Chapman’s killer confounded authorities until 2019, when Samuel Little a man the FBI described as the “most prolific” serial killer in United States history identified her as one of his 93 purported victims.
Little, who died in 2020, met her while she worked as a sex worker. During a series of interviews with the FBI, he described how he choked her to death in a muddy canal.
That settled how she died. But the details of her actual life were tougher to pin down.
Because Miriam often provided fake names and even fake social security numbers during her periodical arrests, Miami police spent two years after Little’s confession trying and failing to track down her family.
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In the days before her death, Miriam “Angela” Chapman talked a lot about going home.
She had arrived in Miami a few months earlier, moving into a motel in a shoddy part of town. Right away, the manager noticed her laugh. It would kick up out of nowhere, even when things weren’t funny.
Like some other young women in the area, she worked the bars as a sex worker. But as the winter of 1976 brightened into spring, she dreamed of getting out. Of climbing on a bus and heading home to Indiana.
“She said she was going to start saving a little money and go home (to her family),” the manager told the Miami News in 1976. “And I don’t think it was just talk, either. She sounded like she meant it.”
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