The photo of the person who did it hung on the wall of his son’s house for 38 years, yet no one ever suspected him.

 On September 3, 1981, Jeff, the older of Linda Laten’s two children, returned from football practice. However, because there was no food at home, he had an argument with his mother. Angry, he rode his bicycle to his grandparents’ house, more than 15 km away, to eat something later. Around 9:30 PM, he returned to find the house empty.

 At 11:30 PM, Linda and her younger son, Tim, 12, returned home. Linda mentioned she was going to a neighbor’s house to play cards, but before that, Jeff saw her doing chores. Tim, in turn, went to sleep. Jeff felt sad for having argued with his mother and took the opportunity to  apologize. They made up, and Linda said goodnight to her children.

 Jeff remembers telling her, “I love you, Mom, see you tomorrow.” Little did he know that those would be the last words he would say to her the following morning. On September 4, 1981, Linda’s younger sister arrived at Linda’s house around 8:30 AM. At the time, the two sisters lived in…  Jud, from the same housing complex in Lakeland, knocked on the front door of his sister Linda’s house.

 Linda didn’t answer, which he found strange because Linda was usually up at this hour. Jud started walking back to his house, but he noticed Linda’s room was out the window, which was wide open. Jud approached and looked inside and saw his sister Linda lying on her side in bed. At first, Jud thought she was sleeping, but he could see better: Linda’s head was on the floor and her body on the bed.

 Jud started screaming, which caught the attention of a nearby janitor who immediately called the police. When the police arrived, they found Linda Slaten, 31 years old, lifeless with a wire hanger around her neck, partially naked, her body stretched out on the bed and her head on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle.

 Her closet was open, but the rest of the room was in order. Within minutes, the Lakeland police, reporters, and medical services arrived. Yellow crime scene tape was spread throughout Linda’s house when the police arrived. Linda’s sons, Tim and Jeff, were still sleeping. Who could have committed such a heinous act?  Was it someone close to the family or a random attack? But only 38 years later was it discovered who this man was.

 Hello, welcome back to solved mysteries. Today we’re going to examine the case of Linda SL, a story so complex that you’ll be shocked to discover who was responsible. So let’s get to another solved mystery.    [Laughter]  It would have been an ordinary morning for 15-

year-old Jeff and 12-year-old Tim, but when they woke up their house was full of police officers. Something was very wrong; the atmosphere of tension was evident. Confused and scared, they were informed of devastating news: their mother’s life had been taken. Shock overwhelmed the brothers, who suddenly found themselves in a nightmare.

 Their small family of three was suddenly without its emotional support. Jeff, who had had some disagreements with his mother, often thought about taking his own life. After this incident, today’s case takes us to Lakeland, Florida, one of the most populous cities in Pok County, just 50 km from Tampa Bay, an important region for its huge tourism and beautiful beaches.

 In 1981, Lakeland  It was a city with many thriving businesses and residential areas filled with townhouses inhabited by close-knit families with many young children at the address North Brunel Parkway 303, where Linda and her two children lived. There were many townhouses; the family even owned one, but they had n’t lived there for very long.

 Sources claim that Linda and her children had moved from Alabama to Lakeland less than a month before the incident. Linda Patterson Slat was born on March 8, 1950. Everyone liked her; they always asked her out because she was young and beautiful, her brothers recalled. It was then that Linda met Frank Slat.

 At 16, she became pregnant with her first child, Jeffrey. Years later, she gave birth to her second child, Timothe Slaten. Soon after, she managed to convince the father of her two children, Frank Slaten, to marry her to form a  proper family. However, what Linda achieved was far from a happy family. Frank proved to be an abusive husband who routinely assaulted her and their two children.

 Dominated by alcoholism and addictions, he became violent whenever… Jeff and Tim remember their father transforming into a real monster, a violent thug who beat them without remorse. ” He was a scoundrel,” they described. “The more he drank, the more violent he became. I remember one time in the bathroom, he was pointing a gun at my mother’s head, and I went there to try to pull him off her.

 I felt like I saved her that night,” recounted Tim, who was only six or seven years old at the time. The idea of ​​filing for divorce began to haunt Linda’s mind, and in 1974 she finally broke free. Linda divorced Frank Slatten after nine turbulent years of marriage. She began a new life as a single mother of two teenagers, trying her best to raise her children with limited financial resources.

Linda juggled work and household chores. The family didn’t have a car, so Jeff and Tim usually walked to school or hitchhiked. Besides their studies, the two loved playing American football. Since they didn’t have transportation to practice, Coach Joe would take them home. A week before the tragic day of September 4th, Linda was tidying the house.

  To welcome her mother, believing that her presence would help her organize the home and make it more cozy, her sister Judy also used to visit her, and the two spent time together having coffee. However, on September 4, 1988, Linda’s NC (New York City) was the desolate morning when Judy found her sister lifeless.

 When the police arrived, they found the partially naked body.  The crackling of police radios inside the small two- bedroom apartment woke Linda’s 15-year-old son, Jeff, who was sleeping in a bed in the living room. Jeff later said, ” I asked the police what was happening. They told me to put on some clothes and leave. I went out the front door, and when I went out, it seemed like all the police officers from the State of Florida were outside.

 There were also news crews, and Aunt Judy was outside crying. She told me they had taken my mother’s life. I just couldn’t believe it.” In the second room of the house, another police officer woke Linda’s youngest son, 12 years old. The officer told him, “You need to wake up and go with your brother.” He didn’t mention my mother and me.

Why aren’t you saying my mother is still in her pajamas? Tim walked through the closed door of his mother’s room. Suddenly it opened when a police officer came out of the room and I saw the whole crime scene, I mean, part of my mother’s bloody body with a cable around her neck.  continues, stop seeing this, no, and I still  see her. Linda was 31 years old at the time.

 As soon as the children were taken to their grandparents, Sergeant Edgar Pickett of the Lakeland Police Department arrived at the crime scene. He led the investigation and found crucial evidence. Early on, he discovered several fingerprints in Linda’s room. Most belonged to Linda, but there was one that wasn’t hers: a palm print was found on the windowsill of the room, the same window with the curtain missing.

 To better understand what happened, Linda underwent an autopsy that revealed several marks and bruises on her arms, shoulders, and neck. In addition, her body was partially naked, indicating the possibility of abuse. On the same day, the two boys went to  Linda’s parents’ house. The first few days after Linda’s case were terrifying.

 The family slept in the same room except for the grandfather, Harris, who…  He stood guard with a gun all night while the others slept. The grandparents believed that a quick return to family routine would help the grandchildren cope with the grief. A few weeks after their mother’s funeral, the boys went back to school, Tim said, returning to football.

 Just being with his friends, life began to return to normal. He thinks his teammates and coach Joe in particular always supported him. He was the assistant football coach, he took us to games and practices, he was a great support. I looked at him with admiration, he recounted. The photo of Tim’s football team was taken a month after the loss of his mother.

For him, the image was a reminder of something his mother always taught: to keep moving forward and never give up. She was a fighter, she weighed maybe 45 kg wet, but she was strong. After the autopsy, it was determined that Linda had been brutally beaten, then abused, then strangled to death with a metal hanger from her own closet.

 Of the evidence found, the palm print was the most crucial because it could identify the culprit immediately if a match was found. However, the forensic DNA analysis that finds  A person based on their family tree, using large DNA databases, didn’t exist at the time. The first suspect was Frank Slatten,  Linda’s ex-husband. In 1975, when Linda divorced Frank, she stated that he had an aggressive nature, was abusive, and didn’t care for the family.

 There was no doubt that he would be considered a person of interest in the case, so he was taken in for questioning. However, when authorities investigated his whereabouts on the night Linda’s life was taken, they discovered he was at home in Alabama. Even so, suspicions about him remained. The second suspect was Linda’s own son, Jeff Slatten.

 But why did authorities consider him a suspect? Well before Linda was murdered, Jeff had a heated argument with his mother. He had a close but distant relationship with her. As the eldest son, he felt the pressure of living in a family with an abusive father and later with a single mother. At times, Jeff and Linda  disagreed, but he always made sure to make amends.

On the night of the incident, he reconciled with his mother before going to sleep. The police questioned him about the incident, and he… Jeff was advised to take a polygraph test, and it was suggested that he be hypnotized to finally learn the truth. His grandparents said, ” Enough! Find who took my daughter’s life and leave this boy alone.

” Two weeks later, Jeff took a second polygraph test and was cleared. The third suspect was Linda’s boyfriend at the time. She, being a single mother, had started dating someone. The man, who remains anonymous, had a close relationship with her and her children. However, when the police conducted a background check and polygraph tests, he was cleared.

 With this, the investigators were running out of suspects. Until, in September 2001, they received a tip. Almost a year after Linda’s case, a rumor surfaced about a 24- year-old man who had committed a similar crime. His name was Jimmy Umer. At the time, he was found guilty of pulling a 10-year-old girl out of her bedroom window and nearly killing her.

When the police checked his record, they discovered that he had been sentenced to 80 years in prison. Furthermore, Jimmy’s crimes and Linda’s case were surprisingly similar, to make matters worse at the time.  In Linda’s case, Jimmy was staying in the same neighborhood as her.

 The evidence against him led the police to believe that Jimmy was the prime suspect. However, there was a problem: Jimmy died while the investigation was underway, making DNA analysis impossible. Now they would have to exhume his body to perform the test. Fortunately, Jimmy’s mother allowed the DNA test, and a sample was collected.

 However, when the results arrived, there was no match. It wasn’t someone from the family or the ex-convict neighbor who could have taken Linda’s life. At that point, days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. In Lakeland, detectives investigated other people, but no one was formally charged. Without new leads, the case went cold.

 The Slat brothers had to face a new reality: their mother was gone, and now they only had their maternal grandparents, Clarence and Margaret Harris. While the investigation continued, Linda’s parents and children held her funeral and soon after began to resume their lives and routines. The brothers returned to school, and as time passed, they began to overcome what had happened at house number 303.

  From North Bruno Parkway, Tim returned to playing football and recalls that his teammates and coach Joe were very supportive when he didn’t have a ride to or from his grandparents’ house. Coach Joe continued to take him to practice. A month later, Tim hung a picture of the team in his room; that picture gave him the motivation to keep going.

 Over the years, the young brothers who had lost their mother grew up and built their own families. Jeff got married and had two children, and Tim also got married and started a family. Over time, both checked with Lakeland investigators about the progress in their mother’s case. Jeff Slay still remembers the night his mother’s life was taken.

 “I didn’t hear anything, and it’s very difficult to live like that.” Even Linda’s neighbors stated they hadn’t heard anything unusual that night. Despite Jeff having built successful lives, they sought to keep their mother’s case moving forward. Tim revealed this in an interview, saying, “No matter how many detectives we had to face, we were there to remind them that we are still here and want to know who did this to our mother.”  Seventeen years had passed since Linda’s case.

Despite the passage of more than a decade, the police persisted in the investigation. In 1998, Sergeant Pickett left his post, and the Slaten case was assigned to a new investigation team. Detective Brad Grace was assigned to the case. Upon reviewing the evidence, he focused on the unidentified DNA that had been collected in Linda’s case in 1981.

 He sent a sample again to the   Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s crime lab in 1999. The lab managed to develop a complete DNA profile of the unknown perpetrator of Linda’s case. After receiving the DNA profile, the detective reviewed the list of suspects again. This time, he was determined to obtain DNA samples from all of them.

 The year was 2001, and Detective Grace believed that matching the DNA profile would definitively reveal the killer. He made sure to speak with the Slen brothers first and managed to arrange a meeting with them. When the brothers arrived, Detective Grace collected their DNA samples and sent them for further testing. When the results came back, there was no match.

 Soon after, Jeff’s name was completely identified as Limo Doo, Linda’s husband.  Next to be investigated, by this time Frank had stopped drinking over the years after Linda lost her life; he seemed to have lost some of his aggressive and abusive tendencies. Tim and Jeff were also able to reconnect with their father during this period and heal some of the wounds of the past.

 Frank agreed to send his DNA for testing, but the DNA did not match the unidentified profile that the detective believed would point to the culprit in the case. In 2005, Detective Grace sent the unidentified DNA profile from the Slaten case to the FBI’s National DNA Database,  where it was continuously cross-referenced with newly submitted DNA samples.

During his investigation, he eliminated dozens of suspects using  DNA evidence. However, he retired in 2015 after spending 17 years on the Slaten case. After Detective Grace’s retirement, the case was assigned to new detectives Tammy Hathcock and Russell Hurley. Three years after beginning their investigation, Detective Hathcock discovered that the FBI had developed an innovative technology that could help identify any unidentified DNA.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, she sent the unidentified DNA from Linda’s case to… Genetic genealogist CC Moore, working for fdle, the public genealogy website jmat run by CC Moore, produced a list of people who might be related to the known suspect after uploading the anonymous DNA of the unknown person to the site.

She then used birth certificates, marriage certificates, obituaries, and social media to create a genetic family tree. As the investigation progressed, Moore created three family branches for the unknown person, which helped her identify the person most likely responsible for Linda Slaten’s death.

 The family tree built based on the DNA profile showed that this person was almost certainly responsible for taking Linda Slaten’s life. This is where the twist became so bizarre that it shocked Tim and Jeff Slaten, because the unknown person’s DNA matched a person pictured in a photo hanging on Tim ‘s bedroom wall with all  his football teammates: Joseph Clinton Mills, often called Coach  Joe.

 The family tree based on the DNA profile indicated that he was almost certainly the one who took Linda Slaten’s life.  Linda Slaten, after discovering the stranger’s name, Detectives Hathcock and Hurley investigated Joseph Mills’s history. They then discovered some crimes he had committed, one of which was forging a will, although he was never charged with it.

 Therefore, the police collected his palm prints and fingerprints. And as you may remember, Sergeant Edgar Pickett had discovered a palm print on Linda’s windowsill. This meant that the victim’s family could finally have closure on a case that had been open for over 40 years. Investigators compared the palm prints taken in 1980 with Mills’s prints and found that they matched.

 However, the detectives still needed to compare a recent DNA sample from the suspect with the DNA obtained from Linda’s room. So they decided to obtain his DNA for testing without his knowledge. They did this by taking garbage bags from Joseph Mills’s house and examining them at the police station, looking for items that might contain his DNA.

 While searching through the garbage, they found a piece of medical tape in one of the bags, which they sent to the crime lab for testing. The detectives investigated his private life.  De Mills in more detail while awaiting DNA results. He spent most of his 58 years in Kathlin, Florida, which was just 30 minutes from the house where Linda lost her life.

 He had children, grandchildren, and was also married. The crime lab results obtained almost two weeks later confirmed that the unknown DNA found and the DNA on the medical tape were an  exact match. In December 2019, detectives arrested Ms. Mills and took him in for questioning. In 1981, when he took Linda’s life, Joseph Mills was about 20 years old.

 A day after the case, the police spoke with him, but during the brief call, Ms. Mills told investigators that he had dropped Tim off at home after football practice on September 3,  1981, the night before Linda’s case. However, the police never considered him a  suspect. Even after Linda’s case, Joseph Mills continued to take Tim to football practice.

 He said he was inquired about the case, how it was going, and if there were any new leads.  He said there was nothing new; he was trying to follow the investigation through the son of the woman he killed on December 12, 2019. Detectives arrested Joseph Mills. He was calm, composed, and controlled, as if it were just another day at the beach.

Most people would ask why he was being arrested, but he showed no emotion during the interrogation. Mills told police that Linda Slaten had invited him for consensual sex, but detectives knew this was a lie. They concluded that he had targeted her before that night, as he frequently took Tim to practice and when he dropped him off at home afterward.

So what really happened on the night of September 3, 1981, according to MS’s statement? He had dropped Tim off at home after football practice. Later that night, when no one was home, he returned and entered through Linda’s bedroom window. He then waited for her to fall asleep, hiding in her closet.

 It was then that he beat her, assaulted her, abused her, and finally strangled her with a wire hanger from her closet.  Joseph Mills pleaded guilty to abusing and taking the life of Linda Slaten. During sentencing, members of Lind’s family confronted him and demanded to know why he did it. “I just want to know why you took my mother’s life.

” All MS said to the court was, ” I’m a good person, I’m not the person they’re painting me to be.” He didn’t give an answer, showed no remorse, or apologize. Mills was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole by the judge. Although the Slaten brothers find some comfort in the fact that MS will never leave prison alive, they feel outraged that he enjoyed so many years of their lives.

He was part of his mother’s life for something too unexpected. He was a Mod for the time, also offering auditing for the deceased. As he didn’t ask many questions, just “Is there any news or any new clue?” and I would say, “No, nothing.” You know, even today Tim still doesn’t believe that his mother’s killer was actually the person he trusted most.

 Tim even said, “I carried a picture of the person responsible for losing my mother in my house, on my desk, all the time, and never…”  I had a clue. Jeff, who still suffers deeply, often thinks about how life could have been if Linda were still alive. They remain extremely close after this incident; they frequently visit their mother’s grave, and Jeff always lights a candle on her birthday.

 Despite everything that happened, they never stopped trying to live life to the fullest in honor of their mother. What do you think about this unthinkable twist? Let us know what you think in the comments below, and like and share this video. For more true crime content like this, be sure to subscribe to our channel, and we hope to see you in the next solved mystery.