Prison worker accused of plot to kill husband

PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. – A woman charged with helping two convicted murderers escape from a maximum-security facility where she worked had discussed having them kill her husband, a district attorney confirmed Wednesday.

Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie said at a news conference that Joyce Mitchell had talked to inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat about killing her husband, Lyle, who also works at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, near the Canadian border.

Sweat and Matt escaped from the 170-year-old prison on June 6 and remain on the lam. Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who befriended the inmates, was arrested June 12.

Meanwhile, state police expanded the search for the killers beyond a 16-square-mile area of woods, fields and swamps where the manhunt has been most intense. Police stepped up roving patrols and were checking the hundreds, if not thousands, of seasonal homes and hunting camps in the region.

Sweat, 35, was serving a life sentence without parole in the killing of a sheriff’s deputy. Matt, 48, was doing 25 years to life for the kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of his former boss.

Joyce Mitchell is charged with helping the killers flee by providing them with hacksaw blades, chisels and other tools.

Prosecutors say Mitchell had agreed to be the getaway driver but backed out because she still loved her husband and felt guilty for participating.

She was charged last week with supplying contraband, including a punch and a screwdriver, to the two inmates. She has pleaded not guilty.

Authorities say the convicts used power tools to cut through the backs of their adjacent cells, broke through a brick wall and then cut into a steam pipe and slithered through it, finally emerging outside the prison walls through a manhole. Wylie said they apparently used tools stored by prison contractors.