Linda Slaton Case: Genetic Genealogy, Palm Print, Life Sentences

The Linda Slaten murder was solved in 2019 when investigative genetic genealogy identified Joseph Clinton Mills, a youth football coach who had coached the victim’s younger son, as the man who raped and strangled the 31-year-old single mother in her Lakeland, Florida apartment on September 4, 1981. Mills pled guilty in February 2022 and received four life sentences without parole.¹

What Happened on September 4, 1981

Linda Slaten was raising two boys, Jeff and Tim, on her own in a Lakeland apartment. In the early morning hours, someone cut through her bedroom window screen, climbed inside, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her with a wire coat hanger taken from her own closet.² Her sons slept through it in the next room. Police officers woke them the following morning to tell them their mother was dead.

Crime scene technicians lifted a partial palm print from the windowsill. A rape kit preserved semen from the assault. Neither could be matched to a suspect with the technology available in 1981, but both survived long enough to matter.³

Why the Case Went Cold

Detectives cycled through the people closest to Linda. Her ex-husband, Frank Slaten, had been violent and abusive during their marriage, but he was in Alabama the night she was killed. Her boyfriend at the time had an alibi. Partygoers from a neighboring apartment were looked at and not charged.³

Investigators also pressed her 15-year-old son Jeff, pulling him out of school for questioning, giving him two polygraph tests, and requesting a hypnosis session. He passed the polygraphs and was cleared. The FBI kept running the unknown killer’s DNA profile through federal databases as years turned into decades. No hit came back.

The Coach the Family Trusted

Joseph Clinton Mills was an assistant coach on the youth football team Linda’s younger son Tim played for. The boys called him Coach Joe. On the evening of September 3, 1981, the night before Linda was murdered, Mills drove Tim home from practice.³

After the murder, Mills kept coaching Tim. He kept giving him rides, picking him up at his grandparents’ house, where the boys had moved. He would ask casually about the investigation. “Any new news or any new leads?” Tim remembered him asking. Tim would tell him no.

A team photograph hung in Tim’s bedroom for years. Mills stood directly behind him in it. “I looked up to this guy,” Tim later told CBS News.

When detectives questioned Mills two days after the murder in 1981, he told them he had met Linda only once and had never left his car or spoken to her when dropping Tim off. Those statements would later become the basis for a perjury charge.¹

How Genetic Genealogy Identified Him

In 2018, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement contacted Lakeland Detective Tammy Hathcock about sending the crime scene DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, a firm that specializes in investigative genetic genealogy.⁴ Rather than searching law enforcement databases, Parabon uploaded the unknown profile to public genealogy databases used by ordinary people looking for relatives. Analysts identified distant genetic cousins of the killer and worked family trees forward until a single name emerged.

In June 2019, Parabon told Lakeland police that Joseph Clinton Mills was their most likely suspect. Genetic connections appeared on both sides of his family tree, and he had lived near the crime scene in 1981.⁴

Investigators still needed to confirm the match with Mills’s own DNA. They collected his household trash, extracted a DNA profile from it, and compared it to the semen preserved from Linda’s rape kit. The samples matched.⁵

The Palm Print That Also Matched

The DNA was not the only physical evidence tying Mills to Linda’s bedroom. In 1984, three years after the murder, Mills was convicted of grand theft for forging a will. He served no jail time, but he was fingerprinted and palm printed during the arrest.³

In August 2019, after Parabon named him, investigators pulled his palm prints from that 1984 booking and compared them to the partial print lifted from Linda’s windowsill nearly 38 years earlier. They matched.⁶ Two independent forms of physical evidence now placed Mills inside the room where Linda was killed.

Arrest, Guilty Plea, and Four Life Sentences

Lakeland police arrested Joseph Clinton Mills on December 12, 2019. He was 58.⁵ A grand jury returned an indictment on four counts: first-degree murder, sexual battery, burglary with assault, and perjury based on the false statements he had made to detectives in 1981.¹

In February 2022, Mills pled guilty to all four charges. He was sentenced to four life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. He was 61 years old, and more than 40 years had passed since the night he climbed through Linda Slaten’s bedroom window.¹

1
The Ledger. Man Indicted in 1981 Murder Pleads Guilty, Faces Life in Prison
2
State Attorney’s Office, 10th Judicial Circuit. Cold Case Murder Prosecution Leads to Four Life Sentences for Lakeland Man
3
CBS News. Linda Slaten Case: Decades-long Search for Florida Mom’s Killer
4
CNN. A Single Mother Was Killed in 1981. Her Son’s Youth Football Coach Is Now Charged with Her Murder
5
ABC News. Son’s Former Football Coach Arrested for Mom’s 1981 Murder
6
WCTV. Lakeland Police Announce Arrest in 38-Year-Old Cold Case Thanks to DNA Technology