WOMAN DEALING DRUGS LEARNED HARD LESSON THE HARD WAY

Sandy Stilwell is serving a 22-year sentence for dealing marijuana and
cocaine. It's her second offense. She was given probation after a 1996
arrest.

Stilwell lived with her boyfriend - who she said is also a drug dealer
- - in a fashionable home in Holland, Ind. Gun in purse, the mother of
three said she made regular trips to East St. Louis, Ill., to buy
drugs. Twice she said she flew to Phoenix carrying more than half a
million dollars that went to suppliers in Mexico.

She went to school functions with her children, chatted up the
neighbors and shopped for antiques on the Internet. At night, she
packaged cocaine and pot for resale. On weekends, she and her
boyfriend attended drug parties.

Stilwell works in the freezer factory at the Rockville Correctional
Facility. She makes $7.25 a day. Selling drugs netted her $12,000 a
month.

"They should have given me hard time the first time I got caught," she
says. "I wasn't being punished with the home-monitoring. I was just
being inconvenienced. It never made a statement to me. I kept breaking
the law."

Her boyfriend is serving his sentence at Pendleton. She says they're
still together.

"Together we see how wrong it all was."

Stilwell says they worked for a drug ring known as "The
Show."

"I'm sure it's still going. There were some very affluent people
involved."

And vicious. Stilwell says they offered to kill the person who was to
testify against her if she could come up with enough money.

"That's when what we were involved in really hit me. My God, they were
talking about murder."

I asked about her children who are now 23, 10 and 3.

"The bizarre thing was that I had convinced myself I was selling the
drugs for their benefit, to give them a more stable future. I did all
the right things. Feed them, clothe them, make sure they were safe. At
the time, I thought I was a great mother."

She says her children saw the people who came to the house for drugs,
but never witnessed the transactions.

"I came up with clever ideas to disguise the drugs. One way was to
attach the pot and coke to coat hangers, cover it with a jacket and
make it look like taking the laundry out. Other times I would
gift-wrap the boxes like they were Christmas presents."

Stilwell says she's only seen her children three times in 15
months.

She starts to cry.

"I put drugs before my children. It really hurts to say that. I live
with that grief every day."

The 41-year-old woman was involved in the Mexican drug trade at the
same time her youngest brother was working on the Border Patrol.

"It is so hard to get out of the drug business, particularly when you
were like us and selling to other people who sold. You find yourself
in a position of power and you don't want to give it up.

"Your life revolves around drugs. Put the kids to bed. Weigh out some
pot. Get the one child up for school. Fix the cocaine baggies. Look in
on the baby."

Sandy Stilwell says she has a 4.0 average in her college studies. She
says she has helped other female inmates study for the GED.

"But I spend most of my time in my room. This is no place to be. There
are horrible people here who have done horrible things."

I ask about her oldest daughter.

"She had an idea what I was doing, but not the scale of it. She feels
sorry for me. I have to live with that, too."