Oct. 11 (UPI) — A cold-case Georgia homicide of a 30-year-old woman was solved after the confession of prolific serial killer Samuel Little and a DNA match from family members, Georgia investigators announced.
Patricia Parker, whose body was found in Dade County in 1981, was identified this week as the victim of Little, 70, who the FBI says has confessed to strangling 90 people to death between 1970 and 2005.
In 2018, Little gave the Texas Rangers information about a young, Black woman in Chattanooga, Tenn., whom he claimed to have murdered in the early 1980s, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a release.
Investigators in Hamilton County, Tenn., contacted Georgia law enforcement in the northwest part of the state that borders the area. Later that year, from prison in Decatur, Texas, Little provided investigators from Georgia and Tennessee with more details that led them to believe the remains found in Dade County were those of a woman Little had taken in Chattanooga and killed in Georgia, the agency said.
In March, 2019, investigators released a forensic reconstruction of the skull found in Dade County, and Parker’s son came forward, investigators said. DNA from family members matched Parker’s remains.
The FBI said Little chose for his victims women who were easy targets because they were homeless, drug addicts or prostitutes.
“All of the unanswered questions, now there are answers,” Mike Mathis, of the Hamilton County Cold Case Unit, told Chatanooga’s WDEF TV station. “We know she didn’t abandon her family, her family knows she didn’t abandon them. She became the victim of a serial killer. Did her lifestyle contribute to that? Probably. It still doesn’t make it right. She’s still a victim and she still has loved ones,” Mathis added.
