Convicted murderers… Richard Matt and David Sweat spent months intensively planning their escape.
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Sources familiar with the interviews told The New York Times that Sweat, who was serving a life sentence for murder, first sawed a hole into the back of his cell, and once that was finished, started looking for an escape route through the tunnels under the prison.
– Sweat began working in January, when he was transferred to the cell next to Matt, using a hacksaw blade to cut a hole in the back of his cell.
The nightly subterranean treks began after the 11.30pm headcount, when Sweat would crawl into his hidden, makeshift hole and squeeze through a series of pipes down several floors into the tunnels. Sweat stole a sledgehammer and other tools to assist in the escape, kept a second set of clothes in the tunnels to work in, and even had an exceptionally lucky break when a shutdown of the prison’s heating system allowed him to take a shortcut. On one occasion, he improvised with a fan using power from his cell to beat the blistering heat being emitted from steam pipes.
Sweat said he used hacksaw blades with handles made from rags to cut holes into the pipe that were big enough for him and Matt to crawl through, the New York Times reported.
Since the escape, two prison employees have been arrested and more than a dozen others placed on administrative leave. Joyce Mitchell was supposed to pick the two of them up in a vehicle, but never showed up.
Matt was shot and killed by police in a showdown in late June.
Sweat was shot and captured near the Canadian border two days later.
The escape, the manhunt and the resulting spectacle proved to be an embarrassment for the Corrections Department and the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
An investigation into Clinton County Correctional Facility is ongoing. The head of the prison has retired after being suspended.
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Sweat says he and Matt joked about the similarity of their mission to the plot from the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Indeed, Sweat told investigators that he and Matt had joked that while it had taken Andy Dufresne, the character in the movie played by Tim Robbins, 20 years to escape, it would take them only 10 years.
