The first thing Texas Ranger Jim Holland noticed when he stepped into a room with serial killer Sam Little was the size of his hands.

‘They looked like shovels,’ he told the Daily Mail, ‘The first thing that really struck me about him physically was these paws. I mean, he just had these massive hands and I was thinking, this guy could definitely strangle someone with no issues.’

Little, a former boxer and drifter, had already been convicted of three murders in California and was in jail there, but had never admitted responsibility for anything. Holland, a veteran interrogator dubbed the ‘serial killer whisperer,’ suspected there could be several more victims. 

The killer initially ranted angrily at him, claiming he had been ‘railroaded’. But then, over the course of 700 hours of interviews, he confessed to an astonishing 93 murders, around 60 of which have since been confirmed, and the FBI says it has little reason to doubt the others.

It makes Little the most prolific serial killer in US history. His victims were mostly prostitutes he strangled as he roamed the country between 1970 and 2005. 

The number of victims eclipses those of Green River killer Gary Ridgway (49), John Wayne Gacy (33) and Ted Bundy (36).

Holland is now revealing the disturbing secrets of the interview room in a new show – Killer Confessions: Case Files of a Texas Ranger – which airs on Investigation Discovery on Tuesdays at 10.00pm ET/9.00pm CT.

His most infamous case began in December 2017 when he was teaching interrogation techniques at a seminar in South Florida.

He was approached by Octavio Aguero, a Florida homicide investigator, who believed Little, who was already in jail in California, could be responsible for a murder he was investigating in the Sunshine State.

Ultimately, it was found Little did not carry out that killing, but the encounter set Holland on his trail.

He was able to establish, via minor arrest records and traffic tickets, that Little had been in his own home state of Texas.

Through the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) system, which tracks and correlates murders, he found potential links to unsolved murders in Texas around the same time.

In May, 2018, Holland went to interview Little in jail in Lancaster, California, entering the room in his trademark Stetson and alligator cowboy boots.

‘I think when I got in the room what really floored me, was his size. He was really a pretty big guy. He had this square jaw. He looked kind of like this Mike Tyson type boxer,’ he said.

‘The second I walked in the room, he was so aggressive, ugly, hateful. He was just miserable, just twisting off on me for 10 minutes. The first part I was literally just trying to stay in that room for the first two minutes, and then the first three minutes, and then the first five minutes.

‘And then it’s him talking about his misery, why he hates it there and everything else. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t really think he would be as ugly as he was. It was just this purge, like a guy who’s been locked up and now someone said how’s your day going, and he just was off. I mean, he was having a pretty s****y day I guess.’

‘The epitome of evil’: Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders

An FBI composite shows 30 drawings Samuel Little made of his victims

Texas Ranger Jim Holland won Little’s trust and got him to confess

After Little finished talking about his hatred of law enforcement, Holland showed him his badge and explained how it was fashioned from a Mexican Cinco Peso coin, and his cowboy hat.

It was the first sign of a connection as Little said: ‘Oh, Texas Ranger.’

Holland, a highly experienced interrogator, also had an ace up his sleeve.

He had been briefed by Mitzi Roberts, the LAPD homicide detective who had nailed Little for the first three murders in 2014.

Little had developed a particular hatred for Roberts, who sat through his trial, and it was ammunition for Holland.

‘I asked her (Roberts), do you have any issues if I toss you under the bus, and she’s like, no, throw away. Obviously she’s a professional, she green lighted, and I went for it because that’s where Little went,’ he said.

‘It was really about finding some type of common ground where I could agree with him (Little) on something, as opposed to being the enemy. You know, we both like cherry pie, we both like tacos, and we both don’t like Mitzi Roberts.

‘You can’t predict what a psychopath or sociopath is going to want. People say, I understand Ted Bundy or whoever else because I’m an expert. No, they don’t, they’re completely and totally full of s*** because no one really understands these people. You can’t comprehend their brain, but what you can do is throw stuff out there and see where it lands.’

One thing that landed with Little was the issue of food. He really hated the food in the prison he was in.

‘I was like, you know, man, you should come to Texas and try the food there,’ said Holland. ‘I told him the prison food in Texas is really good, you know, tacos, we got really, really good barbecue.’

It was an approach similar to the plot of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ in which Hannibal Lecter seeks a cell with a view in return for revealing information.

Samuel Little in 1975 around the time he started strangling women

A drawing the serial killer made of one of his victims

Holland also appealed to Little’s ego.

‘I baited him into wanting to share this with someone, someone like me, who has an expertise in murders and craziness and sickness and deprived people, and I think that was kind of exciting to him,’ he said.

‘Little never admitted culpability to anything before this so he’s got the perfect secret. And we talked about secrets for a little bit, and what good is a secret if you can’t tell anyone.’

The first case Little confessed to, in gruesome detail, was Denise Brothers, a woman who had been found strangled in Texas in 1994.

‘After he’s done telling me about the murder, and he really gets into it, he just sits there and stares at me,’ said Holland.

‘l kept the poker face. What he did is horrible, it’s ugly, but you have to sit there and you have to turn it off to a certain degree. And he didn’t see the negative reaction from me that he expected to see.

‘If I would have said anything, or he would have read anything in my eyes, then we would have been done and he would have recanted the confession.

‘He never saw disgust, anger, any of those things, in my eyes. He just saw someone that he could talk to about it.’

A key was not talking to Little about remorse.

Holland said: ‘He would have picked me up and bounced me out of the room if I would have said anything about him not being able to sleep at night, or feeling bad about what he did, or remorse, or anything like that.

‘I mean, that’s me speaking Martian. He didn’t speak Martian. I don’t even know that he understood what remorse is.’

Little sometimes wrote details of names and places on the drawings he produced from memory

Little being wheeled out of court in Los Angeles after being convicted of three murders in 2014

He said Little appeared to think that his crimes were not murders but ‘a kind of theft of service’ because the victims were prostitutes he didn’t pay.

After the first confession the floodgates opened and by the end of the first day, around six hours, he had detailed dozens, revealing a photographic memory for faces and locations where he had duped them.

‘He literally goes through the murders by state and then city and it’s like, boom, boom. These numbers were just going through the roof and then we start getting into the you know, how is that, is this BS? You’re sitting there, and I guess really kind of scratching your head and wondering, is this real? When I came out of that room, I knew that no one was going to believe what I was going to say.’

With him were an analyst from the FBI, and one from the DOJ, who also believed the confessions.

Holland got a DA in Texas, Bobby Bland, to take a leap of faith and send him a letter promising Little he would not face the death penalty if he moved to a jail in Texas.

After the move, he set up a studio for Little to draw his victims.

Little proved to be a talented artist and produced vibrant pictures which hung on Holland’s office wall with brief descriptions.

In the mornings Holland would bring him McDonald’s and they talked sports, calling each other ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Sammy,’ before interviewing began.

His motive was never fully established.

‘It was like drugs,’ he once told Holland. ‘I came to like it.’

When the Ranger asked him if he had any favorite victims, he chillingly said: ‘They are all my favorites. They all belong to you.’

Over the next few years cases he confessed to were confirmed across the country, including in California, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, Nevada and Arkansas.

Little died in jail in 2020 aged 80, meaning some of the remaining victims may never be found.

Little died in prison aged 80 in 2020 after becoming America’s most prolific serial killer

Images Little produced of victims after Texas Ranger Jim Holland gave him art supplies

Holland described him as a ‘billion layered onion.’

‘His intelligence level, his photographic memory, his manipulation, his total and complete lack of remorse, he fits into that psychopathic realm,’ he said.

‘But I think Little is just one of a kind that, you know, almost gets his own definition. He was evil. I don’t think, I know, he was evil. He was a horrible person, I don’t believe that he had any good redeeming qualities about him. He was a horrible serial killer. People will put there for his, his amusement, he didn’t care about them.

‘He was articulate, he had a crazy sense of humor, he was fascinating, but he was the epitome of evil, and there’s no doubt about that.’

In his new series, Holland aims to pull back the curtain so the public can see what’s going on in criminal cases.

‘The idea is to let people see what’s actually going on behind the scenes, and specifically what’s going on in the interview room,’ he said. ‘It’s a little bit of an education. This is what law enforcement does. This is what I did in those rooms and why I did it.’

He added: ‘I think that people need to realize that evil’s out there, and we need to be aware of that, and we need to preach that to our children. There’s a lot of bad people out there, there’s predators out there, and those people need to be found, they need to be captured, they need to be incarcerated.’

:: Killer Confessions: Case Files Of a Texas Ranger – which airs on Investigation Discovery on Tuesdays at 10.00pm ET/9.00pm CT.