A woman has opened up about her romantic journey with a convicted killer on who she tried to free with a scheme involving a “rented helicopter”. Ivana, 31, was watching a documentary on when she spotted inmate Benjamin Ritchie. Benjamin was on death-row at an Indiana for
shooting and killing a during a robbery gone wrong in 2000. Despite the bloke’s dodgy demeanour, Ivana - 24-years-old at the time - found herself drawn in and decided to write him a letter. Speaking in an interview on , Ivana said after Benjamin responded “one thing led to another” and she flew over from
Sweden, where she lived, to the US to meet him. Ivana - who admitted she’d had a troubled childhood with an abusive “alcoholic” father - was so infatuated with killer Benjamin that she hatched a plan to bust him out of prison. The pair had built up quite the connection over the three-year period where the Bosnian native Ivana visited the deadly inmate 10 times, with each stay lasting a week. She managed to bribe a
prison guard who smuggled in a phone so that she could speak to him regularly. Ivana’s mad-capped plan to bust her convicted lover out of chokey involved a rented helicopter and manic dash to freedom. Benjamin was awaiting the death penalty in an Indiana facility after shooting officer William Toney five times with a firearm. According to
police records at Benjamin’s sentencing, the killer repeatedly interrupted Toney’s wife as she read her victim impact statement and called her a “b**ch” while laughing. The unlikely pair came up with a system of “secret messages” and plotted their escape for months. Ivana admitted the dangerous plan’s best possible outcome would have ended in “getting him out and having like a week with him and then maybe getting killed by the cops, to be honest”, she described. Ivana added: “But I loved him, and when I love someone… I just felt like if he was going to get executed, and I, if I love him, I could die too. I wanted to die too, with him. “The feeling, when I thought about it, dying next to him, it was a good feeling. Because I was dying with someone that I love.” Eventually, Benjamin broke Ivana’s heart when he confessed he felt the plan was too fraught. “In the end he told me he didn't want to risk my life for him getting out. And that's when I went crazy, because my whole plan for my life was to be with him.” “It was just a feeling he gave me when I saw him for the first time. I looked into his eyes, and I just felt I wanted to be with him forever,” Ivana added. Despite knowing that her behind-bars-lover would be in jail for the rest of his life, Ivana said she “couldn’t imagine a life without him”. After Benjamin broke off the daring escape plot, Ivana spiralled into drug use and started using opioids to cope. Eventually Ivana got clean and had a daughter who helped her “change her life”. She admitted in the interview her love for Benjamin isn’t “as strong” as it was originally. Ivana also wasn’t sure if he was even still alive, because it was too difficult to remember that time in her life. “I can't even look him up to see what's going on because it takes me back to that time, and to all these feelings,” she explained. “I knew it wasn't meant to work out.” The Daily Star is now on
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