For 23 years, Judith Flagg’s family believed they knew who killed her. The family wanted an arrest, but police couldn’t make a case against him.
Until Friday.
Police charged Thomas Mitchell Jr., a 49-year-old convict, with stabbing the young mother to death in her Fayette home.
Now Flagg’s family wants something else.
“We’re all just looking for closure,” said Flagg’s brother, David Dion of Livermore.
It was Jan. 6, 1983 when Flagg’s husband, Theodore Flagg, said goodbye to his wife and set off for a 16-hour shift at work, according to police. When he came home that night, he found his wife dead on the floor, their year-old son, Chad, unhurt nearby.
Judith Flagg had been stabbed several times in the head and chest. The knife was not found.
At the time, police said there was no indication that Flagg had known her attacker.
“There was no reasoning behind it whatsoever,” said Flagg’s brother-in-law, Russell Flagg of Livermore Falls.
Soon after, family members say, police told them they suspected Mitchell, then 25.
“All indications led to him,” her brother-in-law said.
But the case wasn’t ironclad, and police didn’t make an arrest. Flagg’s murder remained officially unsolved. Life moved forward.
Judith Flagg’s widower remarried and had two more children. Mitchell was arrested on unrelated charges and jailed.
Then, recently, the family was told of a development. Advances in technology finally allowed police to link Mitchell to the case.
Mitchell, who was serving time in the Maine State Prison on unrelated charged, was indicted for Flagg’s murder.
“It’s been an emotional weekend,” Dion said.
Family members say closure isn’t immediate. A suspect has been charged – but not convicted – in her death. There’s still the trial to go through.
Family members said they badly want closure, an ending with the murderer in jail.
If not for their own benefit, “then to keep somebody like this off the streets,” Dion said.
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