'He draws sketches of 93 women he murdered': US killer's lifetime backed by memory

Agencies
October 9, 2019

Washington, Oct 9: Samuel Little's depravity is matched only by his prodigious memory.

Little, a California inmate considered by the FBI to be the most prolific serial killer in US history, has confessed to 93 slayings committed across the country between 1970 and 2005, recounting the crimes with astonishing, near-photographic detail. He even drew colour portraits of dozens of the women he strangled.

His case, featured on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, has offered a frightening look inside the mind of a killer and the wrongheaded assumptions on the part of law enforcement that enabled him to escape justice for so long.

Little, who is 79 and has been behind bars since 2012 for several killings, preyed on prostitutes, drug addicts and other women on the margins, many of them black like Little himself, and many of the deaths were originally deemed overdoses or attributed to accidental or undetermined causes. Some bodies were never found.

In a case out of Tennessee, for example, Martha Cunningham's body was found bruised and nude from the waist down in the woods in 1975, her pantyhose and girdle bunched around her knees. Detectives initially attributed her death to natural causes; the cause was later classified "unknown."

But in 48 straight days of interviews with Texas Ranger James Holland, who kept the killer supplied with pizza and Dr Pepper, Little offered a wealth of details that were used to corroborate his accounts one by one.

One woman wore dentures, for example. Another was killed near a set of arches in Miami. There was a 5-foot-6 woman with brown skin in Florida in the mid-1980s. In 1984 in Kentucky, there was a 25-year-old woman outside a strip club with short blond hair, blue eyes and a "hippie" look.

And in a case from Florida in the 1970s, Little remembered the flowered sundress and necklace the victim wore, and how he played with it before he choked her to death. Fort Myers, Florida, homicide detective Mali Langton, who was among a number of investigators from other jurisdictions who talked to Little in prison as well, said she was astonished by his memory.

"I couldn't tell you who I bought a burger from yesterday," she said.

Noticing that Little liked to draw, Holland gave him art supplies behind bars. Little went on to produce more than 30 portraits of his victims that proved remarkably helpful.

Serial killers are often world-class liars and manipulators who crave notoriety and exaggerate or confess to crimes they didn't commit, according to criminal justice experts. But Little stands apart.

Law enforcement authorities in several states have verified 50 of his confessions so far and are scrambling to link dozens more cold cases to his recollections.

"I would be suspicious of believing him, except it was actually corroborated," said Marina Sorochinski, a professor of criminal justice at Mercy College in New York. As Holland said on "60 Minutes": "Nothing he's ever said has been proven to be wrong or false. We've been able to prove up almost everything he said."

All told, Little is believed responsible for more killings than Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer combined.

Little's modus operandi made it hard to link him to victims. The former boxer often delivered a knockout punch to women, authorities said, then strangled them while masturbating. He would dump their bodies and soon after leave town.

He claimed to have killed in 19 states. The biggest concentrations of killings were in Florida and California, he said, with about 20 in Los Angeles alone.

He was repeatedly arrested for various offenses over the decades, including murder and assault, and served time for some things, but escaped prosecution for his most serious crimes. He was finally caught when a Kentucky arrest in 2012 on drug charges led authorities to link his DNA to three slayings in California.

"It makes sense that he could have gotten away with so many" for so long, Sorochinski said.

Crimes scattered across several states can lead to communication gaps between jurisdictions and a failure to recognize that a single murder is the work of a serial killer. Also, because the women were mostly living on the dangerous edges of society, relatives may not have realized they were gone and reported them missing to police, Sorochinski said.

Langton said that Little flirted, laughed and was "giddy" as he recounted a particular slaying.

In a 2018 prison interview with New York magazine's website The Cut, he was asked how it felt to kill the women. He replied: "Oooeee, it felt like heaven. Felt like being in bed with Marilyn Mon-roe!"

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News Network
January 8,2020

Sydney, Jan 8:  Authorities in Australia will begin five-day campaign to kill thousands of camels in the country as they drink too much water amid the wildfires.  The government will send helicopters to kill up to 10,000 camels in a five-day campaign starting Wednesday, The Hill reported citing The Australian.

Marita Baker, an Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) (large, sparsely-populated local government area for Aboriginal Australians) executive board member, said that the camels were causing problems in her community of Kanypi.

"We have been stuck in stinking hot and uncomfortable conditions, feeling unwell, because the camels are coming in and knocking down fences, getting in around the houses and trying to get to water through air conditioners,'' she said.

The planned killing of the camels comes at a time the country is ravaged by wildfires since November. The disaster has killed more than a dozen people and caused the displacement or deaths of 480 million animals, according to University of Sydney researchers.

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Agencies
January 11,2020

London, Jan 11: Former cricketer Sachin Tendulkar's famous lap around the Wankhede Stadium after the World Cup 2011 win has been nominated in Laureas's list for the most inspiring sporting event in the last twenty years.

The moment featuring Tendulkar has been described as "Carried on the shoulders by a nation".

On his sixth attempt at the World Cup and with India not having won the competition since 1983, Tendulkar finally became a part of the team that lifted the coveted trophy. Carried on the shoulders of the Indian team, he made a lap of honour, shedding tears of joy after the victory was sealed in his home city.

The 2011 World Cup was also the first time, in which a host nation ended up winning the trophy.

Apart from Tendulkar, England's Andrew Flintoff is the only other cricketer to feature in the list. In 2005, England managed to defeat Australia in an Ashes Test, but Flintoff chose to first shake hands with Brett Lee rather than celebrate with his side.

Matthias Steiner (weightlifting), Natalie du Toit (swimming), Sky Brown (skateboarding), Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee (triathlon), Xia Boyu (mountaineering) have been nominated in the list.

Female tennis stars also feature in the list for coming up with an equal play, equal pay campaign. After pressure from Venus Williams and others, Wimbledon announced that female tennis players would receive prize money equal to the men's.

German international footballer Miroslav Klose was playing for Lazio in Italy's Serie A in 2012 against Napoli when he rose for a ball in the early moments of the game.

The ball came spiraling off his hand and skirted into the back of the net and a goal was awarded. While most players would carry on as if nothing had happened, Klose was honest with the referee and admitted that he handled the ball.

As a result, he also finds a place on the list.

The Laureus Sporting Moment Award celebrates the moments where the sport has unified people in the most extraordinary way.

This campaign has shortlisted 20 sporting stories from the last 20 years that have left their mark on the world.

The winner will be decided on the basis of public voting. It has already started, and the final date to cast the vote is February 16.

Finally, the result will be declared on February 17.
With three knock-out rounds, the top-20 moments will be whittled down to ten then five, with the top-five moments going head-to-head.

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Agencies
May 31,2020

Minneapolis, May 31: The full Minnesota National Guard was activated for the first time since World War Two after four nights of civil unrest that has spread to other U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd, a black man shown on video gasping for breath as a white Minneapolis policeman knelt on his neck.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said the deployment was necessary because outside agitators were using protests over Monday’s death of George Floyd to sow chaos and that he expected Saturday night’s demonstrations to be the fiercest so far.

From Minneapolis to several other major cities including New York, Atlanta and Washington, protesters clashed with police late on Friday in a rising tide of anger over the treatment of minorities by law enforcement.

“We are under assault,” Walz, a first-term governor elected from Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, told a briefing on Saturday. “Order needs to be restored. ... We will use our full strength of goodness and righteousness to make sure this ends.”

He said he believed a “tightly controlled” group of outsiders, including white supremacists and drug cartel members, were instigating some of the violence in Minnesota’s largest city, but he did not give specific evidence of this when asked by reporters.

As many as 80% of those arrested were from outside the state, Walz said. But detention records show just eight non-Minnesota residents have been booked into the Hennepin County Jail since Tuesday, and it was unclear whether all of them were arrested in connection with the Minneapolis unrest.

The Republican Trump administration suggested civil disturbances were being orchestrated from the political left.

“In many places, it appears the violence is planned, organized and driven by anarchic and left extremist groups - far-left extremist groups ... many of whom travel from outside the state to promote violence,” U.S. Attorney William Barr said in a statement.

In an extraordinary move, the Pentagon said it put military units on a four-hour alert to be ready if requested by Walz to help keep the peace.

Activists staged another round of protests on Saturday in at least a dozen major U.S. cities coast to coast, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, New York and Atlanta.

In the nation’s capital, hundreds of demonstrators assembled near the Justice Department headquarters, then marched toward the U.S. Capitol, chanting, “Black lives matter,” and “I can’t breathe,” a rallying cry echoing Floyd’s dying words.

Many later ended up near the White House, where they faced off with shield-carrying police, some mounted on horseback.

The streets of Minneapolis were largely quiet during daylight on Saturday, though several National Guard armoured personnel carriers were seen rolling through town.

On Friday, in defiance of a newly imposed curfew, Minneapolis protesters took to the streets for a fourth night - albeit in smaller numbers than before - despite the announcement hours earlier of murder charges filed against Derek Chauvin, the policeman seen in video footage kneeling on Floyd’s neck.

Three other officers fired from the police department with Chauvin on Tuesday are also under criminal investigation in the case, prosecutors said.

The video of Floyd’s arrest - captured by an onlooker’s cellphone as he repeatedly groaned, “please, I can’t breathe” before becoming motionless - triggered an outpouring of rage that civil rights activists said has long simmered in Minneapolis and cities across the country over persistent racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system.

‘PAINS ME SO MUCH’

The mood was sombre on Saturday in the Minneapolis neighbourhood of Lyndale, where dozens of people surveyed the damage while sweeping up broken glass and debris.

“It pains me so much,” said Luke Kallstrom, 27, a financial analyst, standing in the threshold of a fire-gutted post office. “This does not honour the man who was wrongfully taken away from us.”

Some of Friday’s most chaotic scenes were in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, where police armed with batons and pepper spray made more than 200 arrests in sometimes violent clashes. Several officers were injured, police said.

In Washington, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that if protesters who gathered the night before in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, had breached the fence, “they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.”

CHAOS IN ATLANTA

In Atlanta, Bernice King, the youngest daughter of slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., urged people to go home on Friday night after more than 1,000 protesters marched to the state capitol and blocked traffic on an interstate highway.

The demonstration turned violent at points. Fires burned near the CNN Center, the network’s headquarters, and windows were smashed at its lobby. Several vehicles were torched, including at least one police car.

Rapper Killer Mike, in an impassioned speech flanked by the city’s mayor and police chief, also implored angry residents to stay indoors and to mobilize to win at the ballot box.

“But it is not time to burn down your own home.”

Floyd, a Houston native who had worked security for nightclubs, was arrested on suspicion of trying to pass counterfeit money at a store to buy cigarettes on Monday evening. Police said he was unarmed. An employee who called for help had told a police dispatcher that the suspect appeared to be intoxicated.

In a striking coincidence, Floyd and Chauvin had both worked security at the same Latin nightclub in Minneapolis, though it was unlikely they ever interacted, former owner Maya Santamaria, who sold the El Nuevo Rodeo club in January, told Reuters.

Santamaria said Floyd worked inside the club on certain nights, supporting other staff with security. She said Chauvin, who worked outside the club as an off-duty cop for 16 years, had a reputation for roughing up customers, but she considered him responsible and a friend.

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