"America's Deadliest Serial Killer" (90 Victims) Is Black—Many Of His Victims Were White Women | Blog Posts

"America's Deadliest Serial Killer" (90 Victims) Is Black—Many Of His Victims Were White Women

11/21/2018

A+

This story about black serial killer Samuel Little does not use the words "black" or "white" except in reference to a victim's dress:

He claims he’s America’s deadliest serial killer with 90 victims. Police believe him.
By Kyle Swenson, Washington Post,November 20, 2018

A group of friends slashing their dirt bikes through the woods outside Saucier, Miss., found Julia Critchfield. It was January 1978. The 36-year-old mother of four was naked, her body sprawled on a roadside. She had been strangled. Her killer had draped a black dress over her frame.

Nearly 500 miles away and four years later, Rosie Hill’s body was discovered near a hog pen in Marion County, Fla. The 21-year-old was last seen four nights earlier leaving a bar with a stranger in August 1982. She also had been strangled.

Nearly 700 miles west, Melissa Thomas turned up in a church cemetery in Opelousas, La. It was January 1996. Again, strangled.

The three cases — separated by hundreds of miles and spread over three decades — each stumped local law enforcement. Eventually, the crimes slid into obscurity. The passing years chipped away at witnesses’ memories. Evidence sat in storage, or was misplaced, or swallowed up by hurricanes. Family members mourned publicly, then sank into the private ritual of grieving for the victim of an unsolved crime. Over the years, cold case detectives would try to kick loose new information. A local television station might run a story to mark a grim anniversary.

Unknown to anyone, there was an invisible thread running through each murder — and possibly many more. Authorities only learned about the link this summer, when a 78-year-old serial killer began talking in his Texas jail cell.[More]

You may wonder what color his victims were. The Washington Post doesn't want to tell you. They don't even want to tell you that Hill himself is black. I can tell you that several of them (not all) were white. Here's something I wrote a while ago:

The idea that serial killers are almost universally white is a trope in popular culture that deserves to be discredited.

At the beginning of the movie Copycat, Sigourney Weaver, playing psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson, asks all the men in her lecture audience to stand, and then tells the non-white men to sit down, leaving only white men standing—because they fit the "profile" of serial killers. (This something that professors can only do to white males.)

But this is only true because she's in a movie—movies always have white, educated, urbane, and sophisticated serial killers.

In real life, however, there are a lot of black serial killers.