Prison worker who helped escapees caught in fantasy
It started innocently, as such things usually do. Cheerful chatter, then flirting. A call to an inmate’s daughter on his behalf.
Joyce Mitchell was flattered by the attention she got from the two inmates at the New York maximum-security prison where she worked as a tailor shop instructor and was happy to reciprocate with favours for the men.
But then the favours grew bigger and riskier, as did the stakes of their relationship, Mitchell told police in a series of voluntary statements obtained by NBC News. Tools were bartered for the promise of a painting. A swift kiss exchanged in secret, then more intimate sexual encounters. Soon Mitchell was smuggling hacksaw blades into the prison, plotting to kill her husband and planning to run away with the two convicts.
“I was caught up in the fantasy,” she reportedly said.
At the last minute Mitchell panicked, she said, checking herself into a hospital rather than showing up to drive the getaway car. But that didn’t stop the two inmates, convicted killers Richard Matt and David Sweat, who hacked their way out of the Clinton Correctional Facility and set off on their own.
As hundreds of law enforcement officers scoured several states for the fugitives and the country watched in white-knuckled suspense, Mitchell was questioned, arrested and charged with aiding in the two men’s escape.
On Tuesday, the same day her confession became public, Mitchell, 51, pleaded guilty to the charges against her. Clad in a black-and-white prison uniform not so different from the ones she once mended at the Clinton facility, she tearfully accepted the terms of her plea agreement, under which she faces a prison sentence of 27 months to seven years and a $6,000 US fine, according to the New York Times.
The saga of the manhunt finally over — Matt was shot and killed by federal agents June 27, three weeks into the search, and Sweat was captured two days later — attention has now turned to Mitchell’s involvement in the brazen escape. What could possibly have compelled her to conspire with such brutal men?
In her police statements, Mitchell describes her gradual descent into their scheme.
She began working near Matt, 48, and Sweat, 34, in the fall of 2013, and they got along well. The two men were nice to her, she said, and they made her feel special. Sweat was eventually moved to a different workshop, out of suspicion he and Mitchell were having a relationship (though they weren’t at the time, Mitchell said).
But Matt remained, and the two became close. Mitchell began reaching out to Matt’s daughter as a favour to him.
For months, that’s pretty much all they did, until November 2014, when Mitchell asked Matt — reportedly an accomplished artist — to paint a portrait of her three kids as an anniversary gift for her husband. In exchange, Matt began asking for things. In hindsight, they were clearly tools — a set of padded gloves, two pairs of eyeglasses with lights attached — but at the time Matt offered an innocent explanation for the requests. He and Sweat wanted to paint at night, he told her, according to the documents.
The relationship escalated from there, Mitchell recounted. Mitchell began bringing in baked goods for Matt. In April, he grabbed her while the two of them were alone and kissed her for the first time.
“It startled me,” she said. It also frightened her — her husband worked at the facility as well. When Matt asked for a screwdriver bit shortly after, she brought it to him without question.
In May, Matt approached Mitchell for oral sex, and she consented. On several other occasions, he came to her desk wearing a coat with a hole cut in it, through which she could touch his genitals. Mitchell also gave several notes “of a sexual nature” to Matt to pass along to Sweat, including photos of herself naked.
Mitchell told police she realized that they were carving a hole in their cells by May, but didn’t feel that she could do anything. “I was already bringing stuff in to him, and didn’t really feel I could stop,” she said.
As the inmates’ requests became more and more brazen — they asked for hacksaw blades, chisels and a punch — Mitchell began carefully concealing the smuggled tools in packages of hamburger meat. Tubes of paint were added to the bag with the meat so that if it set off the prison’s metal detector, guards would assume it was merely the metal on the packaging, she said.
According to the original plan, Mitchell was to drug her husband with a pair of unidentified pills. After he was asleep, she would drive her Jeep, packed full of clothes, a gun, tents and other equipment; pick up the escapees at a designated spot; and drive them away. On June 5, Matt told her the day had arrived.
“I panicked,” Mitchell said, “and couldn’t follow through with the rest of the plan.”
That night Mitchell drove to the local hospital, where she was admitted for an overnight stay. When she checked her phone around 11:30 the following morning, she found message after message from her family. The police were looking for her, they said.
A day later, she was at the New York State Police station in Malone, N.Y., admitting her involvement to investigators.