In the summer of 1990, a 30-year-old African American woman named Zena Marie Jones vanished from Memphis, Tennessee. She was last seen on July 6, 1990. Weeks later, on July 28, her body was discovered by a fisherman on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, near West Memphis. An autopsy would later determine that she had been strangled to death.
For decades, her case remained a painful mystery for her family, one of the many unsolved violent crimes that leave families with unanswered questions and a lingering sense of loss.
The silence in Zena's case was finally broken nearly three decades later through the confessions of one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, Samuel Little. In 2018, while in custody for other murders, Little confessed to killing a woman in the Memphis area in 1990. He provided a chillingly detailed account of the murder, stating he had picked up a woman from a motel in Memphis, strangled her in his car, and then drove to Arkansas to dump her body in the Mississippi River. To aid in identifying his numerous victims, Little, who had a photographic memory, drew portraits of the women he had killed.
It was one of these haunting sketches that ultimately brought a name to the long-unidentified victim. In 2019, Zena's family saw a composite sketch drawn by Little and was struck by the uncanny resemblance to their missing loved one. This crucial lead prompted authorities to re-examine the case. In April 2022, through DNA testing, the remains found in 1990 were officially identified as Zena Marie Jones. Little, who had confessed to 93 murders across the country between 1970 and 2005, was convicted of eight of those murders and was serving multiple life sentences when he died in prison in December 2020. His confessions brought a somber resolution to dozens of cold cases, including the tragic death of Zena Marie Jones, finally providing her family with the answers they had sought for so long.
