Palmer was close to both men and would forego the usual frisking of the inmates before taking them back to their cells, bypassing the metal detectors along the way. Matt and Sweat were also trading favours with a corrections officer named Gene Palmer. This was the same month she realised the pair were carving holes in their cells, but by this point, she was too far in, having supplied them with numerous tools, including screwdrivers, concrete drill bits, and chisels. She was on friendly terms with both Sweat and Matt when the pair began working at the store in early 2013, and soon became flattered by the pair's constant flirtatious attention. Joyce Mitchell was an instructor at the tailor store in the "honour block". TRADING FAVOURSĪlthough Matt had a long history of escapes, and Sweat was a meticulous planner, their escape wouldn't have been possible without the help of two corrupt prison employees. This was when Matt and Sweat began planning their escape. They were separated for three months, but successfully requested to be moved back together in January 2015. The pair shared a workstation in a tailor shop, then later lived in adjoining cells for a year. To be allowed in the honour block, you needed to serve nine months without incident, and participate in prison programs. They became close in 2010 when both were transferred to the "honour block" where prisoners were given more mobility, allowed to wear regular clothing, and could even cook their own meals. Sweat entered Clinton at 2002, aged just 22, while Matt arrived in 2008, then aged 41. He was sentenced to life without chance of parole.ĭespite their pasts, both Matt and Sweat were model prisoners once they reached Clinton Correctional Facility. The pair shot him numerous times, before Sweat ran over the still-alive officer in his truck. While they were moving the stolen weapons between trucks, a deputy sheriff foiled their plan. At just 16, he drew extensive blueprints of a group home he was living in, from which he was planning to steal computers and cash.Īt 22, he repeated the same process, drawing up a detailed floor plan of a firearms store he and a friend were planning to rob. Sweat was 14 years younger than Matt, and although he didn't have the same long history of prison escapes, his criminal career was tied together by an inordinate attention to detail. Luckily for all concerned, the trial was without incident. 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. 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. 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. 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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