On the evening of September 3rd, 1981, a 20-year-old volunteer football coach pulled up to a small apartment on North Brunell Parkway in Lakeland, Florida.
He dropped off 12-year-old Tim Slatten after practice the same way he’d done a dozen times before.
Tim’s mother, Linda, came outside to thank him for the ride. The coach drove away.
The next morning, Linda’s sister, Judy, walked over for their usual cup of coffee. When nobody answered the door, she noticed the bedroom window screen was missing.
She looked through the glass and she started screaming. Linda Sllayton, 31 years old, a single mother of two boys, had been strangled with a wire coat hanger from her own closet.
Her sons were asleep in the apartment when it happened. Neither of them woke up.
Police questioned the football coach within days. He told them he’d never been inside the apartment.
They took his word for it and moved on. They didn’t fingerprint him. They didn’t test his DNA.
And for 38 years, the case went cold while Coach Joe kept living his life, raising a family, and growing old in the same town where he killed a woman whose son trusted him completely.
What the investigators didn’t know was that Sergeant Edgar Picket, a crime scene technician one year from retirement, had lifted a palm print from that bedroom window sill, and a rape kit had been sealed and stored.
Those two pieces of evidence would wait four decades for a science that hadn’t been invented yet to finally speak the dead woman’s name.
This is the story of Linda Sllayton, a mother who deserved better. A case that everyone thought would stay buried forever.
And the genetic genealogologist, the fingerprint expert, and the family who refused to let it go.
41 years of silence. And then finally, an answer that nobody saw coming. If cold cases and the science that solves them are the kind of stories that keep you watching, take a second and hit that like button.
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It was early 1981 and Linda Patterson Sllayton was trying to start her life over in a place where nobody knew her name.
She was 31 years old. She had two sons. Jeff was 15, already old enough to understand things a 15-year-old shouldn’t have to understand.
Tim was 12, still young enough to believe the move to Florida meant everything was going to be okay.
Linda had spent the last nine years married to a man named Frank Sllayton. Frank was a violent alcoholic.
Jeff would later describe his father as exactly that, and the memories he carried from that house in Hartsell, Alabama, were the kind no child should have to carry.
Jeff remembered being 6 or 7 years old and stepping between his parents while his father held his mother by the throat with a gun pressed to her head.
That was the house Linda was trying to escape. After 9 years, she finally filed for divorce.
And sometime in mid 1981, she packed up what little she had and moved with Jeff and Tim to Lakeland, Florida.
There was no savings account, no car, no safety net. Linda and her boys moved into federally subsidized housing on North Brunell Parkway.
They lived on welfare and food stamps. Linda made her own clothes to save money because buying them wasn’t an option.
She couldn’t afford a car, which is why it mattered so much when a volunteer football coach named Joe offered to drive Tim to and from practice.
It was one less thing Linda had to figure out. Her sister, Judy Butler, lived nearby and remembered Linda the way everyone who met her did.
Small, barely 100 lb, pretty tough in a way that didn’t come from confidence, but from years of surviving things that should [music] have broken her.
Judy said everybody liked Linda the moment they met her. She was full of life in a way that made people forget she was also full of scars.
Jeff described his mother in simpler terms. She was trying to do the best she could to take care of them.
That was it. That was the whole mission. Government housing, food [music] stamps, homemade clothes, and two boys she was determined to raise right, even if she had to do it completely alone.
The boys adjusted differently. Jeff, the older one, was already carrying scars that no teenager should have to carry.
He’d seen too much in that house in Alabama. He understood what the move to Florida was really about.
A mother running out of options, trying to give her kids something that looked like a normal life.
Tim was younger, more hopeful. He found football. [music] He made friends. He had a coach who drove him to practice because his mom couldn’t afford a car.
For Tim, Lakeland was starting to feel like the fresh start Linda had promised them.
Linda herself was doing [music] what single mothers with nothing have always done. She was figuring it out as she went.
She wasn’t thriving. She was surviving. But she was doing it with a stubbornness that her family recognized as distinctly Linda.
You could knock her down and people had. But she got back up. That was who she was.
She had been in Lakeland for only a few weeks when she was murdered. The woman were about to spend the next hour following through police reports, the [music] DNA databases, and courtroom transcripts was a real person.
She loved her kids with everything she had. She left a dangerous marriage because she wanted them to have something better.
Even though leaving meant poverty, she moved across state lines with two boys, no money, and no plan except survival.
She deserved more time than she got. She deserved to see her sons grow up, and she deserved to be remembered as more than a case file number.
If Linda’s story is already hitting you, [music] and you want to make sure more people hear it, drop a like on this video.
It makes a real difference in getting these cases the attention they deserve. On the morning of September 4th, 1981, Judy Butler walked to her sister’s apartment for their usual cup of coffee.
It was a routine they’d established since Linda moved to Lakeland. Judy would come over.
They’d sit in the kitchen and they’d talk the way sisters do when one of them is rebuilding a life from scratch.
That morning, nobody answered the door. Judy knocked, waited, knocked again. Still nothing. She was about to turn and leave when something caught her eye.
The window screen on the bedroom side of the apartment was missing. Not open. Missing entirely.
The screen had been removed and placed against the outside wall. [music] Judy stepped closer to the window and looked through the glass.
What she saw sent her into the kind of scream that the apartment complex’s maintenance man would later describe as blood curdling.
Screams that carried across the parking lot and brought people running. Linda Sllayton was lying crossways on her bed.
She was partially undressed. A wire coat hanger, the kind you’d find in any bedroom closet, had been twisted tight around her neck.
Police arrived and processed the scene. The killer had entered and exited through the unlocked bedroom window.
The wire hanger came from Linda’s own closet. There were no obvious signs of a struggle in the room, which suggested Linda may have been surprised or overpowered before she could fight back.
Jeff, 15 years old, had been asleep on a cot in the living room. He hadn’t heard anything during the night.
Tim, 12, was in the second bedroom. He hadn’t heard anything either. [music] But when an officer woke Tim that morning and walked him through the apartment, the bedroom door to Linda’s room swung open as they passed.
Tim saw everything. The crime scene, his mother, the hanger. He was 12 years old.
And he says he still sees that image every time he closes his eyes. Into this scene walked Sergeant Edgar Picket.
Pickicket was 53 years old, a pioneering black fingerprint expert with the Lakeland Police Department, and he was one year away from retirement.
He was one of the best crime scene technicians in the department, and he was about to prove it.
Another detective at the scene told Picket that a black man didn’t have any business looking [music] at a crime scene involving a white woman’s body.
Those were the actual words used at a homicide scene to a veteran crime scene.
Sergeant Picket ignored him. He got to work. He dusted everything in [music] that bedroom.
The dresser, the window sill, the window frame, even the floor. And from the bedroom window sill, the exact spot where the killer had climbed in and climbed out, Picket lifted a partial palm print.
That palm print would sit in evidence storage for 38 years. And it would turn out to be the single most important piece of physical evidence in this entire case.
This decision made by a man who was told he didn’t belong at the scene would be the thing that ultimately sealed a murderer’s fate.
Pickicket didn’t know that in the moment. He was just doing what [music] a good crime scene technician does, dusting everything, documenting everything, leaving nothing to chance.
Years later, long after retirement, when the case was finally solved, Picket would learn that the palm print he carefully lifted that morning was the reason a killer spent the rest of his life in prison.
The Lakeland Police Department named their crime lab after him. He earned that honor on a September morning in 1981, kneeling beside a bedroom window, doing work that nobody in the room expected to matter 40 years later.
But that was 38 years away. And in September 1981, nobody had any idea whose palm left that print on the window.
The autopsy at Lakeland General Hospital confirmed what the crime scene had already suggested. Linda Sllayton had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
A rape kit was processed and seaman was collected and [music] preserved, but DNA profiling as a forensic tool simply did not exist.
In 1981. The technology wouldn’t emerge until 1984 and 1985, and even then, it would take years before law enforcement adopted it widely.
So, the biological evidence from that rape kit was sealed, cataloged, and placed into storage.
Investigators had no way to use it. Not yet. Without DNA, detectives worked the case the old-fashioned way.
Build a suspect list. Interview everyone. Eliminate through alibis and polygraphs. The first name on the list was Frank Sllayton, Linda’s ex-husband, the violent alcoholic she’d fled from in Alabama.
Detectives contacted law enforcement in Hartell and confirmed that Frank had been at home in Alabama on the night of the murder.
His alibi checked out. He was cleared. Linda’s boyfriend at the time was also investigated and also cleared with an alibi.
Neighbors who had hosted a card party in the apartment next door that evening were questioned.
Several men who lived in the surrounding area were brought in. And then somehow the investigation turned on Jeff.
The 15-year-old boy who had been asleep on a cot in the living room while his mother was killed became a suspect in his own mother’s murder.
Police pulled him out of school for questioning. They interrogated him repeatedly. One detective looked at the grieving teenager and told him he had big arms and was strong enough to put your hands around your mom’s neck and kill her.
They polygraphed Jeff. He passed. They polygraphed him again. He passed again. They weren’t satisfied.
They proposed putting him under hypnosis. A 15-year-old boy who had just lost his mother in the most violent way imaginable.
And the police response was to treat him like the prime suspect. To pull him out of class, to sit him in rooms and fire questions at him, to suggest that his arms were strong enough to kill his own mother.
Jeff was a kid. He was grieving. He was terrified. And the people who were supposed to be finding his mother’s killer were instead accusing him of being that killer.
It wasn’t until Jeff’s grandparents stepped in, furious and protective, that the interrogation stopped. They demanded the police leave the boy alone, and eventually, reluctantly, the detectives moved on.
[music] Meanwhile, Joseph Clinton Mills was questioned. Within days of the murder, a detective contacted him by phone.
Mills said he had dropped him off around 8:30 [music] p.m. On the evening of September 3rd.
He said Linda came outside to his car to thank him for the ride. He said he never got out of the car, [music] never spoke to Linda beyond that brief exchange, never went inside the apartment, and never came back.
The detective accepted this. Mills was not asked to come in for a formal interview.
He was not fingerprinted. He was not asked to provide a DNA sample. Not that it would have mattered in 1981.
He was talked to on the phone and let go. Sergeant Picket [music] noticed something about the investigation that he would speak about publicly decades later.
In the days after Linda’s murder, black men from the neighborhood were rounded up based on neighbors reports of suspicious activity.
They were fingerprinted. Their prints were compared against the palm [music] print from the windowsill.
None matched. But the white volunteer football coach who had been at the apartment that very evening, the last known person to see Linda alive besides her [music] children, was never fingerprinted at all.
Picket didn’t say this with bitterness. He said it as a fact. And the [music] fact spoke for itself.
Years later, when the case was finally solved and people looked back at the original investigation, the debate centered on whether Mills had slipped through the net.
Or whether the net was never cast in his direction in the first place. Detectives Hathcock and Hurley would later argue that Mills gave no indication of having entered the house in 1981.
So there was no reason to treat him as a suspect. He told police he stayed in his car.
He said he never went inside. He was polite, [music] cooperative, and believable. But Detective Grace saw it differently.
Grace publicly blamed himself for not circling back to Mills during the years he worked the case.
The coach was the last known person to see Linda alive besides her children. [music] He was at the apartment that night.
He had access and the investigation moved past him without ever doing the basic work of fingerprinting him and comparing those prints to the evidence on the windowsill.
Whether you call it a failure of the system or a failure of imagination, the result was the same.
A 20-year-old man who killed a woman in her own bed walked out of the investigation without leaving so much as a fingerprint card behind.
And he walked straight back into the life of the dead woman’s 12-year-old son. The investigation slowed, leads dried up, the case went cold, and Joseph Clinton Mills went home to his life.
In 1981, Joseph Clinton Mills was 20 years old. He worked at the public’s dairy warehouse in the Lakeland area and volunteered as an assistant coach with the Lakeland Volunteers, a [music] youth football program.
Coaching was how he met Tim Sllayton. Tim was one of the boys on his team [music] and Mills drove Tim and other kids to and from practice because most of their families didn’t have reliable transportation.
He was Coach Joe, the guy who showed up, the guy who gave your kid a ride when you couldn’t.
The kind of person a single mother with no car and no money would have been grateful to know.
What happened after the murder is the detail that turned a local cold case into a nationally covered story.
It’s the detail that CBS called the betrayal of Linda Slattton and that Paulison’s show titled the unthinkable betrayal.
After killing Linda Sllayton, Joseph Clinton Mills kept coaching her son. He kept driving Tim to practice.
He kept dropping Tim off at his grandparents house after Linda’s death. He kept acting normal.
[music] He kept being Coach Joe. About a month after the murder, the youth football team took a team photo.
Tim stood in the front in his jersey, 12 years old, still reeling from the loss of his mother.
And standing directly behind him, close enough to reach out and touch the boy’s shoulder, was Coach Joe, Joseph Clinton Mills.
That photo hung on Tim Sllayton’s bedroom wall for decades. He [music] looked at it thousands of times over the years, and he had no idea he was looking at the man who murdered his mother.
Tim’s own words years later after learning the truth, said it all. He said he’d been carrying the killer’s picture in his house his whole life and never had a clue.
He said he looked up to this guy, trusted him, rode in his car, and never knew.
And it gets worse than the photo. Mills used his relationship with the 12-year-old boy to monitor the police investigation into his own crime.
During car rides and conversations, Mills would asked Tim casually if there was any new news on his mother’s case, any new leads, anything the police had shared with the family.
He was using the dead woman’s child as an informant, checking through a grieving 12year-old whether anybody was getting close to figuring out what he had done.
And every time Tim told him there was nothing new, every time the boy shook his head and said the police didn’t have any leads, Mills must have felt a little safer, a little more certain that he’d gotten away with it.
Picture what that looks like from the outside. A youth football coach driving a kid whose mother was just murdered, showing up for practice, putting on the whistle, acting concerned.
And picture what it looks like from the inside. From inside the mind of a man who knows exactly what happened in that apartment because he’s the one who climbed through the window.
Jeff Sllayton would later call Mills a cold-hearted monster. And when you understand the full scope of what Mills did after the murder, that description doesn’t feel strong enough.
This wasn’t just a crime followed by silence. This was a crime followed by a performance, a sustained, deliberate act of deception aimed at a 12-year-old boy who had already lost everything.
Mills went on to live a completely ordinary life. He married and stayed married to the same woman.
He had children. He had grandchildren. He ran a cleaning business. He drove trucks. He lived in the Kathleen area about 30 minutes from the apartment on North Brunell Parkway where he climbed through a bedroom window and killed a single mother while her boys slept nearby.
He was never arrested for any violent crime. His only criminal record before 2019 was a 1984 conviction for grand theft, specifically for forging a will.
He served no jail time for that, but he was fingerprinted and palm printed by Lakeland police.
That 1984 palm print would come back to haunt him. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
For 38 years, Joseph Clinton Mills lived free. He raised a family. [music] He went to work.
He came home. He celebrated holidays and birthdays and anniversaries. He watched his children graduate and his grandchildren take their first steps.
He sat at dinner tables and laughed and lived a life that looked from every angle like the life of a decent man.
He aged into his [music] 50s, then his 60s. He never left the Lakeland area.
He never ran. He never had to because nobody was looking for him. And 30 minutes away, two boys he had shattered were growing up without a mother.
They were sleeping with weapons under their pillows. They were waking up in the dark, terrified.
They were carrying a photograph of their football team on the wall and not knowing that the man in the back row was the reason their mother [music] was dead.
They called the faceless figure who destroyed their family, the monster. They had no idea the monster had a name, a family, and a cleaning business down the road.
If you’ve been watching Cold Case Redemption for a while, you know the cases we cover here don’t stay cold forever.
If you’re new, hit subscribe because the science that finally caught Coach Joe is coming up.
And it’s the kind of breakthrough that’s solving cases all over the country right now.
The case went cold, but it never fully closed. Over the decades, the Lakeland Police Department kept the Linda Sllayton file active, and nearly two dozen detectives rotated through it at various points.
Each new detective would open the file, review the evidence, chase whatever leads were available, and eventually hit the same wall.
Around 1999, Detective Brad GCE took a fresh look at the case. Grace was the kind of detective who didn’t pick up a cold case file to check a box.
He picked it up because he planned to solve it by March of 1999. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement had developed a full DNA [music] profile from the rape kit evidence collected in 1981.
For the first time in 18 years, investigators had a [music] complete genetic fingerprint of the killer.
The problem was that there was nobody to compare it to. In 2005, that DNA profile was entered into the FBI’s [music] CODUS database, the combined DNA index system that stores and continuously cross-references genetic profiles from convicted offenders, arrestes, [music] and crime scenes across the country.
Every time a new profile was added to Kotus, it was automatically checked against Linda Sllayton’s case.
Every time, no match. Grace didn’t just sit and wait for a database hit. That wasn’t who he was.
[music] He went out and worked the case the way cold case detectives do, one lead at a time, knowing that most of them would go nowhere but chasing them anyway, because one of them might be the one that matters.
He traveled. He drove to Louisiana following a tip that went cold. He followed a lead to North Carolina that also went nowhere.
He took dozens of elimination DNA samples from men connected to the case, the neighborhood, Linda’s social circle, even tangential contacts from decades earlier, men who had lived in the area in 1981, men who had known Linda, men who had been at the apartment complex around the time of the murder.
One by one, Grace collected their DNA, sent it to the lab, and waited for results that always came back the same way.
Not a [music] match. He even persuaded Frank Sllayton, Linda’s ex-husband, who had long since stopped drinking and was trying to make amends, to volunteer a DNA sample.
Frank agreed. He was cleared again, this time by genetics. Then came the strongest lead the case had ever produced, a convicted predator named Jimmy Ol.
Mer had committed a violent assault against a young girl by pulling her through her bedroom window.
The method of entry was eerily similar to the Slatton case. A window, an unsuspecting victim, a nighttime attack.
And the connection that made Grace’s pulse quicken. Mer had stayed in the same apartment complex on North Brunell Parkway where Linda Sllayton lived.
Same complex, same method, same type of crime. [music] For a detective who had been chasing this case for years, this was the kind of lead that makes you believe you’re about to solve it.
Grace zeroed in. He pulled every record on Ol. [music] He built a timeline. He mapped the connections.
But there was a problem. Mer had died in prison in 1996, years before DNA technology could have been used to test him against the Slatton evidence.
He was dead. And dead men don’t provide DNA samples. So Grace got creative. He tracked down Olar’s mother and [music] obtained a DNA sample from her to reconstruct a partial genetic profile of her son.
If the maternal DNA shared enough markers with the rape kit evidence, they would know was the killer.
The lab results came [music] back. No match. Not even close. Jimmy Ol, the man who committed similar crimes in the same apartment complex, was definitively excluded.
Another dead end. The strongest suspect in four decades of investigation, eliminated by the same science that was supposed to finally solve the case.
Grace had made a promise to Jeff and Tim Sllayton. He told them he wouldn’t retire until the case was solved.
It was the kind of promise detectives make because they mean it at the time, not because they can guarantee it.
And in 1915, Brad GC retired from the Lakeland Police Department without solving the murder of Linda Sllayton.
[music] He kept the file in his memory. He kept the promise in his conscience, even though he knew he’d broken it by retiring.
Jeff kept [music] the detective in his heart. Years later, when Jeff had a son of his own, he named the boy Brad.
Not after a family member, not after a friend, after the detective who had spent more than 15 years trying to give two brothers the answer they needed, and who [music] had cared enough to make a promise he couldn’t keep.
That’s the kind of bond that forms between a cold case detective [music] and the families who are waiting.
It’s not professional, it’s personal. Grace didn’t just work the Slatton case, he carried it.
By February 2016, the case had passed to detectives Scott Kercher and Russ Hurley. They were the latest in a long line of investigators to inherit the file and they approached it the way every good cold case detective does by going back to the evidence.
They retrieve the preserved DNA from evidence [music] storage. The biological material collected in 1981 and stored for 35 years through changes in technology, departmental leadership, and evidence management protocols was still intact, still viable, still testable, still ready.
But without a suspect to compare it to, the evidence was still a key without a lock.
A perfect genetic profile of the killer sitting in a database matching no one. Meanwhile, Jeff and Tim Sllayton were living the kind of life that violent crime leaves behind.
Not the dramatic, made for television version of trauma. The quiet, grinding, everyday version. The kind where you check the locks three times before you go to bed.
The kind where you wake up in the middle of the night and your first thought isn’t a dream.
It’s the memory of what you saw when you were 12. In the weeks after their mother’s murder, both boys had slept in the same room at their grandparents house while their grandfather, Clarence Harris, sat in a chair all night with a gun across his lap.
A grandfather standing guard over two boys who couldn’t sleep because the man who killed their mother was still out there somewhere and nobody knew who he was.
Jeff slept with a switchblade under his pillow for years. Not weeks, not months, years.
He carried guilt for not waking up during the attack. Even though he was a 15year-old, sleep in a separate room, he turned the question over and over.
What if he’d heard something? What if he’d woken up? What if he could have stopped it?
The guilt ate at him in ways that no therapist could fully reach. He contemplated suicide.
He thought about ending it because the weight of what he carried was more than he knew how to hold.
Tim carried a different weight. The image of his mother’s bedroom that he’d seen as a 12-year-old boy.
The one that flashed behind his eyes every time he tried to sleep. And the team photo on his wall.
The one with Coach Joe standing right behind him. He didn’t know it yet, but he’d been looking at his mother’s killer his entire adult life.
Both brothers stayed close. They lived a few miles apart. They restored cars together. They visited their mother’s grave.
Jeff lit a candle beside Linda’s portrait every year on the anniversary of her death.
The monster had no face and no name. And for 38 years, nobody could tell them who he was.
In November 2018, an official with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Orlando made a phone call that would change everything.
The call went to Lakeland police detective Tammy Hathcock. The subject was a new forensic tool called investigative genetic genealogy.
7 months earlier in April 2018, this technology had been used to identify the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who had terrorized California in the 1970s and [music] 1980s.
The arrest of Joseph James D’Angelo had made international headlines and launched a wave of cold case submissions across the country.
The FDLE official asked a simple question. Did Lakeland have any cold cases with preserved DNA evidence that they’d like to submit.
They did. And the timing mattered because by late 2018, cold case units across the country were waking up to the fact that the cases they’d been sitting on for decades.
The ones with preserved biological evidence and no suspect suddenly had a path forward. The Golden State Killer arrest had proven that you didn’t need a suspect’s DNA in a criminal database.
You just needed his relatives in a consumer database. And millions of Americans had voluntarily uploaded their genetic data to sites like GED Match and Ancestry for family history research.
The killer’s DNA didn’t have to be on file. His third cousins did. On December 4th, 2018, the Lakeland Police Department sent the rape kit DNA from the Linda Sllayton case to Parabon Nano Labs, a Virginia based forensic company that had become the leading lab for investigative genetic genealogy in law enforcement.
In the roughly 2 years since the Golden State Killer arrest, Parabon and its team had identified approximately 100 suspects in cold cases across the country.
100 cases that had been stuck for years, sometimes decades, cracked open by a genealogologist and a public database.
Enter CC Moore. Moore is Parabon’s chief genetic genealogologist. She’s a pioneer in the field of autotosomal DNA analysis, the genealogologist featured on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, and the head of Parabon’s law enforcement division.
By the time the Sllayton case DNA reached her desk, Moore and her team had already identified roughly 100 suspects using the same technology in the 2 years since the Golden State Killer arrest.
The process works like this. Moore uploaded the anonymous killer’s DNA profile to GED Match, a public database where people voluntarily share their genetic data, usually for ancestry research.
GED match generated a list of people who shared segments of DNA with the unknown contributor.
These weren’t close relatives necessarily. They were distant cousins, second and third and fourth cousins, [music] people who shared a common ancestor somewhere in their family tree.
From there, Moore did what she does better than almost anyone. She built family trees branch by branch, generation by generation [music] using birth certificates, marriage licenses, obituaries, sense census records, and social media profiles.
She was looking for a place where multiple genetic lines converged into one family. She found three separate genetic networks that all pointed to the same immediate family.
Three independent paths through the DNA, three branches of a massive family tree, all arriving at the same front door.
This is the power of genetic genealogy. You don’t need the killer’s DNA in a database.
You need his relatives DNA in a database. And in a world where millions of people have uploaded their genetic data for ancestry [music] research, the odds of finding at least a few distant relatives are high and getting higher every year.
More narrowed the field. [music] The killer was known to be male based on the biological evidence.
And in the family where all three genetic networks converged, there was only one son, Joseph Clinton Mills.
Moore later said she identified the probable killer in a single weekend. [music] One weekend, after 38 years of dead ends, she told reporters she was determined to help these boys find out who killed their mother.
And she later called the Linda Sllayton case the one that made her the angriest of all the hundreds of cases she had worked because of what Mills had done to those children and because of the way he would later try to denigrate the victim.
Parabon’s official report dated June 5th, 2019 concluded that Joseph Clinton Mills should be strongly considered as the suspect because genetic connections were found to both sides of his family tree and because he had been living in close proximity to the crime scene in 1981.
When detective Hathcock received the report and opened the original 1981 case file to cross reference the name, [music] she found something that made her blood run cold.
Joseph Clinton Mills. The name was already in the file. He’d been interviewed days after the murder.
He was the football coach who drove Tim home. Hathcock ran down the hallway of the Lakeland Police Department shouting two words.
He was interviewed. The man who killed Linda Sllayton had told police his story in 1981, and they had believed him.
He’d been sitting in the case file the entire time. Knowing who the killer was and proving it in court are two different things.
Genetic genealogy identifies a suspect. It doesn’t convict one. Investigators needed independent physical confirmation before they could make an arrest.
They had two paths and both of them came through. The first was the palm print.
In 1984, 3 years after the murder, Joseph Clinton Mills had been convicted of grand theft for forging a will.
He served no jail time, but as part of the process, Lakeland [music] police fingerprinted and palm printed him.
Those prints went into the system and sat there for 35 years. >> [music] >> In August 2019, investigators pulled Mills’s 1984 palm print from the files and compared it to the partial palm print that Sergeant Edgar Picket had lifted from Linda Sllayton’s bedroom window sill on the morning of September 4th, [music] 1981.
It matched. Think about that for a second. The palm print that a 53-year-old crime scene technician had carefully lifted from a window sill in 1981 at a scene where he was told he didn’t belong had just been matched to the killer 38 years later.
Edgar Picket’s work on that crime scene, his refusal to cut corners despite being insulted by a colleague became the physical link between Joseph Clinton Mills and the murder of Linda Sllayton.
Without that print, the case rests on DNA alone. With it, the case becomes airtight.
The Lakeland Police Department crime lab now bears Edgar Pickicket’s name. He earned it that morning in September 1981, even if nobody realized it until decades later.
The second path was the trash pole. Starting on July 29th, 2019, Lakeland police began conducting surveillance on Mills’s home at 12013 Bailey Road.
Over the course of several days, detectives collected trash from Mills’s address and neighboring addresses to avoid tipping him off.
From the trash, they recovered cotton swabs, adhesive patches from colostomy bags, a plastic spoon, and used medical adhesive tape.
A 2013 Facebook photo had shown Mills wearing a colostomy bag, so investigators knew that any adhesive material associated with that medical device would contain his DNA.
On August 9th, 2019, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported the results. The DNA extracted from the original 1981 rape kit evidence was consistent with the DNA found on the colostomy bag adhesive pulled from Mills’s trash.
Two independent confirmations, a palm print comparison spanning 38 years, a DNA match connecting biological evidence from 1981 to discarded medical supplies from 2019, both pointing to the same man.
Three independent lines of evidence, the genealogy, the palm print, and the DNA, developed across four decades using technologies that ranged from a fingerprint brush in 1981 to a genetic database in 2019.
All converging on Joseph Clinton Mills. There was no ambiguity left, no room for reasonable doubt, no innocent explanation for why this man’s palm was on the murder victim’s windows sill and his DNA was in the rape kit.
The man who told police in 1981 that he had never been inside Linda Sllayton’s apartment had left pieces of himself all over the crime scene, and the evidence had waited patiently for 38 years until science and persistence finally caught up with the lie.
If you’re wondering how Mills kept a straight face telling police he’d never set foot inside that apartment while his palm print was drying on the window sill, so was everyone else.
On December 12th, 2019, 38 years and 3 months after the murder of Linda Sllayton, Joseph Clinton Mills was arrested at his home.
Detectives who were present described him as calm, cool, and collected. Not nervous, not confused, not angry, just calm.
The kind of calm that comes from a man who has been waiting 38 years for a knock on the door [music] and has had a very long time to decide what he would say when it came.
Or the kind of calm that comes from someone who simply does not feel what other people feel.
He showed no emotion, no surprise at being arrested, no fear of what was coming, nothing.
In an initial interview, Mills stuck to the exact same story he had told police in 1981.
He said he had never been in a relationship with Linda Sllayton. He said he had never been inside her apartment.
Nearly four decades later, confronted by officers who clearly knew more than he wanted them to know, he repeated the same lie that had kept him free since 1981.
A week later, investigators confronted him with the fingerprint evidence and the DNA match. And for the first time in 38 years, Mills’s story changed.
He now claimed that Linda had invited him to the apartment. He said he entered through the bedroom window at her request.
He said the encounter that followed was consensual. [music] And he claimed that the wire coat hanger around her neck was Linda’s idea, something she asked him to do as part of a consensual act, and that she lost consciousness and never woke up.
Investigators did [music] not believe a word of it. And the physical evidence contradicted every element of his new account.
[snorts] The autopsy from 1981 documented injuries on Linda’s body that were inconsistent with any consensual encounter.
Her neck showed injuries consistent with violent strangulation and with Linda actively fighting to get the wire off.
The crime scene showed a killer who entered through a window, attacked a woman in her bed, and left the same way he came in.
Detective Russ Hurley’s conclusion was direct. He said he believed it was evident that Mills targeted Linda.
Hurley theorized that Mills likely hid inside Linda’s bedroom closet, the same closet where the wire coat hanger came from, and waited for her to return.
On the evening of September 3rd, Linda and Tim had been at the card party in the apartment next door.
Jeff was at his grandparents house. Mills knew the apartment would be empty. He knew the bedroom window was unlocked and he knew where to wait.
A Pulk County grand jury indicted Joseph Clinton Mills on six counts. One count of firstdegree murder, two counts of sexual battery, one count of burglary with assault or battery, and two counts of perjury.
[music] Stemming from the false statements he had made to detectives during his interrogation, Mills was held without bond.
His courtappointed attorney entered a not-uilty plea and for two more years the Sllayton family waited.
And no, the irony was not lost on anyone that the same man who had used a 12-year-old boy to monitor the investigation for months was now four decades later sitting in a jail cell because that boy’s mother’s DNA had been preserved long enough for science to catch up with the crime.
February 9th, 2022, 41 years after the murder of Linda Sllayton, Joseph Clinton Mills, now 61 years old, stood before Judge J.
Kevin Abdoni in a Pulk County courtroom and changed his plea to guilty. The decision was made to avoid a possible death sentence.
His attorney said it was in his [music] best interest. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in Florida State Prison without the possibility of parole.
Mills offered no explanation. He gave no answers to the questions that had haunted two brothers for four decades.
He made no apology to the family. His only statement to the court was this.
He said he was a good person. He said he was not the person [music] they were painting him out to be.
That was it. That was all he had to say after 41 years. Then the family spoke.
Jeff Sllayton, now in his mid-50s, stood up and faced the man who had destroyed his childhood.
He looked at Mills and asked the question that had been burning inside him since December 2019 when the detective called with a name.
Why, Joe? Why’d you take my mama? Mills said nothing. Jeff told him directly, “I hate you.
You can’t die and burn in hell fast enough for me. Tim Sllayton, the boy who had ridden in Coach Joe’s car, who had trusted him, who had looked up to him, who had carried his photograph on a bedroom wall for decades without knowing what it meant, stood up next.
He told Mills he had so much hate for him. He told Mills he hoped bad things would happen to him in prison.
Their aunt Judy Butler, the woman who had looked through that bedroom window 41 years earlier and screamed loud enough to bring the whole complex running, stood last.
She looked at the man who took her sister and asked the simplest question anyone could ask.
Joe, how could you do that? Do you have any soul? Do you have any remorse?
Mills answered none of them. Not Jeff, not Tim, not Judy. He sat in his chair, expressionless, hands in his lap, and said nothing while the family of the woman he murdered poured 41 years of grief and rage and unanswered questions into a courtroom that couldn’t give them back what they’d lost.
There is something uniquely cruel about a killer who won’t speak, who sits in a courtroom and absorbs the pain of the people he destroyed and gives nothing back.
No explanation, no confession of why, not even the dignity of an apology. Mills told the court he was a good person.
He told a room full of people who knew exactly what he had done that he was not who [music] they thought he was.
And then he went silent. For Jeff and Tim, the silence was its own kind of violence.
They had waited 41 years for an answer to the question why. And the man who could have given them that answer chose to say nothing.
The judge imposed the sentence. Four consecutive life terms. No [music] parole. Not one life sentence.
Four served consecutively. Joseph Clinton Mills would die in prison. He would never walk free again.
He would never sit at a family dinner again. He would never see his grandchildren outside of a visiting room again.
For the justice system, this was a resolution. A case closed, a plea accepted, a sentence imposed.
The file [music] could finally be stamped. But for the Sllayton family, it was something more complicated.
It was over. And it wasn’t over because no sentence, no matter how long, gives Jeff and Tim Sllayton back the decades they lost.
It doesn’t erase the image Tim saw when he was 12. It doesn’t undo the years Jeff spent with a switchblade under his pillow.
[music] It doesn’t return the mother who made her own clothes and moved to Florida for a fresh start and was murdered weeks after arriving.
Both brothers have said that it isn’t full justice. [music] Mills lived a complete free life.
He raised a family. He held his grandchildren. He grew old in the same town where Linda Sllayton was killed.
30 minutes from the apartment where he climbed through a window and took her life.
He got 60 years of freedom that Linda never got. But they have the answer now.
[music] And the monster has a name. What the murder of Linda Sllayton cost her sons cannot be measured in years or court sentences.
Jeff and Tim lost their mother. [music] They lost their childhood. They lost their ability to sleep without fear in a dark room.
And decades later, when they finally learned who killed her, they discovered that the man who stole everything from them had been standing in a photograph on Tim’s wall the entire [music] time.
But this story isn’t only about what was lost. It’s also about the people who refused to let Linda Sllayton become just another cold case statistic.
Nearly two dozen detectives with the Lakeland Police Department kept this file alive across four decades.
Each one picked it up, worked it, and passed it to the next. The case was never closed.
Linda was never forgotten by the department. Detective Brad GC spent more than 15 years trying to solve this murder.
He traveled across state lines, collected DNA samples, chased every plausible lead, and made a promise to two brothers that he meant with everything he had.
He retired [music] in 2015 without getting the answer. But his work kept the case warm enough for the next generation of detectives to pick it up.
Jeff honored Grace’s dedication the way you honor someone who matters. He named his son after him.
Sergeant Edgar Picket lifted a palm print from a window sill in 1981 while a colleague told him he didn’t belong at the scene.
He ignored the insult and did his job with the kind of precision that changed the outcome of a case 38 years later.
Without Pickicket’s print, the physical confirmation that sealed the case against Mills would not exist.
The Lakeland Police Crime Lab carries his name now. Pickicket lived long enough to see his work vindicated.
He passed away in April 2023. Jeff and Tim met him before he died and thanked him personally for what he did that morning.
CC Moore sat down at a computer in Virginia, uploaded a DNA profile, built a family tree, and identified a killer in a single weekend.
She later said this case made her angrier than any other she had worked on.
Not because of the crime itself, but because of what Mills did to those boys afterward.
The coaching, the car rides, the questions about the investigation, the photograph. And then there are Jeff and Tim themselves, two brothers who survived, who stayed close, who live a few miles apart and restore cars together, who visit their mother’s grave and keep her memory alive.
Jeff lights a candle beside Linda’s portrait every year on the anniversary of her death, September 4th.
Every year for over 40 years. Both brothers carry the weight of knowing they were in the apartment the night [music] their mother was killed.
Both carry the guilt of not waking up. Neither will ever fully be free of what happened in that small apartment on North Bernell Parkway in the late hours of September 3rd, 1981.
But the monster has a name now. Joseph Clinton Mills, inmate, four consecutive life sentences.
No possibility of parole. [music] He will die behind bars. And the photograph that hung on Tim Sllayton’s wall for decades.
The one where a 12-year-old boy in a football jersey stands smiling while his mother’s killer looms just behind his shoulder.
Finally tells the [music] truth. Coach Joe is no longer standing behind him. He is behind bars.
The science that caught Joseph Clinton Mills didn’t exist when Linda Sllayton was killed. It wouldn’t exist for decades.
But the evidence that made it possible, the palm print on the window sill and the sealed rape kit in storage survived because people who cared about this case made sure it survived.
Pickicket [music] lifted the print. The lab preserved the kit. Detective after detective kept the file active.
And when the science finally arrived, the evidence was waiting. That’s what cold case justice actually looks like.
Slow, unglamorous. A chain of people across 40 years. Each one doing their part. Most of them never knowing whether it would matter.
And then one day, it all connects. Linda Patterson Sllayton was born on March 8th, 1950.
She was a mother who gave everything she had. A sister who was loved by everyone who met her.
A survivor who escaped violence and poverty and kept fighting for her sons. And 41 years after she was taken from the people who loved her, she got something that most cold case victims [music] never get.
Redemption. If this story stayed with you, if you believe that forgotten victims deserve to have their name spoken and their cases solved, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
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