More prolific killers from the US, according to our readers
In May 2018, Texas Ranger James Holland sat down with an inmate in a California prison to ask about one unsolved 1994 killing in Odessa. Samuel Little started naming cities. Over the following months, he gave Holland a number for each place.
Readers wrote in after our last list to say we’d missed names. “How could you not include Lemuel Smith from NY?” one asked. Another asked about Dr. H.H. Holmes, and a third named Jack Reali of Lowellville, Ohio.
Here are six cases, ranked by how the public record counts them. The numbers differ for every killer, depending on whether you count convictions, confirmed cases, or confessions.
93 confessed, 60 confirmed
Samuel Little was arrested on September 5, 2012, at a Louisville homeless shelter on a drug charge. In California, DNA tied him to three unsolved Los Angeles killings from the late 1980s. Then came Holland’s 2018 interview, and the FBI confirmed that Little was the most prolific serial killer in US history.
He confessed to 93 murders in 19 states between 1970 and 2005. The FBI has confirmed at least 60, and he was convicted of eight. Little had been a boxer and often drew his victims. Many of their deaths were originally ruled overdoses or accidents. He died in a California hospital on December 30, 2020, at 80.
How did a nurse’s friend catch Charles Cullen?
Amy Loughren, an ICU nurse at Somerset Medical Center in New Jersey, noticed something about her colleague Cullen’s charting. Detectives Dan Baldwin and Tim Braun asked her to help them, and she wore a wire to a pub in Bridgewater and challenged him about patient deaths.
Several patients had died with unexplained digoxin overdoses. Cullen was arrested on December 12, 2003, outside a restaurant, and eventually pleaded guilty to 29 murders in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He received 18 consecutive life terms. Cullen said he had killed up to 40 patients over 16 years, and investigators think the true figure may be far higher.
“A freshly dug hole”
On May 19, 1971, peach farmer Goro Kagehiro noticed a freshly dug hole between two trees in his orchard near Yuba City, California. He called the sheriff. Sheriff Roy Whiteaker’s deputies found the first body, and the search eventually turned up 25.
All were farm workers, and the police arrested labor contractor Juan Corona on May 26. After 45 hours of deliberation, a jury convicted him on all 25 counts on January 18, 1973. Judge Richard Patton imposed 25 consecutive life terms. When Corona died in 2019, AP called him the nation’s most prolific serial killer at the time of his conviction.
Jack Reali, the soldier who offered rides
Reali, an Army sergeant from Lowellville, Ohio (sometimes spelled Reale in coverage), answered an Army reporter’s ride-share ad. In February 1972, hunters found the body of Michael Oley beneath snow at a quarry in Hillsville, Pennsylvania, a few yards from the Ohio line.
Military police found a dead man in Reali’s Virginia apartment on September 22, 1973. Days later, a driver wrestled a gun from him and took him to a Pittsburgh police station. WFMJ says he killed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and the total is more than 14.
A court found him not competent to stand trial and committed him for life. He died in a Virginia facility on November 20, 2005, at 56.
Lemuel Smith and the guard at Green Haven
Smith was born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1941. In 1976 and 1977, he killed in the Albany area. An Albany judge later called him the “poster boy” for capital punishment.
On May 15, 1981, corrections officer Donna Payant took a phone call at Green Haven Correctional Facility, told a co-worker she needed to handle a problem, and walked down a corridor. Smith became the first convict to kill an on-duty female corrections officer. Counts vary: three convictions and two confessions, or six victims in some tallies.
In May 2025, Payant’s son Chris, who was 12 when she died, said, “I don’t think Lemuel Smith did it.” No court has reexamined the conviction.
Is Holmes really the first?
Not by every definition. Herman Webster Mudgett was jailed in St. Louis in July 1894 for selling mortgaged goods, and Boston police arrested him on November 17. Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer traced the fate of his associate Benjamin Pitezel and three of Pitezel’s children.
Holmes confessed to 27 killings. Only nine are confirmed, and some of the people he named were still alive. He was hanged on May 7, 1896. The “first serial killer” label dates mostly to the 1990s.
The bottom line
Four of these cases turned on one person noticing something: a farmer’s hole, a nurse’s records, a driver’s wrestled gun, a Ranger’s patient questions. The counts never agree: Little 60 confirmed against 93 confessed, Holmes nine against 27, and Cullen 29 against possibly many more.
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