PRISON BREAK

Inside help suspected in murderers’ escape from U.S. facility.

Investigators questioned prison workers and outside contractors Monday to try to find out who may have helped two killers get the power tools they used to break out of a maximum-security institution in an audacious Shawshank Redemption- style escape.

The manhunt stretched into a third day, with law officers questioning drivers and searching trunks at checkpoints near the Clinton Correctional Facility in northern New York, even though authorities said David Sweat and Richard Matt could be anywhere — perhaps Canada or Mexico. The prison is just over 30 kilometres from the Canadian border.

Spokesmen for the RCMP and the Ontario Provincial Police said they were aware of the matter but had no information to indicate the two men had crossed the border. The Canada Border Services Agency said it was on the alert.

With authorities warning the men were desperate and dangerous, some residents were nervous over the escape from the 3,000-inmate prison in the middle of the small town of Dannemora, N.Y. But others figured the killers were long gone.

“We always joke about it. We’re so close to the prison — that’s the last place that anyone who escaped would want to be,” said Jessica Lashway as she waited for the bus with her school-age children a few doors down from the prison.

Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, sliced through a steel wall, crawled down a catwalk, broke through a brick wall, cut their way in and out of a steam pipe and emerged through a man- hole to make their escape, discovered early Saturday.

They had stuffed their beds with clothes to fool guards making their rounds and left behind a taunting sticky note that read: “Have a nice day.”

They surely had help, and the noise must have been heard, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. Investigators were focusing first on civilian employees and contractors who have been doing extensive renovations at the 170-year-old prison, not on guards.

“I’d be shocked if a correction guard was involved in this, but they definitely had help,” he said.

No prison tools are missing, but contractors typically come in with truckloads of equipment, said Peter Light, a retired guard who now runs a museum inside the prison.

The breakout, which by all accounts took days to pull off, raised a host of other questions that suggested either inside help or a breakdown in security.

“Why did nobody hear it? Officers should have been aware of it if they had done proper cell searches,” said Martin Horn, a former New York City correction commissioner

(The escaped killers) definitely had help

and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Also, how did the inmates hide the hole and the dirt and dust as they cut their way through? And did they have access to blueprints or other inside information to chart their path through the bowels of the prison?

Cuomo said other inmates claimed they didn’t see or hear anything. “They’re all heavy sleepers,” he said sardonically.