6-Year-Old Davie Mitchell, Kidnapped Four Times By His Mother and Three Times By HIs Father, Is Now in Asheville, Jan. 20, 1920

From The Monroe Journal, Tuesday, January 20, 1920

Thrice-Kidnapped Child Is Now in Asheville. . . Taken for Third Time by His Father in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day. . . Mother Has No Clue to Whereabouts

Davie, 6-year-old son of D.G. Mitchell, who was for the third time abducted by his father on New Year’s Day in Los Angeles, and a child which has been kidnapped four times, once by its mother and thrice by its father, is today in Asheville, being carried for at the residence of John H. Cathay, judge of the county juvenile court, who is a brother-in-law of the child’s father.

While all the abductions have been spectacular, the last, which occurred on the child’s sixth birthday, and also at the beginning of the new year, is the most sensational. The father of the boy describes the transcontinental flight after the child had been kidnapped on a Lost Angeles street while enroute from school to his home.

According to his version of the affair and the matters which prompted him, for the third time, to abduct his own child, he had requested his wife, Dr. Mary Evelyn Mitchell, a chiropractice doctor, to allow him to see the boy on Christmas day and also on New Year’s day, and she had refused both requests. Having thus been forbidden to see his own child during the Yuletide season and on his birthday, the father knowing that he could get away with the boy, picked him up and went 18 miles in an automobile to Whittier. There he engaged another car and driving all day and night across the famous desert of southern California, through Death Valley, he landed in Nevada, 320 miles away. 

This run had been made with only one stop, and the route was over the steepest mountains, then into the valley of sand an on account of the late floods there were practically no road save those full of holes. At this point in Nevada, Mr. Mitchell and his son engaged another car and made another 60-mile drive to the main line of the Southern Pacific, striking it at Los Vegas. From there he4 and his son celebrated New Yea and the boy’s birthday in Salt Lake City.

During the entire trip they had not been intercepted and had left no clue whereby Mrs. Mitchell could have them trailed. After outfitting the boy in Salt Lake City, Mr. Mitchell came on to Asheville and he and his son are now in the home of this brother-in-law John H. Cathey.