Violent Women

In a women's prison, inmates Jo (Jennifer Statler), Billie (Jo Ann Kelly), Beverly (Sandy Lyn), Sandy (Pamela Perry) and Thelma (Eleanor Blair) plan an escape by drilling a tunnel through a drain into the prison's sewer. Meanwhile, a prison guard who has suspected that the group has been planning an escape, tries to discover how they will accomplish it. When another inmate, Brenda (Pati Magee), is refused a parole, she demands that the other women include her in their plan or she will tell the warden. Because it would take another month to tunnel through to Brenda's cell, and an upcoming prison inspection would certainly expose the completed tunnels, Jo and Billy decide to kill Brenda. They carry out their scheme by forcing Brenda into a prison washing machine filled with boiling water, then telling the guards they believe that Brenda has escaped in a laundry truck. When the guards lock down the prisoners to search for Brenda, Jo decides to escape before the guards uncover the tunnels. Thelma's cellmate Ginger (Paula Scott), who is due to be paroled in a month, stays behind to close the real tunnel entrance but leave open a decoy tunnel the women dug to the prison kitchen. When Brenda's body is discovered in the laundry, the warden goes to question her cellmate and discovers that some of the other prisoners are missing. Ginger is then called into the warden's office for questioning and lies that the women escaped through the kitchen yard to the prison garbage truck. When the warden learns that the garbage truck had broken down outside the walls, and thus never entered the prison that day, she threatens to revoke Ginger's parole unless she tells the truth. Ginger breaks down and tells the warden about the real tunnel, after which several guards are sent into the tunnel. Meanwhile, Thelma has been bitten by a snake inside the tunnel and dies. The others, hearing the advancing guards, panic and climb out of a sewer manhole cover onto a street, where Billie is killed by an oncoming truck. The remaining three escapees, Jo, Beverly and Sandy, rob a hardware store, kill the owner and confiscate guns and ammunition in the store. Although the women try to escape through a garage, the police trap them, and in an ensuing gunfight, Beverly and Sandy are killed. Jo, who had masterminded the escape plot, is the only one who survives, but she is sentenced to the electric chair for her crimes.