https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2019/06/i-killed-her-right-there-willoughby-hills-detectives-try-to-link-unidentified-body-to-serial-killer-samuel-littles-confession.html?fbclid=IwAR24bJyIyaBhiC07lD79vSTLnpQCJDod6c87c3HKbjXVjo9KV6ns3BH84Bg‘I killed her right there:’ Willoughby Hills detectives try to link unidentified body to serial killer Samuel Little’s confessionWILLOUGHBY HILLS, Ohio -- The two detectives and the confessed serial killer wanted the same thing: to close a murder case that had not been solved for more than three decades.
The woman’s body had been dumped down a grassy slope, near a fence in a wooded area just off Interstate 271.
By the time she was found in 1983 by a man walking his dog, only her skeleton, some clothing and jewelry remained.
It wasn’t clear how she had died or how long she’d been there.
Willoughby Hills detectives back then tried to identify the woman. She’d been wearing a blue-green dress. A man’s Elgin watch was on her left wrist and a gold-colored ring on one of her fingers. A pearlescent brooch was pinned to her dark sweater, which was found among the decaying leaves.
Willoughby Hills unidentified woman
This blue-green dress was found with the body of a woman found in 1983 in a wooded area off Interstate 271 in WIlloughby Hills. Police hope someone might recognize it and help them identify her.
Detectives knew from the coroner that she was petite, somewhere between 20- and 35-years-old, and likely black. An anthropologist helped make a drawing to share with local media.
None of the tips generated by the drawing panned out.
Last year, detectives Jamie Onion and Ron Parmertor decided to pull the cardboard box containing the casefile down from a shelf and take a crack at what Onion called “one of the only whodunnits” the department had.
“Someone out there, we thought, is wondering where their cousin or niece is,” Onion said.
Around the same time, a man named Samuel Little was making national news, as the 78-year-old confessed to strangling women across the country — a catalog of his life’s “work,” which amounted to 93 murders.
Little’s confessions detailed the killings of women, from 1970 until 2005. Seven of those women, he’d killed in Ohio, including three in Cleveland — a short drive from where he was raised.
Little confessed to killing the three women in Cleveland; one in Akron; two in Cincinnati, one whose body was dumped outside of Columbus; and one woman he met in Columbus and disposed of in Kentucky. Police in Akron and Cincinnati confirmed they are looking into cases in their cities.
Explore a timeline of the cases here or a the bottom of the story.
With help from FBI analysts, local officials quickly identified two of the women: Mary Jo Peyton, killed in 1984, and Rose Evans, whose body was found in a vacant lot under a pile of tires in 1991.
On Friday, a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted Little for their deaths. Working backward from Little’s confession to identify his first Ohio victim, a woman he said he killed in the late 1970s, proved more difficult.
He told investigators that after strangling her in a car in Cleveland, he hopped on a highway and then pulled off to dump her body over a fence in a wooded area. Little never knew the woman’s name. He was only with her for about 30 minutes before strangling her, he said.
“The only thing I remember her saying, when she realized I was damn crazy, was, ‘Oh, s---,’” Little said.
Helping the authorities
Little has an uncanny ability to describe the faces and body types of his victims. He’s done artistic drawings of them for investigators.
His geography for the killings and sometimes his timelines are less precise, though he usually recalls the make and model of the car he was driving at the time. He targeted women he said would not be missed.
Christie Palazzolo, a crime analyst with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension program, or ViCAP, has been building a timeline, piecing together Little’s whereabouts and possibly connected murder cases for more than five years.
When Little started confessing last year during an interview with a Texas Ranger about an unsolved murder in that state, Palazzolo and Angela Williamson, a senior policy adviser for the Department of Justice, had the task of trying to match the details he shared with unsolved murders in 19 states.
They mined federal violent crime databases and reached out to more than 200 detectives and investigators with information.
The body in Willoughby Hills, almost a half-hour outside of Cleveland, wasn’t on their radar. But when Onion and Parmertor reached out about an FBI bulletin they’d seen, it looked like it could be a match.
Cleveland takes an interest
The Willoughby Hills detectives didn’t know it at the time, but Jack Bornfeld, an investigator for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office, was already working the case: he had notes from Little’s confession and was trying to find the murder it fit.
But he had a problem.
“We didn’t have a body,” Bornfeld said.
Bornfeld, a retired Cleveland homicide detective, combed through unsolved murders from 1972 to 1986 but couldn’t find any cases that matched. Cleveland police had destroyed missing persons reports made prior to 1990, making the task more difficult.
Little gave a precise description of where he had killed the woman: near East 39th and Broadway. He described her as nicely dressed, and said she was a prostitute who was looking to make money to buy heroin.
He strangled the woman before they had sex, he said, right after a Cleveland patrol car passed.
“They didn’t give a f---- if you killin’ over there,” Little told the Texas Ranger. But just in case, he jumped on the highway with the woman’s body in his black 1973 Thunderbird.
That’s where things got tricky. Little said he was headed toward Akron, but he didn’t name a highway.
“I couldn’t find any record of a female being dumped between Akron and Cleveland,” Bornfeld said.
He called small departments, the medical examiner’s office and drove several times between the two cities trying to find a location that matched Little’s description of the highway pull-off with a fence, close to a wooded area.
Willoughby Hills hoping for answers
There were discrepancies with Little’s confession that Onion and Parmertor wanted to talk to him about.
Little’s original accounting said he dumped the woman over a fence.
The body in Willoughby Hills was found in front of a fence.
Could the fence have been moved over the decades?
Little’s description of the woman’s clothing also had changed. At first, he thought she was wearing pants and maybe a blouse. Then he said maybe a jacket and skull cap. And he hadn’t mentioned jewelry, which in other cases he tended to remember.
Unaware that Cuyahoga County was also working the case, Onion and Parmertor flew to Texas in December.
In the interview room, Little lit up to see some boys from Cleveland. It was a chance to get in a dig at late Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell and ask about Baker Mayfield, the new quarterback he’d heard everyone talk about. He hadn’t yet seen him play.
“What can I help you all with now?” Little asked, sitting at the wooden table in a gray-striped jumper, his wheelchair parked in the corner.
Little ran through the story he’d told before.
The woman was skinny, about 5-foot-tall and with dark skin. She was a prostitute. They parked in an area with old factories. The police drove by.
“I killed her right there,” he said.
Little couldn’t remember which highway he took leaving Cleveland or how far he got before pulling off the highway. Five miles? 10? 15?
If Little had hopped on the highway, trying to head to Akron and ended up in Lake County near Willoughby Hills, he wouldn’t be the first.
“It’s not uncommon,” said Onion, the Willoughby Hills detective. “When I was on patrol, a few times a month somebody would get screwed up and get on the wrong highway.”
Then Onion showed Little some photos. The ones of the wooded area, taken in 1983, minus the woman’s body. They’d been warned Little didn’t want to look at decomposing bodies or skeletons, the results of his actions.
Little leaned in, scrutinizing the image. The woods, the fence.
“I dumped her over in there,” he said. “Yep.”
He pointed out a little drainage ditch stream and said he didn’t remember that. It didn’t appear in the older photos, though, just ones the detectives took more recently.
Parmertor showed Little a photo of the blue-green dress. He studied it.
“I can’t say exactly what she had on,” he said finally.
Little said he’d only spent 30 or so minutes with the woman more than 35 years earlier.
Onion decided to show Little the sketch of the woman, the one the anthropologist helped make.
Little had been drawing his own images of the women he had killed for investigators, and the sketches had been helpful.
The 1983 rendering wasn’t as good, the detectives told him. But it was good enough.
“That’s the girl,” Little said.
How certain do you feel, Onion asked.
“I’m totally convinced it’s her,” Little said. “No ifs, ands [or] buts about it.”
The investigations merge
Little was sure that they’d found the right woman, his first Ohio victim.
The detectives from Willoughby Hills felt confident, but not 100 percent certain.
The Willoughby Hills and Cuyahoga County investigations dovetailed last year, when the medical examiner’s office realized they were both looking to solve what could be the same case.
If Little’s confession was accurate, he’d killed the woman in Cleveland, the jurisdiction of the Cuyahoga County prosecutor.
The investigators met to decide what to do.
Bell knew a murder case could be prosecuted without a body, it had been done before. But he was hesitant to charge Little based on his confession alone.
Knowing the identity of the victim could cement the case. Bell asked the medical examiner’s office whether they might be able to get a DNA profile from the woman’s bones.
The first try was unsuccessful. But a second try, using a ground up piece of bone, worked.
The next step will be to compare the DNA profile with others. There are two ways to do that: asking the Ohio Attorney General’s office to do what’s called a familial DNA search for the woman’s relatives or to do a genealogical search using private databases, which have successfully helped identify other victims and the man referred to as the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo.
Bell asked for permission to use some of the funding the county has to investigate and prosecute cold case sexual assaults to pay for the genealogical testing, which could cost about $5,000 to $6,000.
“We could use a connection to a family member,” Bell said. “If she lived here in Cleveland and did disappear, that would help us to know.”
It would put to rest one more of the unsolved murders Little said he was responsible for over the decades, a time when he told the Willoughby detectives he was “running around acting up.”
“I’m trying to get everything clear with the establishments,” he told the Willoughby Hills detectives. “So people can find out what happened to their daughters, and I can help police know what the hell happened.”
Anyone with information that might help identify the woman found in Willoughby Hills should call Det. Jamie Onion at 440-918-8727 or Det. Ron Parmertor at 440-918-8725.
Emet Celeste-Cohen contributed research for this story.
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