Lakeland Killing Suspect Was Football Coach 38 Years Ago: Police

LAKELAND, FL — New DNA evidence in the 38-year-old Florida homicide case of single mother Linda Patterson Slaten now points to the former football coach of one her two sons, police said.

"He was my football coach, and I trusted this man," Tim Slaten said during an emotional press conference Thursday. Tim was 12 when his mother was killed in his family's central Florida apartment on Sept. 4, 1981, as he and his older brother slept in their bedrooms.

"He'd take me home after the games and practice ... I've been in shock ... I saw the crime scene. It's still burnt in my brain today. ... I saw it firsthand, what he had done, and he's a monster."

Jeff Slaten, who is older by three years, may have been spared from seeing the crime scene but said he has not been spared the pain of close to four decades of looking over his shoulder.

"It's been rough for me my whole life, not knowing who he is. I was scared to death I was friends with him. Thank God I didn't know him," the elder brother said during the press conference. "He is a monster ... His hell is getting started now. Me and my brother —our family has been going through hell for 38 years — always looking over our shoulder."

Joseph Clinton Mills, who is now 58, was arrested last week and is facing charges of first-degree murder, sexual battery and burglary with assault and battery. He spoke with police the day after the murder but was not implicated at that time even though he had been arrested the previous year on a charge of grand theft.

Lakeland police said Mills was identified as a suspect in the case after a relative opted into a public genealogy database that police compared to decades-old DNA found at the crime scene through a crime lab analysis. Police said they obtained a recent sample of his DNA through a search of garbage on his property.

In addition, police said they also preserved fingerprint evidence from the original crime scene that pointed back to Mills through fingerprints on file from his 1980 arrest.

"We couldn't be more happier to tell you about a case that's 38 years in the making," Lakeland Police Chief Rubin Garcia said at Thursday's press conference. "It's a case of some outstanding detective work and lab work 38 years ago on the scene to preserve evidence that led our detectives nowadays to use some cutting-edge technology that we're able to get this case to court."

The arrest has been a bright spot for Lakeland police following the recent death of veteran Officer Kenneth Foley, who suffered a medical episode in his patrol car on Dec. 5.

Donna Wallace, chief of forensic services with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said the Lakeland case is one of handful of cold cases in Florida where genetic genealogy databases have been used to identify a suspect.

"To date, we have five cold cases that have been solved using genetic genealogy leads," she said. "This is the first one for Lakeland PD," which has 28 cold cases.

Slaten's sons said they believe that their mother, who was 31 at the time of her death, may have worked as a librarian in Alabama before the family moved to Florida.

They remember their mother as a caring woman who always was there for her children. She was the kind of person who never treated anyone as a stranger. "She talked to anybody," Tim Slaten recalled. "She was nice to everybody."

The younger Slaten said the accused killer's name never came up as a possible suspect in all of the years since his mother was found dead. The brothers last saw their mother around 12:30 a.m. the day her body was found, at 8:35 a.m. inside their apartment in the 300 block of North Brunnell Parkway.

"There's a list of names over the years, and none of them were a match until they started doing all the DNA," Tim Slaten said. "He was the last person on my brain that I thought was going to do it. We had all these other suspects for years."