Cold Case Files - DNA SPEAKS: A Deadly Premonition

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

When 31-year-old Linda Slaten is brutally strangled in her Lakeland, FL home in 1981, a complex web of suspects emerges. The case takes a dramatic turn when a DNA hit exposes the sinister underbelly of a seemingly peaceful community. Progressive: Progressive.com  Quince: Go to Quince.com/coldcase for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns Rosetta Stone: Cold Case Files listeners can get Rosetta Stone’s lifetime membership for 50% off when you go to RosettaStone.com/coldcase SimpliSafe - Right now, get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/COLDCASE There’s No Safe Like SimpliSafe. 

Hi, Cold Case listeners. I'm Marissa Pinson. And before we get into this week's episode, I just wanted to remind you that episodes of Cold Case Files, as well as the A&E Classic Podcast, I Survived, American Justice, and City Confidential are all available ad-free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now on to the show. This program contains disturbing accounts of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. My mother was an outgoing person, fun-loving. That was the way her spirit was. We went to his house and it was kind of like earlier in the afternoon.

I was a little worried because it was a very angry killing. They saw Linda laying diagonally across her bed. It would have been a slow, slow, painful death. He broke into our house and beat and strangled my mom and then left like nothing. There was really no emotion from him. The police, they came after Jeff quite a bit.

They collected DNA evidence. They had no idea how valuable that would be 40 years later. It was aggravating. My mom was killed almost 40 years ago. And every day you think, was this son of a bitch ever going to get caught? You've been wanting a name for almost 40 years, and then all of a sudden you get handed the name, and it's like, I never had a clue.

There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only about 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's September 4th, 1981 in Lakeland, Florida. Russell Hurley is a detective with the Lakeland Police. Judy and Linda Slayton were sisters. They both lived in the same apartment complex. They would meet for coffee every morning.

Brad Grice, now retired, was also a detective with the Lakeland Police. In that particular morning, Judy had came down and knocked on the door, and nobody came to the door. And as she was walking away to go back to her apartment, she glanced over toward where Linda's bedroom was and noticed that the window was open and the screen was missing. When Judy looked into the window, she saw Linda laying diagonally across her bed. Her feet were off the edge of the bed, hanging down.

There was blood present, and she could see an object around her neck. She screamed and got the attention of a maintenance worker, and then they got somebody to call 911. Lakeland police arrive in minutes. Through the window, they see Linda Slatton's lifeless body. But authorities have another problem.

Where are her two sons? Tim and Jeff. Tim was only 12 years old at the time. Jeff was 15. There was a concern that the kids may still be inside, not knowing exactly what they were going to see or find. They're knocking on the doors, knocking on windows, and they're not getting any response from anybody. First responders can't afford to wait a second longer. So they decide to enter through another window and saw Tim in the back bedroom.

And they saw the kids were okay. Tim Slatton is Linda's son. I kind of looked up and I was like, why is the cop waking me up? And he said, go outside with your brother. He never mentioned my mother's name. So I get up and I start walking outside. And when he opened my bedroom door, they were coming out of my mother's room,

opened her door, and that's when I saw the whole crime scene. I saw my mother's partially clipped body hanging off the bed with a yellow clothes hang around her neck and then blood everywhere. So I knew right then she was murdered. She was laying crossways across the bed. She had her dress pulled down below her breasts and her dress pulled up. It was bunched up on her midsection. Her flip-flops and her underwear were on the floor on the carpet

beneath her. She had a coat hanger that had been put around her neck and tightened down that you could actually see how tight it was in her skin. I've seen a lot of homicides and a lot of blood and things like that, but I had never seen any kind of scene like what happened to Linda Slade. At the time of her death, 31-year-old Linda has begun to turn life around for her family. My mother and father met in their teenage years, way back in the early 60s.

My mother was 15 years old when my brother was born. She was outgoing, fun-loving, and just go do things all the time. That was the way her spirit was. Linda's outgoing personality masks a troubled home life. My father, when I was growing up very young, he was an alcoholic and he was a mean person. And when I was a little kid, I can remember they would fight a lot. My mom eventually left him and took me and my brother to Florida because his drinking was just out of hand. Things start looking up for Linda and her

kids when they moved to Florida in 1974. We stayed with our grandparents, but it was fun, man, because we lived on a farm. I mean, we had a 400-acre backyard to play in. She eventually got an old Chevy Impala. I remember it being dark green. We called it the green machine. And me and my mom and my brother, Jeff, we would just go to the beach or just a park to have a picnic. Linda sells the green machine to help make ends meet. That was just one of the many sacrifices she made for her children. My mom would make her own clothes and walk to work. We grew up poor, but she could always make these awesome meals all the time. It's like, wow, how'd she do that? The night before this all happened, Tim actually came home first from football and was hanging out with Linda.

Me and my mother went next door to the neighbor's house, and there was three other couples there. And then the women were all at the table playing cards. It was a pregnant woman that was there reading people's palms. And she read my mother's palm, and she looked at her, and she goes, you're going to have a very short life. I think my mom gave her a puzzled look, like, how do you know that by reading somebody's palm? Well, I guess the woman was right, because she was dead the next day.

When police entered Linda Slayton's bedroom, it wasn't really disorganized in there. The bed was made. You could see footprints on the floor, and they did find a shoe print on one of Linda's pillows. Based on the footprints, it appeared that the person entered through the open window where the screen was missing. Linda's body is sent for autopsy as police launch their hunts for the killer. Crime scene investigators immediately make what could be a key discovery. There was some partial palm prints on the window sill. It turned out that they were able to lift using tape, dusting it.

It's misleading the way TV portrays prints. People have an assumption that you get a print and they're automatically going to catch somebody. But you have to be able to match that print to a suspect. In the critical hours following the crime, police put together as much information about Linda's relationships as possible. Neighbors tell investigators that Linda was having problems with her oldest son, Jeff. Linda's actually telling neighbors that she don't know what to do with Jeff. He's being rebellious, and she just don't know how to handle that.

My brother Jeff was a typical teenager, you know, mouthy, cocky, want to argue. So him and my mom would have arguments from time to time. Linda Slayton was a tiny woman, 15-year-old. Jeff was a football player. He was a very healthy kid. A cop looked at my brother Jeff and said, you know, you're a big guy. You got strong hands. You could have killed your mom. Tammy Hathcock is a sergeant with the Lakeland Police.

I remember kind of anticipating this interview and thinking, okay, let's make sure that he talks about this. Detectives are eager to question Linda's 15-year-old son, Jeff, about an argument he had with his mom the night before she was killed in 1981. The night before this all happened, Jeff came home from football. He was hungry and he got frustrated with Linda because there really wasn't a whole lot in there. So he got aggravated with her and stormed out of the house.

According to Jeff, he jumped on his bicycle, he rode up to his grandparents, they fed him and then they brought him back around 9 30. And he didn't know where his mom was at the time and she came home from next door told him that there was a little get together next door and that's where she was. Jeff was watching tv and then he went to sleep. 12 year old Tim also tells police where he was that night. Tim was on a community league team and his coach had picked him up and he'd went off to football practice and then the coach dropped him off 7, 7 30-ish. The original detectives did a phone interview with Timothy's football coach and he told them Linda did step to his truck when he's

dropping the boys off and ask him how Timothy performed at practice that day. Both boys' stories are confirmed by their grandparents and football coach. But investigators aren't satisfied. The police took us down and put us in a tiny room with no windows. One cop riding, one cop recording, asking us questions. The cops, they came after Jeff quite a bit. Jeff agrees to submit to polygraph testing. The main questions they asked was, did I murder my mom? Did I kill Linda Slayton?

Did I know who killed Linda Slayton? I was in a state of shock. I didn't know why they was doing it to me. I didn't hear nothing. And that has been so hard to live with that I didn't hear nothing. Because I would have killed that son of a bitch, but I didn't hear nothing. And that's hard to live with. I lived my whole life. I was in an apartment. That happened to my bitch, but I didn't hear nothing. And that's hard to live with. I lived my whole life.

I was in an apartment. That happened to my mom, and I didn't hear nothing. Jeff was polygraphed on two occasions. The first time was inconclusive, and the second time they were able to determine that he was not involved. Three days after Linda's murder, the autopsy report lands on detectives' desks. The autopsy results showed that Linda had died from strangulation. They noted that the coat hanger, how tight it was around her neck, and that there were claw marks, which appear to be from her trying to get this thing off of her to be able to breathe.

And she also had an injury inside her vaginal cavity. It was a laceration, and we believe something was inserted in there that caused that injury, and that's where a lot of the blood came from. They're trying to get any evidence, what they can can off of the victim. So you're going to do fingernail clippings and scrapings. You're going to do the sexual battery kit. They were able to collect semen and they found that the semen was intact, which was very helpful. But there was no database for semen or blood types or anything like that. They would have to have it tested,

try to make a match on a possible suspect of a blood type. Five days after Linda is murdered, as investigators search for the killer, Tim and Jeff say goodbye to their mother. It was sheer hell. Looking at where she was trying to get this coat hanger off her neck and the people at the funeral home try to make it up and look as best they can. But you can just see where she was digging so hard,

trying to get that metal coat hanger out of her neck and fighting for her life. It just, I can't picture the hell my poor mama went through. The boys' grandparents do the best they can to give Tim and Jeff a normal life and routine. After about two weeks, we went back to playing football and hanging out with my friends. Coach Joe and the coaches were supportive. My team players were supportive. This coach and one other coach would come pick me up quite often or take me home. Coach Joe and the other coaches, they knew the game and we were trying to learn the fundamentals of playing the game of football.

We looked up to these guys. The pain was still there, but it was good to get back into a routine, you know, to live life again, to get on with my life. As Tim and Jeff tried to move forward, police turned to another member of the Slatton family, Linda's ex-husband. Frank Slayton was somebody that the investigators had to look at because of the past relationship. He was bad. He drank bad. He was a bad alcoholic. I didn't know who could have done this. I thought, you know, my mom divorced him, took his two sons away. So I thought it was my own dad that did it.

Best I recall, she said, come to my bedroom at this particular place. His demeanor is like a sociopath. I mean, just no emotion. How did her breast get exposed? I guess I did it. It was important for the investigators to look at Frank Slayton since they had such an up and down rocky relationship and he had threatened Linda in the past. Jeff had only been maybe six years old at the time. My dad came home from work, and he'd already been drinking. And me and Jeff, my mom, I believe, were fixing to eat dinner.

And he come in, and he pulled a gun out and pushed her down and put a gun to her head. And my brother Jeff went there and jumped on him, tried to get the gun out of his hand. Oh, I was only seven. I was seven years old when that happened. Oh yeah, it was bad because he shoved me back out the door and he slammed the door back. It took my big toenail and the meat on top of my big toe and peeled it off and blood was going everywhere. But I feel like it saved my mom. Detectives tracked Slatton down in the Alabama town Linda fled years earlier.

Police questioned him by phone. Frank Slayton only lived 10 hours away and could have easily drove over and committed this crime and drove back. His alibi was being at home during the time of the homicide. My dad was, he was already remarried, and his wife said he was there. Any time you have a suspect that you're looking at, you have to try to verify that alibi. Sometimes the alibi is, I was at home by myself,

and how do you prove that? But if you can't disprove it, then there's really not a lot you can do with that. But if you can't disprove it, then there's really not a lot you can do with that. They remain a suspect until you can rule them out. With the suspect pool shrinking, authorities use every tool available in 1981. You know, they didn't have the DNA swabs like we do now and so forth. But they took a lot of people to the Lakeland General Hospital at the time, pulled hair, took blood samples from them, which at the time they were just blood typing and they were just struggling, striking out, you know, they just weren't getting anywhere. You marry your cases

as an investigator. So when you do run out of leads and there's nothing to follow up, and it's very discouraging. By the following year, leads dry up and the case of the young mother murdered in the night goes cold. After my mom was killed, I gave up on school. I dropped out of school when I was 16. The day she got murdered, my childhood got murdered. That's when I stopped being a kid. It was that day she got murdered. I still sleep with a gun next to me every night. Even today, I got to go through the house and look. Somebody be hiding in the shower.

Somebody could be under the bed. Somebody in the closet. And I got to go through my whole house still today and look and make sure there ain't nobody in there so I can relax and try to get some kind of sleep. You know, you go from fear and sadness, then you go into anger. Oh, it made me and Jeff just angry, you know, that this SOB's still walking around breathing air. And then my mom's, you know, in the ground dead. And you try to think who it could have been.

You're always beating yourself up. Try to think who it is. Who could have done this? Who acted funny, you know, before our mom got murdered? As the leaves start to change and there's a crisp chill in the air, I'm eagerly anticipating doing puzzles on the dinner table,

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Price and coverage match limited by state law. It is now summer 1995, 13 years and 11 months after Linda is murdered. More than a decade has passed before a new lead surfaces. Frank Potts was the serial killer suspect from Polk County. It struck an interest with Jeff because some of the family actually knew Frank Potts. And Frank Potts actually had a relationship with one of Linda Slayton's neighbors

and was possibly in the apartment complex at the time of this homicide. Somebody had been in the jail with Frank at some time and said that he confessed to him that he was the one that murdered Linda Slayton. Anytime you have a convicted killer that gives a confession on a crime, you get excited,

especially when somebody like Frank Potts is the guy and he's a suspected serial killer. Frank Potts was an actual friend of my mom and the whole family. But we found out he wasn't a good person, you know, later on. I know that they were looking at him for several other murders in Alabama somewhere. The main case that Frank Potts was in prison for was handled by the Polk County Sheriff's Department. So I went with a detective and my little brother Tim, and we went down there and I seen him in person.

Jeff and Tim asked him, what do you know about my mother's murder? And he didn't know nothing. That was the end of it. Then we had to move on. There again, you know, we got our hopes up high and then nothing. Then the months come on and the years come on. It's spring 1998, 16 years and seven months after Linda is murdered. When I got involved in the case, I had been in the criminal investigations division for about 10 years.

And I saw that we had this book in the sergeant's office that had a whole bunch of unsolved homicides. And the first case in the book was Linda Slayton from September of 1981. I saw that we had DNA in palm prints and that when this happened, obviously DNA didn't exist. Luckily for us, our investigators collected this evidence and stored it properly. We needed to send samples off to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement

in hopes of actually getting a DNA profile. Detective Grice gets a break when the FDLE comes back with a full DNA profile of the killer. To actually have a DNA profile, knowing that once you identify this person, you know, you got a suspect. I mean, that is huge. When the profile is submitted to the national database, however,

no match is found. Detective Grice is not deterred. It's September 2001, 20 years after Linda is murdered. The Lakeland Ledger did an article on the 20th anniversary, which Jeff and Tim was a part of, which ultimately led me to getting them to come to the police department for the first time so I could meet with them and tell them somebody is looking at your mother's case. He went down the whole list, you know, and was checking off names. We were able to use the killer's DNA profile and do the comparison to the original suspects

that were listed. One of the suspects eliminated with DNA is Frank Potts. But Frank Slayton, we did not have his DNA at the time. So ultimately, it was Jeff that actually brought in his dad one day. Frank Slayton consents to a DNA test, and the results show that he is not a match to the unknown suspect's DNA. For Tim and Jeff, it ends 20 years of wondering. It felt good knowing it for sure.

It made me feel good. My dad apologized a bunch of times on me and my brother. He would tell us how sorry he was. He wished he never knew about alcohol, you know, and he would just tell us he was so sorry he'd lost his family because of drinking, you know. And he tried to make it up, you know, and he did it. When me and my brother started having kids, you know, he was being as good as grandpa as he could to him. When he passed away, it tore my son up quite a bit because he was pretty close with him.

Detective Grice continues to submit DNA for comparison, but a match never comes up. It's December 2015, 34 years and three months after Linda is murdered. The last few conversations that I had with Jeff and Tim is I got nothing. I got nothing else, you know? And that hurts. It really bothers you. Detective Grice makes the difficult decision to retire.

When Brad Grice retired, I said, well, I'm going to take my last breath and die and not know who murdered my mom. I remember thinking that and I was starting to come to terms with it, you know. Tammy Hathcock is a sergeant with the Lakeland Police. When I first got on the case, I met with FDLE and just kind of talked through, like, maybe we missed something on this one piece of evidence. Can I send that in? In November of 2018, a call comes in from the FDLE that reignites the case. And they said, hey, this is a new technology that we're doing. You guys' case seems to fit that mold of what we need.

You have some DNA that we can test. And ultimately, our staff was very much on board with trying to get this tested for the genetic genealogy. Cece Moore is a genetic genealogist. I became involved in this case in June of 2019. So once my work begins, I have to build in their family trees to find that common ancestor. Fortunately, we had enough data that I was able to identify these three genetic networks, find the triangulations, and narrow it down to just this one man. I'm the mother of a son, and hearing that Linda was murdered in her own home as a single mom with her two little boys asleep in that home was devastating to me.

With investigative genetic genealogy, we are comparing against voluntarily provided DNA. And so when the suspect's file is uploaded, it's gonna be compared against all of those people's genetic markers that have opted into law enforcement matching. So once that comparison has been done by the algorithms, we'll get a list of people who share DNA with our unknown suspect. So in this case, I was able to build three separate match clusters, or what I call genetic

networks. Once I built all those trees, I had three different common ancestral couples, and I knew that the suspect must descend from all three. Who is the one person or immediate family that descends from all three of these sets of common ancestors? Once I got to that family, I could see that there was only one son that could have been the person who left his DNA behind at the crime scene. He connected to the matches through both sides of his family and through three of his grandparents. So that is a really high confidence potential identification. In just days, CeCe Moore cracks the case that's haunted investigators for decades.

Detective Tammy Hathcock received a call that said they had some results. So we set up a conference call in a conference room. So they started going through the report, and then they got to the page where it talked about Joseph Mills. And I said, I know this name. Why do I know this name? So I found a sheet, and it said Joseph Mills. And I said, I know this name. Why do I know this name? So I found a sheet and it said Joseph Mills. And I read that we had interviewed him back in 1981, like two days after the murder happened. It was Tim's football coach.

Joseph Mills, the football coach who dropped Tim off from practice the night before Linda's murder, is now 58 years old. We find out that he's living in the same exact house that he lived back then. He lives there with his wife. His kids are grown. He's got grandkids. So he just lived a normal life. Mills has only one blemish on his record. I was able to learn that Joseph Mills had been arrested in 1984 by the Lakeland Police Department for a grand theft. And at that point in time, they actually took fingerprints and

palm prints. So I immediately submitted a request to have his prints from that arrest compared to the prints from the crime scene. The unfortunate thing about it was that the prints that we had were not of APHIS quality. And it's a system that they run fingerprints through. So it had to be done manually. The prints match, but detectives still have one more hurdle to clear, getting a recent DNA sample to confirm he is a match. Joseph Mills had a serious condition. And so he pretty much stayed at home most of the time. He had a colostomy bag from cancer, so he didn't leave very often. And that's where we decided to do a trash pull.

Working with Polk County Refuse, Lakeland authorities collect Bill's trash once it has been left on the curb. It's not the most glamorous thing. We're actually, we're in dress clothes, and I was just digging through the trash like it was Christmas day. I was trying to find specific items that could be tested for the DNA.

They actually found a discarded colostomy bag and some Q-tips that were used to clean up the wound and also some tape that was used to hold that colostomy bag on. So when I found that tape, I thought this is gonna have some kind of DNA on there, whether it's hair, whether it's skin cells. I remember packaging it real quick

and having the crime scene girl write everything up. And I drove it straight over to FDLE that afternoon because I wanted to be able to get that tested as quick as possible. I was on pins and needles. I was like, oh my god, oh my god, we are almost there. We're going to get this guy. My friend just came back from a long international trip and it reminds me of all the places I'd like to visit. Before I travel though, I really want to learn more languages so I can get the most out of my trips.

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This is their best offer of the year. Head to simplisafe.com slash coldcase to claim your discount and make sure your home is safe this season. Don't wait. This offer won't last long. Keep your home, your family, and your peace of mind protected with SimpliSafe. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. It's August 9th, 2019, 37 years and 11 months after Linda Slatton is murdered. I was actually on vacation because it was my birthday. I was sitting in the pedicure chair, getting my toes done. And I got the phone call. I kind of was like, maybe this is FDLE,

because she had told me that she was going to call me with the results. I said, hey, I'm off today for my birthday, and she said, I've got a birthday present for you. I started screaming inside the nail shop. Everybody just kept looking at me, but I was super excited. We're fixing to approach the residence. Police issue an arrest warrant for Joseph Mills. We placed him in handcuffs.

We read Joseph Mills' Miranda right and placed him in the car. We got him into the interrogation room and we actually asked him. We want to give you this opportunity for you to fill in all the blanks that we have. It was very bizarre dealing with him because the motions were not there. When I picked the boys up, we stayed in the vehicle.

And I don't recall going to in or out of a house, period. But if you look at him, he's got his arms folded up, so he's boxed up. Until we did present him with several pieces of evidence. Your fingerprints matches you. The DNA matches you. He realized that he was kind of in a bind, and then he started to put it all on Linda,

started blaming Linda. It was like an invitation. We'll show you a good time. We'll have a good time. He said that on September 4th, 1981, as he dropped off Tim in the parking lot, he had a conversation with Linda Slayton. Joseph said that Linda basically invited him over for some type of a good time. And when he got there, she was already there with the hanger around her neck. They started engaging in sex.

What did she want you to do? Tie her up in one. She had a piece of wire. She asked him to tighten the hanger down in a kinky sex game type of thing. But, you know, if you've seen how deep that hanger was into her neck, you know, if you've seen how deep that hanger was into her neck, you know, it was down half an inch. And there's no way that somebody will allow somebody to do

that to them. And then you also see where she clawed her neck trying to get the hanger off. And you left her with her kids in the house to find their mom like that. Mills is charged with first-degree murder. After 38 years, Lakeland police can finally tell Jeff and Tim that their mother's killer is behind bars. It was your football coach, and you rode in a car with a son of a bitch after the fact. I mean, that just makes you mad. You know, I was sitting this close to him,

and I have a picture of us, I think it was taken a month after my mom was killed, in this lineup of all these football players, and he is standing right behind me in the picture. To avoid a possible death sentence, Linda's killer pleads guilty. Both brothers will finally have the chance to get an answer from Mills. I hate you, you can't die. It burned in hell fast enough for me. I don't know why you can't tell me why. Why'd you have to burn my Bible?

He wouldn't answer me. He said they're like the coward he was with his cold black murder. Nice. Didn't make an expression. He was heartless. Didn't care. And I started hollering at him and I said, look at this picture here. This is me and my mom, my brother. We was happy and you took her away from me. And I started hollering at him like that.

And then I showed him the picture of the grave site. You see that? That's where my mom was at. She's there because of you. You murdered her. And I hate you. And that's why I told him he can burn in hell fast enough for me.

I hate him. Joseph Mills is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He's a cold-blooded murdering monster. Sometimes I think maybe why I didn't hear anything. Probably that dirtbag went down to her like this, like, Linda, you say another word or fight me anymore. I'm going to kill Tim and Jeff, you know.

And the love that a mom has for her kids, she probably just went along with it to keep us from getting murdered. I know when she took her last breath and she died, she was thinking about me and Tim. Joseph Mills took my childhood from me, and I had to grow up very fast after he killed my mom. Still don't know why he did it. He won't say.

That's aggravating. He got to live his whole life out, and she was taken out when she was young for senseless crime. Cold Case Files is hosted by Marissa Pinson, produced by Jeff DeRay, and distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at anetv.com. Pluto TV is a place for movie fans like me and TV fans like me. They've got something for everyone and it's free. I love free and I love Jersey Shore.

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