Mitchell was born in 1892. Between 1922 and 1923, in and around Waco, Texas, people were attacked at night, several of them couples in parked cars, struck with an axe or shot; women were raped. Five deaths were attributed to him.
Those named in the record are William Driskell, Harvey Bolton, twenty-one; Grady Skipworth, nineteen; W. E. Holt; and Ethel Denecamp.
He was arrested and confessed. He was tried, convicted and hanged on July 30, 1923.
The circumstances need stating. He was a Black man tried in Waco in 1923, a city where a public lynching in 1916 had drawn a crowd of thousands, and where the alternative to a rapid trial and execution was understood by everyone involved to be a mob. His confession was obtained in custody in that atmosphere, and he was represented in a proceeding that lasted a matter of days.
His hanging was among the last legal public executions in Texas; the state moved to the electric chair and to executions inside prison walls the following year, in part because of scenes like the one at Waco.
The entry records the conviction and the confession and records the conditions, because a confession given by a Black man in Waco in 1922 cannot be weighed as though it were given anywhere else. Nothing here has been re-examined, and nothing about the case has been tested since.