Dannemora: ten years on – Part the second

Wherein our two prisoners break out and both misdirection and a manhunt ensue

This month marks the tenth anniversary of one of the more memorable instances of true crime in upstate New York history: the escape of two prisoners from the Dannemora Correctional Facility. For a good portion of June 2015, this corner of the world was the center of attention (even if some guy whose name rhymes with Ronald Frump stole the national headlines) and the site of one of the biggest manhunts ever in the state.

While on a layoff from my then-place of employment due to the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, I started doing a spinoff of my regular podcast that dealt specifically with instances of true crime here in New York's Capital Region. In June of that year, I devoted the entire month to the Dannemora prison beak on its fifth anniversary. Doing a true crime podcast requires good deal of time committed to research, typing up the script, and (of course) recording the episode. I present the scripts of all four episodes of that true crime podcast series herein — as for my regular writing, it hasn’t gone away. In the meantime, it's forward into the past.

Just a quick note: all the transcripts presented this month have been edited for both clarity, the odd editorialization, and removal of time-sensitive remarks made during the initial writing way back in 2020, pandemic references and all.

Again, just as the last article, we acknowledge the primary source of every post of this series, Charles A. Gardner’s book Dannemora: Two Escaped Killers, Three Weeks of Terror, and the Largest Manhunt Ever in New York State.

On the night of June 5, 2015, Richard Matt and David Sweat finished their shift at the tailor shop at the Clinton Correctional Facility and returned to their respective cells -- Matt in cell A-6-22, Sweat in A-6-23. Both had returned to their cells in Block A, also known as the “Honor Block”. The inmates housed herein were allowed access to a sort of common area, replete with a television set, card table, and even showers at specified times during the day. A sort of Club Med behind bars, if you will. Usually, Matt and Sweat would spend their time between work and lights out hanging around this common area, as that was their allotted time. But, on this night, things were different. By the time the weekend arrived, both Matt and Sweat would set off on a trip that, unbeknownst to them, would land them in the annals of Empire State history.

After the last inmate count of the night, it was lights out at Dannemora. Matt and Sweat quickly stuffed bundles of clothing into their respective beds to make it look as though they were still in the cells when morning came. On one of the paintings in his cell, Matt painted a little note which read: “Time to go, Kid. 6/5/15” 

The original plan was to escape from the prison and, inside of an hour, find their way to a waiting Jeep, climb in, and set off for Mexico. As you may recall from the last episode, Matt was sentenced to do time at Dannemora in 2008 because of the murder of Charles Perreault at a Matamoros bar a decade earlier. Matt took a self-stitched rucksack and snuck into the prison’s utility space through a hole he sawed into the back wall of his cell, which was covered by said painting and a set of magnets thereon. Next door, Sweat was doing the same and before long, the pair crawled their way through an eighteen-inch-diameter pipe within the prison walls, beat the 1 AM deadline and reached freedom by way of a manhole. It would be later compared to Andy Dufresne’s escape from the title prison in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.

As the first light of dawn broke over the North Country on June 6, 2015, a corrections officer on the overnight shift made his way through the Honor Block to take the end-of-shift tally of the prisoners. All 2,600 prisoners were present and accounted for … with two noteworthy exceptions. The officer looked into one of the cells and found that the escapees had left behind a Post-It note with the words “Have a Nice Day” written above a racist stereotypical Asian smiley face.

News of the escape was quick to get out to the public. According to the author of the aforementioned book, a group of Border Patrol agents carrying M-4 rifles blocked the border crossing into Canada on NY Route 30 in the hamlet of Trout River with spike strips as he was driving his mother to a birthday breakfast at a diner in the Quebec town of Huntingdon. Those traveling into and from Canada were subject to vehicle searches at all border checkpoints.

Meanwhile, back at the prison, corrections officers weren’t best pleased by the discovery that two prisoners had suddenly gone missing. It got so that they allegedly beat other inmates looking for answers, even putting some in solitary confinement. But it was not an inmate, rather an employee of the prison who would play a sizable role in the escape: Joyce Mitchell.

Joyce Mitchell

A native of the Franklin County hamlet of Dickinson Center, Mitchell worked in the prison’s tailor shop along with Sweat and Matt; Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, also worked in the prison. Several weeks after the breakout, Mitchell appeared on NBC’s Today and stated that she aided and abetted Matt and Sweat because she was “only trying to save her family”. Also, it was revealed that Mitchell was going through a bout of depression, thus exploiting a personal weakness. Mitchell said that she felt intimidated by Matt, getting so that she was fearing for her life even outside the prison walls. Matt went so far as to court Mitchell and reportedly gave her an open-mouth kiss. For this, the New York Post gave her the nickname “Shaw-skank”. On brand for the Post to pull that shit, but okay.

On June 16, ten days after Sweat and Matt fled prison custody, Mitchell confessed that she provided chisels, hacksaw blades, and other implements of destruction. Furthermore, she stated that Matt made her husband the target of a murder-for-hire plot. Matt would give two pills to incapacitate Lyle; for his part, Lyle Mitchell neither participated in nor did he have any knowledge of the jailbreak. He visited Joyce, then went to the State Police barracks in Malone. Joyce waived a preliminary hearing, thus immediately sending the trial to Clinton County Court in Plattsburgh.

There was a second accomplice in the prison break that did not get anywhere the attention Mitchell did, and his name was Gene Palmer. Palmer was also charged with aiding in the escape by smuggling other tools into the prison and did other favors for Matt in exchange for artwork. As the weekend ended, Sweat and Matt were on their way to freedom, but they weren’t headed for Mexico. Did they even get out of the country, I hear you ask. Watch this space and find out next week!