Denise Christy Brothers was a 38-year-old mother of four living in Odessa, Texas. Addiction had pulled her life apart.
She drifted between her parents’ house and a motel on West Second Street. And her mother and father were raising two of her boys while they watched their daughter slip further away.
On New Year’s Day 1994, Denise vanished. Her family searched everywhere. A month later, a Coca-Cola delivery driver backing out of a lot on Van Street in West Odessa spotted something in the brush.
He thought it was a mannequin. It wasn’t. Denise had been strangled. And for the next 24 years, nobody could say who did it.
The leads dried up. The case went cold. Her father died without answers in 2012.
Her mother followed in 2015. The file sat on a shelf in Odessa collecting dust while the man who killed Denise kept moving from city to city, state to state, killing again and again.
Then a Texas Ranger named James Holland picked up that file. And what happened next didn’t just solve Denise’s murder, it exposed the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States.
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Every case on this channel went cold. Every one of them came back. To understand what happened to Denise Christy brothers, you have to understand Odessa, Texas in the early 1990s.
Odessa is an oil town. It always has been. The Peran Basin drives everything in that part of West Texas.
When oil prices are up, money flows, rigs pump, and the population swells with rough necks chasing work.
When prices drop, the town contracts, businesses close, people leave. The ones who stay are the ones who have nowhere else to go.
By the early ’90s, Odessa was grinding through another cycle. The oil bust of the mid80s had gutted the local economy and the city was still clawing its way back.
There were pockets of real poverty in West Odessa and the [music] streets around West Second were among the roughest in town.
Motel that rented by the weak. Parking lots where transactions happened in the dark. A stretch of road where people who had fallen through the cracks tended [music] to end up.
Denise Christy Brothers ended up there. She was born Denise Dorian Powell on January 19th, 1956 [music] in Ectctor County.
She grew up in Odessa. She married young, had children, and by all accounts tried to build a life in the only city she had ever known.
Her first marriage didn’t last. She married again, and that second marriage is where things started to unravel.
Her second husband introduced her to heroin. By the time the marriage fell apart in 1980, the addiction had its hooks in deep, [music] and it would never fully let go.
Over the years that followed, heroin consumed more and more of Denise’s life. She struggled to hold things together.
She had four children. Her oldest son was living in Miami. Her two younger boys, Damen and Dustin, moved in with her parents, Robert and Billy Powell, because Denise could no longer take care of them consistently.
A fourth child, Derek, [music] was placed for adoption when Denise’s situation deteriorated beyond what anyone could manage.
Robert and Billy did what grandparents in that situation do. They raised the boys. They kept the door open for Denise.
They watched their daughter drift between their home and the West Second Street Motel, caught in a cycle that was bigger than willpower or love or family could fix on its own.
Denise was not invisible to the people who knew her. She was a daughter. She was a mother.
She was someone who, beneath the weight of the addiction, still had a family that cared about her and wanted her safe.
That matters. It matters because the story of what happened to Denise is also the story of what happens when a society decides that certain people’s lives aren’t worth the same investigative resources as others.
And that calculation made over and over again across dozens of cities and decades is the reason the man who killed her was able to keep killing for so long.
On New Year’s Day 1994, Denise was reported missing. She was last seen in the parking lot of the motel near West Second Street in West County Road.
Her family started looking. They asked around. They called the police. And then they waited.
A month passed. On February 2nd, 1994, a Coca-Cola Bottling Company employee was backing his delivery truck out of a lot at 2700 Van Street in West Odessa when he noticed something lying in the brush along the edge of the property.
From a distance, it looked like a manquin someone had dumped. He got closer and realized [music] it was not.
It was Denise. She had been dead for weeks. The winter cold in West Texas had slowed decomposition, but she had clearly been there since around the time she disappeared.
She was partially clothed. When Odessa police arrived at the scene, the detectives recognized her.
Denise was known to law enforcement in the area. They did not need dental records to put a name to the body.
The autopsy confirmed what the detectives suspected. Denise Christy Brothers had been murdered. The cause of death was manual strangulation.
Her hyoid bone, the small bone in the throat that often fractures during strangulation, was broken.
Someone had wrapped their hands around her neck and squeezed until she stopped breathing, then left her in a patch of brush on the side of a road in West Odessa.
She was 38 years old, four children, a family that loved her, a life that had gone sideways in ways she never chose, starting with a drug her second husband put in front of her.
And now she was a case number, a manila folder with photos that no one wanted to look at.
An evidence that led nowhere. If stories like this one matter to you, if you believe that the victims everyone else forgot deserve to have their names spoken and their cases told properly, hit subscribe.
That is what this channel exists to do. Detective Sergeant Snow Robertson caught the case.
He was an experienced investigator with the Odessa Police Department and he knew from the beginning that this one was going to be difficult.
The crime scene gave them almost nothing. Denise’s body had been exposed to the elements for roughly a month.
Investigators preserved her hands in an attempt to recover trace evidence. Anything under her fingernails, any fibers, any fragment of DNA that might point them toward her killer.
The results came back empty. There was no usable forensic evidence on her body. The DNA testing came up blank.
The fiber analysis gave them nothing. Fingerprints were non-existent. Whatever physical evidence might have existed at the time of the murder had been destroyed by weather, time, and the open air location where she was left.
Robertson started with the people who would have known Denise’s movements. He talked to other women who worked the streets in the West Second Street area and one of them pointed him toward a man who was a regular client.
This man drove a van and the women in the area knew him by sight.
Detectives brought him in. He cooperated, consented to a full search of his vehicle and agreed to take a polygraph.
[snorts] He passed. There was nothing tying him to the murder and he was released.
Robertson and his team pursued a second suspect, Denise’s pimp. They investigated him thoroughly and came up empty.
A third man in Denise’s orbit was looked at as well. Same result. The physical evidence wasn’t there.
There were no witnesses who could place anyone with Denise on the night she disappeared.
Nobody confessed. Nothing broke open. The reality of Denise’s case was the same reality that plagued hundreds of similar cases across the country during that era.
She was a woman living on the margins. Her daily movements were unpredictable. She interacted with strangers regularly.
The people in her world were often reluctant to talk to police. And the forensic tools available in 1994 while advancing were nowhere near sophisticated enough to build a case from the scraps that were left at that crime scene.
Without a witness, without DNA, and without a suspect who didn’t have an alibi, the case stalled.
It became another folder in a filing cabinet, another name on a list of unsolved homicides in Ector County.
But before Robertson closed the file, he did one thing that would prove more important than any interview he conducted or any piece of evidence he collected.
He filled out a VCAP report. VCAP stands for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. It’s an FBI database designed to collect and analyze information about violent crimes, particularly homicides, so that patterns can be identified across jurisdictions.
The idea is simple. A detective in Odessa, Texas might not know about an unsolved strangulation in Cleveland, Ohio that matches the same method and victim profile.
But if both detectives enter their cases into VCAP, the system can flag the connection.
In 1994, VCAP was still relatively underused. Many agencies didn’t bother with it. The paperwork was time-conuming and the payoff was uncertain.
Robertson filled it out anyway. He documented the details of Denise’s murder, the strangulation method, the victim profile, the location, the circumstances.
He submitted it to the FBI and moved on. He had no way of knowing that two decades later, that single entry would become the thread that connected Denise Christy Brothers to the most prolific serial killer in American history.
>> [music] >> He had no way of knowing that his paperwork would outlast him, outlast the Powels, and outlast the silence that was about to settle over Denise’s case for the next 24 years.
Because that is what happened next. Silence. The Odessa Police Department didn’t close the case.
Officially, it remained open. But without new evidence, without a suspect, without a lead worth pursuing, there was nothing to investigate.
The file sat in a drawer. The months became years. The years became decades. And the Powell family was left to carry the weight of not knowing on their own.
Meanwhile, the losses kept compounding. In September of 2005, Denise’s son, Dustin Powell, was shot and killed outside the Jaguars Gold Club in Odessa.
He was 21 years old. The family that had already lost Denise now buried one of the boys Robert and Billy had raised.
One unsolved tragedy layered on top of another in the same city to the same family.
Robert Powell, Denise’s father, died in 2012. He was an old man by then, and he had spent the last 18 years of his life not knowing who killed his daughter or whether that person was still walking free.
Every year that passed without an answer was another year that the question hung over his family.
He took that question to his grave. Billy Powell, Denise’s mother, died in 2015. 3 years after Robert, and 3 years before the answer finally came.
She had raised Denise’s boys. She had held the family together through addiction, [music] through murder, through grief that just kept stacking.
And she died without the one thing she had been waiting for since February of 1994.
Think about that for a moment. 21 years of waiting for Robert. 21 years of picking up the phone every time it rang and wondering if this was the call.
21 years of watching the news and hoping to hear a name and then dying without ever getting it.
The file sat on the shelf for 24 years collecting dust, waiting. While Denise Christy brother’s case gathered dust in Odessa, the man who murdered her was somewhere else entirely doing the same thing to someone else.
Samuel Little was born Samuel McDow on June 7th, 1940 in Reynolds, Georgia. [music] His mother was a teenager when she had him.
She left. By Little’s own account, she had been working the streets and she wasn’t equipped to raise a child.
He was sent to live with his grandmother in Lraine, Ohio, a steel town south of Cleveland on the banks of the Black River.
Little’s childhood in Lraine was troubled from the start. [music] He was arrested for the first time at the age of 13 for stealing a bicycle.
At 15, he was picked up for burglary in Omaha, Nebraska. At 16, he broke into a furniture store in Lraine and earned a 2-year sentence in a juvenile facility.
By the time he was old enough to vote, he already had a criminal record and a pattern of behavior that would follow him for the rest of his life.
From the late 1950s onward, Little became a drifter. He moved from city to city across the United States, sleeping in shelters, in cars, in motel, wherever he ended up.
He stole to survive. He drank heavily. He used drugs. And he never stayed in one place long enough for anyone to track him.
Little was a former amateur boxer. He was strong. He knew how to throw a punch.
And he knew how to use his hands. Somewhere along the way, he developed a method of killing that was almost perfectly designed to go undetected.
He would find a woman, usually someone struggling with addiction, someone working the streets, someone without a fixed address.
He would incapacitate her with a blow, a punch hard enough to stun or knock unconscious.
Then he would strangle her with his bare hands. There was never a weapon involved, never a knife wound or a bullet hole or ligature marks from a cord.
Just his hands around a woman’s throat until she stopped breathing. The absence of any weapon was the key to his invisibility.
When a woman was found dead without visible injuries that screamed homicide, the cause of death often came down to the judgment of a medical examiner.
And in underfunded counties across the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, many of those medical examiners were overworked, underresourced, and dealing with case loads that didn’t allow for extensive investigation of every death.
Strangulation doesn’t always leave obvious marks on the outside. It depends on the method, the force, the duration, the condition of the victim’s body when it’s found.
A fractured hyoid bone like the one found in Denise’s autopsy is a strong indicator of homicide.
But not every medical examiner checked for it. Not every jurisdiction had a forensic pathologist on staff.
In some counties, the person signing the death certificate was a coroner with no medical training at all.
An elected official whose qualifications had nothing to do with forensic science. A woman found dead with no stab wounds and no gunshot wounds.
In a neighborhood where overdoses were common, where the deceased had a known drug history, overdose, accident.
Natural causes undetermined. The death certificate was signed. The body was buried or cremated. The case was closed before it ever opened and nobody investigated further because nobody suspected there was anything to investigate.
This is how a serial killer hides in plain sight. Not by being invisible, but by choosing victims whose deaths don’t trigger the investigative machinery that would [music] catch him.
Little understood this. He exploited it deliberately. He chose victims who he believed no one would look for.
Women in the grip of addiction, women working the streets, women experiencing homelessness, women of color in communities where missing person’s cases and unsolved deaths rarely generated media coverage or sustained police attention.
He later told investigators that he would return to the same cities and find new victims, treating the cycle as routine.
His arrest record during those decades was staggering in its own way. Over 25 arrests across 11 states for shoplifting, fraud, assault, armed robbery, driving under the influence, and more.
He was in and out of police stations, in and out of county jails, across the entire country.
He gave his name. He was fingerprinted. He was processed and released. Processed and released over and over again.
And twice he was actually charged with murder. In the early 1980s, Little was charged in the killing of Melinda Lri in Mississippi.
He went to trial and was acquitted. Around the same time he was charged in the death of Patricia Mounts in Florida.
Acquitted again. Two chances for the [music] system to stop him. Two murder trials, two walks out of the courthouse.
After the Florida acquitt, Little served about two and a half years for the assault and attempted strangulation of a woman in San Diego.
He got out, moved to Los Angeles, and kept killing. The scope of what he did is difficult to process.
Between 1970 and 2005, Samuel Little claims he killed 93 women across 19 states. Some of those claims have been verified, some remain pending, but the pattern was consistent.
City after city, year after year, a woman would disappear, a body would be found, the death would be mclassified, or the case would go cold, and little would move on to the next city.
Nobody connected the dots. And that wasn’t just bad luck. It was a structural failure.
Different police departments in different states working different cases in different decades with no centralized system capable of linking a strangulation in Odessa, Texas to a strangulation in Cleveland, Ohio to a strangulation in Los Angeles, California.
The jurisdictions didn’t talk to each other. The databases where they existed were incomplete and the victims themselves were people the system had already marginalized.
Every time Little was arrested for a minor offense, processed, and released, there was a potential moment where someone could have looked deeper.
A fingerprint check against an unsolved case, a conversation with a detective in another jurisdiction, a VCAP query that might have flagged a pattern.
But those moments passed. Every single time they passed, and Little walked out the door and drove to the next city.
He later told investigators something that revealed exactly how aware he was of his own advantage.
He said he chose his victims specifically because he knew no one would come looking for them.
He didn’t frame it as an accident or a coincidence. He framed it as strategy.
He understood the system, its blind spots, its priorities, its failures, and he exploited every one of them with the patience and discipline of someone who planned to keep going forever.
Samuel Little was counting on exactly that. The break, when it finally came, didn’t come from Odessa.
In 2012, nearly [music] 2,000 miles from West Texas, an LAPD detective named Mity Roberts was working cold cases in the department’s cold case special section.
Roberts was part of a team funded by a National Institute of Justice grant, [music] and her job was to take old, unsolved homicides and run whatever biological evidence remained through modern DNA databases.
She pulled the files on three unsolved strangulation deaths from the late 1980s. Audrey Nelson, a 35-year-old woman found in a dumpster in 1989.
Guadalupe Apadaka, found in an abandoned garage that same year, and Carol Alford killed in 1987.
All three were women who had been strangled in the Los Angeles area. All three cases had gone cold years earlier.
All three victims were women living on the margins. Exactly the profile that fell through the cracks of the system.
The biological evidence in these cases had been preserved. Sitting in storage for over two decades, that fact alone was significant.
In many jurisdictions, old evidence is discarded or degraded over time. These samples survived and the DNA technology that existed in 2012 was exponentially more powerful than anything that had been available when these women were killed.
Roberts ran the DNA. The results connected Nelson and Apodaka to the same unknown male profile.
Further testing linked that profile to the Carol Alford case as well. Three victims, one killer, and the DNA pointed to a man named Samuel Little.
Roberts tracked Little through a financial transaction and located him at a homeless shelter called the Wayside Christian Mission in Louisville, Kentucky.
On September 5th, 2012, Little was arrested there on an outstanding Los Angeles narcotics warrant and extradited to California.
For 2 years, Little maintained his innocence. He denied everything. On September 25th, 2014, a Los Angeles jury convicted him on three counts of first-degree murder.
The judge sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Little sat through the verdict and said nothing.
After the conviction, the LAPD shared Little’s full profile with the FBI, his DNA, his criminal history, his known movements across the country.
The file landed with the FBI’s VCAP team, and an analyst [music] named Christy Palatolo began doing something no one had ever done before.
She mapped Samuel Little’s life, every arrest, every known address, every city he had passed through against the national database of unsolved homicides.
The pattern that emerged was staggering. In city after city along the routes Little had traveled over 35 years, there were unsolved cases involving the strangulation of marginalized women.
The numbers kept growing. The geography kept expanding. Palo was not looking at a man who had killed three women in Los Angeles.
She was looking at someone who had potentially been killing across the entire country for decades.
Then she found it. A VCAP entry from 1994. An unsolved strangulation in Odessa, Texas.
A woman named Denise Christy Brothers found in brush in West Odessa. Manual strangulation, broken hyoid bone.
No forensic evidence, no suspect. The entry had been filed by an Odessa Police Department detective named Snow Robertson almost 20 years earlier.
The FBI contacted the Texas Rangers. The case was assigned to a ranger named James Holland, a cold case specialist working out of Decar, Texas.
For the first time in 24 years, someone pulled Denise Christy Brothers file off the shelf.
Robertson’s VCAP entry, the one he had filled out in 1994 as a routine piece of paperwork, had been sitting in the FBI’s database for nearly 20 years.
Nobody had looked at it. Nobody had reason to. But now cross-referenced against the profile of a man who had just been convicted of three strangulations in Los Angeles, that entry lit up like a signal fire.
The geography matched, the method matched, the victim profile matched, the timeline matched. Denise Christy Brothers had been killed by a man who was now sitting in a California prison.
And no one had known it until a cold case detective in Los Angeles ran a DNA swab through a database and an FBI analyst decided to dig deeper.
The investigation that everyone thought was over was about to become the most important cold case in American criminal history.
If you have been following along this far, you already know this story is about more than one case.
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James Holland grew up in Polo, Illinois, a small town west of Chicago. He joined the Texas Department of Public Safety as a state trooper in 1995 and worked his way up to the Texas Rangers in 2007.
Rangers are the elite investigative division in Texas law enforcement. They handle major crimes, cold cases, and public corruption investigations across the state.
Holland specialized in cold cases, and serial offenses. And over the years, he built a reputation as someone who could get confessions out of people who had refused to talk to everyone else.
The Los Angeles Times would later call him a serial killer whisperer. 60 Minutes profiled him.
But in the summer of 2018, when Holland flew to California State Prison to sit across from Samuel Little for the first time, none of that coverage existed yet.
He was just a ranger with a cold case file trying to solve a 24year-old murder from Odessa.
Holland had spent years studying how serial offenders think. He had interviewed killers before. He had closed cold cases that other investigators had given up on.
But Samuel Little was different. Little had already been convicted of three murders and sentenced to die in prison.
He had nothing to gain by talking. He had maintained his innocence through an entire trial.
He had refused to cooperate with investigators in multiple jurisdictions. Every detective who had sat across from him had walked away with nothing.
Holland knew that if he approached Little the same way everyone else had, he would get the same result.
So before he walked into that prison, he spent time studying Little. He read every interview transcript.
He reviewed the trial record. He looked at Little’s behavior patterns, his reactions, his triggers.
He was looking for the one thing that mattered to Samuel Little more than anything else.
The one lever that might get him to open up. The first interview did not go well.
Little was angry. He had been convicted of three murders in Los Angeles, [music] and in prison, he had been labeled a rapist.
That label enraged him. For the first 30 minutes, Little ranted at Holland, furious about being characterized that way, refusing to engage with anything resembling an interrogation.
Most investigators would have pushed back. They would have confronted little with evidence. They would have tried to break through the anger, with pressure, with facts, with the standard tools of a police interview room.
Holland did none of those things. Instead, he listened. And in Little’s rage, Holland identified something that no previous investigator had picked up on.
Samuel Little defined himself as a killer. That was his identity. That was how he saw himself.
And the thing that offended him most deeply was not the murder convictions. It was being called something he believed he was not.
Holland made a decision that changed the course of the investigation. He validated Little’s self-image.
He told Little that he understood, that he knew Little was a killer, not the other thing.
And that distinction, as specific and as disturbing as it sounds, was what opened the door.
Little went quiet. And then he started talking. Holland’s method was the opposite of what most people imagine when they think of a police interrogation.
There was no bright light, no good cop, bad cop routine, no table slapping, no evidence confrontation.
Holland avoided the words remorse and closure entirely because he understood that those concepts are meaningless to someone like Samuel Little.
As Holland later explained, if you start talking to a serial killer about remorse, they think you are speaking a foreign language.
They shut down immediately. You lose them. Instead, Holland built a relationship. He called little Sammy.
Little called him Jimmy. They talked about boxing. They talked about food. They talked about cities Little had visited and things Little had seen.
Holland brought Little his favorite meals, pizza, Dr. Pepper, grits. He sat across from a man who had murdered dozens of women and kept [music] his expression completely neutral, never reacting to the details, never showing shock or disgust because any emotional response from Holland would have broken the spell.
Holland described the process as the ultimate puzzle. He was playing a long game, staying one step ahead of Little without ever letting Little see it.
Every question was calculated. Every subject change was deliberate. Every silence was intentional. When Little veered into territory, Holland didn’t want to explore yet.
Holland gently redirected without Little noticing. When Little tested him with provocative details, Holland absorbed them without flinching.
The moment Holland showed a human reaction, surprise, [music] anger, disgust, the dynamic would have shifted.
Little would have gained the upper hand, and the conversation would have been over. It required a kind of emotional discipline that most people, including most law enforcement officers, are not built for.
Holland sat in a room with a man who was describing the murders of dozens of women and treated it like a conversation between colleagues.
Not because he didn’t care about the victims, but because caring in that room, in that moment, would have been the thing that stopped the confessions from coming.
And slowly, session by session, Little began to trust Holland in a way he had never trusted any other law enforcement officer.
The brother’s confession came when Little mentioned that he might have three victims in Texas.
One of them, he said, was in Odessa. Across the hall from the interview room, FBI analyst Christy Palatolo and DOJ analyst Angela Williamson were listening.
They had Denise’s case file open in front of them. As Little described the Odessa killing, they matched his account against the details in the file.
Then came the moment that locked it. Little told Holland something about the Odessa victim.
He remembered that the woman wore a denture. It was a small, specific physical detail.
Not the kind of thing that appeared in newspaper coverage, not the kind of thing that would be in any public record.
Not the kind of thing a person could guess or infer from reading about the case.
The only way to know that Denise Christy Brothers wore a denture was to have been close enough to her to see it.
Williamson checked the autopsy report. The report confirmed it. Denise wore a denture. That detail locked the confession.
[music] It was the kind of corroboration that separates a real confession from a false one.
Anyone can claim responsibility for an unsolved murder. Jailhouse confessions to famous cases happen all the time, and most [music] of them are fabricated.
But when a person provides a detail that was never made public, a detail that exists only in the case file and the memory of the killer, you know the confession is genuine.
Little had been there. He had killed Denise Christy brothers. And now for the first time in 24 years, someone could prove [music] it.
Holland needed to make sure the confession held up in court. He made a bold move.
He promised little that the death penalty would be taken off the table for the Texas case.
It was a gamble because Holland had never spoken to the Ectctor County District [music] Attorney.
He was making a promise on behalf of a prosecutor he had never met. In a jurisdiction he didn’t control based on nothing but his belief that the bigger picture justified the risk.
Holland picked up the phone and called Bobby Bland, the Ectctor County District Attorney. Bland had never heard of Holland.
He was receiving a call from a Texas Ranger in California telling him that a serial killer wanted to confess to a 24year-old murder in Odessa and that the deal required taking the death penalty off the table.
Bland could have said no. He had every reason to. [music] The death penalty was on the table for a reason.
Denise’s murder was a capital case. Agreeing to wave it meant giving up the most powerful sentencing tool the state had on the word of a ranger he had never met for a suspect he had never seen in a case he hadn’t reviewed.
But Bland understood what Holland was telling him. This was not about one case. It was about dozens, maybe more.
If Little Kept talking, families across the country would get answers they had been waiting decades for.
The cost of Bland’s cooperation was a sentencing concession. The cost of refusing was silence.
Dozens of cold cases staying cold. Dozens of families staying in the dark. Bland agreed.
He provided the written waiver. He later said that he put his faith in Holland and in the larger mission.
There was a greater good at stake. And this was one of those rare moments where a local prosecutor’s decision had national consequences.
With the deal in place, Little was transferred to the Wise County Jail in Texas.
Holland and Little sat down together for 48 consecutive days of interviews, full days, morning until evening.
And in that [music] stretch, Samuel Little confessed to roughly 65 murders. He went state by state, city by city, Jackson, Mississippi.
One, Cincinnati, Ohio. One, Phoenix, Arizona. Three, Las Vegas. One, he described locations, physical details of victims, the positions of bodies, the circumstances of each killing.
Some details were razor sharp. He could describe the color of a woman’s dress, the shape of her face, the intersection where he first saw her.
Others were hazier because little was recalling events from 20 and 30 years earlier. And even a memory as vivid as his had limits when it came to exact dates and street names.
But the overall pattern was consistent. He was not guessing. He was not inventing stories to please Holland or to earn privileges.
The details he provided were too specific, too idiosyncratic, too verifiable. When investigators checked his claims against unsolved case files in the cities he named, the matches were there.
A body found in a dumpster behind a specific building. A woman reported missing on a date that aligned with Little’s timeline.
Autopsy findings that matched his description of how the victim died. Over and over the details lined up.
Investigators also gave Little art supplies. Colored pencils and paper. And little who possessed a vivid visual memory began drawing portraits of his victims, detailed faces, some with names and dates and cities written beneath them, others depicting women whose identities remain unknown.
Over the course of the interviews, he produced roughly 50 of [music] these drawings. Each one represented a human being.
Each one represented a case that might still be open somewhere. The total when Holland and the analysts added everything up came to 93.
[music] Samuel Little confessed to killing 93 women across 19 states over a span of roughly 35 years.
And it had all started with one cold case file from Odessa, Texas. One woman named Denise Christy [music] Brothers.
One Vicap entry filed by a detective in 1994 who had no idea what it would eventually unlock.
On July 16th, 2018, an Ector County grand jury indicted Samuel Little for the murder of Denise Christy Brothers.
The charge carried the weight of 24 years of silence. In November of 2018, authorities publicly announced the indictment and for the first time revealed the scope of what little had confessed to.
[music] The story went national overnight. A man already serving life in California had admitted to killing nearly a hundred women across the country.
And the case that cracked him open was a forgotten murder in a West Texas oil town.
On December 13th, 2018, Samuel Little appeared in an Ector County courtroom in Odessa and pleaded guilty to the murder of Denise Christy Brothers.
[music] He was sentenced to life in prison. It was his fourth life sentence running concurrently with the three [music] he was already serving in California.
After the plea, Ectctor County District Attorney Bobby Bland addressed the significance of the moment.
He credited the Texas Rangers, the Odessa Police Department, the Ectctor County Sheriff’s Office, [music] the FBI, and the Department of Justice.
He framed the conviction not just as justice for Denise, but as justice for victims across the country whose cases had been connected to Little through the investigation that her case made possible.
Bland put it plainly. People all over the country had been waiting for answers, waiting for justice.
And even though that justice came late, it would not be denied. Denise’s family released a statement.
They said that not knowing what happened to their mother for over 24 years had created a void in their lives.
They said it was a shame that their grandparents, Robert and Billy Powell, did not live to see the day.
And they expressed hope that the other victim’s families would finally get the answers they [music] deserved.
Damian Brothers, Denise’s son, had been 14 years old when his mother was killed. He was the one who had been asked to identify her body.
For 24 years, he had carried the weight of not knowing who killed her or why.
He told interviewers that the family had searched everywhere for Denise before her body was found.
They had never stopped wondering. Denise is buried at Sunset Memorial Gardens in Odessa. Her headstone reads, “Beloved daughter and mother.”
For 24 years, that inscription was the only statement anyone could make about her. There had been no arrest, no trial, no name attached to what happened.
Just a stone in the ground and a family that kept waiting. Now there was a name.
There was a guilty plea. There was an answer to the question that had hung over the Powell and brothers families since February of 1994.
It wasn’t enough to undo the damage. It wasn’t enough to bring back the years that Robert and Billy Powell spent wondering.
But it was something. It was the bare minimum of what Denise deserved. And it was 24 years late and it still mattered because in cold case work, the answer always matters.
Even when it comes too late for the people who wanted it most. The courtroom in Odessa that day was not packed with national media crews.
It was not a spectacle. It was a man in a wheelchair entering a plea in a case that most of the country had never heard of.
For a victim that most of the country would never know by name. [clears throat] The significance of the moment wasn’t visible from the outside.
It was felt by the people in the room who had spent 24 years carrying a question that nobody could answer.
Now it was answered. And that answer mattered more than the sentence, more than the legal process, more than anything else that happened in that courtroom.
The answer was Samuel Little. The answer was that Denise’s death was not random and unexplainable.
It was the act of a specific person and that person had been caught and he had admitted what he did.
93 [music] Once Samuel Little started talking about Denise Christy brothers, he didn’t stop and James Holland, who understood exactly what was happening, used the brother’s confession as the catalyst to keep the conversation going.
Little had spent his entire life believing he would never be caught. FBI analyst Christy Paladolo later explained the psychology behind it.
Little was convinced that no one was keeping track of his victims. The women he targeted were people the system had already failed.
Nobody was filing reports. Nobody was pressing for investigations. Nobody was connecting a dead woman in Mississippi to a dead woman in Ohio to a dead woman in Texas.
And for 35 years, he was right. But now in a jail cell in Wise County, Texas, sitting across from a ranger who had figured out how to talk to him, Little was doing something he had never done before.
He was accounting for them, all of them. He went city by city. Jackson, Mississippi, one, Cincinnati, Ohio, one, Phoenix, Arizona.
3, Las Vegas, one. He described each killing with varying levels of detail. Some he remembered with eerie clarity, recalling the layout of a room, the clothing a woman was wearing, the intersection where he picked her up.
Others were blurriier because he was reaching back 20 or 30 years into memories he had never expected to revisit.
But the accounts were consistent. He described the same method over and over. The punch, the strangulation, the disposal.
DOJ analyst Angela Williamson, [music] who had been working the case alongside Pallet Solo, later made an observation that captured the scale of what they were dealing with.
Little himself did not know how many victims he had. He knew the states. He knew the cities.
He remembered faces, but he had never sat down and counted. It was the investigators who tallied the number.
It was Williamson and Palat Solo and Holland who added it all up as little talked.
The final count came to 93. 93 women, 19 states, roughly 35 years. Investigators gave little colored pencils and paper and he began drawing.
He produced approximately 50 portraits from [music] memory. Some of the drawings were remarkably detailed.
Faces with specific features, hairstyles, expressions. Some were annotated with names or cities [music] or approximate years.
Others depicted women little could describe but could not name. Women who decades after their deaths still had no identity attached to them.
The FBI released these drawings publicly, they posted them on the FBI’s website alongside whatever details Little had provided, location, [music] approximate year, physical description, and asked the public for help.
If anyone recognized a face, if any family realized that a woman who disappeared years ago might be one of Little’s victims, the FBI wanted to hear from them.
The drawings themselves became one of the most striking elements of the case. They were [music] not crude sketches.
Little had genuine artistic ability, and the portraits he drew captured expressions, hairstyles, and facial features with unsettling specificity.
Looking at those drawings, you are looking at the faces of real women as they were remembered by the man who killed them.
It is a deeply uncomfortable experience. But for families who had been searching for decades, those drawings were sometimes the first and only lead they had.
The FBI also released video clips of Little’s confessions, edited segments where he described [music] specific killings in specific cities.
The purpose was the same. Get the information in front of as many people as possible.
Let families see and hear the descriptions and decide for themselves whether the woman Little was describing could be someone they lost.
On October 6th, 2019, the FBI made it official. They publicly confirmed Samuel Little as the most prolific serial killer in the history of the United States.
At the time of the announcement, 50 of his 93 confessions had been verified through independent evidence.
43 were still pending confirmation. The FBI stated that they believed all 93 confessions were credible.
His confirmed victim count surpassed Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, who had been convicted of 49 murders.
It surpassed Ted Bundy. It surpassed John Wayne Gasey. And the reason he was able to kill that many people over that many years was not because he was smarter than anyone else.
It was because the system was broken in exactly the ways he needed it to be.
Underfunded medical examiner offices that didn’t have the resources to investigate every death thoroughly. Jurisdictions that operated in isolation, unable to see patterns that cross state lines.
A culture that did not treat the disappearances and deaths of marginalized women with the same urgency it would have applied to other victims.
Little didn’t invent those failures. He just walked through the gaps. And the reason his case is so significant is not just the number.
It is what the number reveals about how the country handled violence against marginalized women for decades.
Every one of those 93 confessions represents a case where a woman [music] died and the system either looked the other way, lacked the resources [music] to investigate properly, or classified the death as something it wasn’t.
That is not a story about one killer. That is a story about a hundred failures stacked on top of each other across 35 years.
In August of 2019, Little pleaded guilty via video link to four additional murders in Ohio.
Two in the Cincinnati area and two in Cleveland. That brought his total murder convictions to eight.
Other victims continued to be identified after his death. In 2021, a woman known only as Escatapa Jane Doe was identified as Clara Birdlong through genetic genealogy.
In 2023, investigators identified Ivonne P as a victim killed in Mon, Georgia in 1977, making her one of the earliest confirmed killings in Little’s timeline.
The work continued case by case, name by name, family by family. Each identification was a cold case solved.
Each one was a family that finally got an answer they had been waiting for.
And each one traced back directly or indirectly to the investigation that started with a 24year-old murder file in Odessa, Texas.
On December 30th, 2020, Samuel Little died in a hospital while in the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
He [music] was 80 years old. He had been suffering from diabetes, heart problems, and other ailments.
He had been serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He died at 4:53 in the morning.
He took whatever he hadn’t already confessed to with him. More than 700 hours of interviews over 2 years, and there were still things he never said, names he never gave, cities he passed through without offering details.
The investigation extracted more from Samuel Little than any serial killer interview in American history.
But it didn’t get everything. It couldn’t. Of his 93 confessed murders, more than 60 have now been verified through independent evidence.
But roughly half of his victims remain unidentified. They are Jane Does in FBI files.
They are faces in colored pencil drawings. They are women who vanished from cities across America decades ago and whose families may still not know what happened to them.
The FBI’s appeal is ongoing. The portraits little Drew are still posted publicly. The tip line is still active.
Investigators in jurisdictions from Florida to California are still working to match Little’s confessions to unsolved cases, even years after his death.
Every identification is another family that gets the phone call they gave up expecting. Every match is another name [music] restored.
The work is painstaking. And it happens quietly. There are no press conferences for most of these identifications.
No camera crews, just a phone call from a detective or an FBI agent to a family member who may not have heard their missing loved one’s name spoken by law enforcement in years.
Sometimes the family already suspected. Sometimes they had no idea. Sometimes the person receiving the call is a sibling in their 60s who lost a sister in their 20s and has been carrying that absence [music] for longer than most people carry anything.
Some of Little’s confessions include specific enough details that investigators can match them to known cases relatively quickly.
Others are vagger, a city, an approximate year, a physical description that could match multiple women.
In those cases, it takes genetic genealogy, dental records, old missing person’s reports, and sometimes sheer luck to connect a drawing to a name.
And even with all the tools available today, some of those connections may never be made.
Little’s memory, vivid as it was for visual details, was imperfect when it came to dates and specific locations.
He might remember a face perfectly, but place the killing in the wrong year or the wrong neighborhood.
Investigators have to work through those discrepancies one at a time, comparing his accounts against police records, morg records, and cemetery records in cities across the country.
And for every victim who is eventually identified, there may be others who never will be.
Women whose disappearances were never reported. Women who had no family looking for them. Women who slipped [music] through the same gaps in the same system that allowed little to operate for 35 years without being [music] stopped.
That is the unfinished part of this story. Not every cold case gets its resolution.
Not every family gets the phone call. Not every name is recovered. But some are.
And the reason some are is because of what happened in Odessa. Think about the chain of events.
In 1994, a detective named Snow Robertson filled out a VCAP report for an unsolved strangulation in West Texas.
It was paperwork. [music] It was one of a hundred things on his desk that week.
He had no idea whether anyone would ever look at it. Almost 20 years later, an FBI analyst named Christy Palisolo pulled that Viccap entry as part of a nationwide background investigation into a man who had just been convicted of three murders in Los Angeles.
That entry connected Denise Christy Brothers to Samuel Little. That connection brought the case to Texas Ranger James Holland.
[music] Holland walked into a California prison, identified the one psychological lever that could open Samuel Little up, and spent two years drawing out 93 confessions [music] that reshaped what the country knew about serial violence in America.
One file, one [music] entry, one detective who did the paperwork when it would have been easy not to.
That is what connected Denise to Little, Little to Holland, and Holland to 92 other families who had been living in the same silence that the Powell family endured for 24 years.
Denise Christy Brothers was not famous. She was not powerful. She did not have advocates with [music] resources or connections.
The system that should have protected her failed her when she was alive, and it nearly failed her in death.
Her case went cold because the tools [music] didn’t exist. The evidence wasn’t there and her life was one that investigators in 1994 didn’t know how to prioritize.
But her case did not stay cold. And when it finally broke open, it didn’t just give her family an answer.
It gave dozens of other families theirs. There is a headstone at Sunset Memorial Gardens in Odessa that reads, “Beloved daughter and mother.”
That is who Denise Christy Brothers was. A daughter, a mother, a woman who deserved better than what she got in life and who deserved better than 24 years of silence after her death.
She got the answer eventually. Her sons got the answer and through her case, families across 19 states got theirs.
Holland’s interview technique is now studied by law enforcement [music] agencies across the country. The way he approached little, the validation of identity, the avoidance of moral language, the patience [music] required to sit with a confessed killer for hundreds of hours without breaking character, has become a reference point for how investigators handle serial offenders.
The brother’s case also reshaped how the FBI uses VICAP. The database that Snow Robertson [music] contributed to in 1994 is now cited as a model for why every unsolved violent crime should be entered into the system, even when the case seems hopeless.
Because you never know which entry filed in which city in which decade will be the one that connects the dots.
That is what cold case redemption looks like. Not a dramatic courtroom scene, not a made for television confession, [music] just years of work by people who refused to accept that a case was closed simply because it was old, a detective who filled out the right paperwork.
An analyst who searched the right database, a ranger who asked the right questions, and a family in Odessa, Texas, who waited 24 [music] years for a name.
If you believe these stories deserve to be told, if you think the victims who were forgotten deserve to be remembered, subscribe to this channel, share this video, [music] because somewhere out there in an FBI file or a colored pencil drawing, [music] there are women who still don’t have their names back.
And the only way their families find out is if people keep paying attention.
