Joyce Mitchell, the prison guard who helped Richard Matt and David Sweat escape to their freedom, entered a not guilty plea at her arraignment hearing late Friday evening, after she was accused of providing the convicts with contraband they used in sawing through steel to escape from their cells at the Clinton Correctional Facility, New York Daily News reports.
Mitchell was arrested Friday evening in New York. Police said she had been charged with one felony and one misdemeanor, for first-degree promoting prison contraband, and fourth-degree criminal facilitation, respectively.
The prison worker charged with aiding in the escape of two convicted killers from the maximum-security correctional facility had planned to meet the pair at midnight on the night of the escape and then take of with the escapees, according to initial reports by NBC News.
“It’s basically, to show up down at the power house at around midnight, and pick them up. As we all know now, she failed to show up,” Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie told NBC News Saturday. “Pick them up, leave the area.”
“The three of them were going to move on together. That was the plan,” Wylie said.
According to new reports however, the two murderers on the run were actually planning to kill the husband of the woman accused of aiding them with their escape, a source said.
The killers’ nefarious plan was reportedly disclosed in a stunning confession made by the prison tailor shop worker Joyce Mitchell, 51, the law enforcement source said Sunday.
“They planned on killing her husband,” the source told the News.
Joyce Mitchell confessed the killers’ plan to authorities saying she was supposed to drive the men to her house, but she ‘didn’t say that she was going to help them’ with the killing..
“Said the plan was to pick them up and go to her house,” the source said. “She didn’t say that she was going to help them” kill her husband.
Police had originally investigated whether Mitchell’s husband, Lyle Mitchell, who also works at the prison, had aided the escape.
Mitchell, 51, had come under investigation before the escape due to her close relationship with Sweat at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. She was not disciplined, but government officials told NBC News that Matt had charmed her with sweet talk for several months in the hopes she would eventually be the deadly duo’s getaway driver.
Sweat was sentenced to life with no chance of parole in the 2002 killing of a police officer, while Matt was serving a 25-year-to-life sentence for a 1997 conviction in the kidnapping and killing of a man. A $100,000 reward has been offered for info leading to the recapture of the inmates.
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Sources: NBC News & New York Daily News
