On May 7, 1922, William Driskell, a cotton buyer and part-time deputy constable in Waco, Texas, was killed with an axe in his own garage and robbed of his pistol, his watch and a ring. That spring the city was gripped by attacks on couples in parked cars and quiet places. On May 25, Harvey Bolton, twenty-one, was killed and the woman with him raped; some records give his first name as Harold. Two days later a white neighbor seized Jesse Thomas, a Black service-car driver, who was declared to be Bolton's killer and shot dead; a mob then mutilated his body. It had been only months since a Waco judge, Richard I. Munroe, had told the city that anyone who joined a lynching was himself guilty of murder. The attacks went on.
On November 20, 1922, Grady Skipworth, nineteen, was killed with a shotgun. On January 10, 1923, an attacker left behind a checkered cap. Ten days later, on January 20, W. E. Holt and Ethel Denecamp were parked five miles outside Waco when a gunman came out of the dark, shot Holt in the head, beat Denecamp to death and dumped her in a field. Their car was found abandoned on a Waco street the next morning. A witness identified the owner of the cap as Roy Mitchell, thirty, a Louisiana native living in Waco.
He was arrested on January 30, 1923, on a gambling charge. In his house police found Driskell's handgun and holster and, hidden behind wallpaper pulled away from a chimney flue in the bedroom, a watch chain and charm identified as Skipworth's. After three days in jail, on February 2, he signed a confession to five murders. Before his trial in March he recanted it. He was indicted in eight murders as well as rapes and assaults, and tried in six separate murder cases, each ending in conviction. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld them, and Governor Pat M. Neff turned down a clemency petition with thousands of signatures.
On July 30, 1923, he was hanged outside the McLennan County jail before a crowd put at four to five thousand, some accounts say more, watching from rooftops, trees and the street. His last words were "Goodbye, everybody." The hanging is often called the last legal public execution in Texas, but Nathan Lee was hanged at the Brazoria County courthouse on August 31, 1923, making Mitchell the next-to-last. Texas soon moved executions to the electric chair inside the state prison.
The case has always been read in two ways at once: as the prosecution of a man tied to the crimes by his confession and by his victims' property in his house, and as the trial of a Black man in a city where one Black man had already been killed by a mob as a suspect in the same series. The confession was taken in custody in that atmosphere and withdrawn before trial, and the trials were quick. The victims were white, and it was, as a Waco paper put it long afterward, dangerous to be a Black man in Waco in 1922 and 1923.