WILKES-BARRE — In less than a week, one of Luzerne County’s most notorious killers will be a free woman.
Joann Curley, 53, will be released from state prison on Monday after serving every day of a maximum 20-year prison sentence for poisoning her husband, Robert Curley, to death in 1991, prison officials confirmed.
“I don’t feel she served enough time,” said the victim’s sister, Susan Curley Grady. “She should be serving a life sentence.”
Curley Grady and other family members, who reluctantly agreed to a plea deal Joann Curley reached with prosecutors in 1997, fought for years to keep Joann Curley behind bars.
The state parole board has rejected her bid for early release every time it’s come before them over the past decade.
“It’s over. I cannot do anything else. We kept her in there 20 years to the day. She’ll be a free woman now,” Curley Grady said. “Nobody knows where she’ll go when she walks out of that place. She’ll be able to go wherever she wants.”
Joann Curley did not respond to a letter The Citizens’ Voice mailed to her last month at State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs, a women’s prison in Crawford County. Efforts to reach local relatives over the past week have also been unsuccessful.
Joann Curley systematically poisoned Robert Curley, 32, by slipping thallium — a colorless, odorless and tasteless chemical used in rat poison — in his drinks during their 13-month marriage while they lived in the Miners Mills section of Wilkes-Barre.
Following a five-year investigation, Joann Curley was charged with homicide.
After pleading guilty to third-degree murder in 1996, she was sentenced to a 10- to 20-year prison term, which was the maximum penalty for third-degree murder at the time.
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