Rose Jackson, a 60-year-old woman, was killed in St. Louis, Missouri on December 19, 1985, in a crime that at the time left more questions than answers about who had been inside her home and why they wanted her dead. In later accounts of the case, her death was described as a strangling, the kind of close, intimate violence that often points investigators toward someone who didn’t need to break in, someone who could get close enough to take control and not panic about being seen.
In the years that followed, her name didn’t stay isolated to a single unsolved homicide file. As St. Louis detectives worked other killings—separate scenes, separate dates, separate victims—Rose Jackson’s murder was ultimately treated as part of a larger cluster of cases tied to one defendant. A Missouri appellate decision reviewing those convictions later listed her death first in a sequence of four murders spanning 1985 to 1988, underscoring that investigators and prosecutors believed what happened to her was not a one-off tragedy, but an early chapter in a longer run of violence.
By the summer of 1988, police attention narrowed onto Jerry Lee Little Jr., and news reporting at the time said he was charged not only in the then-recent killings that had alarmed the city, but also in the 1985 slaying of Rose Jackson—a “south St. Louis woman” who, according to that report, had befriended him. The picture that emerges is of a man who could present himself as safe enough to be let in, close enough to be trusted, and then turn that familiarity into access.
A follow-up report from the same period added that Little had already been a suspect in Rose Jackson’s killing back in 1985, but was returned to Jefferson City as a parole violator shortly after—an abrupt turn that could pull a prime person of interest out of reach just as a case is trying to find traction. The same reporting also emphasized that another victim with the surname Jackson in the later series was not related to Rose, a detail investigators often have to clarify when patterns start to form and the public tries to connect dots that aren’t actually connected by family ties.
In court, the state ultimately tried the linked charges together, and Little was convicted and sentenced across multiple counts tied to four different murder events, with sentences described as nine life-imprisonment terms, including consecutive life terms without probation or parole. When he appealed, the Missouri Court of Appeals upheld the convictions and the denial of post-conviction relief, leaving those life sentences intact and effectively closing the courtroom phase of the case, even as the story of each individual victim—including Rose Jackson—remained its own devastating loss.
