Creepypasta Presents:
The Unfortunate Life of Jamie Robert Mitchum
March 12, 2019
by Matt Richardsen
My mother always told me to stay away from Jamie Robert Mitchum.
Maybe I should have listened to her.
I guess I didn’t really understand why at the time. I guess children are more trusting. Sure, he was strange. Anybody could see that. Jamie was the type of kid to play with a magnifying glass on the blacktop during recess. He wore the early loss of his mother on his sleeve and the bruises from bouts with bullies on his arms. Jamie fought with everybody. He fought with the teachers. He fought with whatever parental figure stumbled through the door of his house that week. I think he would fight a dog if it looked at him the wrong way. But good friends were hard to come by at the time. We were two dorks destined to stick by each other’s side.
My strongest memory of him begins in the fifth grade, on the day they found Maggie Henneway’s body buried behind the schoolyard.
Or, more accurately, the day Jamie found her body behind the schoolyard.
* * * * * *
We were playing Cowboys & Indians at recess. Same as any day. Jamie always insisted on being the Cowboy. His interpretation of the rules included chasing me around the school yard, with a weaponized tree branch at the ready. Offensive stuff, I get it, even for back then.
At one point, Jamie cornered me towards the back of the property. We were up against some fencing that separated us from the woods, and I thought I was done for. I thought I was finished. It would not be the first time Jamie took the game a little too seriously by beating the Hell out of me. The kid thrived on violence. He lifted the branch over his head. He laughed at me cowering with a maniacal ‘fake’ laugh that seemed almost too real to be false. But just before he took his swing, Jamie stopped, and pointed towards a pricker bush behind me.
“Look. Let’s go touch it,“
I’ll never forget the callousness in his voice. The kid didn’t seem concerned. He didn’t seem scared. He didn’t try to get the teachers. He just pointed, lazily, almost uninterested at the stack of human remains just three feet behind my right shoulder.
I looked at it.
I wish I hadn’t.
The woman was sliced down the center of her torso; from the top of her chest to the bottom of her stomach. It almost looked like something you might see in an autopsy room. Small little stab injuries spread out through her abdomen and midsection. Her face appeared swollen and disfigured. I turned away and vomited.
“Don’t be a baby,” he said. “It’s just a body. Let’s go touch it,”
Before I could take in anymore, I screamed, and somebody ran and got Miss Abernathy.
The rest of that day remains a blur.
* * * * * *
The police investigation took months. I remember that part as vividly as yesterday. They talked to Jamie. They talked to his dad. They even talked to his dad’s girlfriends, and almost anybody he made contact with on a day-to-day basis. My parents were even interrogated. We did not know why, at the time. But we found out when the police announced a break in the case.
Maggie spent her last night alive in the Mitchum house.
It is hard to say exactly what happened. Some believe that Mr. Mitchum (Jamie’s dad) and Maggie were sleeping together. The officers and District Attorney settled on that theory and prosecuted it successfully. Nobody seemed very interested in the fact that Jamie found the body. Nobody seemed very interested in his deviant behavior at all. And so I didn’t push them.
