Confessions of a Serial Killer, Monday, Channel 4 at 9pm
UNTIL this week, I'd never heard of Samuel Little.
Yet he is one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Over four decades, he committed around 90 murders but evaded capture time and time again.
Confessions of a Serial Killer looks at the murderer and examines how he managed to escape the rule of law for so many years.
With never-before-heard audio recordings, the programme examines more than seven hours of taped police confessions from Little as the true scale of the horrors he inflicted finally came to light.
Presenter and film-maker Ben Zand travels to the US where Little's trail of murder first began in the 1970s.
He meets Brenda whose mother Carol was one of the women Little has been convicted of killing. Looking at photographs of her mother, she tells of how she knew very few details of her mother's murder or the police investigation.
Strangled to death, she heard nothing from police about the probe for around three decades until a phone call out of the blue revealed her mother's killer may have been caught.
She finally got justice for her mother in 2012 when Little was arrested after DNA testing at a homeless shelter in Kentucky matched him to several murders. He was convicted for the 1987 killings of Carol and two other women.
Four years later he admitted he had killed 90 people from the 1970s with his last murder committed in 2005.
The FBI's investigations, so far, have confirmed Little carried out 46 murders and is linked to another 12 putting him on course to be the most prolific serial killer in US history.
The documentary also hears from one of Little's victims who escaped his clutches. Laurie Barros, who was 22 at the time, relives her terrifying ordeal after she was left by dead during a vicious assault in 1988.
Working as a prostitute on the streets of San Diego, she was grabbed in a headlock by Little and bundled into his car. Knocked unconscious, she was dumped in a rubbish disposal site, only to wake five hours later, dazed and injured.
Thirty years later, she still feels the impact of that night on her life, wracked by survivor's guilt, she says she "didn't deserve to live" when so many others died at his hands of Little.
"I've always wrestled with that, why me? Why didn't I die," she said.
"I didn't deserve to live. And a lot of times I wished I hadn't.
"I remember saying to myself as if I’m praying to god, god tell my parents I'm sorry for getting killed."
The documentary broadcasts for the first time the police confessions of Little, now aged 78, explaining how he believes he got away with the murders for so long.
"I didn’t take chances," he said.
"I didn’t waste no time digging bodies. I got so crazy I wanted more. That’s a curse that I have got."
He also drew pictures of the women he said he murdered to help police identify them.
But how he could keep getting away with it?
Despite being arrested more than 100 times for offences including armed robbery and rape and spending some time in jail, his murders seemingly went unnoticed.
Investigators say Little operated in several states with some bodies never identified and deaths left uninvestigated.
Zand, on his journey from California to Mississippi, is unafraid to ask serious questions of the US criminal justice system.
He believes Little managed to remain on the loose for so long because of the people he targeted - the most vulnerable and marginalised in society.
The popularity of true-crime documentaries continues to soar and fans of this sort of genre will definitely be gripped by this insightful, yet disturbing, documentary.
