Like something from a movie, in 1985, Joyce Bailey Mattox, of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, devised a plan to rescue her love interest, Jesse Glenn Smith. There was only one problem: Smith was an inmate, serving a lengthy prison sentence at the time.
No one knows how Mattox became acquainted with the prisoner. It has been hinted that perhaps she would visit the prison with her church group, and that’s how she came to know Smith.
In December 1985, Joyce Bailey Mattox, a former textile worker, chartered a helicopter. As the pair lifted into the Carolina sky, she pulled a pistol on the pilot, forcing him to land in the prison yard at the Perry Correctional Institution in Pelzer, South Carolina.
Three inmates scrambled aboard the overcrowded chopper amid a hail of gunfire as it lumbered from the ground, barely clearing the 12-foot fences that surrounded the prison. The helicopter landed four miles away, and the pilot was released unharmed. The woman stuffed money into the pilot’s pocket before fleeing in a silver sedan.
The fugitives that escaped the prison were identified as James Rodney Leonard, aged 20, serving a life sentence for murder, William Douglas Ballew, aged 42, and Jesse Glenn Smith, aged 35, both were serving lengthy terms for armed robbery.
The four were apprehended roughly four days later at a rest stop off Interstate 95, two miles from the Florida state line in Georgia, around 3:30 A.M.
Mattox was sentenced to 40 years for air piracy, and the others had time added to their existing sentences.