THE case against a mother accused of helping her millionaire-turned-fugitive son flee the country will be set down for trial.

Elizabeth Anne Turner is charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice between July 1, 2013 and September 15, 2017 and providing false testimony.

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The matter was briefly mentioned at Mackay District Court today and adjourned for mention on July 1 “for the allocation of a trial date”.

Ms Turner is accused of buying and preparing a yacht to help her son, Markis Scott Turner, flee the country ahead of a drug smuggling and trafficking trial.

Mr Turner was arrested and charged in May 2011 over allegations he was a major player in a multimillion-dollar drug syndicate.

It is alleged he imported more than 71 kilograms of cocaine from South America into Australia after the Australian Federal Police seized barrels of hydraulic oil reportedly containing drugs at Mackay railway yards. The trial was to start in September 2015.

Mr Turner, who was on supreme court bail, last reported to police about 6.30am on August 14 that year and disappeared until his capture two years later in 2017 in the Philippines, where he remains awaiting extradition.

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It is also alleged Ms Turner deliberately misled judicial proceedings by telling the Brisbane Supreme Court she had not been in contact with her son for several weeks and believed he had taken his own life on April 21, 2016.

She has previously denied the charges, although no formal pleas have been entered.

For many from the Chicago area, Oct. 4, 2007, began with the stunning news that Rhoni Reuter, the longtime pregnant girlfriend of former Chicago Bears player Shaun Gayle, had been murdered.

Now Reuter’s convicted killer hopes she’ll be granted a new trial and is speaking out about her case for the first time on television.

“I did not [kill Reuter], and I am not capable of doing anything like [that]. I’m a mother myself, that’s unconscionable to me. Absolutely not,” Marni Yang, a 51-year-old mother of three, told ABC’s Juju Chang in a recent interview for “20/20.”

Reuter, 42, was seven months pregnant when she was found dead on the kitchen floor of her apartment in Deerfield, Illinois. There were no signs of robbery or forced entry at the crime scene. Authorities said she had been shot multiple times at point-blank range with a 9mm handgun, with two shots fired directly at her abdomen. To investigators, it suggested that the shooter was aiming not just at Reuter, but also at the unborn child.

Reuter’s killing rocked the quiet, affluent Chicago suburb. It was the first murder Deerfield had seen in 30 years and Gayle had been a safety on the celebrated Chicago Bears team that won the 1985 Super Bowl.

Gayle had been dating Reuter for 18 years while seeing a number of other women at various times over the years as well, including Yang. It was clear to authorities that someone wanted his pregnant girlfriend dead. During her trial, prosecutors argued that Yang’s motive was fueled by jealousy.

Yang, who has long maintained her innocence, was convicted in 2011 of killing Reuter and is currently serving a double life sentence.

Her new defense attorney Jed Stone filed a post-conviction relief petition in October 2019 citing new evidence that he believes will prove Yang was wrongfully convicted. Yang, who has exhausted all her requests to appeal, hired a new legal team led by Stone in this last attempt for a new trial.

The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office filed a motion to dismiss Yang’s petition, describing it as a “skillfully, lawyerly rebranding of the facts and the overwhelming evidence against Marni.”

“It’s not a rebranding of the facts,” Stone told “20/20.” “It’s taking a look at the facts, and putting them in a light of truth.”

Who would kill Rhoni Reuter?

Although Gayle and Reuter were together for almost two decades, they never lived together.

Her family say they were surprised when they learned of Gayle’s non-monogamous relationship with Reuter.

“I wouldn’t think that my sister would have put up with that sort of relationship,” her brother, Thad Reuter, told “20/20” in a 2011 interview.

Her sister-in-law, Anna Reuter, agreed, saying, “She loved Shaun with her whole heart, and I think she expected the same back. I really didn’t see any other people in the picture at all.”

On the day Rhoni Reuter’s body was discovered, Gayle called Deerfield police, saying a reporter had called him asking if he knew anything about being named a suspect in a shooting there. When the officer who took the call confirmed to Gayle that Reuter was the victim, the former NFL player broke down in hysterical sobs.

“Don’t go to her house,” the officer told him, and asked him instead to come to the police station.

When Gayle arrived, Deerfield Deputy Chief Rick Wilk said the former NFL player was “visibly upset,” but it was “a little suspicious” to Wilk that Gayle had called within hours of the murder occurring.

During questioning, Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Detective Scott Frost said Gayle became strangely composed.

“He … was very reserved, very calm.,” Frost said.

Frost said he asked Gayle what he had done in the last 24 hours, and that some of his details on timing seemed to be off.

“We’re having issues with his timeline from… what he did the night before, what time did he go to bed, what time did he leave,” Frost said.

On the morning of the murder, Gayle told police he slept in, worked out with a trainer and then got a haircut mid-morning at a barber about 10 minutes away from Reuter’s apartment.

Frost said Gayle insisted he was innocent. Police asked him about other women with whom he had been involved recently.

“He, kindly enough, gives us a list of a list of almost 18, or 16 different women that he either went on a date with or got a phone number from or was romantically involved with… these are 18 women over a three-year period,” Frost said.

“You have several women that could have been jealous of Rhoni,” Wilk added.

When asked who he believed the killer might be, police said Gayle named Monika Kurowska, whom he had a relationship with a year prior and he said it had ended badly.

Kurowska was a Polish fitness model and personal trainer, whom Gayle said he had dated for several months in 2006.

Gayle said one night Kurowska came to his apartment complex and began ringing his neighbors’ buzzers. He found her outside of his apartment with a bloody hand, and later discovered one of his windows had been broken. Gayle eventually obtained a protective order against her.

In a statement to ABC News, Kurowska said she was upset when she got to Gayle’s home and saw him with another woman. She says she wanted to speak to him, but he wouldn’t open the door. She knocked on his window, and in the heat of her frustration, she said she accidentally broke it. She said she decided to end the relationship and that she never saw Gayle again.

Gayle told police he believed Kurowska was sending harassing letters to various people in his life, including Reuter, her mother and other women he had been seeing. The anonymous letters were written in broken English and claimed Gayle was romancing a number of women at the same time.

When Rhoni Reuter’s mother received one of these letters, she called Gayle. He assured her that her daughter was safe and that the letters were from “a crazed fan,” according to Thad Reuter.

When Rhoni Reuter’s body was found, detectives recovered one of these letters inside her purse.

While being questioned by investigators, Kurowska denied sending the letters and said she was at a training session with a client when Rhoni Reuter was murdered, which checked out.

Police cleared Kurowska as a suspect, and eventually cleared Gayle as well. Soon, they began focusing on another woman Gayle had been casually seeing: Marni Yang.

The mysterious letters

Yang, a divorced mother of three who worked multiple jobs, including as a real estate agent, said she met Gayle at a Bears convention where she was working security. She said the two started seeing each other after he reached out to her about investing in real estate.

When police first called Yang in for questioning regarding the Reuter investigation two months after the murder, she told them she and Gayle had known each other for about six years.

As part of their investigation, the police obtained a warrant to search his house, which included seizing his computer.

After gaining access to his email, investigators told Gayle that they believed Yang had been accessing his email for years, but Yang denies this.

“There is absolutely no way that I would even have had access to anything like that,” she told “20/20.”

Though police said other people they interviewed within her circle told them Yang often bragged about being Gayle’s girlfriend, she denied that was the case.

“I don’t think the word ‘boyfriend’ was ever used, really,” she told “20/20.” “That was not what I referred to him as.”

Investigators suspected that Yang was the one responsible for sending harassing letters to Reuter, her mother and other women in Gayle’s life. They believed she had discovered emails from Kurowska in Gayle’s inbox and copied her pattern of broken English to make it appear as if the letters had come from Kurowska.

During a search of Yang’s house, police said they discovered mailing labels with the addresses of the women in Gayle’s life — the same ones who had received the letters.

Yang denies she had sent the letters and claims instead that she was one of the women who received such a letter.

Police discovered that she had owned a 9mm handgun, which used bullets that matched the caliber of the ones found at the crime scene. Yang had also purchased two volumes of a book with instructions on how to make a homemade silencer and then bought the materials listed in the book at a Home Depot store, according to prosecutors.

Yang told police she didn’t have the gun at the time the murder took place; in her post-conviction relief petition, she claims that her son’s friend has admitted to stealing it from her home during a get-together months before the murder. She told “20/20” the book was part of “a gag gift” for a former police officer she had dated. “Firearms are a hobby of his,” she said.

According to prosecutors, one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Yang was a recorded conversation she had with a close friend, Christi Paschen, who calls herself a professional psychic. Yang has said Paschen was only an acquaintance.

During the conversation, Yang told Paschen, who was secretly working with investigators and wearing a recording device, that she had put on an elaborate disguise and shot Reuter. That disguise, prosecutors say, seemed to match witnesses’ description of the suspect on the day of the murder.

“[Reuter] started screaming … At that point, I realized we are now at the point of no return, OK? … And I just started emptying the clip,” Yang is heard telling Paschen on the recording. “I took maybe one or two steps into the kitchen to finish the job.”

On March 15, 2011, Yang was found guilty of first-degree murder and intentional homicide of an unborn child. She was given a double life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Marni Yang: ‘I knew perfectly well that I was being recorded’

Sitting in Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois, Yang opened up about her case for the first time in front of a TV camera.

“I feel like prior to this, I don’t think it would have mattered,” she told “20/20.” “I feel like there is a time. That time is now.”

The crux of Yang’s defense is that she now claims that she knew Paschen was wired and falsely confessed to the murder on purpose in order to protect her son, whom she believed police were investigating as the murder suspect.

“I knew perfectly well that I was being recorded,” Yang said. “I saw the wire.”

Her attorney Jed Stone claims there are recorded phone calls between Yang and her parents that took place before her conversation with Paschen, in which Yang told them she planned to make up a story about the murder and “let the attorneys sort it out with police.”

“It was a rash and ill-conceived decision to protect my children,” Yang said. “I lied.”

In its motion to dismiss Yang’s post-conviction relief petition, the state says that three months after the murder, when police interrogated Yang over a number of days, they told her repeatedly that her son was not a suspect.

During her trial, prosecutors pointed to a surveillance video from a gas station in Reuter’s neighborhood that showed a car driving near the scene around the time of the murder, which they said matched the description of the one Yang had rented that same week.

Yang’s defense team argued in its post-conviction relief petition that the prosecutors got the make and model of the car wrong.

In response, the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office says Yang’s defense team made similar arguments at trial, which the jury rejected.

Yang, an aspiring fitness model, now claims she had car trouble that day and that she had rented the car for a photoshoot. However, when asked about it during her interview with “20/20”, she couldn’t remember the name of the photographer with whom she was working.

Her defense team also claims that ballistics evidence proves the person who shot Reuter was much taller than Yang, who is only 5 feet tall.

“I think the strongest piece of evidence that we have is the scientific evidence of the bullet trajectories, showing that Marni Yang, because of her height, could not have fired the bullets that killed Rhoni Reuter,” Stone told “20/20.”

In response, the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office says that the conclusion that the shooter was someone taller than Yang is flawed. They said the defense relied on the medical examiner’s report, which stated that a particular wound was going downward. However, when the medical examiner testified at trial, he said that after examining the tissue he determined that wound was actually going upward.

The state also argues that many of the statements that Yang’s defense team filed as part of the petition were not notarized or were not sworn to, and therefore those claims should be dismissed.

The petition filed by Yang’s legal team includes a number of allegations from her children about the investigation and the case against their mother, including that police forced two of her children to sign written statements they knew to be false.

Yang’s children, Emily, Andrew and Brandon Yang, were home alone when police showed up with a search warrant at their house three months after the murder. Just 16 years old at the time, Emily and Andrew said they were brought to different police stations and questioned separately without a parent or attorney present.

“The only way that I got out of that situation was to write down a statement … that my mother wasn’t home the morning of the murder… but she was home that morning,” Andrew Yang said, adding that he “had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized” after the ordeal.

At trial, Emily Yang testified that her mother told her she had sent those harassing letters so that all the women Gayle was involved with could find out about each other. But she now says that police told her to write that in her statement.

“I didn’t know anything and they wouldn’t accept that. And … the mental frustration, it really broke me,” Emily Yang said. “And it got to the point where I started banging my head on the table.”

The State’s Attorney’s Office denies the children’s statements were coerced. They said when Emily Yang testified she never said her statement to the police was a lie.

Yang’s children are standing by their mother now in support of her defense.

“I would just say to her that … no matter… everything that she’s been through, [she can] be proud that she’s raised … a really good young man,” Andrew Yang told “20/20.”

“I’m hoping that we can all get through this together,” Emily Yang added.

Marni Yang’s father, Larry Merar, has paid around $1 million for her defense. It’s money that Stone acknowledged could have gone to help support Merar’s grandchildren while their mother is in prison, but more so, he added, “it bothers me greatly that Larry Merar can’t do this for 9,000 other people… in America’s prisons and jails who are innocent.”

Although a judge ruled in December 2019 that her petition can move forward, the next step in the proceedings for Marni Yang’s case has been put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. A few weeks ago, she cited the health crisis in a new petition for clemency, which is scheduled to be heard in July.

They don’t make Mother’s Day cards gushy enough to reflect the kind of sacrifices Xiaoning Sui has made for her son.

Five months in “quasi-isolation” in a Spanish prison; handwashing his tennis teammates’ underwear in a hotel room sink; spending $400,000 in an ultimately unsuccessful — and as it turned out criminal — bid to get him into a top notch American school.

The 49-year-old’s final humiliation came this week as a judge in Boston sentenced her to time already served for attempting to bribe a soccer coach into securing a place for her son at the University of California, Los Angeles as a supposed top-tier soccer recruit.

“I set a horrible example for my child and I was a bad influence,” Sui told the judge through an interpreter via teleconference from her home in Surrey, B.C., according to a report in the New York Post.

“I promise that I will never do that again.”

No matter how cold or hot, ‘she sat there to watch’

Although the case made headlines around the world this week, documents filed as part of the proceedings reveal new details about Sui, her path to Canada and the circumstances in which she found herself at the centre of the so-called Varsity Blues scandal.

Born in Shanghai, Sui — who is also known as Peggy — has been the principal caregiver for her son Eric since he was born in 2000.

She has a degree in electronics and has worked as both a technician and an office manager, but left the workforce in 2007 to spend more time with her son — and to guide his athletic career.

“She brought up her son and was there every step of the way,” Sui’s sister Xiaomin Sui told the U.S. court in a letter.

“Every time her son was in training, or playing a game, no matter how cold or how hot the weather was, she sat there to watch, and helped him analyze after the game, in order to improve the game.”

Washing son’s teammates’ underwear

According to a sentencing submission filed by Sui’s lawyer, she and her son moved to Canada in 2015, seeking better educational opportunities for Eric.

She lives with her sister and niece in the Lower Mainland, while her husband continues to live and work in China.

Since Eric was five, Sui has thrown herself into his sport.

“She helped other parents who could not drive their kids by driving their kids to the tennis training and bringing them back,” the document says.

When her son’s team went to compete and the hotel did “not have washing machines, she helped young athletes wash their underwear and sportswear by hand.”

In 2018, Sui began working with a Florida-based recruiter who “matched tennis players with college tennis coaches to facilitate the players’ potential recruitment as part of the college admissions process.”

And that’s how Xiaoning “Peggy” Sui came to know William “Rick” Singer.

‘A practitioner of that mysterious art’

Search Rick Singer’s name on YouTube and you’ll come across a series of black and white videos dedicated to overcoming the mysteries of the U.S. college admissions system: The Right Fit; Personal Best; Mastery.

According to American prosecutors, Singer founded his college counselling and preparation business — known as “The Key” — in California in 2007, getting approval as a charity in 2013.

In his promotional videos and a book — Getting In: Gaining Admission to Your College of Choice — Singer promises to help students and parents unveil the curtains on the admissions process.

“I’m one of the people who decides who gets in and who doesn’t. I am a practitioner of that mysterious art,” he writes.

“And I’ll tell you a secret. It’s not an an art. It’s a science.”

What Singer’s book and videos don’t say is that his version of that academic alchemy cost parents millions.

He turned average students into golden applicants by paying ringers to write their exams and greasing the palms of sports coaches who secured coveted spots on university teams for his clients’ children as fake athletic recruits.

She said ‘OK’

Sui was told Singer could help her son get into UCLA — but it would cost $400,000.

She spoke through a Chinese translator with the tennis recruiter and Singer in a conference call in August 2018. She was told Singer had a “special way of writing” applications.

“Singer never disclosed that any portion of the $400,000 Ms. Sui agreed was intended to be a bribe,” Sui’s lawyer wrote in her sentencing documents.

On the same call, she begged Singer and the recruiter to keep the payment a secret from her son.

In the months that followed, Singer worked to create a fake athletic profile for Eric and to arrange with UCLA soccer coach Jorge Salcedo to admit him as a purported soccer recruit.

They combined pictures of Sui’s son playing tennis with those of another individual playing soccer to invent a “top player for two private soccer clubs in Canada.” 

And Salcedo filled out a form claiming he saw Eric playing soccer in China and that he had “good quickness and speed.”

In the court documents, Sui’s lawyer claims his client wasn’t part of efforts to fabricate an athletic resume for her son.

He claims it wasn’t until October 2018 that the reality of the situation was explained in terms that left no room for doubt as to what was actually happening.

Sui was told to wire $100,000 directly to the UCLA soccer coach and told that although her son was a tennis player, he would be entering the school as a soccer prospect.

She said “OK.” 

And investigators were listening, because by then Singer was cooperating with the FBI in an investigation that would see dozens of his clients — including Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman, Full House‘s Lori Loughlin and Vancouver businessman and former CFL athlete David Sidoo — charged with conspiracy to commit fraud.

‘A money crime’

The charges against Sui were filed in a sealed indictment on March 5, 2019, but Sui claims she had no knowledge of them until she was arrested in Spain while travelling the following September.

She waived extradition to the United States, but the process took five months. Sui spent the time in Madrid V Penitentiary.

Despite being held in an institution known as a “VIP prison” for the high-profile politicians who have been held there, Sui’s lawyer claims his client’s time behind bars was scarring.

“She was confined to her cell for approximately 15 hours per day. For approximately one month, she was in a cell alone,” he wrote in the court documents.

“For a vast majority of the time there was no other Mandarin speaking inmate in the facility. With her family members thousands of miles away, Mrs. Sui spent 157 days in quasi isolation.”

Sui was finally transferred to U.S. marshals and sent to the United States in February. She was released on $250,000 bail at that time and allowed to return to Canada.

Her sentencing was set for this week, but given restrictions imposed because of COVID-19, both the prosecution and the defence suggested the proceedings be held by video conference instead.

It was unlikely she would be able to travel to the U.S. anyway.

Sui had pleaded guilty in February, and her lawyer argued she had already served more time — and in much harsher conditions — than any of the other parents ensnared in Singer’s dealings.

It wasn’t a lesson she would need to learn twice.

“No rational person aware of what has occurred to Ms. Sui would ever knowingly and intentionally choose to ensure what she has experienced over the last nine months,” her lawyer wrote.

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock agreed. But he also said there should be a fine.

“It’s a money crime,” he told Sui. “And it seems to me that it ought to be paid for in money too.”

The penalty — $250,000.

But what is money, anyway — compared to the love for a son?

Student, 20, who allegedly crashed into young mother in a brutal hit and run before dumping her Honda Accord admits she was high on drugs at the time

• Nakeisha Shaneye Smith, 20, allegedly hit Olivia McKay with her Honda Accord 
• Smith then allegedly drove off, leaving the mother-of-one with a broken leg
• She was charged with grievous bodily harm with intent after police found her 
• Smith appeared in court on Thursday where she admitted: ‘I was on drugs’

By Alana Mazzoni For Daily Mail Australia

Published: 08:26 EDT, 14 May 2020 | Updated: 08:28 EDT, 14 May 2020

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On a late April evening almost three years ago, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies responded to a disturbance call in the Windsor Hills neighborhood.

They found Alecia Benson on her back inside a well-kept home, battered, unconscious and gasping for air.

Her only child, former NFL player De’von Hall, smoked a cigarette in the middle of the street outside. He fought three deputies who tried to handcuff him before being restrained and, days later, was charged with murdering his mother with his bare hands.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Lauren Weis Bernstein declared Hall not guilty by reason of insanity during a hearing last week. The defense and prosecution stipulated to the change of plea based on reports by doctors from both sides, according to a district attorney’s spokesman.

Hall, who played defensive back during brief appearances with the Minnesota Vikings, Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, will be sent to a state hospital for an indeterminate amount of time.

“Alecia Benson was a wonderful mother who tragically died,” Hall’s public defender, Ashley Morgan Price, said in a statement. “Mr. Hall will now go to a state hospital to get the type of mental health treatment that Ms. Benson always wanted for her son.”

Hall struggled with mental health issues for several years, his family and friends told The Times for an article in 2017. The professional football career of the former standout at Reseda Cleveland High and Utah State ended, in part, because of concerns over unusual behavior.

The behavior grew more alarming after football. He wore headphones to combat voices in his head. He posted nonsensical messages on social media. He appeared for a Canadian Football League combine event in Santa Monica wearing a wrinkled suit. He slept in a park near the Coliseum — despite Benson’s attempts to get him to move into an apartment — and darted through traffic on Western Avenue. When a group of former Utah State teammates encountered him outside the Coliseum in 2013, he dragged a garbage bag and spoke gibberish.

Benson, 48, worked for a local doctor. Family members remembered her easy laugh, serving as a confidante for nieces and nephews and viewing caring for her son, even as his mental health declined, as her responsibility.

After deputies arrested Hall on April 24, 2017, they found $3,000 in $20 bills inside his backpack. He also carried a gym bag containing a hair dryer, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, three pair of tennis shoes and two Batman DVDs.

Legal proceedings were suspended in June 2017 amid doubts about Hall’s mental health. He was found incompetent to stand trial that December and sent to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino. The criminal proceedings eventually resumed, and Hall returned to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles.

More than three decades after a Florida mother was found sexually assaulted and murdered inside her home, investigators used genetic genealogy to identify the killer as her youngest son’s former football coach. 

Joseph Clinton Mills of Lakeland, was arrested by the Lakeland Police Department on December 12 and charged for the crimes committed against 31-year-old Linda Patterson Slaten in 1981. 

Mills, now 58, would have been 20 at the time of Slaten’s death.

He had denied being in any relationship with her when interviewed in 1981, but after his arrest this month reportedly told investigators that she had invited him into her home for ‘wild sex.’  

The horrific incident began on September 4, 1981, when Slaten was found strangled to death with a clothes hanger inside her bedroom.  

Around 8.35am, Lakeland Police Department officers dispatched to Slaten’s home after John Allen, a maintenance worker for the Lakeland Housing Authority, was alerted of the body by Slaten’s sister, Judy Butler. 

The Lakeland Ledger reports that Butler told police she walked to her sister’s apartment that morning to see if she wanted to meet for coffee, but Slaten didn’t answer the door. 

As Butler walked back to her own apartment, she noticed the screen to Slaten’s window was missing and, after peeking inside, saw her sister lying on the bed with what appeared to be a wire hanger around her neck. 

When officers arrived, they found Slaten with her dress pulled down from the top and up from the bottom, exposing her private parts.

Slaten’s underwear and shoes were on the rug, and detectives reportedly said she was bleeding from her vagina. 

Detectives acknowledged that there were no signs of struggle in the room, but her window was not locked and the screen was removed. 

Her children, Jeffrey Slaten, then 15-years-old, and Timothy Slaten, aged 12 at the time, were sleeping during the alleged attack. 

‘I saw the crime scene. It’s still burned in my brain today,’ Timothy said at a news conference, according to ABC News. 

Jeffrey told detectives in an interview that the family of three had just moved into the Lakeland apartment two weeks before his mother’s death.  

Slaten’s  body was transported to the Lakeland General Hospital where medical staff completed an autopsy and performed a sexual assault kit.  

But the Florida Department of Law Enforcement couldn’t find a culprit, and the case went cold.

Jeffrey said: ‘It’s been rough on me my whole life not knowing who it is. Always being scared to death I was friends with him…always looking over our shoulder.’ 

All this changed in November 2018 when investigators considered using genetic genealogy to crack the case. 

Genetic genealogy compares unknown DNA to public genealogy databases that are populated by the DNA of relatives who voluntarily upload it. 

Since the arrest of the suspected ‘Golden State Killer’ in April 2018, around 100 suspects have been identified using the novel method, said Parabon NanoLabs Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore. 

After analyzing DNA in the unidentified suspects DNA, Parabon analysts told authorities that the most likely suspect was Mills. 

‘Joseph should be strongly considered due to the fact genetic connections were found to both sides of his family tree, and he was living in close proximity to the scene of the crime in 1981,’ the report said.  

In the summer of 2019, authorities searched Mills trash and were able to find matching DNA to the samples found in Slaten’s sexual assault kit.  

They were also able to match Mills fingerprints, taken from an arrest in 1984, and match it the those found on Slaten’s window ledge.   

When Mills was first interviewed in 1981, he told authorities that he saw the victim briefly when he drove Timothy home from football practice that evening. 

On the day of Slaten’s death, Timothy told detectives that his football coach, known as ‘Joe’, had taken him to football practice at Winston Elementary and later drove him home.  

Mills, who was a coach for the Lakeland Volunteers football program, said Slaten had approached his car to thank him for bringing Timothy home. 

He told police he left and hadn’t returned to the apartment that night.   

When detectives interviewed Mills on December 4, he denied knowing anything about the crime and maintained that he didn’t have any relationships with the athlete’s parents. 

After his arrest, police say Mills told them that when he dropped Timothy off that night, Slaten had ‘extended an open invitation to come to her residence for a “good time”,’ according to court documents. 

He reportedly told authorities that he returned to Slaten’s home in the early hours of September 4, 1981, and entered through the unlocked bedroom window. 

Police say Mills claimed that ‘Slaten asked him to engage in “wild” sex.’

‘Mills stated upon entering Linda Slate’s bedroom, Linda Slaten already had a wire hanger around her neck as she lay on the bed. Mills stated he twisted the wire hanger around her neck tighter and tighter while engaging in sexual intercourse with Linda Slaten until she lost consciousness,’ ABC News reports. 

Mills reportedly told police that he left through the window before Slaten’s body was discovered. 

Authorities have pushed back against Mills claim that the encounter was consensual, saying that there was evidence of a foreign object used in the sexual assault and Slaten had cuts consistent with a struggle to remove the wire from her neck. 

Mills has been charged with first-degree murder, burglary and sexual battery. 

His arraignment is scheduled for January 21, 2020.