Jake Mills, a 60-year-old man, was killed in Shreveport, Louisiana, in December 1986. On December 12, he was found lying on the living room floor inside his home at 1549 Poland Avenue. Mills had been stabbed multiple times. Investigators believed circumstances inside the residence suggested that he may have known the person who attacked him, raising the possibility that the killer had been admitted willingly rather than entering as a stranger.
The killing became part of a disturbing collection of unsolved homicides under investigation in Shreveport during the mid-1980s. Several of those victims had been attacked inside their own homes, and stabbing, binding, strangulation and other forms of close-contact violence appeared repeatedly among the cases. A later published account of the series described Mills as having been bound and stabbed, comparing his death to the February 1986 killing of Johnny B. Jenkins, another Shreveport man who was attacked in his residence. Newspaper-based research consistently confirms that Mills suffered multiple stab wounds, although the surviving publicly available information provides relatively little detail about the precise condition of the scene or the sequence of the assault.
For months after Mills was killed, there was no publicly announced arrest in his case. The investigation eventually became intertwined with the much larger inquiry surrounding Nathaniel Robert Code Jr., a Shreveport man who came under intense scrutiny after another particularly brutal set of killings in August 1987. On August 5, Code's grandfather, William T. Code, and two boys, Joe Robinson Jr. and Eric Williams, were found murdered. Nathaniel Code, who was at the scene and identified himself to investigators as William's grandson, agreed to speak with police.
During the investigation that followed, detectives obtained Code's fingerprints and found evidence linking him to the earlier 1985 murders of Vivian Chaney and members of her household. He was arrested on August 6, 1987, and charged with first-degree murder in connection with those killings. As police reviewed a succession of previously unsolved Shreveport homicides, Code was publicly identified as a suspect in a number of additional deaths. Jake Mills was among the victims whose cases police examined in connection with Code.
Investigators' suspicion of Code in Mills' death never developed into a criminal charge. Mills was one of several victims whom authorities suspected might have been connected to Code but for whom the evidence was apparently insufficient to support prosecution. Available accounts do not identify physical evidence conclusively tying Code to the Poland Avenue crime scene, and he was never officially established in court as Mills' killer. No other person appears in available accounts as having been arrested or charged with Mills' murder.
Code ultimately went to trial in 1990 for four other murders: Vivian Chaney, her daughter Carlitha Culbert, her brother Jerry Culbert and Chaney's boyfriend, Billy Joe Harris. Prosecutors presented extensive physical and circumstantial evidence tying him to those crimes. The jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. Although Code was also suspected in other Shreveport killings, including those of Mills and Jenkins, those suspicions were never converted into charges or convictions for their deaths.
As a result, the distinction remains important in Jake Mills' case. Nathaniel Code became the principal publicly identified suspect and was eventually convicted as a multiple murderer, but his conviction did not solve Mills' homicide in a legal sense. Mills' December 12, 1986 killing remained an uncharged case attributed to Code only as a law-enforcement suspicion. Available information does not show that anyone has ever been tried or convicted specifically for the murder of Jake Mills.
