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The Boy Who Lost His Mother to the Man on His Wall
Little Tim Slaten trusted the person that had murdered his mother and kept a picture of him in his home.
For 38 years, two brothers who had shared a profound grief were united in their pursuit of justice. They tirelessly provided law enforcement with the names of potential suspects responsible for their mother’s heinous murder. Astonishingly, the man that was eventually apprehended by the police was never on their list of suspects.
In the early hours of September 4th, 1981, the police in Lakeland, Florida, responded to a distress call from an apartment complex on North Brunnell Parkway. Tragically, that’s where they discovered the lifeless body of Linda Slaten, a 31-year-old mother of two who had been raped and then strangled to death with a wire coat hanger. Linda’s two sons, 15-year-old Jeff, and 12-year-old Tim, were asleep in separate rooms when the crime took place.
Linda’s sister had planned to meet her for a coffee on that fateful day, but upon arriving at the apartment, she was confronted with a devastating discovery: her sister’s lifeless body. The case would go cold for decades.
To make matters worse, when police finally discovered who the individual responsible for this unfathomable act was, they found…
