Carol Alford. Audrey Nelson. Guadalupe Apodaca.
Before the national maps, before the portraits and the extraordinary totals, Los Angeles investigators had three women and three unsolved homicides. Alford had been killed in 1987. Nelson and Apodaca had been killed in 1989. Their cases would become the opening through which a much larger history was exposed.
The LAPD attributed the renewed investigations to cold-case screenings and DNA testing financed through a National Institute of Justice grant. The cases had not returned to attention because Little chose to reveal them. Preserved evidence and funded reexamination had created an opening he did not control.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department's account, DNA linked the Nelson and Apodaca cases to Little through California's offender database. Detectives then had a person to locate. They did not have to wait for him to volunteer a story or provide a picture. Something outside his control had placed him within their investigation.
On September 5, 2012, Little was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, on an outstanding Los Angeles narcotics warrant. The U.S. Marshals assisted the Los Angeles detectives. He waived extradition and was returned to California in October.
The warrant matters because the event is easily flattened in retelling. He was not arrested that day on the strength of ninety-three confessions. Those confessions had not happened. Nor was the arrest itself proof of a nationwide series. It was a practical step within an investigation that still had to establish its case.
There is a temptation, knowing the ending, to treat every earlier event as if the people living through it knew the same ending. That would erase the uncertainty that made their work difficult. A suspect can be in custody while important questions remain unanswered. A DNA association can direct attention without eliminating the need to examine everything else.
On November 27, 2012, Little was connected to the Alford case as well. By January 7, 2013, the LAPD publicly announced that he had been charged in the three murders.
What had looked like three old cases could now be considered together around one man.
The women did not become interchangeable because their cases had a suspect in common. The point of connecting them was to make the investigation stronger, not to allow one woman's evidence to stand in for another's. The shared connection created a new responsibility: to understand what else in Little's history might belong to the same pattern.
He was seventy-two when the LAPD announced the charges. The history investigators needed to examine was not confined to a recent address or a short period of travel. The eventual federal account would trace encounters with law enforcement back to 1956. Little had also used the name Samuel McDowell.
An alias is useful in a mystery because it seems to promise a clean revelation: the false name falls away and the true person appears. In an investigation, identifying an alias is more often the beginning of additional work. Records created under different names still have to be understood in their proper places and times. A name is a means of connecting information, not an explanation for everything that information contains.
The same caution applied to his movements. To know that someone traveled widely is not to establish where he was on the date of a particular crime. A national theory still has to survive local questions. Who was the victim? What happened? What evidence remains? Can the suspect actually be connected to that place and time?
Those questions had now become larger than the three Los Angeles files.
Yet the opening was concrete. It was not an investigator sensing evil in an old man's face. It was not the dramatic intuition of a stranger who happened to see him on the street. The official account describes evidence preserved from unsolved cases, associations made through DNA, investigators locating him, and a return to the jurisdiction pursuing him.
The most disturbing part of the breakthrough was what it made newly possible to ask.
If three killings could be connected after more than two decades, what else might still be waiting in records kept elsewhere?
Los Angeles could investigate the cases in front of it. To examine the wider question, the detectives needed help that could reach beyond those files.
In 2013, they notified the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.