Wild Escape: The Prison Break from Dannemora and the Manhunt that Captured America

By Chelsia Rose Marcius

A crime reporter’s thrilling account of the infamous 2015 prison break, manhunt, and capture based on interviews with one of the inmates who pulled it off.
 
On June 6, 2015, inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility, New York State’s largest maximum-security prison. The media was instantly obsessed with the story: Aided by a prison seamstress, who smuggled hacksaw blades, chisels, and drill bits inside the facility via a vat of raw hamburger meat, the two convicted murderers sliced their way through steel cell walls, navigated a maze of tunnels, climbed out of a manhole, and walked off into the night.
 
After nearly three weeks on the run, US Customs and Border Patrol agent Chris Voss shot and killed Matt on June 26, 2015. Two days later, New York State Police Sgt. Jay Cook shot Sweat twice in the back. He survived. While some details of this elaborate modern-day prison break have come to light, only one reporter has spoken directly to Sweat. In Wild Escape, he answers the most important question in the case: Of all the inmates who dream of escape, why was he the one who could make it happen?
 
“The details Marcius has amassed are comprehensive and stunning and serve to heighten the impact of her story. This is first-rate journalism, written about a crime and a criminal from the inside out.” —Stephen Singular, New York Times–bestselling author of Talked to Death
 
“Marcius writes with genuine narrative power. Her depth of research provides insights into this historical escape that we can’t get anywhere else.” —Anthony Flacco, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Road Out of Hell

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781635761818

Book preview

Foreword

The first time I heard of David Sweat was the day he and Richard Matt escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility. I was immediately taken by what had occurred: two inmates had broken out of the Main (the maximum-security part of the prison), and they were the first to do it in more than a century.

As a staff reporter for the New York Daily News I was sent from Manhattan—about 325 miles south of the facility—to cover the escape and the three-week manhunt that followed. I spent ten days in the Adirondack region, searching for information that might advance the story. I traveled between surrounding cities, towns, and hamlets like Dannemora, Plattsburgh, Cadyville, Owls Head, Mountain View, and Malone, talking to locals. I spoke with prison guards on background about goings-on behind the barbed wire. I interviewed newly released inmates at a Mobil gas station off Route 9 in Plattsburgh—a drop-off point where these ex-cons can catch a Greyhound bus—to get a sense of what life was like on the inside both before and after the escape.

Despite their different perspectives on what had transpired, most found common ground on three major points: Matt and Sweat had outsmarted the system, they had made a mockery of the state’s corrections department, and they had exposed a culture of complacency and corruption that had pervaded Clinton for years. While some worried about finding the inmates in their backyards, others were rooting for them to make it to Mexico, to Canada, or wherever they wanted to go.

They never got out of the Adirondacks.

On June 26, 2015, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent killed Matt. Two days later a New York State Police sergeant captured Sweat. The media went wild with headlines. My own paper printed Blood, Sweat & Cheers! on its front page the following day. In the months after, reporters continued to keep tabs on the case. But, as with all breaking news, the media quickly moved on to the next big story.

I did not.

Eight months after authorities apprehended Sweat, I still wanted to know about the man who survived. By then law enforcement had a good sense of how Sweat and Matt did it (and a report from New York’s Office of the Inspector General, released in June 2016, would provide further details regarding the execution of their plan). But there was still a single yet complicated question hanging in the air: Of all the inmates who dream of escape, what made Sweat take action and see his plan to fruition? In other words, why was he the one who could make it happen?

To find out, I drove to Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, New York, March 6, 2016—the first day in my search for the answer.

I have spent a year and a half interviewing Sweat, and I’m the only reporter he has agreed to speak with. Over the course of 20 visits, we spent nearly one hundred hours discussing the escape, his life in prison, his friendship with Matt, and the events that landed him in Clinton. In this book, I have also included passages that reveal the ugly events of his childhood and adolescence. I offer these as an explanation—not an excuse—as to how Sweat ended up with a life sentence behind bars.

Before I discuss the reporting, I need to say this: my relationship with Sweat has always been a professional one. Throughout this process I have been asked time and again if Sweat has been flirtatious or manipulative, or, in turn, if I have used my womanly wiles to obtain information from him. It is a shame that I have to address this subject at all, and I never intended to do so. Yet many people I talk to continue to assume that, as a female journalist, I must rely on feminine prowess in order to get the story. Let me be clear. Sweat and I are not romantically involved, nor have either of us been inauthentic with the other for our own personal gain. I wanted to hear his story, and I believe he trusted me to tell it, to do right by it. This kind of confidence is built on a foundation of truth and respect that is earned.

Full disclosure: I was not permitted to record or take notes during my visits to Five Points—a tremendous frustration for any good journalist. After our meetings, each one about six hours long, I would go to my car (or get on the Harlem-bound overnight bus for visitors, a transportation service I later discovered) and begin to type every quote I could remember. When I had written all the quotes I could retain, I jotted notes on anything else we discussed. If he said something particularly striking (which he did quite often), I would repeat the words back to myself right after he said them, in an effort to burn the sentence into my brain. It was not an ideal method, but it proved to be much more effective than I anticipated.

Letters from Sweat were most helpful. He has written to me about his upbringing and his time on the run. One sixty-page-long account detailed what he and Matt did every day out in the woods. The dialogue I have written between him and Matt comes directly from this letter. (Unfortunately, several letters had either been lost in the mail or fell out of their envelopes during transit, as officials assigned to monitoring prison mail often opened his letters and then sent them to me without resealing. I also suspect a few were confiscated by facility personnel.) For that matter, nearly all the dialogue that appears on these pages comes directly from my interviews with the speakers, who repeated these exchanges to the best of their recollection. (There are a few instances where I have included spoken words—and, on rare occasion, a subject’s internal dialogue—that do not come from direct quotes. In these instances, when paraphrasing might take the reader out of the story, I have chosen to structure the sentences as one would a quote, but without the quotation marks. An example of this is when former Clinton inmate Jeremiah Calkins listens to the radio and hears a broadcaster talking about the escape. Calkins did not recall the broadcaster or the radio station, only the essence of what the broadcaster said. I used the information he provided to write the following: Two prisoners have escaped from Clinton, the broadcaster said. Their whereabouts are unknown.) I also used the information from Sweat’s writing and our conversations to construct a timeline of events from before, during, and after the escape. After comparing his notes to news and weather reports, as well as my own notes and recordings from press conferences, interviews, and additional legwork, I found that Sweat’s account from memory was nearly spot on.

But this book is not only about Sweat. I have talked to corrections officers, state troopers, former inmates, contractors who work at the prison, and locals who live in the North Country. I have visited former Clinton prison seamstress Joyce Mitchell at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where she is serving time for aiding Matt and Sweat in the escape. I have spent hours with John Stockwell, the corrections officer who came across Matt and Sweat in his hunting cabin. I have talked with Erik Jensen, who did time at Clinton and has made prison reform his life’s mission. I have spoken at length with New York State Police Sgt. Jay Cook, the man who shot and captured Sweat. And I have interviewed people from Sweat’s past—his mother Pamela Sweat, his father Floyd Kenyon, and Shawn Devaul, one of the two other Binghamton boys who was with Sweat on the night that would permanently change the course of his life.

I was careful to corroborate the information from these interviews with official accounts, including the inspector general’s report, as well as a number of lawsuits filed by inmates against the facility. (There were very few times that Sweat’s account did not match up with the inspector general’s findings. These were minor in scope, e.g. Sweat told me he smoked a stogie with Matt when their escape route was ready. The inspector general reported Sweat said he and Matt smoked a Marlboro to mark the occasion. In those instances, I went with Sweat’s version of events as he relayed them to me. I have inserted footnotes to acknowledge these discrepancies.) Other important information came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision fact sheets, and information released from the office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Police, and the U.S. Marshal Services. I have included a full bibliography of these sources at the end of this book.

There are rare instances where one person’s recollection of events differed radically from another’s. This is perhaps most obvious in the case of Sweat and Joyce Mitchell. Sweat maintained that Joyce wanted to kill her husband, Lyle Mitchell; Joyce said this was never the case, and that it was Matt who talked of murdering Lyle. I have presented both of their claims in this manuscript, as there was no definitive way to decipher which narrative is true and which is false.

There were only a few people I sought out who did not want to talk to me. One of them was Corrections Officer Gene Palmer, and his part in the book is smaller because of this reticence. What I wrote about Palmer is based on interviews with inmates, contractors, and guards who know him, as well as an interview with North Country Public Radio in 2000, where he shared his sentiments about life at Clinton. I personally covered one of his court appearances, and I used my own reporting to construct that scene. For other court proceedings that I did not attend, including his arraignment and sentencing, I watched video footage and spoke to other reporters who were there. (I followed the same methods with courtroom proceedings for Mitchell and Sweat.) In addition, I revisited the interviews I conducted for the Daily News, including conversations with Sandy Oneill and Jeremiah Calkins.[1]

To note: the names in this work are real. The last names of Sweat’s son Bradly and ex-girlfriend April (Bradly’s mother) have been omitted for privacy.

The writing style of this book is influenced by that of narrative nonfiction, but it is important to mention here that I did not take liberties with the facts for the sake of good storytelling. When describing a person’s thought patterns, I asked the people represented in these pages how they felt and what they were thinking during a particular moment so I could recreate those scenes and show what took place. If I did not obtain the necessary information to accomplish this, I did not resort to creative license. My goal was to write an accurate portrayal of the subsequent events and the people who took part in them, vetting each detail to the best of my ability.

A final note: I never went into this project with the intent of writing a book. Plain curiosity about the man I had reported on during the manhunt but had never met was the driving force behind my first visit to Five Points. Yet after I got to know Sweat, I knew this was a long-term endeavor I wanted to take on. In that way, Wild Escape came to me.

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[1] Sandy Oneill (or Sandra Oneill, her full name) has been misspelled in a number of publications. It should be Oneill, not O’Neill, as previously reported.

Introduction

The village of Dannemora sits on less than two square miles of remote mountain land, where a tangible isolation hangs as thick as the foothill fog. In this northeast corner of New York State, some 25 miles south of the Canadian border, temperatures dip to inhumane lows during the winter months, and summer winds can carry the crispness one might expect of an autumn breeze. Strangers seldom stop here, but for those who do, a west-bound drive along Cook Street, Dannemora’s main drag, provides a glimpse of its few businesses: there’s the Ford car dealership, the U.S. Post Office, the one-chair barber shop, and Liquor and Wines, its name illuminated in neon red lettering. On this stretch of Route 374, as Cook is formally known, there are traces of shuttered establishments, such as the peeling signs of Outfitters Plus Sporting Goods and Wind Chimes Country Cooking. The pubs that once dotted the thoroughfare have disappeared, though fond talk can still be heard in neighboring towns of the ol’ Eight Post and Ruthie’s Main Gate. A row of one- and two-story houses, most with similar screen doors and raised wooden porches, also line Cook Street; and farther west is Maggy Marketplace, the all-purpose grocer, pharmacy, and deli that sells foot-long clubs by the bundle.

To the south is St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and its yard of headstones, surrounded by other simply built homes on other simply named streets, like Carter and Clark, or Maple, Orchard, and Smith. And to the north stands a thirty-foot grayish-white wall, an impressive concrete structure armed with even taller watchtowers, a fortress of sorts separating the villagers from their unlawful neighbors.[2]

Beyond this edifice lies Clinton Correctional Facility, Dannemora’s stateliest citizen. For more than 170 years it has served as New York’s largest all-male maximum security prison. The surrounding terrain—awesome, isolated, and rich with iron ore—proved to be the perfect place for a mid-nineteenth-century penitentiary. Built on the edge of the Blue Line, a boundary delineating the six million acres of Adirondack Park, the untamed expanse has long served as a physical and psychological barrier to freedom for the prisoners of the cold and secluded Little Siberia.[3]

An extended walk through its surrounding woods would wear away even the strongest of desires to flee. Thin green needles of Scotch pine can poke painfully at the skin, and thorns on the stems and leaves of the land’s abundant blackberry plants can slice, swell, and infect the flesh. Thick ragweed grows high around its bogs, where sinkholes more than fifteen feet deep produce a foul scent of methane gas, and rotting lily pads leave an oily blue film on the surface of the swampy muck. No-see-ums and biting black flies flourish in the marsh, feasting off the deer, black bears, and coyotes (pronounced ky-oats in these parts) that also roam the wilderness. And beaver fever—an unpleasant bout of diarrhea, vomiting, and chills brought on by ingesting the area’s untreated waters—can paralyze the most seasoned of woodsmen, who often find themselves lost under the thick canopy as the magnetism of the ore-filled land will pull the arrow of even the finest compass off course.

Such treacherous conditions left most inmates resigned to life behind the white wall, where routine had taken root for as long as anyone could remember. Dull, predictable days—beginning with 7 a.m. chow, 7:45 a.m. work, lunch at noon, and then a return to work before supper at 6 p.m.—had an unsettling effect on Clinton’s guards. Rumors of COs napping on the state’s time began to sift down to the village below, and whispers of other more sinister goings-on spread as far south as Saranac Lake. Locals had heard of a certain stairwell where guards struck incarcerated men with billy clubs, beating them into compliance. Others spoke of COs who, having failed to make their required rounds, had more than once found inmates strung up in their cells, feet dangling above the concrete floor, bodies already stiff.

In the days before June 6, 2015, a dangerous arrogance had seeped into Dannemora’s rugged landscape, best displayed by guards who boasted that no inmate had ever escaped from the Main—the most secure building on Clinton’s campus—and no inmate ever would.

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[2] While there are varying figures for the height of Clinton’s perimeter wall, thirty feet is the figure used by the New York Office of the Inspector General in its June 2016 report on the escape.

[3] The exact origin of the nickname is unknown, but appears to date back to at least the late nineteenth century. Several historians surmise that the moniker came from the men incarcerated at Clinton during this time period.

PART ONE

Friday, June 5, 2015

Chapter One

David Sweat pushed the teeth of his last remaining bit of hacksaw blade through the inner wall of the metal steam pipe. Weeks of working from inside the dark, dank cylinder had now come down to this one final cut. Drawing his knees in, he pressed the soles of his boots against the rectangular section he had chiseled. The fiberglass lining cracked under his feet. Within minutes, that part of the channel gave way.

Spring weather had brought the kind of luck Sweat needed. Clinton had shut down its heating system for the season, and the pipe—its surface scalding during the winter months—had started to cool. By May he was able to make his first incision. Using only the hook of his hacksaw blade he carved a tiny hole into its surface.[4] He hewed away at the metal until the gap grew large enough to fit a grown man. Satisfied with the product, he crawled into the pipe, and approximately twelve feet down he began to whittle an exit. He normally would have used a drill for this work, but he could not risk the clang of power tools. Instead, he wore the metal away one inch an hour. Minutes turned to days, days turned to weeks, but Sweat did not care. He had nothing but time.

Now, tearing through some of the remaining insulation, he edged his way out of the pipe and stood fully upright in a long tunnel, which was dim and damp from years of exposure to contained steam. The underpass—used by Clinton contractors to access the piping system—was below Barker Street, a two-block residential road in Dannemora sprinkled with manholes. (Sweat did not know the street by name, but he knew that there was a paved road directly above the pipe.) He walked the length of the passageway, inspecting each of the exit points above his head. The first two had been chained shut, so he continued toward the end of tunnel to the last manhole, which opened with minimal effort.

Sweat peered out and saw a clearing behind the prison’s powerhouse; the structure was an indication that he had gone too far. The last thing he wanted was to pop out of the ground into someone’s front lawn.

He then backtracked about two hundred yards until he arrived at one of the other manholes. The plate was secured by chain, yet Sweat was able to sever a link using what blade he had left. Placing his palms flat on the surface, he extended his arms upward, heaving the cover onto the asphalt. He then climbed the iron ladder and lifted his head just above the lip. To the south was the powerhouse. To the north was the concrete perimeter wall.

He breathed in the free air of the Adirondacks.

"This will be perfect," he thought.

Sweat glanced at the silver watch