Gary Little

Gary Morton Little (March 6, 1939 – August 18, 1988) was an American judge from Seattle, Washington who committed suicide in 1988 after allegations that he had sexual contact with underage boys. The public allegations against Little, and his subsequent suicide, followed a decade of rumors that had circulated about him, including several media exposes that had been quashed before publication, and a state investigation of Little which had been sealed.

Early life and education Little was born in Seattle, the son of truck driver Sterling Little, who died in August 1947 after hanging himself in a jail cell in the King County Courthouse where he was being held on a burglary charge. Gary Little's widowed mother worked as a stenographer while he and his sister were raised by their grandmother. Little, described as a "driven and able" student, graduated from Lincoln High School and earned a scholarship to Harvard University.

Career Beginning in the 1960s, Little worked as an Assistant Attorney General assigned to the University of Washington. During this time, he also served as a volunteer counselor in the Seattle juvenile court and as a part-time teacher at the prestigious Lakeside School from 1968 to 1972. He subsequently was retained as general counsel for the Seattle School District, and was later credited with engineering the district's "sweeping desegregation program".

Little was elected to the King County Superior Court in 1980.

At about the same time, three of Little's former students at the Lakeside School contacted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to allege instances of sexual abuse by the judge when he was working at the school in the 1960s. The newspaper began an investigation of the claims, in the process of which it discovered a previously unknown arrest of Little from 1964 on charges of assault against a 16-year-old in Little's Seattle apartment; the charges in that case had been dismissed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's inquiry stalled after the former Lakeside students refused to swear affidavits as to the veracity of their accusations. Publishers had demanded the affidavits to protect the newspaper against the possibility of a future libel lawsuit.

Death On August 18, 1988, Little shot and killed himself in his chambers in the King County Courthouse, the same building his father had killed himself in more than 40 years before.

More than 600 people attended Little's funeral.

Personal life Little was viewed by colleagues and community members as "funny, articulate, [and] brilliant" and seamlessly embedded himself as a fixture within Seattle society despite his modest origins. He was known to be a "dapper" dresser who frequented the city's finest clubs and restaurants. Some jurors who served in his court recalled that he had a penchant for making the law accessible and adeptly handling the mechanics of complex cases.