The Little Things is a winding crime thriller that constantly tries to make its audience second-guess the story's direction and question the characters' motives. Directed by John Lee Hancock, the film presents a series of murders that may or may not even be connected. Every detail counts and - as they say in the movie - it's always the little things that matter.
Starting off as a script written all the way back in 1993, The Little Things takes cues from nineties Hollywood thrillers like Se7en and focuses more on the detectives attempting to solve the cases than it does on the cases themselves. Deputy Sheriff Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) and Detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) are the classically hardened police partners mutually bound to connecting homicides, but the former has a secret he keeps deeply hidden. Deacon may need that darkness to learn whether if the creepy Albert Sparma (Jared Leto) is the true killer he has been hunting for years.
The murders all contribute to the flow of the plot, but The Little Things' ending highlights the fact that murder investigations often result in nothing but dead ends, despite what lengths the two detectives might go to. In fact, that seems to be the point of the movie: that no true crime case is a clear-cut path to finding evil and meting out justice, that moral lines become blurred while on the hunt for a hunter. Here are all the crimes and murders in The Little Things - and which ones matter most to the plot.
The Opening Scene
The Little Things opens with a scene that feels straight out of a horror movie. A mysterious figure in a brown car stalks a woman named Tina Salvatore all the way to a gas station she stops at. Panicked, Tina tries to run away before managing to flag down a passing truck, so luckily for her she survives to be a witness later in the film. The most significant aspect of this scene, though, is the car and the cowboy boots the killer is seen wearing - details that intertwine with other cases in the film.
The Cowboy Boots Robbery
The cowboy boots are the reason why Deacon travels to Los Angeles in a quest to retrieve evidence. In a seemingly unrelated case, a woman reports that the suspect in a local robbery was wearing a distinct pair of snakeskin boots, a detail that is necessary for the sheriff's office to have in order to press charges. At first, this incident sounds unrelated to anything else, just a chance to allow the plot to kick into motion. However, the stalker in the opening scene was also wearing boots, suggesting that the owner of those boots - who escaped custody through a plea deal - may be the true killer in the film. In any case, Deacon keeps the now-worthless evidence to find a use for them in the film's climax.
Baxter's Four Murder Cases
We are first introduced to Detective Baxter during a press conference at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, where it's revealed that there has already been a string of four murders in the past two months that are haunting LA. Baxter is upset that he is no closer to pinning down a suspect, and gets even more annoyed at the possibility of the FBI intruding on the case if nothing is solved. Luckily for him, Deacon is present, and so Baxter takes the opportunity to bring him to the next murder scene.
Julie Brock
The first case that Deacon and Baxter are on the same crime scene is the brutal slaying of a young woman named Julie Brock, found in a bloodied apartment with a plastic bag over her head. This is when Deacon's preeminent sleuthing skills become clear, as he recognizes the patterns from an earlier, unsolved case he worked on. Both the Julie Brock case and the "case up north" (as he calls it) involved the victims being tied up, stripped nude, and placed with a bag over their heads. This connection also leads to Baxter looking into the Mary Roberts case, which binds him closer to Deacon.
Ronda Rathburn
One of the most frequently mentioned cases in the film isn't even definitively a murder. The same brown car from the opening scene of the movie is seen stalking a jogger named Ronda Rathburn who disappears the next day. This piece of evidence proves that it's probably the same person, but the case starts to get complicated when the other murders are considered. When Baxter talks to Ronda's parents, they tell him that she always wore a red barrette. This detail returns at the very end of the movie when Deacon mails him that remaining piece of evidence - only it's not the same barrette. Rather, Deacon bought a copy just to ease his partner's mind by convincing him that Sparma was truly the killer.
"The Floater"
Deacon and Baxter at first believe that a body found in the water may be the connection they need in order to prove the connection between Ronda Rathbun and Julie Brock, but alas, the body of Ronda is nowhere to be found. Rather, the victim is a prostitute, leading the detectives to keep an eye out for anyone engaging in these sort of after-hours activities. Deacon points out that the scene does have a connection to the cases he's been working on, since all the bodies are bound and gagged in a clean and organized fashion. This is also when Baxter tells Deacon the suspect they apprehended before committed suicide.
The "Tea Party" Stone
While further investigating and trying to find possible connections between the murder cases, Deacon takes Baxter to the site of a previous murder in which two women were bound, knifed, and positioned sitting around a stone with plastic bags over their heads in the same pattern as Julie Brock and the prostitutes in the water. Deacon explains that it was like a "tea party where the guests fell asleep," and also mentions that a third body was found nearby. Despite these apparent connections, the scene mostly serves as a way for Deacon to explain to his partner about how murder victims become angels, and that the cases become personal responsibilities.
Mary Roberts
The big reveal of the film is the fact that Deacon accidentally shot Mary Roberts during a murder investigation. The incident happened because a rustle in the bushes during a search spooked Deacon into firing his gun, thinking that the commotion might be the killer. It turned out to be Mary Roberts, though, running away from her captive, meaning that Deacon not only killed an innocent woman, he also killed a valuable lead. This is what led to his heart attack and divorce, traumatizing him while also driving him to cover up Baxter's murder of Sparma.
Albert Sparma
The final murder of The Little Things is the killing of the main suspect by an emotionally perturbed Baxter, who drives out with Sparma in an attempt to uncover the body of Ronda Rathburn. The confusing part of all of this is that Sparma, despite his obsession with crime and murder, may not even be the real killer. In fact, it's very possible that, as he states, he never killed anyone in his life, and that his connection to the case is nothing but a creepy but guiltless fixation on the bloody details of a true crime story. When Deacon finds out about Baxter's crime, though, he plants the boots he retrieved from the earlier robbery in Sparma's apartment, effectively framing the suspect for the murders whether he's innocent or not. Deacon also mails Baxter the red barrette to convince him that the real killer has been brought to justice.
The Little Things: All the Evidence Sparma WASN'T the Killer