Little was born on June 6, 1940, in Reynolds, Georgia, then a town of 871 inhabitants, about 45 minutes from Macon. He has claimed his mother, Bessie Mae Little, was a prostitute. Records from the 1940 census list Bessie Mae as living at her grandmother’s house on Macon Street. The census listed the 16-year-old’s job as “maid.” The man Little later said was his father, 19-year-old Paul McDowell, also lived in Reynolds, near the railroad depot. Investigators believe Little’s mother may have abandoned her son as a boy. (Attempts to contact members of the McDowell family were unsuccessful.)

By his teens, Little’s paternal grandparents had moved to Northeast Ohio, to a house a handful of blocks from the U.S. Steel mill in Lorain. Little soon moved in with them, taking their last name as his own. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School, but quickly got in trouble with the law.

According to records kept at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus, Little was committed to the Boys’ Industrial School, a reformatory for teenaged boys in Lancaster, southeast of Columbus, in February 1954. He was 13. His booking card listed him under the name of his grandparents, McDowell, and said he was there for stealing. (He had stolen a bike, he later told New York.) His IQ was listed as 96. His mother’s whereabouts were “unknown.”

The boys at Lancaster spent half their days in school and the other half doing manual labor. They lived in cottages, which were overseen by older boys and segregated by race. Little was assigned to farm duty, where troublemakers were often sent. The farm crew raised animals such as chickens and cows, and vegetables including carrots, cabbages and lima beans. Boys could also take part in the drill team and Golden Gloves boxing. Students aimed to have the fewest disciplinary reports, since that could lead to early release. But by the time Little was released to his grandparents, in September 1955, he had racked up 47 reports. Most others had one or two.

In 1956, Little was arrested for burglary in Omaha, Nebraska, and served time at a youth authority. In 1957, prison records in Columbus show he broke into a Danley’s Dry Cleaners in Lorain and was sent to the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. He was paroled from Mansfield after a few years, but then sent back in October 1961 for breaking into an abandoned furniture warehouse in Elyria. Later, Little said he learned to box during his stints at Mansfield, using his then-5-foot-11-inch, 155-pound body to pummel other inmates. He was paroled from Mansfield again in December 1964. In a grainy photo taken on the day of his release, he was a gangly 24 year old. He stood uneasily in a cream-white suit with big lapels. His arms were stiff at his sides, hands bunched into almost-fists. He had grown up in prison.

In 1966, Little was arrested by Cleveland police for assault and battery. He had beaten a woman.

On his booking paperwork, he listed another woman as his wife. He listed her later too, after an arrest for stealing several designer jeans from a Higbee’s at Midway Mall in Elyria. That paperwork said they were married in Lorain in 1965 and then separated.

By the late 1960s, Little had left Cleveland for Florida. His mother, then called Bessie Mae Smith, was listed on his Mansfield paperwork at a Miami-area address. It was in Miami, in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 1971, that Little committed his first confirmed murder. He met Mary Brosley at a bar on New Year’s Eve, the Sun-Sentinel later reported. He strangled her and dumped her body in the Everglades.

Little returned to Cleveland a few months after murdering Brosley. On May 28, he was arrested for the early morning robbery of a Clark gas station in Westlake. While in prison, in September, he was charged with sodomy and aggravated assault. By December, the robbery case made Plain Dealer headlines when the state’s key witness, Little’s girlfriend, Lucy Madero, who was present at the robbery, was forgotten by police, the courts and prosecutors. They left her in the county’s decrepit 1930s-era jail off Payne Avenue for almost six months without cause.

The jail was so rundown that inmates could talk through holes in the walls and ceilings. As Little told the story later, Madero told a cellmate named Orelia Jean Dorsey that she intended to testify against Little.

Before the trial, Dorsey met Little and warned him about Madero. Dorsey was right. Madero testified against Little when the case came to trial in March 1972. But with the tip-off from Dorsey, Little was prepared. Dorsey, Little said, even testified on his behalf. Records show a jury found him not guilty.

Dorsey was, Little later said, “no beauty” and 30 years his senior. But her act of loyalty persuaded him to take up with her. Dorsey taught Little how to fence stolen goods, a skill that subsidized their life of wandering. She was his traveling companion, shoplifting expert and surrogate mother. (His grandmother, Fannie Mae McDowell, died in 1972, followed by Bessie Mae in 1973.) Dorsey remained his “old lady” until she died of a brain hemorrhage in Los Angeles in 1988.

In the years between 1957 and 1975, AP reported, Little was arrested 26 times in 11 states, a number which only climbed over time. He dodged charges both petty and felonious in his travels, including shoplifting, rape, assault, kidnapping and murder.

As they crossed from state to state, Little and Dorsey settled into a routine. Night after night, in a seedy motel or cheap apartment somewhere, Little put Dorsey to bed. Then he went out into the dark.

Nov. 11, 2018: Interrogation Room,

Wise County Detention Center.

Decatur, Texas.

Little sat waiting for the two men from Cleveland. He wore the gray-striped clothing and orange Crocs of an inmate. His wheelchair rested in a corner.

Little had been extradited to Texas from California in September 2018, where he continued talking with Holland. He had even begun to draw remarkably specific pictures of his victim’s faces. These interviews were all recorded and Palazzolo and Williamson sent word to law enforcement across the country. A select group were invited to interview him.

On Oct. 1, an email from Williamson pinged into Richard Bell’s inbox. The email to Bell, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s chief of special investigations, said Little had confessed to three possible murders in Cleveland. One had popped up in the ViCAP system. Bell and Jack Bornfeld, a prosecutor’s investigator and former Cleveland police homicide detective, got on a plane.

They came prepared. Bell carried an accordion file of notes, reports and pictures. He had even chosen his clothing specifically to put Little at ease. Little hated prosecutors. One in Los Angeles, Beth Silverman, had put Little’s victims on the witness stand and sent him to jail for life. Even mentioning the California case would throw him into a foul mood. So instead of a suit, Bell opted for jeans. Bell had also studied cars, a favorite topic of Little’s, and was prepared to talk about the Cleveland Browns, another favorite.

Bell didn’t like catering to Little, but he wanted to get a confession. “I knew that I could worry about taking showers later,” he says. Some municipalities were simply using the information Little provided to close cases. But Bell and Bornfeld had gone to Texas with the hopes of charging Little. Little, however, would only talk if spared the death penalty. Bell had a letter to that effect, which Prosecutor Mike O’Malley had reviewed.

In the interrogation room, Holland handed the letter to Little. He examined it, folded it up, put it in his shirt pocket and said, “How can I help you?”

After some talk about the Browns, about 20 minutes into the interview, they turned to the murders. Bornfeld handed a photograph across the table to Little. “Does she look familiar to you at all?” he asked.

“Yes, this is her,” said Little. He stared at the photo of Mary Joe Peyton, holding it with two hands.

“That’s her?” asked Bornfeld.

“That’s the way she looked, huh? I remember. Yup, she was heavyset, just like that gal,” said Little. “Especially in this picture.”

He met her around East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue. The area, the entrance to University Circle, had a reputation for being friendly to the sex trade at the time. Entrepreneur and self-styled black revolutionary landlord Winston Willis had assembled a complex of bars, porn theaters and nightclubs, as well as businesses of the more reputable sort, there in the 1970s. By 1984, the Cleveland Clinic was fast encroaching, but some of the old district remained.

Little said he met Mary Joe at a bar in the area. She was sitting on a stool. Little pawed at his face as he told the story, long fingernails scratching audibly against his stubble. “She saw me, and then we made a date,” Little said.

Mary Joe got into Little’s car, a black 1976 Thunderbird. She directed him to a warehouse on East 82nd Street. “When we got over there, we did our thing, and I choked her out,” said Little.

Bell and Bornfeld had their first confession. But they weren’t done. Minutes later, Bornfeld opened his portfolio, which held three of Rose’s mug shots. “Who is that, there?” Little asked, trying to peek.

“This one is later on, around 91-92. Remember some young lady you dumped …” said Bornfeld.

“In the tires?” Little asked.

“With the tires,” said Bornfeld.

“Oh that’s her?” asked Little.

“You tell us,” said Bornfeld.

Bornfeld arranged the mug shots on the table. Little picked up the one of Rose in the cartoon character shirt. “Oooooh. Ha ho,” said Little. “Oh god, yeah. That’s her.”

“What do you remember about her?” Bell asked.

Little kept staring at the photograph.

“Them eyes and that face. I believe that … talking sh--,” Little said.

“Talking sh--, huh?” Bell said.

Little laughed, but didn’t answer. He stared at the photo of Rose.

“Mmmm,” Little muttered, “Mmm, mmm.”

He had picked Rose up near East 55th Street and Central Avenue in 1991, he said. She had been smoking crack with a group of men and got into his bubble-top van. They drove to an old man’s house, where she stayed about 20 minutes, Little said, to get money for more drugs, then got back into the van. But when they pulled onto East 39th Street, Rose refused to go into the back of the van. “You’re going to kill me back there,” Little remembers her saying.

Rose fought him all the way, regaining consciousness several times. But Little was bigger, weightier, stronger. He dragged her body into a field and covered it with two large tires.