Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Woman pleads guilty to manslaughter in death of elderly ‘husband’

NEW YORK - A Nevada woman who admits that she killed her elderly husband with prescription drugs here 6 1/2 years ago while stealing his money pleaded guilty Wednesday to second-degree manslaughter.

Sylvia S. Mitchell, 35, admitted in Manhattan's State Supreme Court that she "recklessly and repeatedly" fed Valium, Tylenol with codeine, and other drugs to 85-year-old Andrew G. Vlasto while she emptied his bank accounts.

Mitchell, brought to justice because of Vlasto's persistent relatives, will be sentenced by Justice Bonnie Wittner on July 6 to five to 15 years in prison, the maximum penalty for the top count in the indictment.

Mitchell married Vlasto, a Greek immigrant, in August 1993 although she has three children with a man she lived with in Las Vegas for years, prosecutors said. She was arrested there in April 1999 in Vlasto's death.

When Mitchell was arraigned here last year on manslaughter and larceny charges, Assistant District Attorney Youmin Kim said the "voodoo" ceremony in which she and Vlasto were married with no witnesses was an illegal sham.

Assistant District Attorney Daniel Castleman said Mitchell was not charged with murder because "we don't believe she intended to kill him."

"She hadn't finished cleaning him out," Castleman said. "He had property in Greece that she wanted. She just wanted to keep him malleable, as she admitted in court, but she overdid it."

Mitchell, plying Vlasto with drugs to make it easy for her to take his money, apparently gave him an overdose in Atlantic City in October 1993. She took him to Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia where he was detoxified and she was warned by doctors that the drugs were dangerous for Vlasto.

Six days later in New York, Mitchell took Vlasto to Bellevue Hospital Center where he was again diagnosed with having an overdose of drugs in his system. Vlasto died on Nov. 10, 1993, in Bellevue.

An autopsy, performed over Mitchell's objections, showed that Vlasto died of pneumonia and sepsis, "complicated by an overdose" of several prescription drugs.

Court papers say Mitchell got prescriptions for the drugs from a doctor she knew and gave them to Vlasto. The doctor, Lewin Moseley, died in 1997.

Mitchell's former lawyer, Barry Fallick, said after her arraignment that she was a fortune teller in Manhattan when she met Vlasto. Fallick had said that Vlasto had hired her to work for him.

Mitchell had already stolen $80,000 from Vlasto's bank accounts in the first month of their marriage, prosecutors said, and quick-acting relatives saved the rest of his $500,000 estate.

Suspicions about Mitchell arose after a friend of Vlasto's nephew, James, sent him a San Francisco Examiner story last June about five men, aged 87 to 96, who were "slowly poisoned to death" between 1983 and 1994.

James Vlasto turned the clippings over to the district attorney's office and the investigation began. Castleman credited Vlasto with doing much of the ground work, such as poring over bank records, telephone records, hospital files and prescription forms, that got the investigation moving.

Vlasto said Mitchell's plea and promised sentence "means closure for our family. My uncle died in a horrible way but justice finally has been done."

archive