Escape from dannemora6/9/2023 They also fitted Matt’s body with tasers that could be triggered to send a 50,000 volt jolt into his body, should he attempt anything. While on trial for the murder of his former boss, authorities were so concerned he was planning a courthouse escape that they removed the glass from the bench, for fear it could be suddenly shattered and used as a weapon. In 1986, in prison on a forgery charge, he scaled a barbed wire fence and escaped, before being captured hiding out at his brother’s house four days later.Ĭorrectional officers watch an intersection in front of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. It was one in a long line of escapes for Matt, the first of which was from his group home in his early teens.ĭisliking his new housing situation, he stole a horse and rode to freedom. He was later charged with the first murder and sentenced to 25 to life.ĭuring his stint in Mexico, he attempted a prison break and was shot. This time he was arrested and served nine years in a Mexican prison. On the run, after his accomplice confessed, he crossed the border into Mexico and killed again, stabbing a man in a bar rest room in another robbery gone wrong. Matt had killed twice: The first was an attempted home robbery on his 76-year-old former boss, which ended in him and an accomplice killing the man, dismembering the corpse with a hacksaw, and throwing it into the Niagara River. Both had spent most of their adult lives in prison. They both came from broken homes, and were abandoned early by their mothers. They were both canny and charming enough to bend those in authority to do their bidding. Richard Matt and David Sweat had much in common. The pair left the backyard and ran to freedom. The guy eyed the guitar case and took the excuse as given. Sweat improvised an excuse about cutting through the yard after realising they were on the wrong street. Unfortunately, the car pulled into the same driveway and the owner hopped out, yelling at the pair. It was still before midnight when they tasted freedom, less than an hour from when they were subject to their bed check.Īs they climbed out of the manhole, they saw headlights and darted panicked into a backyard. The pipe ran under the prison and took them to yet another manhole, this one in the centre of town. On the night of Jshortly after 11pm, the pair climbed through the hole they had dug, and through tunnels, between cell walls, and finally into the same steam pipe Sweat had almost escaped through weeks earlier. Sweat placed further notes along their escape route, including a Post-It that read “Have a Nice Day” with a racist drawing on it. I had to do something,” and more flippantly, “Time To Go Kid!” with the date they escaped. Matt left two taunting goodbye notes in his cell, reading, “You left me no choice but to grow old & die in here. RELATED: ‘Well-endowed’ killer’s sinister charm RELATED: Sweat details his Shawshank Redemption-style prison escape Besides, he had promised Matt they would escape as a team. One night, he had actually climbed through two separate manholes, one which led into a power plant courtyard, the other to a street intersection.īoth led to the outside world, but Sweat decided not to risk freedom at that junction. Sweat had spent 85 undetected nights inside the tunnel, digging and plotting. Over the past few months they had travelled through this tunnel system numerous times. “They’re going to think you came back from playing in a band or hanging out with your friends.” “If somebody sees a guitar case, they’re not thinking you escaped,” he later explained. They also filled a soft-bodied guitar case with clothing - a vessel chosen because Sweat believed a guitar case was a self-contained excuse for two guys walking around town in the middle of the night. They packed supplies: 20 packs of peanuts, 12 sticks of pepperoni, and 40 granola bars, plus cayenne pepper to mask their scent from tracker dogs, a trick they learned from the film Cool Hand Luke. The pair swiftly put dummies fashioned out of jumpers and prison pants inside their beds, only crudely resembling sleeping bodies. Moments earlier, a corrections officer at the Clinton Correctional Centre, a maximum-security prison five-and-a-half hours north of New York, had done the standard 11pm night check. The nights of secret tunnelling through a wall in the cell the favours called in from a guard who had taken a romantic shine to both of them the 85 different test runs undertaken in the dead of night - it had all been building up to this moment. Six months of planning was about to pay off for prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat.
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