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THE INTENSE MANHUNT for two escaped murderers in far upstate New York has hit its 10th day as a woman charged with helping the killers flee from prison heads back to court.
Prosecutors say Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who had befriended the inmates, had agreed to be the getaway driver but backed out because she still loved her husband and felt guilty for participating.
“Basically, when it was go-time and it was the actual day of the event, I do think she got cold feet and realized, ‘What am I doing?’” Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie said Sunday.
Reality struck. She realised that, really, the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.
Mitchell was charged with helping Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border on June 6. She is due in court this morning in Plattsburgh.
Wylie said there was no evidence the men had a “Plan B” once Mitchell backed out, and no vehicles have been reported stolen in the area.
That has led searchers to believe the men are still near the maximum-security prison in Dannemora. At the same time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo cautioned that for all anyone knows the convicts could be in Mexico, where one of the inmates had fled after killing his boss in the late 1990s.
“We don’t know if they are still in the area or if they’re in Mexico by now,” he said.
Mitchell (51) was charged Friday with supplying hacksaw blades, chisels, a punch and a screwdriver. Her lawyer entered a not guilty plea on her behalf. She has been suspended without pay from her €51,000-a-year job overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison.
Wylie said yesterday that the killers apparently cut their way out using tools stored by prison contractors, taking care to return them to their toolboxes after each night’s work. He said:
They had access, from what we understand, to other tools left in the facility by contractors under policy and were able to open the toolboxes and use those tools and then put them back so nobody would notice.
The convicts used power tools to cut through the back of their adjacent cells, broke through a brick wall, then cut into a steam pipe and slithered through it, finally emerging outside the prison walls through a manhole, authorities said.
Workers yesterday welded shut a manhole at the base of a wall on the side of the prison where the two men escaped. They also sealed two other manholes on the street near the prison, including the one from which the convicts climbed out.
More than 800 police officers went door-to-door over the weekend and combed the rural area signs of the escapees. Residents were very much on edge, with some saying they were keeping guns handy. But there was also an outpouring of support for the search effort. A restaurant urged people to tie blue ribbons around trees and mailboxes.
“The locals have been awesome,” said Sgt. Barry Cartier of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department, part of a crew from a neighboring county working 12-hour shifts. “They come around with food all the time. We’ve got too much to eat.”
Sweat (35) was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. Matt (48) was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of his former boss.
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Somebody being murdered is not “antics”.
I saw Coveney & Vradkar in Boots yesterday
@3monkey: lol old arsenic and lace..
I get some of those symptoms when I eat the wife’s dinners. She’s either a bad cook, or genuinely tryin’ to get rid of me.
@Paul Culligan: So you didn’t read the instructions when you purchased the goods…..
She does the shopping as well Chris, so I’m caught either way.
Joffreys death on Game of Thrones made it cool again!
The borgias used to take small quantities of poison over time till the built up resistance to it. Then when they invited victims to a meal they could all eat the same food and only the guests would die
Second most deadly poison in the world is platytoxin from zoanthids, a species related to coral and anemones and which is an hazard to marine aquarium keepers, coming in on coral frags. A single gram is enough to to kill 300,000 mice, or 80 people.
Or even pure nicotine, a favourite of the assassins of the Court of Louis Roi du Soleil, who would coat their dagger blades with it, knowing that their victim need only sustain a slight nick to be killed. The deadly poison, there’s enough in a single cigarette to kill several, if it be extracted and administered direct to the blood, suppresses the respiratory system and kills within minutes.
End of the day it could have been a lot of things. “Tout est poison, rien n’est pas poison. La poison c’est la dose.” Paracelsus.
Btw smoking a cigarette doesn’t kill one (short-term) because the absorption of nicotine through the cheek cells allows the body to metabolise the tiny amounts before it kills. Not so with direct injection or administration via an open wound.
By bottle or by tongue, a joke about malicious gossip lol. But the Romans use to carry arsenic into battle incase they lost the battle as they could retreat and dump the arsenic into the wells they came across and that is where poisoning the well expression came from.
http://www.rferl.org/a/wikileaks_cables_add_to_speculation_over_litvinenko/2254821.html
The juice of gone-off prawns has been used to get rid of the occasional inconvenient husband in Asia too. Mixed in with a curry.
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