New Theory: Serial Killer Murdered 1960s Musician

An amateur sleuth thinks he's cracked a decades-old mystery tied to a founding member of the O'Jays—by pointing to a largely forgotten serial killer. In Rolling Stone, Brenna Ehrlich revisits the case of Frankie Little, a guitarist and songwriter who left the R&B group in the 1960s, vanished from East Cleveland around 1979, and was later found as unidentified remains behind an Ohio factory. Police only put a name to the bones in 2021 through forensic genealogy, and the question of who killed Little is still hanging. Enter Richard Jones, a former journalist and current tech businessman who became fixated on the case after Ehrlich wrote about Little in 2022.

Jones' theory centers on Samuel Dixon, a serial killer convicted in California in the early 2000s and once a roommate of Little's neighbor, local politician Otis Mays. "A Black man who was convicted in 2003 of murdering and sexually abusing four people, Dixon has been largely ignored by the media, a lapse that could have led to Little's case going truly cold—that is, if Dixon's guilty of another murder," writes Ehrlich. Detectives say they've looked into the possibility and have found no evidence to support it, but they're not ruling it out, either. Meanwhile, Dixon himself denies killing Little in letters to Ehrlich. Read the full story, which digs into overlooked Black serial killers, "the murky world of East Cleveland politics," and a family still waiting for answers.