The census from the year Little was born said Bessie Mae worked as a maid and that his father was year-old Paul McDowell. Soon after his birth, Little's family moved to Lorain, Ohio , where he was brought up mainly by his grandmother. He attended Hawthorne Junior High School , where he had problems with discipline and achievement.
In , after being convicted of breaking and entering into property in Omaha, Nebraska , Little was held in an institution for juvenile offenders. By his own account, he was working at various times as a cemetery worker [ 18 ] and an ambulance attendant. In , Little was sentenced to three years in prison for breaking into a furniture store in Lorain; he was released in By , he had been arrested 26 times in eleven states for crimes including theft, assault, attempted rape, fraud, and attacks on government officials.
In , Little was arrested in Pascagoula, Mississippi , and he faced charges for the murder of year-old Melinda Rose LaPree, who had gone missing in September of that year.
A grand jury declined to indict him for her murder. However, while under investigation, Little was extradited to Florida and tried for the murder of year-old Patricia Ann Mount, whose body had been found in September Prosecution witnesses identified Little in court as a person who had spent time with Mount on the night before her disappearance.
Due to mistrust of witness testimonies, Little was acquitted in January Little moved to California, where he stayed in the vicinity of San Diego. One month later, he was found by police in the back seat of his car with an unconscious woman, also beaten and strangled, in the same location as the attempted murder of Barros.
