A 78-year-old US man has confessed to 90 murders dating back several decades.
If proven, Samuel Little would be among the most prolific serial killers in American history.
The FBI is working with the US Department of Justice, the Texas Rangers, and dozens of state and local agencies to match his confessions with evidence from women who were killed in states from California to Florida between 1970 and 2005.
Little's run-ins with the law date back to 1956, and the FBI says there are "clear signs of a dark, violent streak among his many shoplifting, fraud, drug, solicitation, and breaking and entering charges".
But law enforcement has only recently begun unraveling the true extent of his crimes.
He was arrested at a Kentucky homeless shelter in September 2012 and extradited to California, where he was wanted on a narcotics charge.
Once there, Los Angeles police obtained a DNA match to Little on the victims in three unsolved homicides from 1987 and 1989.
They charged him with three counts of murder.
For these crimes, he was convicted and sentenced in 2014 to three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
In all three cases the women had been beaten and then strangled, and their bodies dumped.
Image: FBI
In the early 1980s, Little had also been charged with killing women in Mississippi and Florida - but escaped indictment in Mississippi and conviction in Florida.
He had, however, served time for assaulting a woman in Missouri, and for the assault and false imprisonment of a woman in San Diego.
The FBI found an alarming pattern and compelling links to many more murders.
"We found a case out of Odessa, Texas, that sounded very much like him, and we could place him passing through the area around the same time" said crime analyst Christina Palazzolo, who worked on the cases.
"We sent that lead out to the Texas Rangers, who were eager to follow up on the long-cold case."
In the spring of 2018 the convicted murderer was hoping to move prisons - in exchange for information.
Ms Palazzolo says: "Over the course of that interview in May, he went through city and state and gave Ranger Holland the number of people he killed in each place.
In total, he confessed to 90 killings.
These incidents are either linked to victims who have not yet been identified or to murders described by Samuel Little that have not yet been definitively corroborated by law enforcement | Image: FBI
Ms Palazzolo, and US Department of Justice senior policy advisory Angela Williamson, have been working to match up evidence to as many confessions as they can.
The team has so far confirmed 34 killings with many more pending confirmation.
Williamson and Palazzolo say Little remembers his victims and the killings in great detail.
He remembers where he was, and what car he was driving. He draws pictures of many of the women he killed.
He is less reliable, however, when it comes to remembering dates.
The FBI has says his uncertain timeline "has created a verification challenge for the ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) team, along with the issues stemming from the victims Little targeted, his methods, and how much he moved around - features of his crimes that begin to explain how he got away with murder for decades."
It adds: "Little chose to kill marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs. Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated."
Little, a one-time competitive boxer, usually stunned or knocked out his victims with powerful punches and then strangled them.
With no stab marks or bullet wounds, many of the deaths were not classified as homicides but attributed to drug overdoses, accidents or natural causes.
The FBI says Little is in poor health and will likely stay in prison in Texas until he dies.
"The goal now is to identify his victims and provide closure and justice in unsolved cases", it says.
