Cough brings down escaped killer, partner still foot loose

Published 3:14 pm Saturday, June 27, 2015

MALONE, N.Y. – For one escaped killer, it came down to an untimely cough, refusal to put up his hands and a deadly ending to a frustrating three-week manhunt for him.

But the other escaped killer avoided a similar fate by separating from his prison break partner and remaining unnoticed in the dark woods of the Adirondack Mountain region in far northeast New York State.

Richard Matt was cut down in a flurry of gunshots by Border Patrol agents Friday afternoon 50 miles west of the maximum security prison from which he fled in the overnight darkness of June 5-6 with cellblock neighbor David Sweat.

Sweat wasn’t sighted, although search officials said his footprints and evidence of his having  been with Matt were found in and around three remote hunting cabins near the Canadian border.

Sheriff David Favro said a police dragnet for Sweat in the wilderness area stretched for more than five square miles. He said officers on the scene were optimistic his capture could happen at any time.

“Now it’s a one-man show,” said Favro. “It makes it more difficult for him. And I’m sure fatigue is setting in as well, knowing the guy he was with had already been shot.”

State Police Superintendent Joseph D’Amico said Border Patrol officers spotted Matt hiding near the cabin he had fled from just ahead of their arrival on the scene. He said the federal agents heard a human coughing sound, moved quickly toward it and noticed Matt crouched in a thicket.

D’Amico said Matt had a shotgun and was ordered “to put his hands up.” He said the fugitive declined to obey the command, causing the agents to fire their guns at him, killing him on the spot, the shotgun alongside his body.

“They verbally challenged him,” said D’Amico. “He was shot when he didn’t comply.”

Two hours earlier, the State Police official said, Matt had fired a shot from a stolen 20-caliber shotgun at a recreational vehicle traveling on State Route 30 in an apparent attempt to hijack the camper.

At first, the driver of the vehicle thought a tire had blown. But when he pulled over eight miles down the road and inspected the back of the camper, he noticed the gunshot hole and notified police.

His call resulted in a special Border Patrol tactical team helicoptering to the scene of the shot, and combing the nearby woods, where they came upon the hunting cabin that Matt had broken into. Within 20 minutes, they came face-to-face with Matt, who turned 49 the day before.

With one escaped killer dead, and one still on the run, the manhunt force of 1,100 officers organized a circular search zone for the 35-year-old Sweat. Even with the assistance of helicopters in the sky, Infrared body heat detectors and bloodhounds, the searchers could not locate Sweat.

Residents were advised to lock their doors, report any suspicious sightings or activity to police, and avoid at all cost confronting Sweat, who they said is dangerous, desperate and likely armed.

Matt and Sweat broke out of  New York’s top-security prison in Dannemora by cutting holes in their adjacent cells, navigating a series of catwalks and tunnels to the bowels of the facility and cutting an escape hatch in a steam pipe that led to a manhole outlet two blocks outside the prison walls.

Investigators said they were enabled by Joyce Mitchell, 51, a civilian tailor shop supervisor in the prison who had befriended the convicts. She has been arrested on charges of providing them with contraband tools for the break  — hacksaw blades and drill bits implanted in two pounds of frozen hamburger delivered by a prison guard to Matt’s cell without being checked through a metal detector.

The guard, Gene Palmer, has also been arrested for taking gifts from the prisoners and allowing them to get behind their cells in the catwalk complex to hide contraband art paint supplies and increase the heat intensity of the hot plates they used for cooking behind bars.

Both Matt and Sweat were serving time for murder but had earned special privileges as honor inmates who snitched on other prisoners’ illegal activities to gain favor with the prison guards.

Sweat has been sentenced to life without parole for the 2003 cold-blooded killing of a deputy sheriff who interrupted a gun shop burglary. Police said he fired 22 bullets into the officer, then ran over him with a car.

Matt was serving 25 years to life for kidnapping, torturing and dismembering the body of his former boss in North Tonawanda, N.Y. He fled to Mexico, where he was convicted of killing another man and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Mexican authorities, however, eventually returned him to U.S. officials to face their murder warrant. He was convicted and sentenced in 2008.