New York - The woman who helped two convicted killers escape from a maximum security prison in New York said she only took part in the plot “to save my family.”
Joyce Mitchell, who for seven years worked as a seamstress at the Clinton County correctional facility, told NBC television in an interview broadcast on Monday that one of the inmates told her he loved her, and that he wanted to kill her husband.
Mitchell, 51, said the two murderers, David Sweat and Richard Matt, also had learned where her mother and one of her three children lives, and that she was worried about their safety as well.
“I did wrong. I deserve to be punished but, you know, people need to know that I was only trying to save my family,” she said in a tearful interview - her first since the daring escape, which made international headlines.
Mitchell has been charged with helping the two men obtain tools used in their jailbreak.
She reached a plea deal and faces up to seven years in prison when she is sentenced on September 28, US news reports said.
The two escapees broke out of the upstate New York prison in June, and became the subjects of a nearly three-week-long manhunt.
Matt was shot dead by a federal agent during the manhunt, and Sweat was apprehended just a mile and a half (three kilometres) south of the Canadian border.
Mitchell admitted that her relationship with the two inmates “got a little too comfortable,” but said she had found pleasure in their company.
She said her flirtation with the two men, particularly with Matt, came at a time when she was feeling unhappy in her marriage.
“I was going through a time where I didn't feel like my husband loved me anymore,” she told NBC.
“I was going through a depression, and I guess they saw my weakness and that's how it all started,” she said.
“Their attention made me feel good.”
The two inmates were held in New York's most escape-proof facility because of the heinous nature of their crimes. Matt was convicted of killing his boss and chopping his body in pieces. Sweat was in prison for killing a sheriff's deputy by shooting him 15 times.
But Mitchell said she befriended the men despite their violent criminal records.
“A few months before they decided to get out, they were asking me for things... I would bring cookies, brownies, stuff like that,” she said, adding that she brought them the items in violation of prison rules.
“They are supposed to check our bags every morning when we come in, and they are supposed to check them when they go out, but they never did,” she said.
Eventually the two inmates raised the stakes, asking Mitchell to bring them tool parts and other contraband they could use to break out of prison.
She denied reports that she had romantic ties with Matt, and said she never had a “consensual” sexual relationship with him, although she said he forced himself on her on at least one occasion.
“It started out as a flirtation thing, but that's all it ever was. There was never any love between myself and Mr Matt,” she said.
Matt and Sweat apprised Mitchell of their progress drilling out of the prison week after week, but she never informed authorities about the escape plan.
“I knew I was in way over my head so I had to keep going with whatever they were saying,” she said.
Despite a career working in prison, adjusting to life behind bars has proved difficult, Mitchell said.
“It's not some place that I would have ever expected to be,” she said.
AFP