“Even though he is already in prison, the F.B.I. “For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” Christie Palazzolo, an F.B.I. The bureau said it believed all of his confessions were credible. Little’s confessions, including descriptions of his victims and where he dumped the bodies. Little was convicted of at least eight murders, some of which were solved using D.N.A. At least 50 of the murders have been verified by the authorities, the F.B.I. Little, whose crimes went undetected for decades, strangled 93 people between 19 in at least 14 states, according to the F.B.I. Her cause of death is still undetermined, investigators said. Little, who died in prison last year at 80, the primary suspect in Ms. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Birdlong, born in 1933 in Leflore County. This month, using DNA samples, investigators were able to conclude the remains belonged to Ms. Birdlong, saying she left the area in the ’70s with a Black man who claimed to be passing through Mississippi to Florida. In August, an investigator found a woman in Leflore County who remembered Ms. Another distant cousin in Texas also said Ms. The grandmother said that her cousin, Clara Birdlong, went missing from Leflore County in the 1970s. That research found a connection to a distant cousin, living in Texas, and then to the cousin’s 93-year-old grandmother, who was originally from Leflore County, Miss., about 100 miles north of Jackson. This year, investigators again tried to identify the woman and contracted a DNA research facility in Texas to create a family tree based on samples from the remains. Little was in Jackson County in 1977, during the window of the woman’s death. Little confessed to killing “Escatawpa Jane Doe,” whom he did not know by name, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department said. Many of the deaths were originally ruled overdoses and others were attributed to accidental or undetermined causes, the authorities said, adding that some of the bodies were never found. In many cases, their disappearances and deaths did not draw the same level of attention as other killings. They sometimes were estranged from their families and struggling with poverty and addiction. Little said he often targeted women who were marginalized, young and Black. He said he would pick up vulnerable women from bars, nightclubs or along the streets and then strangle them to death in the back seat of his car. He later confessed to 93 murders, many of them across the Southeast. Little was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison for the murders of three Los Angeles women during the 1980s. In 2012, an investigator for the police department in Pascagoula, about 200 miles southeast of Jackson, the state capital, uploaded the victim’s information into a national database used for cases involving missing and unidentified people, but was unsuccessful in finding a match. While her identity had eluded investigators for decades, she became known as “Escatawpa Jane Doe,” after the area she was found, near the Escatawpa River Marsh Coastal Preserve. The body was found three or four months after she had been killed, investigators said. A medical exam determined the remains belonged to a Black woman who had a gold tooth and wore a wig. The remains were found by a group of hunters in Mississippi in December 1977, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.
KILLER STEVE JACKSON SERIAL
A Mississippi sheriff’s department announced on Tuesday that it had identified the skeletal remains of a woman found 44 years ago, naming her as Clara Birdlong, who the authorities believe was a victim of Samuel Little, the serial killer who confessed to killing more than 90 people.