In the summer of 1987, a quiet Shreveport, Louisiana neighborhood was rocked by a brutal crime that claimed the lives of three individuals, including a young boy. On August 5th, 12-year-old Joe Robinson, a Black male, was found murdered at a residence on West 66th Street. He, along with 8-year-old Eric Williams, had spent the previous day working in the yard with 73-year-old William T. Code and had been given permission to spend the night.
The following afternoon, after the boys failed to return home, a concerned family member went to check on them. Upon entering the house, a horrific scene was discovered. Joe Robinson was found deceased on the living room couch, having sustained a significant blow to his forehead. In other rooms of the house, the bodies of Eric Williams and William Code were also found. All three victims had been bound and gagged. While William Code had been stabbed multiple times, both Joe Robinson and Eric Williams had been strangled to death with a cord.
The brutality of the crime led investigators to suspect the perpetrator was someone familiar to the victims. Suspicion soon fell upon William Code's own grandson, Nathaniel Code. When questioned by police, Nathaniel Code's fingerprints were taken and matched to evidence from another unsolved, brutal quadruple murder that had occurred two years prior, known as the "Cedar Grove massacre."
Nathaniel Code was arrested and subsequently indicted for the murders of his grandfather, Joe Robinson, and Eric Williams. While he was ultimately tried and convicted for the four murders in the Cedar Grove case, for which he received a death sentence, the arrest brought a resolution to the tragic and violent end of young Joe Robinson's life.
