Thursday, New York City Police arrested 42 year old David Albert Mitchell on charges that he brutally raped a 73 year old woman in New York's Central Park on Wednesday, September 12th. West Virginia authorities say Mitchell was a person of interest in the 2002 slaying of Barbara Flake in the McDowell County community of Jenkinjones, where Mitchell once lived. An ex-girlfriend, Saretta Mitchell, says he bragged about killing Flake, but investigators never had enough evidence to charge him. Police determined that Flake died from a blow to the head when they found her skull two years after she disappeared from her home. Authorities say Mitchell has been in and out of prison since he was 18. Mitchell served eight years in a Virginia prison for the 2003 abduction of Saretta Mitchell and got out last year. Records show he violated probation three times, then apparently fled to New York. His first felony arrest was in 1989, when he was accused of killing 86 year old Annie Parks of Jenkinjones. Although Mitchell was acquitted in that case, he was arrested again a few months later, charged with raping another Jenkinjones resident who was in her 70s and stealing her gun. Prosecutors dropped the sexual assault charge in that case under a plea bargain. He was released from the Mount Olive Correctional Center in February 2000, but incarcerated again in December 2000 on a grand larceny charge. He finished that sentence in 2001.
