On June 20, 1997, Joyce Mims, a 41-year-old Black woman, was found dead inside a vacant house at 2940 N. 5th Street on Milwaukee’s north side. Renovation workers discovered her on the second floor of the building, in a small closet-like area just off the living room. Family members had reportedly last seen Mims two days earlier as she walked away from her home. When homicide detectives entered the vacant property, they found evidence that she had suffered a violent assault before her death.
Mims was lying on her back and had visible bruising to her chest and along the right side of her face. An autopsy conducted by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office found numerous abrasions and contusions around her neck, hemorrhaging within the neck muscles, a fracture of the left hyoid bone and petechial hemorrhaging in and around her eyes. She had also suffered blunt-force trauma to portions of her neck and back. Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. John Teggatz determined that Mims died from asphyxia caused by manual strangulation. Her death was investigated as a homicide.
Investigators collected biological evidence during the autopsy, including vaginal swabs that were sent to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory. At the time, the available DNA technology did not immediately identify the person who had left the evidence. Years later, improved testing proved crucial. In 2003, a crime-lab analyst developed a male DNA profile from semen recovered from the evidence collected from Mims. The profile was entered into Wisconsin’s DNA databank, but the initial searches produced no match to a known offender.
During the early investigation, police considered George L. “Mule” Jones as a possible suspect. Jones had known Mims for years; reporting described them as having been friends and at times romantically involved after knowing each other in Mississippi. Investigators administered a polygraph examination in which Jones denied killing Mims, and the examiner considered some of his answers deceptive. Jones was also connected socially to another woman whose strangulation was being investigated. Despite those suspicions, he was not charged with killing Mims, and the investigation remained unresolved for years.
The critical development came after another strangulation a decade later. On April 27, 2007, Ouithreaun Stokes was found dead inside another vacant Milwaukee building. DNA recovered from evidence in the Stokes investigation was entered into the state databank, and investigators discovered that the male profile matched the profile from the Joyce Mims case. The finding established that the same unidentified man was connected to both crime scenes. Further examination of other unsolved Milwaukee homicides eventually linked the same genetic profile to a series of women killed over a period stretching from the 1980s into the 2000s.
The investigation intensified as Milwaukee police and prosecutors formed a task force and reexamined old evidence with newer DNA technology. Detectives eventually focused on Walter E. Ellis, a Milwaukee man with an extensive criminal history who had lived near several of the locations where victims had been found. Investigators discovered an especially troubling reason his DNA had not appeared in the offender database earlier: while Ellis was incarcerated, another prisoner had provided a DNA sample under Ellis’s name. The substitution was detected as an irregularity at the crime laboratory, but authorities did not obtain Ellis’s correct genetic profile at the time.
In August 2009, detectives executed a search warrant at a Milwaukee residence associated with Ellis and seized a toothbrush that a resident identified as belonging exclusively to him. The Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory developed a DNA profile from the toothbrush and compared it with evidence from the Mims and Stokes investigations. On September 4, analysts reported that the DNA from Ellis’s toothbrush matched the male evidentiary profiles from both cases. The laboratory concluded that the profiles shared a common source.
Ellis was arrested in early September 2009. Prosecutors initially charged him with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide, one specifically accusing him of intentionally causing Mims’s death on June 20, 1997, and the other involving Stokes. Additional investigation connected Ellis through DNA evidence to several more Milwaukee killings, and prosecutors ultimately charged him in seven homicides. The case established that Mims’s killing was part of a series of strangulation murders committed across Milwaukee over more than two decades.
Ellis initially pleaded not guilty and was preparing for trial, but on February 18, 2011, he unexpectedly entered no-contest pleas to all seven murder charges. A no-contest plea did not require him to formally admit committing the killings, but it allowed the court to find him guilty. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dennis Cimpl convicted Ellis on five counts of first-degree intentional homicide and two counts prosecuted under Wisconsin’s earlier first-degree murder statute. Joyce Mims’s killing was among the convictions.
On February 24, 2011, Ellis was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. The sentence permanently resolved the criminal case against him for Mims’s murder nearly fourteen years after her body had been discovered. Ellis never publicly provided an explanation for the killings. He remained imprisoned until his death in December 2013. For Mims’s family, the DNA evidence that had sat without an identifying match for years ultimately became the evidence that connected her murder to a serial offender and led to a conviction.
