Monica Renae Barnum, a 20-year-old woman, was found dead in Shreveport, Louisiana, on July 18, 1985. Her mother discovered her body inside an apartment on Ashton Street. Barnum had been bound and stabbed, and she had also been strangled with a wire coat hanger that remained around her neck when she was found. The circumstances indicated a deliberate, violent attack in which the killer had taken time to restrain her before her death.
Publicly available accounts do not establish a confirmed motive for the killing.
For roughly two years, Barnum's homicide remained without an arrest while Shreveport investigators confronted a disturbing series of killings involving victims who had been restrained, stabbed, strangled, shot, or otherwise attacked inside residences. The day after Barnum was found, four people were discovered murdered in a house in Shreveport's Cedar Grove neighborhood: Vivian Chaney, Carlitha Culbert, Jerry Culbert, and Billy Joe Harris. Those killings would eventually become central to the investigation of Nathaniel Robert Code Jr., a Shreveport man with a previous conviction for attempted aggravated rape.
The major break came in August 1987 after three additional victims were found murdered in the home of Code's grandfather, William Code. Nathaniel Code came into contact with investigators because of his relationship to William, and police soon developed evidence linking him to the 1985 Chaney-Culbert quadruple homicide. On August 6, 1987, Code was arrested and held without bond on four counts of first-degree murder. At the same time, Shreveport Police Chief Charles Gruber publicly said Code was also considered a suspect in several other killings. Among the cases police were examining was the July 1985 strangulation and stabbing of a young woman in another part of Shreveport, a description corresponding to Barnum's homicide. Investigators announced that they were reviewing open homicides with similarities to the murders already associated with Code.
Barnum consequently became one of the victims whose death was suspected of being connected to Code, but the distinction between suspicion and a proven case is important. Later accounts identify Code as a person of interest or suspect in Barnum's murder, yet no evidence has surfaced showing that he was arrested or formally charged with killing her. Unlike several other victims attributed to Code, Barnum's case was never taken to trial against him.
Code ultimately went on trial in 1990 for the four Chaney-Culbert murders. Prosecutors presented extensive physical and circumstantial evidence, including fingerprint evidence and testimony concerning the distinctive methods used to restrain and control victims. A jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. The Louisiana Supreme Court later upheld the convictions and sentence. Those proceedings established Code's responsibility for the four murders for which he was tried, but they did not result in a conviction for Barnum's death.
As a result, the available public record leaves Monica Barnum's murder in a troubling position: investigators eventually focused suspicion on a man who was proved responsible for other Shreveport killings, but the evidence in her particular case never produced a prosecution. No separate arrest, charge, trial, or conviction for Barnum's homicide is reflected in the available accounts. Nathaniel Code remains the principal publicly identified suspect connected to her death, but responsibility for her killing was never established against him in court.
