THE GREAT ESCAPE
Convicted killers use tips culled from movies for daring prison break
Ontario Provincial Police issued alerts across Ontario and Quebec yesterday after two convicted murderers tunnelled out of a U.S. maximum-security prison near the Canadian border using ideas borrowed from The Shawshank Redemption and Escape from Alcatraz.
Adding their own touch, they left a taunting note telling authorities to “Have a nice day.”
Using power tools apparently smuggled into the jail, the pair cut holes in the steel walls of their cells, before following a series of pipes and tunnels under the ninemetre-high walls of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y.
David Sweat, 34, and Richard Matt, 48, who were both serving life sentences for vicious murders, emerged to freedom through a manhole cover about 180 metres from the prison walls and made off into the night.
Having used a trick from Escape to Alcatraz in which dummies were used to fool the guards during the two-hourly checks of their cells, their escape was uncovered only when they failed to respond to a 5:30 a.m. roll call on Saturday morning.
A huge search was immediately launched to locate the pair, who were described as “extremely dangerous.”
But with the Canadian border just 40 kilometres north of the small town of Dannemora, authorities feared they may have already left the country.
An embarrassed New York state Governor Mario Cuomo was left trying to explain how two maximum-security prisoners had managed to obtain powerful cutting equipment.
At the jail, which was opened in 1865 and houses 3,000 inmates, he said questions of how they had escaped remained for later, adding: “The first order of business is to get these killers back.”
Prison officials said all the facilities’ tools had been accounted for, but contractors who had been working at the jail might have had equipment stolen without noticing.
Cuomo, who was given a tour of the escape route, de- scribed it as a “really elaborate, sophisticated operation.”
He added: “It’s very important that we locate these individuals. They are dangerous, and we want to make sure they don’t inflict any more pain and any more harm on New Yorkers.”
In scenes reminiscent of the movie classic The Shawshank Redemption, Sweat and Matt escaped through tiny holes cut in the walls of their adjoining cells. The pair then descended into the bowels of the 150-year-old building, following rusty steel walkways, water and waste pipes.
Once down at ground level, the pair cut a hole and clambered into a heating pipe that carries steam into the prison during the cold winter months.
Before departing for the outside world, they left the note.
Sweat was serving life without parole after shooting a sheriff ’s deputy, Kevin Tarsia, 22 times in a 2002 killing. Matt was jailed for 25 years to life after being found guilty of the kidnapping, killing and dismemberment of his former boss, 76-year-old William Rickerson, in 1997.