Grandmother Josie Clark, jailed for 12 years by an American court for air piracy, has told of how she was forced into taking part in a bid to free her husband from death row.

In a letter to the Keighley News from her prison cell shortly before she was sentenced, Mrs Clark, 54, said: " I need people to know I am guilty but not bad. My part in all of this was forced. I was not a willing party."

She also revealed: "I can tell you that my family and one of my grandchildren's lives were in danger if I had not gone along with these people."

Sitting at a Florida court, US District Judge Henry Lee Adams agreed and said he did not give Clark the maximum 20-year sentence because she tried the break-out under threat from another death row inmate -- identified in court records only as Costa -- and she had no prior criminal record.

She is starting her jail term after a brazen escape bid during which she hired a helicopter, before threatening the pilot at gunpoint and ordering him to fly to the prison in Florida where her 30-year-old, double-murderer husband, Ronald, is being held.

It was a scene inspired by the film Break-out, starring Charles Bronson and Robert Duval, in which a helicopter plucks an inmate from a Mexican jail.

"It's happened on TV a million times," said Judge Adams. "But I've never seen a situation where people were willing to go to this extreme."

The plan was foiled by heavy thunderstorms, which forced the pilot to turn back to the airport in Keystone Heights near Jacksonville. Clark and a younger female accomplice ran to a 1985 red Camaro car with a South Carolina licence plate and were later arrested.

Earlier this year, in a court in Jacksonville, Clark pleaded guilty to a charge of hijacking an aircraft on Florida's north-east coast.

Clark, whose maiden name is Jackson, attended St Anne's RC School, in Keighley, during the 1960s.

Her grown-up children are from a former marriage, and she met her new husband through a prison pen-pal scheme in 1997.

They were married a year later and he was being held in a maximum security jail at the time of the rescue attempt.

Clark's children only found out about the marriage from a fax she sent to the hotel where they worked in the seaside resort of Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight.

In May, she made a plea through the Keighley News to any old friends from the Keighley area to write to her in jail while she awaited her sentencing.

She wrote then: "I just fell in love with the wrong guy. I don't get much mail at all, only from my mother and sisters. Mail is all I look forward to.

"I am not allowed to write or receive letters from my husband, and not likely ever to see him again."

Clark, a grandmother, divorced her first husband after 24 years. She has three sisters and left Keighley in the mid-1960s.

Clark twice planned the escape, but decided against it and fled back to England.

While she was in England, she told the Florida court, her husband wrote to her professing his love and urging her return.

During the crime, last December, Clark hired a helicopter with her accomplice, saying they were conducting an aerial survey of Florida's orange groves for a British development company.

Shortly after take-off, one of the women yanked off pilot Frederick Neuhart IV's headset. When Neuhart turned around, one of the women was pointing a gun at him.

She ordered the pilot to fly to the jail. In a box, she was carrying two fully-loaded AK-47 assault rifles.

Judge Henry Lee Adams sentenced Clark's accomplice, Wendy Calderon, last month to 11 years and three months in jail.

"This offence is unusual in any circumstance outside of a movie," the judge said in sentencing Clark.

He also ordered her to pay £3,700 for the helicopter charter fee.

In her last letter to the Keighley News, Clark says: "It was not me who held the gun in the helicopter, that is the one thing I did not plead guilty to. Yes I chartered the helicopter and went up in it.

"I changed my mind about helping these people as soon as I saw the other girl with the gun. It frightened me very much.

"The idea did not come from a past movie, it came from some very sick minds."

She added at the time of writing: "Right outside my cell window there is a helipad for the police helicopter, and each day when one lands there I go crazy. If it is at night I have nightmares about it."

" I wanted to tell you these few things as it bothers me very much that anyone would think I could hold a gun to anyone's head or threaten anyone's life.

"I need people to know that I'm guilty, yes, but not bad."

She ends: "It's strange how things happen because up to now I thought that I had lost my sons, but I got two letters from them. God is good. In trying to protect them all I thought I had lost them.

"Thank you for all your concern and help in this. I'm not a bad person, just someone who is having a hard time realising she has been used."

Before being sentenced she wrote: "I am most likely going to prison. I pray to God that I do not go for a long time. I only made one mistake and that was listening to the wrong people."

Ronald Clark was sentenced to die in 1991 for the murder of a Yulee man, according to Department of Corrections records. He was also sentenced to life in prison in the killing of a fisherman in Nassau County in 1989.