After pleading guilty to multiple charges including murder in the death of her boyfriend, a Florida woman will spend her entire life behind bars.
Penny Rebecca Pospisil was 47 years old and lived in a campervan with Anthony Franklin Mitchell, 55, at an RV Park in Lake Panasoffkee in Florida. This park is about 20 miles from The Villages. On or about August 23, Pospisil killed Mitchell, a physically disabled man, and dismembered Mitchell’s body. After leaving her home, she drove two hours to Melbourne, Florida where she lived in an RV park. Soon neighbors complained about the smell coming from her house.
After conducting a wellness check in her camper, police arrested Pospisil on December 22, 2018. They discovered Mitchell’s remains, which were severely decomposed. Mitchell’s family claimed that they hadn’t heard from Mitchell since August 22, 2018.
According to reports Mitchell died from blunt force trauma and strangulation. However, Pospisil initially claimed that Mitchell had died naturally and that she had cremated him. She claimed that Mitchell had abused and killed her, but it was not supported by the police.
She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, abuse of a deceased body, and grand theft of more than $300 but less than $20,000 because she had stolen Mitchell’s credit cards. After Mitchell’s death, she began receiving Social Security benefits.
Prosecutors painted a horrible picture of Pospisil’s horrific crime in preparation for sentencing. They wrote that Pospisil’s heart and other organs were “notably absent” from the crime scene. In a sentencing memo, they also stated that the victim’s “genitals had been removed from his decaying body.”
Prosecutors stated that Mitchell’s postmortem desecration was so brutal that it “was unrecognizable”. In order to “conceal” Mitchell’s body from others, they stated that Pospisil had to use “tools and chemicals” to continue to abuse it.
On Friday, Sumter County Circuit Court Judge Mary P. Hatcher issued Pospisil, now 51, the maximum sentence: life in prison for the murder and then consecutive sentences of 15 years for abusing a corpse and five years for grand theft.
It is unclear why adjudicating the case took four years.
