Ex-wife of escaped murderer says she would remarry him

Anita Kysor says her
ex-husband deserves
another chance.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The ex-wife of a convicted murderer who escaped from a northwestern Pennsylvania prison and remains at large says she always believed he could be rehabilitated and that he deserved another chance.

Anita Kysor, 57, of Pitcairn, said Malcolm Kysor was “kind, considerate, polished — the perfect gentleman,” and that she would marry him again “in a heartbeat.”

Malcolm Kysor, 53, escaped from the medium-security State Correctional Institution at Albion on Nov. 25 by hiding in a trash can. He had been serving a life sentence since 1988 for a murder in Erie County in the early 1980s.

The FBI indicated a few days after the escape Kysor was likely in Indiana or Minnesota, where he has family.

Albion prison superintendent Marilyn S. Brooks was relieved of her command after the escape. She and other prison workers face discipline. Another inmate has been charged with helping Kysor escape.

Anita Kysor met her former husband when she was working as a nurse at UPMC Presbyterian hospital in the early 1990s and he was an inmate at Western Pen, then a maximum-security prison in Pittsburgh’s Woods Run neighborhood.

They met through another inmate with whom Anita Kysor had become friends while he was receiving treatment for a liver transplant.

She had been married and divorced twice previously when they married in 1994. They were married for eight years, though her time with him was limited to four or five prison visits a month. Physical contact was prohibited, but she says they bonded emotionally.

She spent more than $30,000 on his appeals, hiring four lawyers in hopes of getting him a new trial. The appeals failed and, dispirited, she divorced him in 2002.

“I am so terribly sorry about that. It was one of the dumbest things I ever did,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “If you ask would I marry him again, the answer is ‘yes.’ In a heartbeat I would.”

Anita Kysor maintains that her ex-husband is not violent and that the murder of which he was convicted was a case of self-defense, an argument Malcolm Kysor and his lawyers had presented unsuccessfully to a jury.