Falling into the love trap of two prisoners, prison warden Joyce Mitchell, 51 years old, smuggled drills and hacksaw blades into the prison to help them escape in a prison break that caused a stir in history.

Joyce Mitchell was a warden and sewing factory supervisor at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, for many years.

In 2012, Joyce met David Sweat, 32, who was serving a life sentence for killing a sheriff’s deputy on July 4, 2002.

While in prison, David was assigned to work at the garment factory and tried to gain favor with the supervisor to get special treatment. He became close to Joyce, even boasting that he was the female warden’s “favorite prisoner”.

However, their relationship came under scrutiny when other inmates began gossiping about sexual encounters between the two. Prison officials opened an investigation to determine whether Joyce and David had been inappropriately intimate, but found no evidence of wrongdoing.

However, Joyce’s behavior was disturbing enough that David was transferred out of the factory. The two no longer had direct contact with each other.

When Joyce is upset about not being able to see David, inmate Richard Matt, who also works in the garment factory, quickly approaches to comfort her, and takes advantage of her.

Richard is serving a life sentence with a minimum of 25 years for the 1997 murder of his former boss, then the murder of another man while fleeing to Mexico.

“David was fired from the garment factory, lost his job, had no pay,” Joyce said. “Richard would ask me to bring things to David so he could have food or something. I would bring cookies, brownies and things like that. I did that a lot.”

Acting as a go-between, Richard also gave David love letters, nude photos and sexually explicit notes from Joyce.

When David and Richard learned that Joyce was willing to break the rules, they realized that this female guard could be the key to their escape. According to David, Richard “figured out a way to get things” from Joyce by “playing with her feelings” for him.

David Sweat (left) and Richard Matt. Photo: New York State Police

Richard began to develop an intimate relationship with Joyce after the escape plan took shape. He made Joyce “feel special”, painting portraits of her three daughters for her husband to give to their wedding anniversary. Initially, Joyce reciprocated by calling her daughters for him. The conversations then turned to sexual topics.

In late April 2015, Richard became more daring, kissing and making intimate gestures towards Joyce. The female prison guard admitted to having sexual relations with the 49-year-old prisoner in the garment factory on several occasions. She was convinced to help Richard smuggle in tools such as hacksaw blades, chisels and drills so they could cut holes in the cell walls and create escape tunnels.

Following Richard’s instructions, Joyce smuggled the items in by hiding them in frozen hamburgers kept in the prison’s refrigerator. Richard would ask the warden, Gene Palmer, to pick them up.

With his tools, David immediately began cutting a hole in the steel wall behind his cell. Night after night, he chiseled and enlarged it, then sawed through the back of Richard’s cell. The two inmates were held side by side.

When Richard said that he and David had broken through the wall and gone down into the 45 to 60 cm wide underground steam pipe after a few days, Joyce felt there was no way back.

It took David more than four weeks to cut a hole in the pipe, which led through the concrete wall to a manhole on the road about 122 meters from the prison wall. By June 2015, the escape tunnel was complete.

At around 10:30 p.m. on June 5, 2015, after their usual pre-bedtime check, the duo arranged their clothes into two dummies on the bed, then snuck out through the holes they had cut. David brought a guitar case filled with gear so that “if someone saw the guitar case, they wouldn’t think you were a fugitive.”

The two prisoners crawled through the tunnel and reached the manhole in the early morning of June 6. They also left a note saying “Have a nice day”.

David Sweat and Richard Matt left a note saying “Have a nice day” on a punctured pipe. Photo: CNN

According to the trio’s plan, Joyce would drive to pick up the two inmates outside the prison walls and provide them with clothes, guns, and camping equipment to help them escape. However, on the night of the escape, Joyce panicked, suffered chest pains, and was hospitalized. She backed out, abandoning the idea of ​​meeting them at the rendezvous point.

When David realized Joyce was nowhere to be seen, he became furious. The pair decided to flee into the dense forest and swamps that surrounded Dannemora. Without help, they had to walk to the Canadian border, 40 miles away.

After two inmates were discovered missing from their cells, prison officials launched a massive manhunt involving more than 1,300 officers from local, state, federal and Canadian law enforcement agencies.

The escape from the maximum security prison has been compared by many to the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption .

Authorities found all the equipment and speculated that a prison employee might have been involved. When they questioned the employees, they tracked down Joyce. By June 12, although the whereabouts of the two inmates were still unknown, police had enough evidence to formally arrest and charge Joyce for her role in the escape.

On June 17, investigators discovered that Joyce had helped David and Richard escape as part of a plan to kill her husband. Richard had given Joyce a sedative that would make it easier to kill her husband after they escaped. However, Joyce had thrown away the pills instead of giving them to her husband.

Joyce said she feared the prisoners would kill her and her husband after she had outlived her usefulness, and “panic-stricken her and prevented her from carrying out her plan”.

Meanwhile, the fugitive duo quarrel on the run. David, the younger, stronger, and more resilient, begins to feel that Richard is a burden. After 18 days of trying to survive in the wilderness and on the back roads of upstate New York, David can no longer bear it and leaves Matt behind.

Three days after the two split, on June 26, 2015, after a standoff with authorities, Richard was shot dead in Malone, New York, more than 50 kilometers from the prison.

Two days after Richard’s death, Officer Jay Cook found David walking down a road near the Canadian border, chased him into a field, and opened fire as he tried to run away.

David was later arrested and taken to hospital, while officer Jay Cook was hailed as a “hero” by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The three-week manhunt cost New York state $23 million.

Joyce Mitchell in court in September 2015. Photo: NBC

In July 2015, Joyce pleaded guilty. “I liked the attention, the feeling they gave me, and the idea of ​​a completely different life,” she said of why she agreed to help the two escape.

Joyce denied having sex with David, but admitted to passing nude photos. She also admitted to “flirting” with Richard and said he forced her to perform oral sex on her. Joyce said she complied out of fear, but under oath she admitted to “multiple sexual acts with Richard”.

In September 2015, Joyce was sentenced to seven years in prison for introducing a prohibited item into a detention facility, plus an additional year (to be served concurrently) for facilitating a crime. Joyce was also fined $6,375 and ordered to pay nearly $80,000 in restitution.

When she heard the verdict in 2015, Joyce said tearfully: “I wish I could turn it all back. This is by far the worst mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I will live with regret every day for the rest of my life.”

In addition to Joyce, prison officer Gene Palmer was also fined $5,375 and sentenced to six months in prison, but ended up serving only four months. Other prison officials were also found guilty of negligence, but only two faced charges.

After recovering, David was sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison for each count of escape and possession and use of a prohibited substance in a detention facility, and ordered to pay $79,841 in restitution.

Joyce was denied parole twice, in 2017 and again in 2019. In February 2020, Joyce was released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility—New York’s only maximum-security prison for women—after serving nearly four and a half years. However, she was ordered to remain under supervision until June 2022. Since her release, Joyce has kept a low profile.

The 2015 New York prison break was one of the most sensational prison breaks in American history, and was retold in the documentary Dannemora Prison Break and the television film Escape at Dannemora (2018).