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Officials say serial killer's confession is helping to solve dozens of other cold case murders

We now know who was behind so many murders, but the more difficult question is why.

HOUMA- Samuel Little is claiming responsibility for 90 deaths, many of them were unsolved.

"Cold cases are harder to resolve," Assistant Chief Duane Farmer said.

Farmer has been with Houma Police for 33 years.

"I started three years after the '82 crime. And I was here for the one in '96," Farmer said.

In 1996, 40-year-old Daisy McGuire's frozen and beaten body was found stuffed in a small area on Magnolia Street. Eyewitness News sat down with McGuire's family shortly after Little confessed to her murder and many more.

"This man beat this girl with a jack iron in her head. And I always, always thought about what was she feeling? What was she going through," McGuire's brother Bobby Simmons said.

"When I was speaking to Texas authorities when he was giving me a description of the crime scene, that Samuel Little gave him. From the description that I told him that we do have one, before even looking at the cases. That's how descriptive it was," Farmer said.

Those descriptions are what multiple agencies across the country are looking into. Some have closed cold cases that have been on the books for 20 to 30 years. In a Texas Jailhouse, Little confessed to being involved in 90 cases stretching from the West Coast to the East.

1982, Macon Georgia, Fredonia Smith was found strangled to death, her body dumped in a park.

"Lord knows whoever did this, God got his eyes on you and he gonna take care of you," Smith's mother said.

Smith's brother is now the only relative alive for the truth.

"My father, brothers, they're all gone," he said. "They don't - at least I was here to get closure," Smith's brother said.

Back in Houma, Farmer says Little's chilling photographic memory left no question about the two local cases.

"He would remember the times, the dates, locations and towns, victims that he murdered some by locations of the bodies some by name," Farmer said.

Farmer says DNA often cracks cold cases, but in Little's case, it was the confessions. We now know who was behind so many murders, but the more difficult question is why.

Caresse Jackman can be reached at cjackman@wwltv.com.

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