name. In the end she was just another of the 93 women he killed, in a murderous spree across the US that somehow continued unsuspected and uninterrupted for 35 years. It is amazing how easy it is for a woman to go missing, but not to be missed; astonishing how the seemingly obvious can be overlooked, when it happens to women who are not properly seen. It was only this week, following months of prison confessions and painstaking cross-checking, that the FBI finally confirmed 79-year-old Little as the deadliest serial killer in American history.
How on earth did he get away with it for so long? The answer is depressingly as old as the hills: Little was confident he would not be caught, one FBI analyst said, because “he thought nobody was accounting for his victims”. He was relying, in other words, on them being the sort of women who might not be seen to matter – or at least not enough to merit more than cursory investigation. They were mostly if not exclusively black, as Little himself is, and often living on the fringes of what was regarded as respectable life in the 70s and 80s. One woman caught his eye sitting on the porch of a crack house. There was a “hippy”-looking white girl hitching lifts outside a strip club, a trans woman who called herself Marianne and was still only in her teens. Some were sex workers, or addicts easily drawn into petty crime: women living transient lives, who might not be immediately missed or looked for too urgently, and whose deaths might be shrugged off by the authorities as nothing out of the ordinary because something like this was always half expected to happen. Several were written off as overdoses or accidents, even in the most preposterous circumstances. Martha Cunningham was found in the woods in Tennessee, bruised and naked from the waist down with some her jewellery missing, yet still deemed to have died from natural causes.
That was in 1975, and it is comforting to think such things could never happen now, that investigations are so much more sensitive and sophisticated, information so much more routinely shared between different forces, that a suspicious pattern would quickly be identified.
But there have been too many uncomfortable British echoes of this case to be sure, and not only in murder investigations. Abusers at the heart of gang grooming scandals got away with it for so long by preying on the “right” girls: those who were troubled or damaged and who didn’t initially come across as vulnerable, the runaways and the misfits who confused affection with abuse. The serial killer Stephen Port took the lives of four gay men in east London between 2014 and 2015 without initially arousing suspicion because police put the deaths down to overdoses of GHB, the so-called “chemsex drug” often taken at parties, failing to realise Port had been spiking his victims’ drinks.
Rapists may more easily evade prosecution if they target women they don’t expect to make credible witnesses. Predators live in the cracks in the system, claiming victims whose lifestyles are judged risky or unsympathetic. Solving crimes like this isn’t just a matter of good investigative technique, but of subconscious assumptions and recognised humanity.
In her book The Five, telling the story of Jack the Ripper’s victims, the social historian Hallie Rubenhold focuses not on the grisly moment of their deaths but on their unexamined lives. In her hands they are not mutilated corpses, but flesh and blood women pushed for various reasons – alcoholism, abandonment, grinding poverty – to the fringes of Victorian society. Justice was served, Rubenhold said, not by endlessly trying to guess the Ripper’s identity a century later but by respecting the humanity of his victims, who in their time had been painted as fallen women more or less deserving of bad ends. I thought of her book this week when the FBI published the stories of five women Little had confessed to killing, but whose descriptions could not be matched to a name despite a trawl of missing persons records and unsolved crimes.
Framed as they are in the hope of jogging someone’s memory, these accounts similarly dwell not on the way the women died but on anything their killer might remember about how they lived. One was just trying to get home to her mother in Miami when she got into his car. Another proudly pointed out her grownup son across the street. A third lived with room-mates, who asked her and Little to get them some shaving cream while they were out. In describing what connected these women to the world around them, not what set them apart from it, these stories turn victims back into people.
It’s far too little and far too late, of course. Yet like the dignified drawing of a sheet over a poor naked body, or the reading of names at a cenotaph, this last small gesture of respect may not be wholly futile. If people die whenever someone decides that these lives don’t matter – that they are too far away, too difficult to think about, too hard to see in the shadows – there is something both moving and necessary about bringing them into the light.