Fifty-five miles west of Clinton in Dickinson Center, an alarm clock rang. As Joyce Mitchell reached through the darkness to shut it off, she remembered it was Friday, the day of the week she had come to dread. She did not know yet which Friday they would carry out their plan, but she knew one thing: Matt was telling the truth when he said they were making headway on the route.
For the last six months, the fifty-one-year-old prison seamstress had dreamed of a different life from the one she was living with her husband, Lyle. Since the couple had moved into the two-story house with the rusted metal roof on Palmer Road, an extra layer of heft had settled around her waist, and the corners of her mouth had given way to gravity. Her layered, outdated ’do—its individual strands as kinked as those on the ears of a spaniel—had acquired several variations of yellow over the years, and few cosmetics had ever found a permanent place in her morning routine.
On this morning, she got dressed, brewed coffee, and packed a lunch, as always. Joyce rarely ate before leaving; it was much more pleasant to have her breakfast—today, meat and potatoes, seared and roasted the night before—while seated at her desk in Clinton’s Tailor Shop 1, where she could enjoy half an hour of stillness until 8 a.m. when the inmates arrived.
In the eight years she had been employed at the facility, Joyce—whom the prisoners knew as “Tillie,” her longtime nickname dating back to her high school years—had come to welcome their company. She especially liked the company of David Sweat, whom she considered the most talented worker among the men she supervised. Joyce had openly admired his proficiency with patterns and skill with a sewing machine. (He could complete thirty to forty pairs of women’s prison pants within two to three days, an impressive display of dexterity.) Watching him handle each skipped stich, broken needle, or bunched-up bit of thread with his characteristic calm confidence stirred something in her she had long suppressed.
It had been nine months since Sweat was removed from her shop. His dismissal had brought on uncontrollable tears. A supervisor claimed Sweat made an inappropriate remark to another civilian employee, though Joyce suspected other motives for the decision. She knew of an anonymous note, penned by a prisoner and sent to Clinton’s higher-ups, that insinuated she and Sweat were having illicit relations. Flirtations in the way of small gestures (a touch of the arm, a gentle smile) had certainly taken place between the two of them—but, as both Sweat and Joyce would later say, they had not exchanged so much as a kiss.
At that time, she saw him five days a week, seven hours a day. Now it was hardly ever, as he was no longer working under her watch.
At 6:05 a.m. Joyce opened the passenger door to the family’s black Jeep Cherokee. In their one-hour commute to Clinton, she and Lyle, also an industrial training supervisor at the prison, often discussed their children, their grandchildren, and the day ahead. Today, however, Joyce shut her eyes and leaned back against the seat.
Lyle looked over. “Everything OK?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I just have a headache.”
She had said this more than once in recent weeks. It was a convenient excuse for her staid silence.
Since Matt first told her about the plot to escape, Joyce had satisfied their every request. She had been the one to buy the hacksaw blades, chisel, drill bits, and steel punch, tools they needed to carry out the plan. (She had concealed these in a vat of raw hamburger meat to get them past the “blue shirts,” as she called Clinton’s guards. It had long been custom for employees to bypass bag checks and metal detector screenings. Workers frequently brought in food, which was rarely subjected to search. Hence, most of these items—even two pounds of frozen ground chuck—failed to raise eyebrows.) She had agreed to pick them up outside the prison wall, and even said she would live with them in Mexico, or wherever they ended up. The fantasy had been all-consuming: it had offered a reprieve from monotony, and a mental escape from small-town boredom. For six months the daydream had lived neat and nice in her head, where all of its dire consequences could be ignored. Now, the fear of being found out, of going even farther down this rabbit hole, filled her with unshakable panic. She knew they were almost finished with the route, and the reality of her complicity began to sink in.
As Lyle hugged the curves of the road, something told her that tonight would be the night.