Monica Renae Barnum was 20 when her body was found in an Ashton Street apartment in Shreveport on July 18, 1985. Her mother discovered her; Barnum had been bound, stabbed, and strangled with a wire coat hanger that remained around her neck. The circumstances indicate a deliberate, violent attack in which the killer restrained her before the killing. No confirmed motive is recorded.

Investigators later reviewed Barnum’s case alongside a string of violent residential killings in Shreveport. After a major break in 1987 and an arrest of Nathaniel Robert Code Jr. on unrelated quadruple murder charges, police identified him as a suspect in several other cases, including the July 1985 strangulation and stabbing that matches Barnum’s homicide. Code was tried and convicted for the Chaney-Culbert killings, but Barnum’s murder was never prosecuted against him and no arrest, charge, trial, or conviction for her death is recorded.

Does anyone have information about Barnum, the Ashton Street apartment, or contacts who might have known her in 1985?