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Williamson was at a cold-case conference in December 2017 when she and Texas Ranger James Holland, an expert on interviewing sociopaths, happened to hear about Little, who— despite dozens of arrests for violent crimes
2017年12月威廉姆森參加了一個懸案會議，當時她和反社會者面談專家、德州騎警詹姆斯·霍蘭德碰巧聽說了利特爾，——盡管數十次因暴力犯罪被捕
—had eluded murder convictions until 2014, when his DNA connected him to the late-1980s Los Angeles murders of Audrey, 35, Carol Alford, 41, and Guadalupe Apodaca, 46.
——利特爾直到2014年才被定謀殺罪，那時他的DNA將他與上世紀80年代末發生在洛杉磯的謀殺聯系起來時，受害者是35歲的奧黛麗(Audrey)、41歲的卡羅爾·阿爾福德(Carol Alford)和46歲的瓜達盧佩·阿帕代卡(Guadalupe Apodaca)。
Williamson and Holland had a hunch that Little—who at first denied those murders but had run out of appeals by then—might have information on cold cases that had long vexed them.
威廉姆森和霍蘭德有這么一點預感——利特爾起初否認那些謀殺，但到那時已經不能上訴了——長期困擾他們的懸案，此時可能有了一點眉目。
So with Williamson and FBI analyst Christie Palazzolo listening from across the hall with a pile of case files and access to the FBI database, Holland first met with Little at the California prison in May 2018, gingerly poking into the 1994 unsolved murder of Denise Brothers in Odessa, Texas.
所以，2018年5月，威廉姆森和聯邦調查局分析員克里斯蒂·帕拉佐洛(Christie Palazzolo)帶著一堆案件檔案和聯邦調查局數據庫，在大廳的另一端聆聽霍蘭德的講述時，霍蘭德第一次在加州監獄見到利特爾，小心翼翼地調查了1994年發生在德克薩斯州敖德薩的丹尼斯兄弟謀殺案。
"Jim was talking about, 'Did you ever do anything in Texas?' And threw out city names, threw out Odessa. And Little just unloaded, basically the contents of the Odessa case file that Christie and I had in front of us," says Williamson.
“吉姆說‘你在德州做過什么事嗎？沒有說城市的名字，沒有說敖德薩。利特爾就不再防備，侃侃而談，基本上，我和克里斯蒂面前的敖德薩案件檔案的內容就是這樣。”威廉姆森說。
"That's how all the cases have come out. He just kept talking, telling us what he did, where he did it, listing off cities, approximate years. It was dumb founding."
“所有的案子都是這樣了結的。他只是不停地說，告訴我們他做了什么，在哪里做的，列出城市，大概有多少年。這是一個愚蠢的發現。”
All told, Holland logged more than 700 hours of one-on-one interviews with Little, plying the killer with peanut M&Ms and Dr.Pepper to keep his confessions coming.
話雖如此，霍蘭德總共對利特爾進行了700多個小時的一對一采訪，用花生巧克力豆和胡椒博士來逼供。
To gain Little's trust Holland even talked Ector County, Texas, District Attorney Bobby Bland into waiving the death penalty in exchange for Little's guilty plea in Brothers's murder.
為了獲得利特爾的信任，霍蘭德甚至說服了德克薩斯州的埃克特縣的地方檢察官鮑比·布蘭德放棄死刑，以換取利特爾對兄弟謀殺案的認罪。
"That broke open the floodgates, and he started confessing to a bunch of cases," Bland says. "The details he gave were so uncanny that they had to be true."
“這打開了閘門，他開始坦白一系列的案件，”布蘭德說。“他說的那些細節太離奇了，肯定是真的。”
And Little seemed to relish reliving his crimes, most of which played out before DNA testing and surveillance cameras were ubiquitous.
利特爾似乎喜歡重溫自己的罪行，其中大部分都是在DNA檢測和監控攝像頭無處不在之前發生的。
"You have a person who enjoyed what he did and wanted to remember the details for his own gratification," says Bland.
布蘭德說:“這個人，他喜歡自己所做的事情，并希望記住其中的細節以滿足自己。”
At one point prison guards showed Williams on and Palazzolo portraits of celebrities that Little had drawn and taped up in his cell. "They were pretty decent, and we could tell who everyone was," Williamson explains.
有一次，獄警給威廉姆斯和帕拉佐洛看了利特爾在牢房里畫完貼起來的名人肖像。威廉姆森解釋說：“他們相當出名，我們可以分辨出每個人是誰。”
"So Ranger Holland was like, 'Hey, you really like talking about your victims. Would you like to draw them?' Little said, 'Yeah.' He would stay up all night drawing."
“所以霍蘭德說，‘嘿，你那么喜歡談論你的受害者。你想把它們畫出來嗎？利特爾說：“好的。”’他會通宵達旦地畫畫。”
Soon Holland invited other cold case detectives, like Miami-Dade, Fla., Police Det. David Denmark, to take a crack at Little on their own unsolved cases.
不久，霍蘭德又邀請了其他的懸案偵探，比如佛羅里達州的邁阿密-戴德，警官戴維·德馬克(David Denmark)對自己未偵破的案件進行了調查。
"We were all ears, and he was all mouth," says Denmark. "We were like, 'Holy crap!' He knows he's going to die in prison, and here he is telling us he wants to help us out."
“我們洗耳恭聽，他只管說就好，”德馬克說。“我們說，‘天啊!’他知道他會死在監獄里，而現在他卻告訴我們他想幫助我們。”
