Jillian has a serial killer's remains sitting in the garage of her family home.

This post deals with murder and may be triggering for some readers.

The first time Jillian Lauren met Samuel Little he rolled his wheelchair up beside her in the visitor's room of California State Prison and told her, "you're my angel sent from heaven".

He was about a foot from her face, taking her by complete surprise. She wasn't expecting to be allowed to get so close to him. Yet here she was, staring eye-to-eye with a man convicted of murdering three women. 

A man who found sexual pleasure in strangling his victims and disposing of their bodies on the side of the road, or in piles of trash.

A man, she suspected, of murdering many more women than the ones he'd been put behind bars for. 

"I had gotten a bunch of like donuts, Little Debbie cakes, Funyuns and Coca Cola - I didn't know what he liked. So I just sort of served him food and started talking, and that whole first day he denied everything," Jillian told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations podcast.

"He just looked like a ghost to me. He looked so empty. Even though he was friendly and charming and bright, immediately something was not there."

Their first in-person meeting was in 2018, when Little was 78-years-old. She'd written to him six months prior, telling him she was a journalist, and she just wanted to hear his side of the story. 

She led with complete flattery, telling him she thought he'd been "misrepresented" and that he "hadn't got enough attention". The groundwork was so meticulously placed by the time they met, she had him confessing by their second visitor's room meeting. 

"To get that [first] confession... I can't deny it was an incredibly exciting moment. And then you realise, be careful what you ask for. The next four years of my life and my family's life was murder, murder, murder, murder," said Jillian.

All up, Little went on to confess to murdering 93 women over the course of many decades, making him America's most prolific serial killer. 

Samuel Little confessed to murdering 93 women before his death. Image: Getty.

He would lure women into his car, or his 'killing field' and strangle them, evading law enforcement for so long by targeting those society devalues - minorities, prostitutes, drug addicts and the poor. 

"He worked the system brilliantly, for decades," said Jillian.

From 2018 until his death in 2020, she was in almost daily contact with him, allowing him to form an unnatural and unnerving attachment to her as she worked on a Stan documentary called Confronting a Serial Killer, and a soon to be released book.

"I was his daughter, I was his wife, I was his mother, I was his soulmate. We were 'going to live all in a palace with his other babies together in heaven,'" she explained. "He called his victims, his babies."

He wasn't always nice to her though.

"For instance, I was asking him a question, and he didn't like women talking too long. He was just like, 'shut your mouth. Or I am going to crawl through this phone and eat your fucking lips off'. I said, 'Oh my gosh, no no no, I'm just a little kitty cat. I'm not saying anything, you talk.'"

Later, when the FBI would listen back to her calls, they'd question her reporting techniques in calling herself a 'kitty cat' and allowing a serial killer to call her 'baby doll' and 'angel'. But as Jillian told True Crime Conversations, "I was being as submissive as I could possibly be - and it worked".

Jillian herself is a survivor of strangulation. In her early 20s she had an abusive boyfriend who tried to strangle her on their kitchen floor when she finally mustered the courage to leave him. He released her just in time. 

"When you've had a painful past, it can create a sense of empathy. That's why I care about these victims. I want to understand violence against women in this culture, and this is the part I can play in this. To bring some kind of voice, story, justice, humanity to these victims who are dehumanised by being ignored," she told Stan's Confronting A Serial Killer.

The first letter she received from Little, she was completely grossed out and wore gloves as she opened it. But as time went on, Jillian realised she had to really commit to playing this part in order to tell this story. 

But it didn't just affect her life, it seeped into that of her husband and two young boys, who she'd have nightmares about being found in a dumpster like one of Little's victims, Audrey Nelson. 

"The Sam Little project wears on you. It wears on the relationship. It wears on the family. The repetitiveness of it, the consistent demands of a sociopath...," she admitted.

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Jillian's dedication to telling the stories of Sam Little's victims left her on the receiving end of a phone call she wasn't expecting in 2020.

"Samuel has died of COVID related complications, and you're his next of kin," said the caller. 

Right now, in 2022, Jillian still has his ashes in her family garage, and as she told True Crime Conversations, "I still don't know what to do with them".

She did try to get his brain donated to the top neuroscientists in America to study, but Sam hadn't filled the paperwork out correctly, and so his organs went to waste. 

Despite calling her relationship with Sam one of "the most defining of her life," Jillian doesn't miss him. She only misses the purpose he gave her.

From prison, Sam drew the women he murdered. Image: Stan.

"For what he put me through, I hated his guts. But I was so involved in this case, it took all my time. It took everything from me for years...he was sort of my only friend," she told True Crime Conversations. "I was talking to him on the phone every day. So I don't miss him....I miss the adventure he took me on. I miss the hunt".

The hunt is not something Jillian is giving up just yet. Many of Sam's victims remain unidentified except for the macabre jail-cell portraits he painted of them. 

Jillian is determined to make sure they aren't forgotten. 

Feature image: Stan.