CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
AUGUST 2018
California State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located in the city of Lancaster, roughly eighty miles northeast of the palm tree–lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it might as well be eighty million. The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where over three thousand men live sandwiched between a sunbaked terrain inhospitable to much more than scrub brush and a wide, unforgiving sky. In the early morning hours, when dawn lights up the desert in dusty shades of rose, there’s something almost peaceful about the way the outside world recedes quickly, beyond the fifteen-feet-high, maximum-security-specification mesh fencing. In the flat heat of midday, when temperatures regularly reach one hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the desert winds blow so hot and wild they could sear the eyelashes off your face, the landscape holds a biblical feeling of punishment.
The prison campus is strewn with identical two-story tan-colored buildings that blend into the expanse of sand and rocks beneath them. The only flashes of color are the garish turquoise doors with industrial grade locks and matching windows the width of butter knives. On the morning of August 8, 2018, after waiting for seven hours for my number to come up, I finally faced its iron security gates, but I kept setting off the metal detector. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten my aunt’s advice. I wound up having to pry the underwire out of my bra with my teeth, because there were no sharp objects available. The prison wives carefully coiffing their children’s hair in the bathroom beside me cheered me on.
“You go, girl. Gnaw that shit out. You got this.”
It would be my first time inside a men’s maximum-security prison. It would most certainly be my first time talking to a serial killer that I was aware of. I was as prepared as I could be, but you always forget something.
Once I made it through the metal detectors, I waited with a group of ten women and children, as a tall iron gate opened. We stepped into the cage that formed the liminal space between freedom and its opposite. I was an impostor. These people were there to visit loved ones, because they had no other choice. I was there to visit a monster, because I wanted a story no one else had.
The gate behind us whirred and clanked closed. We stepped out onto the prison campus. I walked on shaky legs toward B Block, my knees actually knocking together. Such a cliché. But the body is the body, and fear is unoriginal.
I carried a clear plastic baggie full of quarters and a key fob. My friend Sasha had once done time in the same prison, and I’d called him for tips.
“It’s impossible to get an appointment,” he told me. “You have to show up at six in the morning and wait in a line of cars outside the gate. They don’t start letting you in until nine thirty, but if you line up later than six, you’ll never see him. Bring quarters. You’re not cool if your visitor doesn’t bring quarters for the vending machines.”
Criminal psychology had fascinated me since my first fix, Manson—the gateway drug for many a true crime buff. The outrageous crimes documented in Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s seminal true crime classic Helter Skelter signaled the end of the sixties. Manson and his family upended the burgeoning ethos of tuning in and dropping out. How can you twist peace and love into the evisceration of innocent human beings?
In the same way, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood documented not just the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, but also the end of the fifties white-bread meritocracy of the American dream. Surely if you were a hardworking, virtuous, cherry pie–making, white, midwestern nuclear family, you would thrive and succeed. You can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough! Life is a system of just deserts. Isn’t it?
No, it isn’t. For the Clutters, it wasn’t. For the LaBiancas, it wasn’t. What do you do with that lesson?
Manson himself was overrated, a mediocre mind at best. At any senior prom, stoned quarterbacks spout deeper platitudes. Manson got press, superfans, fawning groupies for his theatrics, his emptiness, and his “girls.”
The gravitational pull of these famous multiple murders could make you give up on not just ideals but humanity in general. How can you still view with anything but cynicism the human animal, capable of such casual cruelty? Or it could be a puzzle. It could be a career maker. I had a voracious and reportedly infuriating level of curiosity, plus a strong stomach for both gore and narcissism. I had a chance.
I approached what I hoped was B Block, as the hot wind lashed my hair to my face and sheriff’s deputies passed by me in SWAT vests. Some smiled and said hi or remarked on the weather.
I handed the guard my ID.
“You here to see Little?” he asked. “How you know Little?”
“He’s a friend,” I said. I wasn’t sure how this thing worked, but I knew enough to not say I was a journalist.
“A friend? My ass,” the guard said cheerfully as he put an enormous brass key into an enormous brass lock and admitted me to a cinder-block room full of families huddled together at plastic tables. Along one wall was a play area with Astroturf and a few tubs of oversized LEGOs. Next to the play area was a gray seamless background where you could get your picture taken with your loved one for a two-dollar token.
I used the quarters to buy Funyuns, a Coca-Cola, and some Little Debbie Honey Buns. I put them on the table and tried to figure out where to train my eyes. At the door? At the red line behind which the inmates stood until given permission to sit?
Instead, Little wheeled up on me from behind and startled me.
“Hello, Sam.”
Sam was wheelchair-bound, suffering from diabetes and a heart condition. He wore standard prison-issue shapeless denim pants, a blue cotton T-shirt with CDC printed on the back in block lettering, and a pair of orthopedic white sneakers due to a toe amputation. The tail end of a baby-pink heart surgery scar the size of an earthworm peeked out from the top of his T-shirt. He sported a thinning pelt of kinky white hair and a beard to match. Age spots discolored his skin, giving him the appearance of a molting lizard. At first glance, he appeared a frail and pitiable grandpa, but you could see the evidence of the man he once was: a six-foot-one powerhouse with catcher’s mitts for hands.
Gravity had done its inevitable work, dragging his jowls into lazy folds around his jaw, but you could still make out the strong cheekbones, the handsome face, the glittering pale-blue eyes that once put his victims at ease. The sound of children, chatter, and vending machines bounced off the cinder blocks.
Sam wagged a finger at me. “You!” he said. “You my angel come to visit me from heaven. God knew I was lonely and he sent me you. You want a story for your book? Oooooeeeee, do I have a story.”
I came prepared to do battle with a dragon, and instead I faced a lonely old man over a bag of Funyuns. Sam spoke in a soft patois, cobbled together from what I would soon learn were his Georgia origins and his years growing up in the Ohio steel town of Lorain. I leaned in, then leaned in some more, until I was approximately a foot from the face of the man I knew had strangled and brutalized at least three women and who knew how many more. My eye twitched.
Sam and I talked that first day about our childhoods, about our first loves, about his family tree, which includes (it really does) both Malcolm X and Little Richard. We talked about my kids. We talked about baseball, boxing, and his long-term girlfriend, Jean, who had been a master shoplifter. We talked about travel. We talked about art. He was good at only two things in his life he told me: art and boxing. Later he’d admit to a third at which he was far better.
Sam had learned to draw in the Ohio State Reformatory as a young man, and it was still his preferred pastime.
“What do you like to draw?”
“Oh, girls. I mean women. I mean ladies,” he said, searching for the term I’d find least offensive.
Was the answer “victims”?
“I can draw anything. Paint, pencils, whatever I can get. I can do all the light and dark. Just like I see you right now.”
What was he seeing? What had he seen in them? How do you find someone simultaneously worthy of the kind of deep attention it takes to render them and also disposable?
“I live in my mind now. With my babies. In my drawings. Not with these robots in here. The only things I was ever good at was fighting and drawing.”
We talked about his hero, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the prizefighting career Sam had almost had. He was once a middleweight champion in the prison boxing ring who’d been called “mad” for his speed and fury. The Mad Daddy. The Mad Machine. The Machine Gun.
I sat with him for hours that first day and returned the next, committed to it being my last go at him. If I couldn’t make a dent in his bullshit, it wasn’t worth the gas mileage.
After about six hours total, he lingered on a story about a woman in Florida. “I want a TV,” he said.
“I want things too.”
His eyes went dead flat. I had almost forgotten to be afraid of him. “You going to buy me a TV?”
“I don’t know, Sam. Am I?”
He laughed and drummed his half-inch-long, dirty yellow fingernails on the table. “Okay, okay, you got me! What do you want to hear about for your story, little miss? You want to hear about the first one?”
I dug my toes into my shoes. Was this really going to happen? I don’t know why it shocked me. We’re all dying to spill our secrets. It just takes figuring out what will nudge us over the edge into free fall.
“She was a big ol’ blond. Round about turn of the new year, 1969 to 1970. Miami. Coconut Grove. You know Coconut Grove? Nah, you wouldn’t know Coconut Grove. She was a ho”—he corrected himself—“a prostitute. She was sitting at a restaurant booth, red leather, real nice. She crossed them big legs in her fishnet stockings and touched her neck. That was my sign from God.”
With that, he began an incantation of murders. He remembered eighty-six, give or take a couple. With astonishing detail and near photographic recall, he took me back through his past, when the road was his home and the back alleys and underbelly bars of city after city across the country offered a feast of low-hanging fruit, women whose eyes were half-dead already, women who Sam believed in his heart had only been waiting for him to show up and finish the job. Back to better times, when Sam believed God himself gently placed neck after willing neck, still pulsing with life, into his hungry hands. He imagined himself as some kind of angel of mercy, divinely commissioned to euthanize.
I put every word in my mind’s lockbox and stayed on track. If I lost the thread, I’d lose control of the interview. Sentiment, horror, shock: these were things that could wait. What could not wait was the confession: a confession I could do nothing but mentally record while I robotically responded, because this confession was fucking nuts. Eighty-four? Eighty-six? Could he have possibly killed that many women?
My subconscious did the calculus while I looked the man in the face. I kept my legs crossed at the ankles, knees pressed so tight they could hold an aspirin, hands clasped in my lap—when I didn’t have a friendly, encouraging palm on his arm. I thank my mother for my Emily Post posture. I used to judge it until I realized all that clenching effort can help you keep a calm face.
“I only ever told this to one other person in my life. Texas Ranger Jimmy Holland. Him and you. You’re my only friends,” said Sam.
Who? Was Sam delusional? Was that a ridiculous question?
Had I wasted my time on a killer with imaginary friends? A Texas Ranger? Who was next, Buzz Lightyear?
It turned out Texas Ranger James (Jim to his colleagues, Jimmy to his mom) B. Holland, Company B, was real indeed. Passionate about cold cases and famous for eliciting confessions from psychopaths, this cowboy had found what he called a Samuel Little Texas nexus—Denise Christie Brothers—a 1991 Texas murder case likely committed by Samuel Little. It was enough to dig into the case. Like Detective Roberts, he also suspected the man of many more murders across the country and was confident that with the support of the FBI and the DOJ, he’d crack him. He was right.
Sam told me about a day, just months before, on May 17, 2018, in a windowless interview room off a hallway buried deep in B Block, when he sat across from a real live cowboy. A black hat faced a white hat, deciding whether to hold or fold.
It settled in slowly that I’d unwittingly inserted myself into an open federal investigation.
In the months to come, I continued my face-to-face interviews with Sam. I took any relevant details of unsolved crimes to the cops.
During this same time, Holland elicited his mind-boggling series of official confessions and arranged interviews with law enforcement from jurisdictions across the country. He would later describe me as a headache.
I insisted on the essential part played by a free press in any democracy.
Just let the law do their job, young lady.
In Texas?
He sent a rare eye-roll emoji.
I responded, You and me and the devil make three.
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