FARMINGTON – The murder trial for a South Portland man accused in the 1983 stabbing of a Fayette woman began today in Franklin County Superior Court, with attorneys for the state and defense making their opening statements.
The jury trial of Thomas H. Mitchell, Jr., 52, of South Portland, is anticipated to last several days. Although the murder of Judith F. Flagg, 23, occurred in Kennebec County, the trial was moved to Franklin County following a change of venue request filed by Mitchell’s defense.
Despite occurring 26 years ago, the murder was clearly fresh in the minds of Flagg’s family, who filled several benches in the Franklin County Courthouse.
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According to the state, recently-tested DNA evidence resulted in indicting Mitchell with murder in 2006. Deputy Attorney General William Stokes, who is prosecuting the case, presented an overview of the state’s case during his opening statement.
Flagg’s murder, both Stokes and Mitchell’s attorneys agree, occurred on Jan. 6, 1983, sometime between the late morning and early afternoon hours. Flagg’s husband, Ted Flagg, then 25, left early that morning to work at a local mill. Judith Flagg remained at home with their 13-month-old son, Chad.
The family had purchased their home on Watson Heights Road, in Fayette, from Thomas Mitchell, Sr., the defendant’s father, moving there in 1980.
After Ted Flagg left on the morning of her death, Judith Flagg spent sometime on the phone with her sister, as well as other family members, for much of the morning.
According to Stokes, Judith Flagg told her sister that a man had called earlier and asked about Ted Flagg. Judith Flagg told her sister that the man had claimed to be a friend of her husband and that she had told him Ted Flagg would not be back until late that evening. The sister told police that Judith Flagg eventually had gotten off the phone, telling her that “someone’s here.”
Further calls to the residence, Stokes said, didn’t get through. The line was busy.
Late that night, after getting off work at 10:30 p.m., Ted Flagg returned home, entering through the garage door.
“He found his wife lying on the kitchen floor,” Stokes told the jury, “with a significant amount of blood around her. His son was lying on top of his mother.”
Chad was physically unharmed, but Judith Flagg had sustained a series of cuts to her hands, wrists and fingers, as well as stab wounds to her chest, torso and lower back. The medical examiner later found that her death was a result of those stab wounds.
Police, summoned by the family, began an investigation. They found a set of footprints, walking towards a seldom-used kitchen door and running away, in freshly-fallen snow. Casts were taken of those prints. Evidence was taken from the kitchen itself, as well as the baby’s room nearby, where there were signs of a struggle.
The police, Stokes said, found other evidence as well. A South Portland Police Department sergeant testified today that he saw an olive-green 1973 Thunderbird, with a tan top, chrome grill, and maroon primer paint along one side, operated by Mitchell, heading north out of Portland that morning. A mail carrier, making her rounds along Watson Heights Road, later told police that she had nearly been hit by a maroon Thunderbird with a tan top and chrome grill, as that vehicle had lost control while heading down a hill toward her and slid into a shallow ditch. Stokes said that she described the driver to the police and helped them develop a composite sketch which reportedly matched Mitchell’s appearance.
Mitchell was also not unknown to the Flaggs, according to Ted Flagg. He said that Mitchell had approached him at his new home to inquire about a lamp which Mitchell, Sr. had owned. Ted Flagg told Mitchell that all of his father’s property had been given to the real estate office.
Despite Maine State Police detectives’ early interest in Mitchell, which culminated in a search of the home he shared with his mother and aunt, the case went cold in 1984.
“At that point,” Stokes said, “the investigation into the death of Judy Flagg basically stopped.”
DNA testing would not become a law enforcement tool until years later. The state’s crime lab only began possessing the technology and training to DNA test specimens in 1996. In 2003, authorities again began to look into the Flagg case again. Eventually, Maine State Police Detective Jason Richards was assigned to take over the case.
The footprint casts, products of a light snowfall that fell two decades ago, were checked out of evidence. Finding them broken, a crime lab technician specializing in imprint evidence put them back together, piece by piece. She said that the prints allowed her to tell the size, tread design and manufacturer’s mold used to make the shoes worn by the individual who made the footprints. This information, Stokes said today, matched the shoes taken from Mitchell during the search of his residence.
Other crime lab personnel tested a swab taken from Judith Flagg’s mouth, detecting the presence of sperm cells. Both Judith Flagg and Chad Flagg’s clothing were also tested, and the sleeve of Chad Flagg’s clothing also contained traces of semen.
The crime lab ran a Y-STR DNA test on the specimens. A procedure which screens out X-chromosome genetic material, which typically exists only in females; a Y-STR test only can exclude individuals, it cannot match samples to people. Stokes said that technicians would testify that, as expected, the test excluded 13-month-old Chad Flagg. However, a different result came back when the test was applied with Mitchell’s DNA.
“The result was that Thomas Mitchell could not be excluded as the source of the male DNA,” Stokes said.
The lab then ran another test, a Standard-PCR DNA test, on the fingernail clippings taken from Judith Flagg’s hands. The lab detected two matches; one to Judith Flagg’s DNA and the other to Thomas Mitchell’s. Stokes noted that for the lab to make a meaningful finding, the random match probability, or chance that a random person could have left the sample, would have to be 300 billion to one. However, in this case, the random match probability was estimated at 69 quadrillion to one.
A billion is a thousand million. A quadrillion, in its most common usage, means a thousand million million.
Stokes said the state intended to prove that Mitchell entered the Flagg’s residence, orally raped Judith Flagg and then murdered her.
“The evidence will show that Judy Flagg fought for her life,” Stokes said, “and her baby’s life.”
Mitchell is being represented by Greg Dorr and James Strong. Dorr, who gave the defense’s opening statement, said that there was little to dispute with the general timeline of Flagg’s murder. However, Dorr called the evidence used by the state into question, noting that the material had in many cases been stored for decades, prior to modern-day evidentiary procedures.
“There is no eyewitness to this crime,” Dorr said, “because of that, the state’s case is entirely made up of circumstantial evidence.”
Dorr pointed out that as many as 15 people had been inside and outside of the Flagg residence before the police had even arrived, as Ted Flagg had first called his family. The footprint casts were broken over time and had to be reconstructed. There were fingerprints taken inside the home, but none of these were ever proven to have come from Mitchell, and some remain, to this day, unidentified.
Dorr said that his client, who intended to testify on his own behalf, had stayed at his father’s home years earlier. In the baby’s room, where police would later determine a struggle had occurred, Mitchell suffered an injury which resulted in him “[bleeding] profusely”, Dorr said.
“You heard me say earlier that ‘justice delayed is justice denied,'” Dorr reminded the jury at one point, “and that is true when one considers what the Flagg family has gone through. But Mr. Mitchell has been inconvenienced by this delay. The people he was living with, his mother and aunt, are now deceased.”
Dorr, who said Mitchell would testify to this before the jury, said that those women could have told police that their son and nephew had been home that day.
Dorr finished his presentation with an introduction of one final piece of evidence. Three pubic hairs were found on the outside of Judith Flagg’s clothing. Those hairs, examined at a microscopic level in 1983, were determined to have not come from either of the Flaggs. However, Dorr noted, they were also shown to be incompatible with Mitchell.
The state began presenting its case today, a process expected to take possibly two weeks.
