On August 5, 1987, William Code, seventy-three, was beaten and stabbed thirteen times in his home in Shreveport, Louisiana, after being bound and gagged. Two boys who were in the house, Joe Robinson Jr., twelve, and Eric Williams, eight, were bound, gagged and strangled with a cord. The police noted that the savagery of the attack made them wonder whether the killer was someone close to the old man. Outside the crime tape, a grandson of the eldest victim, thirty-one-year-old Nathaniel Robert Code Jr., approached the investigators, and he went to the station with them that morning for an interview. He denied any involvement but made a statement the authorities called incriminating. His palm prints were taken and matched prints found at the scene, and he was arrested on August 6. They also matched two earlier crime scenes, where five people had died.
The first of those was the home of Debra Ann Ford, twenty-five. On the night of August 31, 1984, her killer pulled the screen off a bathroom window and got in, confronted her in the living room, tied her hands, gagged her, stabbed her repeatedly and cut her throat, and left by the front door. She was found face down on a sofa. Investigators called it a regular whodunit, and a $1,000 reward brought nothing.
The second was on 72nd Street in the Cedar Grove neighborhood in the early hours of July 19, 1985. Billy Joe Harris, twenty-eight, was shot twice in the head and twice in the chest through a pillow, his throat was cut and his hands and ankles were tied with shoelaces. Jerry Culbert, twenty-five, was shot once in the head as he slept. Carlitha Culbert, fifteen, was found face down with her hands tied behind her back with the cord of an iron and her mouth taped; her throat had been cut so deeply that she was nearly decapitated. Her mother, Vivian Chaney, was found slumped over the bathtub, bound with telephone cord, beaten and strangled by hand and with a ligature; her death was attributed to strangulation and drowning. Chaney is given as thirty-four in some accounts and thirty-seven in others. Her dress was soaked with her daughter's blood, a sign that she had been alive and present when Carlitha died. Two girls in the house, aged seven and ten, survived. A relative, Shirley Culbert, arriving by taxi from the bus station, found the bodies at 6:25 in the morning, and the driver called the police. The assistant chief, Sam Burns, said he did not know that he had seen anything more vicious in twenty-five years on the force. The FBI profiler John E. Douglas later said the Ford and Culbert murders shared the same manipulation, domination and control of the victims, a calling card.
Code was born on March 12, 1956. His parents divorced six months later, and he was raised by his great-aunt Josephine Code and by the grandfather he would kill. As a boy, nicknamed Junior, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and stare blankly before going on, and he was said to have set fire to animals. He failed ninth grade, left school and went to live with an uncle, Johnny Boyd, who in 1971 shot him four times after an argument; he ran four blocks before collapsing in the street. In July 1975 he was charged with the aggravated rape and burglary of a twenty-year-old woman, pleaded guilty that November to attempted aggravated rape and was sentenced to fifteen years. His mother died while he was in prison. He was released for good behavior in January 1984, seven months before Debra Ford was killed. He worked for a contractor until he was fired in 1985 for attacking a co-worker in a dispute over a radio station, and on February 3, 1986, he married Vera Code, who insisted afterward that he was a caring man who would never hurt anyone.
He was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder across the three scenes but tried only for the four Cedar Grove killings, in Caddo District Court, beginning in September 1990. Prosecutors said he had stalked his victims at night on a bicycle. An acquaintance, Oscar Washington, testified that he saw Code with blood on his arms between two and three in the morning on July 19, 1985, and that Code told him he had been in a fight and come out on top. Code did not testify; his defense argued that one man could not have killed four people at once and that his mental problems, among them borderline personality disorder, should spare him from death. After 106 witnesses and more than 450 exhibits, the jury of five men and seven women took an hour to convict him on all four counts, and on December 28, 1990, Judge Gayle Hamilton imposed the death sentence the jury had recommended.
The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld it. 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.