Who killed Frankie Little Jr.? In a follow-up to a 2022 Rolling Stone story, Brenna Ehrlich meets with Richard Jones, a retired journalist who became obsessed with Little’s case and developed a theory: that Little was killed by Samuel Dixon, a convicted serial killer who remains incarcerated and has largely escaped public attention.

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. I traveled to East Cleveland to meet Jones — and exchanged several letters with a largely unknown serial killer — to see if the former journalist’s theory has weight. What I found adds another layer of horror to an already tragic story.

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