On November 23, 1978, 14-year-old Karleen Jones, a Black girl from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, was killed. Her death remained an unsolved homicide for decades, with no arrests or publicly identified suspects and the case described as cold for more than forty years.

In 2018, incarcerated serial killer Samuel Little began giving confessions. Among those he described was the murder of a young African American girl in Louisiana in 1978; some of the details Little provided matched what is known about Karleen Jones’s death. Detective Sergeant Brett Taylor of the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office later worked to officially link Little to Karleen’s killing.

The case record reports that Little’s confession provided an answer long sought by Karleen’s family and the community.