On the morning of August 31, 1984, a small crowd gathered outside a shotgun house at 315 East 74th Street in the Cedar Grove neighborhood of Shreveport, Louisiana, where Deborah Ann Ford, twenty-five, lay dead on her living room floor. One of the neighbors standing there talking about the murder was Nathaniel Robert Code Jr., twenty-eight. The Caddo Parish coroner, Dr. George McCormick, told the police that what had been done inside was a signature crime, the work of one person, and that whoever did it was a serial killer who would kill again. He was right. Before Code was arrested, seven more people would die in two more houses a few blocks apart, among them his own grandfather and two little boys, and the prints that tied him to the first of the killings were already sitting on Deborah Ford's bathroom window.
Ford was a single mother of two girls, Nicki, nine, and Shawn, five. She had been burglarized before, and she had her father nail the back door shut and nail screens over every window. On the evening of August 30 she took the girls shopping for school clothes, and they left to spend the night at their grandmother's. On the way out Nicki closed the open bathroom window and propped a stick above the frame to hold it. Ford talked with friends across the street, had a visitor until after eleven, spoke to another friend on the phone as late as half past twelve, and went to sleep on the couch, as she always did. Some time before morning, someone pried the screen off the bathroom window, wedged the window open with a piece of metal and climbed in over the tub. She fought; furniture went over and her hands were bruised. Her killer cut the cord from a box fan in the kitchen and tied her wrists behind her back in a distinctive way, the cord wrapped tight around one wrist and looped around the other with a gap between, like a pair of handcuffs. He gagged her, stabbed her nine times in the chest and then cut her throat six times. She was still alive when he began, and the attack lasted fifteen to thirty minutes. A friend, Brenda Greggs, came over to use the phone at eight the next morning and found the front door open and the stereo playing. Investigators lifted three palm prints and a thumbprint from the window and the wall beneath it, placed as if someone had opened the window from outside. Nobody matched them to anyone, and a $1,000 reward brought nothing.
A few blocks away, at 213 East 72nd Street, lived Vivian Chaney, thirty-seven, her boyfriend Billy Joe Harris, twenty-nine, her brother Jerry Culbert, twenty-five, and her three daughters: Carlitha Culbert, fifteen, and Tomika and Marla Chaney, ten and seven. Vivian, Carlitha and Jerry were all visually impaired, and the two younger girls had intellectual disabilities. Between half past eleven on the night of July 18, 1985, and six the next morning, someone forced the back door. As McCormick reconstructed it, the killer used a gun and the life of the teenager to control the two adults. He tied Harris's hands with shoelaces in the same handcuff knot and shot him through a pillow so as not to wake Jerry Culbert, then shot Culbert once in the head as he slept. He bound Carlitha's wrists with the cord cut from an iron, taped her mouth with silver duct tape and cut her throat. Vivian, hobbled by telephone cord and led by a ligature around her neck, was made to sit in her daughter's blood before she was taken to the bathroom, beaten, strangled and held under in the tub until she drowned. The killer went back to Carlitha and nearly decapitated her, and at some point returned to Harris and cut his throat. Each body lay in a different room. Tomika and Marla were found asleep and unhurt.
Their aunt, Shirley Culbert, had come in from out of town hoping to surprise the family. At six in the morning she heard the stereo playing, got no answer at the front, found the back door open and went in. She woke the two girls with difficulty, took them out of the house and called the police. Jerry Culbert's wallet was gone, along with a jar of change, food stamps, pictures of the girls and a striped tote bag; Vivian had cashed a check for more than $100 the day before, and there was no money in the house. On the bathtub over which her body was draped, investigators found three left palm prints, fresh since the tub was last cleaned, pressed down hard as if someone had steadied himself with one hand while holding her under with the other. Pieces of professional-grade duct tape lay in the alley behind the house. The assistant police chief, Sam Burns, said he did not know that he had seen anything more vicious in twenty-five years on the force. Tomika was questioned again and again, once under sodium pentothal, and her accounts kept changing: most often a single man who came in the back door with a rope and a knife with holes in it, a knife her drawing showed to look like one missing from Deborah Ford's house.
Nobody had yet connected any of it to the man who lived around the corner. Code was born on March 12, 1956. His parents divorced six months later, and he was raised by a great-aunt, Josephine Code, and by his grandfather, William. As a boy, nicknamed Junior, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and stare before going on, and he was said to have set fire to animals. He failed ninth grade, left school and moved in with an uncle, Johnny Boyd, who shot him four times in 1971 after an argument. In 1975 he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis the doctors who examined him years later rejected. That November he pleaded guilty to the attempted aggravated rape of a twenty-year-old woman and was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor. His mother died while he was in prison. He was released for good behavior in January 1984, seven months before Deborah Ford was killed. He worked for a plumber from March 1985 until the first week of that July, two weeks before the Chaney murders, and on February 3, 1986, he married a woman named Vera, who insisted afterward that he would never hurt anyone.
William T. Code, seventy-three, lived behind steel burglar bars at 641 West 66th Street, and two weeks before the end he refused to lend his grandson any more money because the last loan had never been paid back. He told the electrician who put in his security lights that he was afraid of Nathaniel. On August 4, 1987, he spent the day working in his yard with two boys, Joe Robinson Jr., twelve, and Eric Williams, eight, the grandsons of his friend Enamerteen Williams, and she gave them permission by telephone to stay the night, as they had before. A neighbor, Donald Ray Johnson, saw Nathaniel come out of the house some time after eight that evening, lock the inner door and the iron bars behind him, and drive off with a woman he introduced as his new wife. Johnson thought it strange: the old man always walked visitors to the door himself, and he would not have let his grandson in.
When the boys did not come home, Mrs. Williams went to the house the next afternoon, heard music through locked doors and saw a bound foot through the window. She came back with her brother and her key. Joe lay face down on the living room couch, dazed by a blow to the forehead, his wrists and ankles tied with white plastic cord in the handcuff pattern, gagged and strangled with the same cord. Eric had been dragged from a bed and tied the same way; when the plastic cord ran out, his killer finished with electrical cord, and strangled him with a second length. William Code lay face down on his bed in his dressing gown, hog-tied with electrical cord, gagged with a telephone cord, beaten about the head and stabbed thirteen times. There was no sign of forced entry. The $400 to $600 he had cashed the day before was gone, and so was a small pistol. A knife like the set in his kitchen and a ring of keys that fit his door turned up in a storm drain six hundred feet away. McCormick read the difference between the bodies as a message: no knife and no overkill for the boys, and a frenzy for the grandfather, the sign of a relationship between the victim and the man who killed him.
Nathaniel Code walked up to the investigators and introduced himself as the grandson. He said his grandfather had phoned him the night before about people hanging around the house, that he had gone over at two in the morning, checked the yard and ridden home on his bicycle. He agreed to go to the station and give a statement as, apparently, the last person to see the old man alive, and in it he volunteered that he had touched the vacuum cleaner, the fan, the humidifier and the telephone, which were exactly the things the binding cords had been cut from. He let the police take the clothes and shoes he had worn. His prints matched the palm prints on Vivian Chaney's bathtub, and he was arrested for the Cedar Grove murders on August 6, 1987. The prints on Deborah Ford's window were his as well. The crime lab later found a spatter of human blood on his tennis shoes, too little to type, and a search of his house, with his wife's consent, turned up cut electrical cords and duct tape chemically identical to the tape on Carlitha's mouth. Detectives learned that in the days before his grandfather died he had been asking several people for a loan, had offered himself to Shreveport narcotics officers as a paid informant for $100, and on the day the bodies were found had bought cocaine and shared it with a cousin.
A Caddo Parish grand jury indicted him for the murders of Deborah Ford and the four people on 72nd Street, and a second indictment charged him with the deaths of his grandfather and the two boys. In 1989 the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the Ford count tried separately, and he went on trial in September 1990 for the Chaney household alone. The judge let the jury hear about the other two houses anyway, as proof of identity. The FBI's John E. Douglas testified that the killer's methods had shifted from scene to scene but his rituals had not: the electrical cords taken from inside each home, the knife, the overkill, the victims split up into separate rooms, and above all the handcuff knot, which Douglas said he had never seen before. Put the cases in one pile, he told the court, and you would think it had all happened at once. Oscar Washington, a National Guardsman out jogging at a quarter past two on the morning of July 19, 1985, testified that he had passed Code on Henderson Street heading toward 72nd with a paper bag under his arm, and that about forty-five minutes later he met him coming back covered in blood, carrying a striped bag, saying he had gotten into it with somebody and come out on top. Code had tried to sell him a long knife, a handgun, credit cards and food stamps smeared with blood. Days later Code asked him, "What did you see me do?" Another neighbor saw Code on the corner at half past five that morning, staring at the house.
Code did not testify. His lawyers argued that one man could not have killed four people at once, and a string of doctors described him variously as antisocial, borderline or liable to slip into psychosis under stress; none found brain damage or low intelligence. After 106 witnesses and more than 450 exhibits, a jury of five men and seven women took about an hour to convict him on all four counts and unanimously recommended death, finding that he had killed during an armed robbery, killed more than one person, and killed Harris, Carlitha and Vivian with especial cruelty. Judge Gayle Hamilton sentenced him to death on December 28, 1990. On November 29, 1993, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed. It found that two fingerprint experts had crossed a legal line by telling the jury Code was the killer, but held the error harmless given the weight of the print evidence, and it noted that Caddo Parish had seen no comparable murders since 1976. He was never tried for Deborah Ford, William Code, Joe Robinson or Eric Williams.
An execution set for September 29, 1994, was postponed when he took his case to federal court, and a second date, May 15, 1995, was stayed by a district judge. In 2013 he was one of three Angola inmates who sued over extreme heat on death row, and Carlitha's brother, Albert Culbert Jr., answered that Code had lost his privileges when he took his family's lives. Louisiana carried out no executions from 2010 until March 2025. Culbert has testified before a legislative panel on the death penalty, and in 2025 he asked why Code, sentenced years before a man Louisiana had just executed, still had no date. Code has always denied the killings, and as of 2026 he remains on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
March 12, 1956: Nathaniel Robert Code Jr. is born.
1971: his uncle, Johnny Boyd, shoots him four times after an argument.
November 1975: he pleads guilty to the attempted aggravated rape of a twenty-year-old woman and is sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor.
January 1984: released from prison for good behavior.
August 31, 1984: Deborah Ann Ford, twenty-five, is found murdered in her home in the Cedar Grove neighborhood of Shreveport.
July 19, 1985: Vivian Chaney, Billy Joe Harris, Jerry Culbert and Carlitha Culbert are found murdered at 213 East 72nd Street; Tomika and Marla Chaney are found unhurt.
February 3, 1986: Code marries a woman named Vera.
August 1987: William T. Code and two boys, Joe Robinson Jr. and Eric Williams, are found dead in the grandfather's house on West 66th Street.
August 6, 1987: his palm prints are matched to Vivian Chaney's bathtub, and he is arrested for the Cedar Grove murders.
1989: the Louisiana Supreme Court orders the Ford count tried separately.
September 1990: he goes on trial for the four murders on 72nd Street.
December 28, 1990: convicted on all four counts, he is sentenced to death by Judge Gayle Hamilton.
November 29, 1993: the Louisiana Supreme Court affirms; he is never tried for the deaths of Deborah Ford, William Code, Joe Robinson or Eric Williams.
September 29, 1994: a scheduled execution is postponed; a second date, May 15, 1995, is also stayed.
2013: he joins two other Angola inmates in suing over extreme heat on death row.
2026: still denying the killings, he remains on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.