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  DANNEMORA

  Two Escaped Killers, Three Weeks of Terror, and the Largest Manhunt Ever in New York State

  CHARLES A. GARDNER

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 Charles A. Gardner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3924-9

  Electronic edition: March 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3926-3

  ISBN-10: 0-8065-3926-7

  Dedicated to all law enforcement

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE - INSIDE HONOR BLOCK

  PART I - THE SETTING

  CHAPTER 1 - DAY ONE

  CHAPTER 2 - IRON MINES AND IRON BARS

  CHAPTER 3 - LITTLE SIBERIA

  CHAPTER 4 - AMENITIES AND ACCOMMODATIONS

  CHAPTER 5 - RIGHT-SIZING

  PART II - THE INMATES

  CHAPTER 6 - TWO HARD CASES

  CHAPTER 7 - BROKEN BOY, BROKEN TOYS

  CHAPTER 8 - SWEAT’S ROAD TO CLINTON

  CHAPTER 9 - DEPUTY TARSIA’S LAST TOUR

  CHAPTER 10 - BOY BULLY TO TEENAGE THUG

  CHAPTER 11 - CATCH AND RELEASE

  CHAPTER 12 - MURDER FOR HIRE

  CHAPTER 13 - GLADIATOR SCHOOL

  CHAPTER 14 - RICKERSON’S MURDER

  CHAPTER 15 - MATT TAKES A RIDE

  PART III - THE PLANS, THE SCHEMES

  CHAPTER 16 - THE COMPLACENT GUARD

  CHAPTER 17 - LONELY, UNDISCIPLINED, CORRUPTIBLE

  CHAPTER 18 - CORCRAFT’S TAILOR SHOPS

  CHAPTER 19 - TAILOR SHOP TROUBLES

  CHAPTER 20 - ROMANCING AND CONTRABAND

  CHAPTER 21 - LAYING THE FOUNDATION

  PART IV - THE BREAKOUT

  CHAPTER 22 - BREACHING THEIR CELLS

  CHAPTER 23 - A SUBTERRANEAN MAZE

  CHAPTER 24 - MITCHELL GOES DEEP

  CHAPTER 25 - SUBTERRANEAN STRUGGLES

  CHAPTER 26 - “TIME TO GO, KID!”

  CHAPTER 27 - CHANGE IN PLANS

  PART V - THE SEARCH

  CHAPTER 28 - DISCOVERY

  CHAPTER 29 - LOCKDOWN, OVERTIME, AND A MEDIA BLITZ

  CHAPTER 30 - SHELTER IN PLACE

  CHAPTER 31 - CLINTON STRONG

  CHAPTER 32 - THE PURSUIT AND THE PURSUED

  CHAPTER 33 - THE POWER OF POLITICS

  PART VI - THE CHASE

  CHAPTER 34 - TWISTED HORN

  CHAPTER 35 - TIMING IS EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER 36 - BOUNTY HUNTERS AND MEDIA FOLLIES

  CHAPTER 37 - ESCAPE ROUTE

  CHAPTER 38 - THE CHASE IS ON

  CHAPTER 39 - THE BROMANCE ENDS

  PART VII - THE RECKONING

  CHAPTER 40 - GIN AND POTSHOTS AT HUMBUG MOUNTAIN

  CHAPTER 41 - CLOSING THE BOX

  CHAPTER 42 - MATT’S FINAL STAND

  CHAPTER 43 - PRESS CONFERENCE, THE LAW, AND THE LOCALS

  CHAPTER 44 - SWEAT RUNS FOR THE BORDER

  CHAPTER 45 - SWEAT GOES DOWN

  PART VIII - THE AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER 46 - ASSIGNING THE BLAME

  CHAPTER 47 - FINAL ACCOUNTING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  INSIDE HONOR BLOCK

  As the weekend began, the two killers returned to the top tier of Cell Block A, finished with Friday’s work in the prison tailor shops. But instead of joining the other inmates for evening recreation, they stayed behind in their cells. This didn’t attract much notice; both were in the habit of skipping recreation. In fact, it had been months since either of them had joined in the card games or clustered around one of the TVs down on the block’s first level.

  Like most nights, they were busy, taking advantage of their neighbors’ absence for a few hours. But tonight was different. Tonight it was time to pack.

  In cell A-6-23, the balding blond thirty-four-year-old cop-killer was stuffing clothing, a pair of hiking boots, and a stash of food into a cloth guitar case. Next door, in A-6-22, the burly forty-eight-year-old double murderer—the jailhouse artist the other inmates called “Hacksaw”—was loading up a backpack he’d stitched together from stolen fabric on one of the prison’s sewing machines. He had a new pair of boots, too, which he set on the floor along with his backpack.

  By a quarter to ten, they were done, and the packed bags tucked out of sight. That’s when the other inmates filed past on the way back to their own cells.

  Instead of eating earlier in Clinton prison’s mess hall, they waited until after recreation and prepared their own suppers in their cells. This wasn’t unusual, either. Tonight’s dinner was chicken and salad, and plenty of it. Enough to share with the guy in A-6-21. The same guy that Hacksaw had presented with a TV set just that morning. A guy who now had more than one reason to be grateful to his neighbor. And, along with his neighbor’s morbid but well-deserved nickname, another reason to keep his mouth shut about anything he might hear going on next door that night.

  When eleven o’clock arrived, the cop-killer in A-6-23 laughed to himself. He didn’t like the guard who would be making the midnight-shift count; he was one of those sticklers who wouldn’t let the little things slide. He’d shine a flashlight into each cell and make each man show himself, instead of just taking for granted that somebody was under every pile of blankets. But before tonight’s guard shift was over, the inmate assured himself, that uniformed prick would finally get his. And hard.

  The count was finished a few minutes after eleven, and the cells went dark. As soon as the guards’ footsteps receded down the stairs from the third tier, the two inmates quickly re-made their beds. Stuffed bundles of clothing made it look like somebody was in each bunk. Hacksaw took the time to write a couple of notes that he’d leave behind. One of those he wrote with a black Sharpie marker on a painting of Tony Soprano. He’d painted it himself; he was as skilled with a brush as he was with a saw. The note said, “Time to go Kid 6/5/15.”

  Soon it would be midnight. But for now, it was still June 5, 2015. In less than an hour, he hoped, he and his friend would be climbing into a Jeep on one of the back streets of Dannemora, New York, and on their way to Mexico. First, though, he had to remove another of his paintings, revealing the hole he’d sawed in his cell’s steel back wall. After slipping through onto a dimly lit catwalk in the utility space behind the cells, he reached back through the hole and returned the artwork to its place, securing it to the steel wall with magnets. Next to him, his younger friend was doing much the same, pulling his guitar case through the steel wall, camouflaging the hole behind him.

  As they’d done on so many other nights, both inmates quietly slid into a gap between the catwalk and the steel walls, using pipes and conduits as rungs to climb down into the prison’s subterranean guts. There they threaded their way through what was now a familiar maze of tunnels. Well before midnight, they squirmed through a stretch of eighteen-inch pipe under Clinton Correctional Facility’s thirty-foot-high perimeter wall. A few minutes and a few hundred yards later, they arrived at a manhole that led up to the street. They were early.

  Now it was just a matter of waiting the few minutes until midnight, when the Jeep that would complete their escape was due to arrive. The young cop-killer worried about this and said so. But Hacksaw reassured him. Don’t worry, he told his partner, as they crouched under the manhole cover. Lifting it to take a peek outside. Checking the time. Almost twelve.

  Don’t worry, Hacksaw said. She’d promised him she’d be here.

  PART I

  THE SETTING

  CHAPTER 1

  DAY ONE

  THAT SATURDAY STARTED LIKE ANY OTHER. It was the first weekend in June, a peaceful summer day in the Adirondacks. Sunny but with a cool breeze out of the north; a nice day to be out and about.

  June 6, 2015. It was Mom’s birthday. At eighty-two, she was still plenty active, and we had no reason not to follow our long-standing tradition. We’d made plans to pick her up and take her for lunch at a little joint in Huntingdon, Quebec, just across the Canadian border. Haute cuisine this was not; it was just something we had been doing every year, a silly, simple ritual. “International dining,” Mom likes to call it.

  I was getting organized for the day when the phone rang. I checked the clock: Just after nine. Was something up with Mom? I grabbed for the hand-set. I’ll admit I felt a bit of relief to hear it was one of my neighbors, but my relief quickly turned to concern. This particular neighbor worked in the state prison in Dannemora, just a forty-minute drive from here over two-lane mountain roads. The call was to warn me that something very big was going down.

  It seems that two inmates had broken out. The news hit me right in the gut. See, I knew all about this place, properly called the Clinton Correctional Facility. It’s where I’d started my career as a prison guard, twenty-seven years before.

  I thanked my friend for the heads-up and put down the phone. Damn. Something like 2,600 of New York State’s most violent prison inmates
were locked up in Dannemora, and now they were two short. All the experience I’d gained—much of it the hard way—from a quarter century in the Department of Corrections told me: nothing good could come from this.

  Even so, I wasn’t about to let this spoil our day. Penny, my wife, had already walked the dogs and was back in the house. I told her what I’d heard. She took this in stride; after all, she’d worked in the prison system herself. It’s where we met. Even after she left Corrections to go to work for the local school district, she’d been listening to the stories about my adventures inside the prisons.

  So the day was going to be business as usual as far as we both were concerned. I’m not intimidated, worried, or scared by inmates, inside or outside the walls. Here’s the thing: in my opinion, inmates are like a pack of wolves. In a group, they are deadly. However, if you only have one or two of them to deal with, the odds are in your favor, especially if you’re the bigger dog.

  Mom lives near downtown Malone, and even though it’s the biggest town in this end of the Adirondacks, that’s not saying much. It took Penny and me just a couple of minutes to get to Mom’s house. We headed out around 10:30, picked up Mom, and then took State Route 30 as we’d done thousands of times before, due north. I barely slowed down through a couple of tiny crossroads burgs, Constable and Trout River, and in just fifteen minutes we were at the border. That’s where today’s harsh reality struck us. At the normally sleepy Trout River border crossing, we saw spike strips on the pavement. A “fleet white” Ford Explorer with the blue stripes of U.S. Customs and Border Protection was blocking both lanes of Route 30, and the way into Canada.

  That triggered my professional instincts—retired or not—and I took a closer look. It wasn’t just a roadblock; turns out we were down-range from a posse of border agents wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying military style M-4 rifles. Looking up the business end of a high-powered semi-automatic weapon is never good. But in our peaceful neck of the woods, this would quickly become our new normal.

  The officers indulged me for a couple of minutes of tense conversation that confirmed what I’d figured. High alert. Two escaped inmates. Could be anywhere. And so, naturally, they were watching the border. Very closely. Penny, Mom, and I waited in the truck for the few minutes it took an officer to open the back doors, pop open the cap’s rear window, and give our Ford F-350 truck a careful inspection. A second officer moved the official vehicle and spike strip a few feet, opening up the northbound lane. A third man lowered his M-4 and waved us through to Canadian customs.

  That was our first real snapshot of what was going on.

  What we didn’t know then, couldn’t know, was that this drama would stretch out for three long, tense weeks, and come to an end just a short distance from where we were.

  A few minutes after crossing the border and passing a sign that read “Montreal 63,” we were sitting in LeBlanc Patate in Huntingdon, also known as Pivans to the locals. The place is just across the road from a dam and a picturesque old stone mill on the Trout River. We ordered our usual, slaw-covered dogs and fries. In my opinion, this is the very best food you can get in a cardboard box. But the menu is limited, as you might expect at a joint named for a white potato. So dessert would come from somewhere else.

  It’s our custom, on Mom’s birthday, to take her for ice cream. For that, we drove back into the United States. This time, we used the Chateaugay, New York, crossing. Here, just like at Trout River, we ran into watchful, heavily armed customs officers. Normally they’re warm and relaxed. Today, though, they were all business: not just alert, but aggravated, too. One officer explained why he was frustrated. Nobody had been able to give them a good timeline of when the inmates had escaped. And that, of course, had everything to do with how far they might have gotten by now. Not far into United States territory, at U.S. Route 11, we came to the first of several roadblocks we’d have to pass on our short drive home. Just like at the border, we were stopped and the truck was searched by state troopers carrying assault weapons. Their tactics were familiar to me. During my years in uniform, I’d been through many a drill myself on how to conduct a roadblock and search a vehicle.

  This roadblock is where I first saw what would be in everybody’s faces for weeks: these escaped inmates’ mug shots.

  Their names were David Sweat and Richard Matt. These guys, the troopers told us, were both convicted murderers. Not too surprising, considering that the great majority of inmates at Clinton had committed violent crimes. Both of these characters were considered extremely dangerous. And these officers, like the customs agents at the border, were unhappy that they didn’t have better information about when the two had broken out.

  From the troopers at the roadblocks, I learned a bit about who they were looking for. Richard Matt had been in prison for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a seventy-six-year-old businessman. Matt had been in his employ. His victim’s body was cut into pieces and thrown into a river. David Sweat had been convicted of murdering a deputy sheriff by shooting him and running him over with a car.

  Despite this sobering news, I was determined to carry on with the second course of Mom’s annual birthday celebration. By the time we got to Harrigan’s ice cream stand just past the four corners at Brainardsville, we’d been through a second roadblock and were only twenty-five miles from Clinton Correctional Facility. Delicious as Harrigan’s soft-serve is, after all we’d been through that day, we just didn’t have our hearts in this simple and sacred tradition. I told myself, this is no joke. We need to get Mom home where she’ll be safe.

  Mom was happy to get back to her place in Malone. She told me she wasn’t going to let this business scare her. She’s no stranger to the prison system; she’d worked in the Department of Corrections herself, as a nurse.

  But when we got home, we went right to the TV. For the rest of the day we flipped obsessively from channel to channel, getting snippets of the story from both local and national media. We didn’t know this yet, but we were in the middle of what was quickly shaping up to be New York State’s biggest and most elaborate manhunt ever.

  On day one, I thought about this from my perspective as a retired corrections lieutenant. But how this could change all of our lives, I had no idea. And as it unfolded, it became more than a cops-and-robbers story—or cops and murderers. Through the weeks leading to its bloody conclusion, it would prove to be an example of law enforcement at its best. But it also turned out to be a tale of treachery, lust, and betrayal. At least two prison workers had betrayed their professional trust and the state’s public safety. A veteran guard had let inmates get the better of him, turning him into an unwitting conduit for tools they would use in their breakout. And a married woman had cheated with two vicious killers, conspired with them to kill her husband, and planned to run off with them after they escaped. At the end, even the escapees would turn on each other, one of them abandoning the other to his fate.

  And at the very top of New York State’s government, powerful men behind desks found scapegoats among the prison’s staff. When somebody had to take the fall for the conditions in Clinton prison, those at the top paid no penalty—even though their own decisions had made those conditions inevitable.

  What happened in the Clinton prison was the predictable result of twenty-plus years of relentless cost-cutting pressure from the state. This left the Corrections staff with no choice but to set priorities among conflicting rules—rules that couldn’t all be followed to the letter. Unless guards substituted time-saving alternatives for certain required security steps, the prison’s routines would come to a halt. Unmentioned when it came time to parcel out the blame was one essential fact. By skimping on resources for so many years, the state had made full compliance with its own requirements impossible.