In the autumn of 1980, the life of 31-year-old Mary Ann Porter, a Black/African American woman from Fort Wayne, Indiana, was tragically cut short, leaving a mystery that would linger for decades. Her family reported her missing in late October of that year, sparking a search that ended in heartache. On December 13, 1980, her body was discovered off the roadway in the 4600 block of West Wallen Road in the northern part of Allen County.
The initial investigation into her death yielded no viable suspects, and as time passed with no answers, her case grew cold, filed away as an unsolved homicide.
For nearly four decades, the circumstances surrounding Mary Ann Porter's death remained shrouded in silence. The break in the case came from a place no one in Fort Wayne could have anticipated. In 2018, a Texas Ranger named James Holland was interviewing a man named Samuel Little, who was already a convicted serial killer. Little, who has claimed responsibility for over ninety murders across the United States, began to confess to a string of unsolved killings, including two in Allen County from the same night in October 1980.
Little provided a chillingly detailed account of his actions that fateful night. He told investigators that he had picked up both Mary Ann Porter and another woman, 18-year-old Valeria Boyd, at different times from the vicinity of Maumee and Division Streets in Fort Wayne. He confessed to strangling both women in his vehicle before disposing of their bodies in separate, rural areas of Allen County. Boyd's body had been discovered on November 4, 1980, in a field in southern Allen County, more than a month before Porter's was found.
Following Little's confession, the Federal Bureau of Investigation notified the Allen County Police. Detectives from Allen County traveled to Texas to interview Little themselves. His detailed recollections of the murders of both Porter and Boyd were convincing enough for authorities to officially link him to the decades-old cold cases. The investigations were then forwarded to the Allen County Prosecutor's Office. Samuel Little, already serving multiple life sentences in California for his numerous other crimes, was never tried for the murders of Mary Ann Porter and Valeria Boyd, but his confession finally brought long-awaited answers to their families and closed a dark chapter in Fort Wayne's history.
