Nathaniel Code

Victims

8 - 4 convictions, for the July 1985 killings of Vivian Chaney, her daughter Carlitha, her brother Jerry Culbert and Billy Harris, and 4 further killings charged against him and never tried

Years active

1984 - 1987

Location

Shreveport, Louisiana, USA

Method

Stabbing with knife - Shooting - Strangulation

Status

Indicted by a Caddo Parish grand jury on five counts of first-degree murder, the August 1984 killing of Deborah Ford and the four July 1985 Cedar Grove killings. The Ford count was severed before trial. In 1990 a Caddo District Court jury convicted him on the four remaining counts and he was sentenced to death; he has been held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola since January 1991. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on November 29, 1993 and denied a rehearing on January 6, 1994. After a series of federal appeals the case was returned to the state courts, and no execution has been scheduled. Louisiana carried out no executions between 2010 and 2024 and authorised nitrogen gas as a method in 2024. A legislative committee took evidence from victims’ families about the delay in 2019.

Code was born in 1956 in Shreveport. He had convictions for violence from his teens and had served time for a stabbing.

Between 1984 and 1987 eight people were killed in three separate incidents in Shreveport. In 1984 a woman was found stabbed. In 1985 four people, including two children, were killed in one house, bound with electrical cord, some shot and some stabbed. In 1987 his own grandfather, William Code, seventy-three, and two great-nephews aged twelve and eight were killed in the same manner in another house.

The eight dead were Debra Ford, twenty-five; Vivian Chaney, thirty-four, her fifteen-year-old daughter Carlitha, her brother Jerry Culbert, twenty-five, and her boyfriend Billy Harris, twenty-eight; and Code's own grandfather William Code, seventy-four, with Eric Williams, eight, and Joe Robinson, twelve.

The three scenes were linked by the use of cord, the binding of the victims and the ligature marks. He was arrested and convicted, and sentenced to death in 1989.

He remains on Louisiana's death row, more than thirty-five years later. Louisiana has carried out one execution since 2002.

The killing of his own grandfather is what made the case; it is also what identified him, since it brought the investigation inside his family. All eight victims were Black, in a case that received very little attention outside Louisiana at the time.