Anita Kysor admits she's made some bad choices.

But, she insists, her decision to marry a convicted murderer while he was serving a life sentence was not one of them.

Her former husband, Malcom Kysor, 53, escaped from a state prison near Erie seven weeks ago by hiding in a garbage can. He remains a fugitive.

"I hope wherever he is people take good care of him, and I hope he is staying out of trouble," Ms. Kysor, 57, of Pitcairn, said in an interview.

She calls her former husband by his prison nickname of "Mac," and says he was as fine a man as she ever knew. They were married for eight years, during which her time with him was limited to four or five prison visits each month. Physical contact was prohibited, but she says they bonded emotionally.

Unlike most men she knew, she said, he was respectful and eager to listen to her.

"Mac was kind, considerate, polished -- the perfect gentleman. I always felt good being around him," she said.

She spent more than $30,000 on his appeals, hiring four lawyers in hopes of getting him a new trial.

Ms. Kysor grew annoyed when an interviewer suggested that an inmate would have good reason to be kind to the woman who was paying his legal bills.

"No, it wasn't like that. I've been played. He wasn't playing me," Ms. Kysor said.

None of the appeals succeeded. Dispirited by those failings, she divorced him in 2002.

"I am so terribly sorry about that. It was one of the dumbest things I ever did," Ms. Kysor said. "If you ask would I marry him again, the answer is 'yes.' In a heartbeat I would."

She runs her own massage and electrolysis business, but she met Mr. Kysor through her first career as a registered nurse.

While working at UPMC Presbyterian in the early 1990s, she helped treat an inmate who needed a liver transplant. The ailing prisoner struck up a friendship with her. He suggested that she meet "Mac," a career thief and convicted killer who was housed at Western Pen, then a maximum-security prison in Pittsburgh's Woods Run neighborhood.

Ms. Kysor, who had been married and divorced twice before, applied to be put on his list of visitors. Right from the start she liked Mr. Kysor.

"Very nice man. I never heard him say an unkind word about anybody," she said.

On visits to the prison, she even brought along her young daughter from a previous marriage. Ms. Kysor said her child warmed to the imprisoned killer just as she had.

The Kysors' wedding in 1994 was atypical in one sense. The number of prison marriages in Pennsylvania is "very low," said Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

Conversely, men convicted in high-profile murder cases have often married in prison.

The Menendez brothers, Erik and Lyle, both have had prison weddings since their convictions in 1996 for murdering their wealthy parents.

Dr. Sam Sheppard and Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, physicians convicted of killing their wives, also married women who befriended them while they were in prison.

Dr. Sheppard's second wife was from Germany, also Ms. Kysor's homeland. Ms. Kysor is familiar with the Sheppard story and said she considers Dr. Sheppard and her former husband to be victims of the legal system.

Even so, she cut off contact with Mr. Kysor after their divorce. She asked him not to call or write. He violated her wish once, writing to her last year while he was in a maximum-security prison in Fayette County.

Soon after, on April 3, 2007, Mr. Kysor, a model prisoner, received "a promotional transfer" to the medium-security Albion prison in Erie County.

At Albion, he took a job in the prison kitchen for 42 cents an hour. It was there that he began plotting his escape.

On Nov. 25, a Sunday, Mr. Kysor, who was not on the work schedule, volunteered for an extra shift in the kitchen.

Then he slipped inside a garbage can with the help of John Gromer, a 26-year-old inmate from Philadelphia. Mr. Gromer covered the can, then shoved it from a loading dock onto a pickup truck.

The truck, carrying pig slop to a farm in Erie County, hauled Mr. Kysor out the prison gate to freedom.

Jeffrey A. Beard, the state corrections secretary, said negligence by at least five prison employees enabled Mr. Kysor to escape.

Notably, a sergeant at the prison gate skirted procedures by failing to hook up a heartbeat detector, which would have shown that Mr. Kysor was riding alongside the food scraps.

Mr. Beard relieved Albion Superintendent Marilyn S. Brooks of command after the escape. She went on sick leave and has missed two scheduled meetings with Mr. Beard since. Another meeting is scheduled for this week, when she will be in jeopardy of losing her $112,000-a-year job with the state.

Four lower-ranking employees are undergoing disciplinary hearings because of Mr. Kysor's escape.

Anita Kysor said she was surprised that prison workers could lose pay or even their careers because of her former husband's prison break.

Asked whether she was afraid that he would hurt somebody to preserve his freedom, she said she hoped he would not put himself in that position.

She maintains that Mr. Kysor is not violent. She said the murder he was convicted of was actually a case of self-defense to ward off a homosexual attack.

Mr. Kysor and his lawyers made that same argument to a jury, which did not believe it.

While hitchhiking near Erie in 1981, Mr. Kysor was picked up by an Ohio man named Barney Fenton. Mr. Kysor said Mr. Fenton took him to a golf club, plied him with liquor, then made a sexual advance.

Mr. Kysor said he beat Mr. Fenton to death with a golf club, then stole his valuables.

Prosecutors convicted him in 1983 of theft-related charges in the Fenton case. He already had served time for stealing in Alabama and Warren County.

But the state did not try Mr. Kysor for murder until 1987, when he was about to be paroled. Ms. Kysor maintained that prosecutors waited six years because the case was filled with holes.

She said her former husband and his younger brother were molested by a relative when they were young. A psychiatrist she hired said Malcolm Kysor had post-traumatic-stress disorder because of the molestations.

When her husband came under similar attack as an adult, she said, he fought back to protect himself.

But jurors found that Mr. Kysor, a man who stole for a living, killed Mr. Fenton to get what he wanted.

State police said Mr. Kysor probably made it out of Pennsylvania a day or so after his escape. In a federal warrant, they said he had probably traveled to the Midwest, where he has family.

Ms. Kysor said he has a son, Nicholas, from a relationship with another woman. She barely knew other members of his family, most of whom lived in Erie.

Now, with her former husband back in the headlines, Ms. Kysor finds herself as sympathetic to him as ever.

"I always believed Mac could be rehabilitated," she said. "I always believed he deserved another chance."

But when Malcolm Kysor did not get what he wanted through the legal system, he reverted to his old ways. He broke the rules and then he broke out of prison.