In the summer of 2005, the discovery of a woman's body on the side of County Road 41 in Lee County, Mississippi, marked the beginning of a years-long mystery. The deceased was identified as Nancy Carol Stevens, a 46-year-old Black/African American woman from Decatur, Alabama. An autopsy would later reveal the cause of death to be manual strangulation, confirming that she had been murdered. Investigators from the Lee County Sheriff's Department, in conjunction with the Decatur Police Department, pursued various leads in the initial stages of the investigation, but the case eventually grew cold, leaving the question of who was responsible for Nancy's death unanswered for over a decade.
For thirteen years, the case of Nancy Carol Stevens remained a dormant file, a painful and unresolved chapter for her family. That changed dramatically in 2018 with a confession from one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, Samuel Little. While incarcerated in a Texas jail, Little began to confess to a staggering number of murders spanning several decades and states. Among his many admissions was the murder of a woman named 'Nancy' in the Tupelo, Mississippi area. This information prompted investigators to travel to the Wise County Jail in Decatur, Texas, to interview him.
During the interview on October 23, 2018, Samuel Little provided investigators with detailed information about the murder that only the killer would know. He recounted meeting Nancy Stevens in the parking lot of a Walmart in Tupelo, Mississippi. Little stated that he and Nancy were in his RV in the Walmart parking lot when he killed her. He then drove her body and left her on the side of County Road 41. With this confession, the long-cold case of Nancy Carol Stevens' murder was finally solved. The case against Samuel Little for her murder was set to be presented to a Lee County Grand Jury in January of the following year. Little was already serving multiple life sentences for other murders at the time of his confession.
