Las Vegas woman held in connection with body found in her back yard

Jen Lawson

Tuesday, July 22, 2003 | 11:14 a.m.

The night before a 36-year-old woman was arrested in connection with a body buried in her central Las Vegas back yard, she told her roommate she had killed someone and asked him to leave for the night so she could move the body, according to an arrest report obtained by the Sun.

Anna Linda Mitchel was taken into custody Monday morning, several hours after police found a human hand sticking up out of the dirt in the back yard of her home in the 1200 block of Eighth Place, in the historic John S. Park neighborhood.

She was being held in the Clark County Detention Center this morning on a murder charge.

According to police documents, a man called Metro's 911 line about 3:30 a.m. Monday and said his friend told him a body was buried in the back yard of the house where he rents a room.

When police pulled up to the house, Christopher Laudermilk came outside. He told them he pays rent to Mitchel, who owns the house. When he came home about 8 p.m. Sunday, Mitchel told him "she needed to talk to him about something important," according to documents.

"Anna went on to tell Laudermilk that she had killed someone and buried the body in the back yard of the home," the report says. "Anna asked Laudermilk to leave the house for the night so that she could move the body elsewhere."

Laudermilk told officers he called a friend and asked him to pick him up. Several hours later Laudermilk returned to the house and "to find out if what Anna told him was true," documents say.

Laudermilk said he went into the back yard and saw "a pile of dirt that appeared to be recently disturbed," according to paperwork. "A bad odor emanated from the area and there was a hole where Laudermilk observed a strange dark object."

Officers walked into the back yard and, near a storage shed, they found disturbed ground and a shovel near the hole. "Inside the small hole they observed a human hand protruding from the ground," the report says.

The officers knocked on the front door and Mitchel answered. They placed her in a patrol car and took her to Metro's homicide office, where she told detectives she wanted to speak to an attorney, according to the report. She was placed under arrest on a murder charge and taken to jail.

The Clark County coroner's office this morning had not yet identified the body or determined the manner of death. An autopsy was scheduled for later today. Police said the body had been buried "for some time."

Police are asking anyone who has any information about the case to come forward. Police think number of people knew about the body before it was discovered.

"She talked to several people in which she requested help in moving the body," Thompson said, but no one helped her.

Thompson said investigators have found no obvious motive for the murder. Mitchel is believed to have been behind in her mortgage payments on the four-bedroom house, which she bought in 1997, and was about to be evicted.

Mitchel was described by neighbors Monday as a "lost soul" with a drinking problem.

"I am very upset," said Marie Johnson, after finding out that her neighbor had been arrested. "I feel very bad to think that this could happen."

"I know she was very disturbed," Johnson said. "She drank heavily and I suspected that with all the men that were coming and going that drugs were involved, but I don't want to pass judgment on anyone."

Mitchel was arrested in 2000 on a charge of driving under the influence, a Metro Police spokeswoman said.

Mitchel used to work at Circus Circus, Johnson said, but lost her job within the past year. She was married in 1990, according to county records, but Johnson said her husband died.

"She was a lost soul," Johnson said.

Joe Pittman, who has lived in the house next to Mitchel's since 1956, called her "a very distant person."

"She drank a little," he said, "but in all the years she's lived there, she never interfered with anything."