A 74-year-old man was convicted Tuesday of three counts of first-degree murder for killing three women in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s.
Samuel Little is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole when he returns to court Sept. 25. Jurors deliberated for about two hours before reaching the verdict.
The panel also found true the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders. Prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty for Little.
Little was convicted for the killings of:
— Carol Alford, 41, whose body was found July 13, 1987, in an alley off East 27th Street;
— Audrey Nelson, 35, whose body was discovered in a dumpster behind East Seventh Street on Aug. 14, 1989; and
— Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, whose body was found inside a South Los Angeles commercial garage on Sept. 3, 1989.
Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said during the trial that Little was “a sexual predator” who followed a distinct pattern in his violent assaults.
“Each of these victims was murdered exactly the same way,” Silverman told the jury.
She showed photos of the victims, all found wearing only a shirt and with drag marks that indicated the women had been killed elsewhere and later moved.
Two victims were severely beaten prior to death and were strangled so violently that the hyoid bone in their necks was fractured, according to the prosecutor.
All three women tested positive for cocaine during autopsies.
“These were victims who were obviously addicted to cocaine, who would do anything … to get their hands on that,” Silverman told the jury panel. “There was a crack cocaine rage going on in South L.A. in those days.”
Semen and other DNA from the victims’ clothing matched Little’s DNA profile so closely that, for at least two pieces of evidence, the chance of a random match was one in 450 quintillion, Silverman told jurors.
Little was arrested in Louisville, KY., in 2012 on an unrelated narcotics charge out of Los Angeles and extradited to California, where he was charged with the murders.
Little’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Michael Pentz, questioned the evidence, and challenged the prosecutor’s insistence that DNA proved his client’s guilt.
Pentz told jurors that the DNA results would show “that Mr. Little had nothing to do with the homicides.”
