ESCAPE FROM DANNEMORA-Michael Benson

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Two deadly killers, desperate and on the run after months of planning Ricky, Matt and David Sweat cut, chopped, coerced, and connived their way out of a maximum security prison in the wilderness of upstate New York and managed to elude police for three weeks, sending the region into lockdown

and keeping the entire country on edge. The media called it a bold escape for the ages, and veteran true crime writer Michael Benson leads us along the stories every wild path to dig out a tale of adventure, psychology, sex, and brutality. Escape from Dana Moore examines the strange case of Joyce Mitchell, the longtime as an employee who had a sexual relationship with at least one of the killers, and who smuggled them tools and aided in the escape while they cooked up a plan to kill her husband.

In the end, Benson looks closely at conditions at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Danamore and New York, a crumbling Gothic pile now under investigation for charges of drug trafficking and brutality. The book that we're featuring this evening is Escape from Danamora. Richard Matt David Sweat in the Great Adirondack Manhunt with my special guest journalist and author Michael Benson.

to get into prison in the first place. Because once you understand how brutal and horrible these men were, you realize how why there was so much frustration with law enforcement that instead of having the key thrown away, they were handed the key to get out.

and it eventually developed into a maximum security prison. Basically because of it's like the real estate, the best place to put a prison is the place is very remote because the surrounding area, the terrain is not meant for the average human being, and it forms an outer outer wall, much like they put Alcatraz on an island in the middle of San Franis. If you got out of the prison, you still have to deal with the chop he wars.

And in the long run, it was the outer outer wall of the Anadas that captured Matt Sweat.

Matt by five years in Dana Moora. So let's go back to Dana Moore in more recent times and talk about the conditions that were prevalent in there before we talk about any of the crimes and the history of David Sweat and Richard Malo.

New York City, so there's constant dangers. So but on the other hand, the riot that you mentioned brought about some reforms and one of those reforms was they instead of just punishing prisoners, they tried to rehabilitate them. And part of that was the tailoring shops. Prisoners if they chose to, could learn how to sell make a suit and perhaps earn a living when they got out, if

they were going to get out. And it was in the in the Terror Shop where Matt and Sweat Mcjulie Mitchell who turned out to be the co conspirator in the escape.

a Clinton correctional facility. But this you do talk about the actual conditions brought on by again the unusual circumstances that bring people together for years and years relationships developed. And you also say that some of the restrictions rules all of those things go by the wayside or get stretched or so as you do in the book, explain really the conditions in a place like this with dangerous criminals and despite that conditions in reality.

the guards were worried about gang fights. Nobody was looking at these two guys who you know, weren't going anywhere for a long time and weren't affiliated with any group and sure have fun being adjacent self. And what they did was they created a two headed monster. You know, Richard Matt is a schmoozer, he's a ladies man. He can attract people to his cause and get people to do things for him favors. And David Sweat was a

three dimensional thinker. He could seuth puzzles, could read a blueprint from across the room upside down, and he could figure out a way to get out, and Matt's job was to recruit the help they would need to accomplish their plan. So yeah, I mean the conditions at the prison are important in the sense that there was a focus of concern at the time of the escape, but it was not on the escapees.

I had a place they're calling one dirt road it's a remote spot and they fancy themselves and a commandos or something that they're tearing around the woods and these these cars, and they're bragging to each other about if they ever get caught by the cops, they're going to shoot it out. You can never have enough guns. So they come up with a plan to go down there, you have a fireworks plant in Pennsylvania, steal a bunch of weapons. They plow a pickup truck right through the

front door, alarm goes off. They load up the truck with the guns, tear out of there, and then they stop at a park closer to home and where they're going to transfer the guns from one vehicle to the other. And as they're doing this, Officer Kevin Tarzia of the Binghamton County Sheriff's Department comes pulling up and puts the spotlight on them. So they've been waiting for this moment for a long time. They come up firing. Both Sweat

and his cousin shoot the officer. Sweat gets in his car and runs the officer over a few times just to make sure he's dead. And you know, that's that's the kind of guy he was. But the planning that had come into the into the the robbery that day. Here's your indication of how he thought. He had had a diagram of the entire fireworks plant and where exactly the guns were going to be. So when they got inside, the knew exactly where to go with what's the tape,

and they were in and out very quickly. But the idea of shooting it out with cops if they ever got stopped, of course, was a was a stupid one.

was the lover who broke up her first marriage. There there was always she always had one husband, one boyfriend. The fact that she would, you know, commit adultery inside the prison not that shocking. So yeah, she believed that inmates with benefits. And she's a plain woman, bespectacled, middle aged, blond, a little heavy, and she's been with her husband for fourteen years. At this point, they're living on a nice street in Dickenson Center, about fifty five miles from the prison.

Her husband, Lyle, also works in the prison, and she becomes Sweats good friend, and he becomes the prisoner in charge of that Taylor shop. But what happens is she ends up taking some some nude pictures of herself and gives them to him, and they get caught doing that, and she gets reprimanded, not fired, and he gets moved to a different job. But then his good buddy, Richard Matt moves in and by the time he gets there, you know, the he already knows from his buddy David

that Joyce is susceptible to the attentions of men. And that's all Richard Matt needs to know. You know, he knows he can manipulate this woman. So yeah, she uh yeah, she told her first interview with the police after she was a questioned, said that she had taken naked photos of her breasts and vagina and given them to Sweat, but she didn't know what he did with them. I

can imagine, I suppose. And during that interview she said that although she had uh she'd been punished at work for having an inappropriate relationship with Sweat, it was really Matt that she liked, and he liked her back, and he made her feel special. She she brought him all kinds of present brownies cookies. He was able to relay messages to his daughter through her. She would call Matt's daughter and then say, you know he's Back's doing fine. You know, did you get the president he sent that

kind of thing. In exchange for this, she gave them hexaw blades, supposedly at first, saying she didn't know what the hecksaw blades were for. She thought maybe they oh, they were using them to build frames for the paintings they were doing or something like that. But eventually she figures out that there's an escape and she thinks she's

going to be part of them. She thinks she and her new boyfriend, Richard Matt, who she's fooling around with in the rooms behind the behind the tailor shop, thinks that they're all going to run away together and live happily ever after. Now, Mitchell's coworkers noticed a change in her during the two months before the escape. She starts to wear makeup, to wear extra button on his shirt would gun button. She's lost way. She was trying to look more beautiful and sexier while on the job. And

this is this is a pattern in her life. The longtime friends would go, oh that means a boyfriend, so she's a The sex served to make Joyce Mitchell dependent on the prisoners, and the men convinced her that she was their trusted partner, that they were even going to bump off her husband on the way out so that she could dry right off into the sunset with them as a single gal so and she even went so far as to call Cabins for Rent and Vermont inquiring

about raps because that's what that's where they were going to go. So she lived in a fantasy world right up until the last minute, when all of a sudden, the light bulb went on over her head and she realized that she was being duped by these guys. And the chances are if she showed up on the outside with the getaway Carrie she promised to do that she

would be killed. They didn't meet her, they needed her car, and that caused her an anxiety attack and she went into the hospital so well instead of supplying the getaway car, she was many miles away, and that ended up being

the key factor. Because these guys were not outdoorsmen. The last thing they wanted to do was to go into those woods, but they had to another choice you know, the getaway car didn't show up, so they went to Plan B, even though they didn't have a Plan D. And it was it was because they weren't really I suspect Richard Matt had never really slept outdoors in his entire life, and Sweat had some scout like training when there was a kid, and he fancied himself an outdoors

Then he was the guy who was out in the woods driving the ar Visa around. But they weren't really survivalists. They needed civilization, so they couldn't get too deep into the atronics. They had to stay close to civilization. They used the cabins in the woods and stay close to roads so they would know that they were going in the right direction. That kind of thing. That was eventually

their undoing. But Joyce Mitchell also she was responsible for them not getting away because she backed out at the last minute.

some hope. So tell us as you do about Richard matt Well.

He was abandoned, left in a car, grew up in a series of foster homes, one in particular, and his foster parents were actually pretty good to him and got him involved in youth activities in sports, which he excelled. But again a nature versus nurture type thing. He was the son of an air do Well, a criminal without a conscience, and that's what he grew up to be himself, and he turned into a little bit of a one

man crime wave in the Buffalo area. He's a bad kid, frightening propensity for violence, and his crimes, as often happens, escalated until he was arrested for kidnapping, torturing, and killing and dismembering a former boss in an attempted robbery that went really, really bad. His partner that twenty five year old Lee Eugene Bates, who was a part time strip club employee and criminal justice major at Erie Community College.

Interesting combination, and Bates was largely responsible for the prosecution and getting a conviction against Maddy, who read to cut a deal and testify against him. But the crime starts because Matt's boss was fired him makes a comment, offhand comment that don't worry, I've got one hundred thousand dollars in a shoe box buried in the basement or what he said, something like that, And it's like the creepy

couple of guys in Cold Blood. They got it in their head that these people had money and they weren't going to leave until they got it. And the problem was, you know, Rickerson lied, he didn't have one hundred thousand dollars. There was no treasure in the basement. But Richard Matt was not gonna believe it. And William Dickerson was seventy six years old, and they put him in the trunk of a car and drove him around, and they'd stopped

periodically and beat him. Or actually they did, They shouldn't say that, because Baits, as far as we know, drove. Matt did all of the torture. Then they threw him in the trunk of the car. They drove back and forth between the Buffalo area and Ohio a few times, and every he would use the stick, the security device

that keeps people from stealing your car. He'd beat him with that, and when he's still, you know, the old man still wouldn't say where the money was, Matt upped the torturing and he broke Rickerson's fingers, you know, snapping the aging bones like Brent sticks. And when Rickerson howled in pain, that got on Matt's nerves. So after it was more than a day, it was like twenty eight hours of this this horrible scene, going up and down

the roads with this man in agony in the basement, screaming. Finally, Matt got sick of it, realized that they were never gonna get the money, and they couldn't leave this guy alive because he knew who they were because they hadn't bothered to wear masks, grabbed him by the head and twisted till it snapped, and that was it for William Rickerson.

They went to a park near the Niagara River and hid the body underneath a woodpile, and then later Matt decided that wasn't good enough, so he went back with the hacks off and cut the body up into pieces and through the through the gory chunks into the Niagara River. Which but that's not where the story stopped, because Matt gets away to Mexico and his brother's car, and the car almost next to to Mexico, it's found abandoned in Texas, crosses into Mexico, and of course he can't stay out

of trouble. He just can't do it. He goes to a strip joint Mexico and sitting next to a guy who says he's in the oil business. So this goes ching, you know. Matt says, here's a good guy to rob, follows him into the men's room and stabs the guy to death and takes his money, runs out of the bar and gets maybe one hundred two hundred yards when they catch him and now he's on the fast track

of Mexican justice. They throw him into a hellhole prison where he's tortured with cigarette butts, where he gets a tramp stamp tattoo that says Mexico Forever. Guys don't down there, don't like gringos that much, and so yeah, but yeah, all of this despite the fact that there were there were adults in Matt's childhood and teenage years who thought that he he was mad rather than bad, and he could be saved. But they were wrong, and that was that was a bad, bad man. He was never going

to be anything other than someone who hurt and abused people. Saw. Another hero of the story is north Towne Wine. The chief of direct detective is Glenn Gardner. Now he's astute. Crime scene investigation at the Rickerson House really led to a major break in the case. He was such a pain in Matt's butt that Matt once tried to put out a hit on the investigator and the prosecutor was

lou Heremski. After ten years of being in the Mexican prison, they're sick of him down there, keeps trying to get out. He's a pain in the butt, So they give him back, even though nobody asked for him, and he comes back to Erie County and he's prosecuted for the Rickerson murder ten years after it happens, which is a really tough thing to do because jurors can find reasonable doubt in ten year old memories a lot easier than they can

in more immediate ones. A job on all parts down there, and if the trial itself went on for a very long time, it was very expensive because they were convinced that Matt was going to try to escape. He had a history of escape. He'd been gotten out of the Eerie every correctional facility when a guard quote forgot to lock his door unquote, and he'd made prison escape attempts down in Mexico, so that extra security. He was wired

up with a with a stun gun. You know, they had just press the button and he would have sizzled on the ground for a little while, and that would have kept him from running away. They were afraid that people were going to he had friends who were going to invade the courtroom and take him. None of that happened. But when he finally was sent to Dana Mora, all of those people in Tanawanda in an old Buffalo area really really didn't want to ever hear his name again.

They were they were pretty sick of him. And he meets David Sweat and Dan and Moorra. They realize that they've got things to come and their thinkers and they put their heads together and you know, within days of meeting each other, they start thinking about how to get out of here. Between the two of them, they came up with the plans.

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When we last spoke, Michael, we were talking about the conditions that were ripe for these two people to get together with complementary skills, with a concerted plan with this woman that they knew could be an asset. These people cunning and clever and like you say, complimentary skills. How was it. What's the first thing they did? It's very interesting how they got a jaining adjacent cells. Tell us what they did besides get that cell, and how they

got those cells together? And what is the first thing they did in this escape plan in a practical way.

part of the part of the escape. I mean, if there's just a concrete wall there and on the other side is the sky, you know you're gonna have to tie sheets together to get out. But that's that was the way it was. When they cut through their cell walls, there was a sizeable infrastructure crawl space. It's there so that repair men can fix the heating system and the electric system and all the all the stuff that they needed to do. It was right on the other side

of their of their cells. Now, every night, for months after the holes are made, Sweat crawled out of his cell and worked on finding and creating a way out. And now, during much of that time, it was it was Matt's job to get them the tools they needed to get them mobile they would need once they got out, and his other job was to lose weight because Sweat

finds it. The only way out is to crawl through the heating pipe, which is turned off in the spring, and Matt's too chubby to fit, so he loses thirty forty pounds during the weeks leading up to the escape so that he will be able to fit through the through the pipe. And even so it was a tight squeeze, and during the actual escape, Sweat had to pull him through a lot of to tie him up, tie him and pull him. At one point, I guess when he was trying to get through the pipe's pants came down

and there was a big laugh. But it was estimated that Sweat crawled out of his cell eighty five times. He wasn't in his cell for any night for three months, and he crawled back for only eighty four of them. Were supposed to believe that he did this only with very primitive tools. He says, he used, you know, hack saws and drill bits and things like that. And if you look at the pipe, they cut the hole in not only to get in the pipe, but then another hole to got out of the pipe on the other

side of the wall. It looks like power tools are really necessary. And the reason he knew ahead of time that there was a crawl space back there was because of one of the prison guards showed him there. Sure, come on, think a look, you know, let's change your electriccy a little bit so that you can better paint. They were using they're both very skilled artists, and they were painting and using that to give to h to guards and civilian employees in exchange for favors. And so

what says that there were often guards. Guards went back into the into the crawl space area to smoke, and he remembers one time he was down and they're trying to figure out how to get out of the prison and he had to dodge a cigarette butt that came flying down from an upper level. So, yeah, the escape route starts with a hole in the back of the of the cell, and then there was a staircase or not stairs, a ladder went all the way down to

the sub sub basement. Then there was the They had to get into the into the heating pipe, which took

like a month of work. Right there, crawl through the pipe which goes through the outer wall of the prison, the forty foot wall, go under it, and then for a while inside the pipe, got a hole to get out, and he asked to know once he gets out of the pipe, he's going to be able to get to another ladder that's going to lead up to a manhole that lets him out in the middle of a street intersection a block and a half away from the prison.

So all of this is taking place in an atmosphere in which the prison employees believed that escaped is impossible. I mean, why do bedchecks? Where's the guy going? Nobody followed any rules the generations had god by, since anybody knew what the rules were, and it seems kind of unbelievable that this guy could leave his cell eighty five times and then never even come close to getting caught.

And they were doing he was doing things down there that must have made noise too, like Governor Cuomo was. One of his early comments was a lot of people spill out of heavy sleepers around here.

And one of the things she had smuggled into them was seventy containers of pepper, which they were constantly sprinkling behind them, but thinking that that would throw off the canine searchers that would becoming or eventually some saying they against their will, they started to go across backyards and stuff, and immediately they got yelled at, hey, get off my property. Some guy said, sorry, we're on the wrong street. We don't know where we are, and they head into the woods,

which is up and down mountains and all. This is really tough on Richard Matt's legs. He's not in good condition. So as they get deeper and deeper further from civilization, they start to squabble a little bit because Sweat says, Sweats only thought that I'm continuing to be free, and Matt, who was an alcoholic on the outside, is you know, let's let's let's find a drink, Let's find a place for where there's a war mattress to sleep on. That's uh.

So they time in a series of cabins that aren't being used, and eventually then they leave evidence of themselves behind when they leave, and that's, uh, that's when the news starts to tighten around them when they get a positive DNA match from the spittle in a sink that they found, you know, in one of the cabins, and they said, well, you know, this is about a day old.

And that really helped because it has for the first two weeks of the search, no we had any idea which direction they went in, and it was really like searching for, you know, two needles in a very very big haystack.

law enforcement. What's the law enforcement response, the media response, the community response as you describe.

a nice storm, we all get together. We'd go rescue people who were stuck in places, and so teamwork is part of the pattern of that area anyway, And they got up to about twelve hundred people who were involved in the manhunt, and the community really really was supportive once they found out these guys were out there searching in the woods. Donations came in, restaurants gave free food, everybody. Everybody wanted to be helpful, and they were. The other

factor is the weather's just horrible. It's just rained sheets the entire time. That the helicopters are rarely used as part of the search. But instead of morale getting low because of the weather, the manhunters were kind of they they got pumped up that a little bit because they knew if they were miserable, the guys they were chased or twice is miserable.

So they bring her in and her first story Rings of the Truth, and that's the story where she says that she, you know, she was lonely, she was depressed, she got involved in she kind of fell in love with Richard Matt She was looking forward to the running away. There was a fantasy, and then the last second she realized it wasn't gonna happen. And time went on, of course,

and her lawyers talk to her more and more. She changed her tune, and all of a sudden it was, you know, Richard mass abuse, and he terrorized her and said he was going to kill her husband if she didn't do what he said. And that's the story she's sticking with now. But she let her fantasies get away with her, and luckily for us and for herself, I'm sure she did back out at the last second because the Favid Sweat might have been satisfied with tying her up and leaving her by the side of the road.

But I'm thinking Richard matt would have killed her.

Joshua Lamity was a good kid in his early twenties, got a young wife and babies, and he works a couple of fast food jobs to make ends meet in the town of Alone, where he was born and grew up. But he bears a strong facial resemblance to David Sweat, and for three weeks. Every time he would try to walk to his job, screaming up and guys would be pointing guns at him, and so no one was happier too. To know that the crisis is over, then Joshua Lamity's life go back to normal.

I think Matt only goes down into the hole twice before the actual escape, so he's done all the work. He could have escaped on his own, but he was a man of his word. He went back and got Matt as he promised he would. And the thinking was that that really had done his share, because Joyce Mitchell is gonna be outside waiting with a car, and that

was Matt's responsibility to get that done. But the second that they all of a sudden become killers on the run in the woods, in the mountainous terrain, the difference between their ages and then their physical capabilities becomes really obvious, and Sweat is being bobbed down by Matt at every turn. It's like having a ball and chain on. And the other problem is that every time they go into a cabin where there's a little relief and get some warmth

and rus, Matt gets drunk. So not only has he got the fatso who can't walk fast anymore, Richard Matt inebriated and unable to really function well. So there comes a time when Matt's very very drunk. He falls down in the woods and doesn't get up and sweats as that's it, I'm done, and just splits heads off in another direction. So and after that, Matt does not last very long at all. He's got a shotgun and he

he wants to see if it works. I mean, he goes out and shoots at a camper driving by, and that that again, that brings law enforcement around, and now that the news is really tight, they know he's They know he's in there someplace because the report of the show when when did the shot take place? Just now, so they're on the site and Matt's lying on the ground in the stomach with his shotgun. I think he only had one shell. He doesn't have a second shell.

Gun's empty, but he pointing it anyway, and he makes a fatal mistake, which is he he coughs, and these manhunters hear it. And a guy from from the Texas Border Patrol, whose unit was on hand to help with the man hunt, is the is the sharpshooter who puts man away, puts three, you know, three shots into the same hole in his head, even though even though Matt's obviously did when they get to him and he's wreaking

of alcohol. The first thing they do is they pull the shotgun away from him, and that's and that's that. And you know, there's no sigh of relief because as far as they know Sweats nearby with their temple and his cross hairs, they don't know that he's miles away at this point, heading in to be tedding north for the Canadian border.

of a coincidence. State Trooper Sergeant Jay Cooked his supervising a search team on the Coveytown Road near the Sound town of Constable, and it's miles He's thirty miles from Dana Moore. Now he's sixteen miles from where Matt was killed, but he only a mile and a half from the

Canadian border. And Cook's driving his vehicle on patrol and he spots a man in camouflaged outfit walking along the woodline, so he stops the car and he watches as the guy intoa chigues walks into a newly cut il salfa field. Cook stops the vehicle and pursues on foot, gets a strong visual realizes this is it. This is the guy. So now when Sweat realizes he's been recognized, he made

a run for it, heading for the trees. And the officer knew that if the prisoner made it to the trees, he's likely to evade capture and maybe cross the border into Canada, and then the whole search would go on and on. So cooks a shopp or I'll shoot. Sweat doesn't stop what Cook does, and he's a marksman, so he takes aim, takes a deep breath, squeezes off a shot which hits Sweat but doesn't knock him down. And

then the second one, Sweat falls to the ground. He's wounded, but he survives and is able to give us his version of events. Now, somewhat controversially, he was prosecuted for his escape and placed in permanent solitary confinement. Now that that's controversial because people say he's already serving life without burrow. How do you punish a guy further than that, there's no death penalty. But the prosecutor said, when you commit a crime in the state, you get prosecuted. That's how

it is. So Sweat may have been able to burrow his way out of the beility of the Beast once, but he's going to be in a solitary confinement for the rest of his life. And that means the good guys won in the end.

Please please don't, please don't go down there yet, governor okay, nearby, the governor did what he wanted to do. Yeah, and then but then they made a videotape of the actual so we can all go on YouTube and experience the just how clusterphobic there was to take the twenty minutes it took to get from their cells to that manhole out on Buck Street.

He calls Albany for permission and they say no, cost too much money. Now, if he had been able to call his own lockdown, who have been searches of all the cells, and the back doors to Matt and Sweats cells would have been discovered and there would have been no escape. So in trying to save money, they end up creating a situation that in the costume, you know, millions and millions of dollars keedny wise pound foolish.

have friends were inmates. And then in this case that turned out to be a key factor because you've got a guard kind of giving these guys a little tour of the what's behind their cells, gives a preview of Hey, this is the first step in your escape plans.

it seems impossible. And there there was a toolbox down there that had been left behind by some construction workers and they picked the lock with a with a paper clip, and so there were there were tools available in it. Then the culture at Dana Moore wasn't tools weren't bad.

One of the ways you rewarded prisoners for being good is you like them have little projects to go out in the in the backfield and you know, build a bird house or you know, the mat and Sweat were making frames for their paintings, so you know, idle hands were what they were worried about. Guys with tools were busy and then occupied and happy. But having tools that aren't really being accounted for. Another factor that was used and abused by the guys who are looking to get over and get out.

of trusting inmates. That inmates are con mens supreme. They will find your weak point and they will exploit it. I think she's probably would better serve New York State in that capacity than sitting in a prison fell someplace. On the other hand, I kind of think that probably Joice is handling prison better than most because she's just familiar with being inside a prison, and what was the.

she's been away, legal problems. He's kind of gotten himself into a little bit of trouble, so that the family's not doing well in the post escape, It'll be interesting to see if if Lyle sticks with sticks with her faithfully or if the uh, you know, she's driven a wedge in their relationship that really can't be healed.

Weekly inspections of cell integrity, of any one of which would have busted men sweat discontinued so long ago that corrections officers didn't know they ever existed. Their estimated four hundred required checks of sweat sell they would have caught him sneaking out the back door. But they revealed that Joyce Mitchell smuggle more than seventy containers the pepper into the prison. Seventy container the pepper. It's a lot of pepper. One of the key items of prisoners were using in

their escape of the tape measure. The tape measure was to measure the girth of Richard Matt to see if he would fit through the pipe. She also got them a map of the area, although they forgot to bring it when when they left it left it behind by accident. They used a long orange extension cord that Sweat used

to hook up an electric fan and light during his work. Now, the report thoroughly itemized the proper procedures at CCS and supported their central thesis that new regulations were not as important as wiping out the culture of carelessness at CCS that prevented the old regulations from being followed. So that in a nutshell, they Inspector General recommended the tray staff be trained better. And I think that's where they're going to to probably use use Joyce Mitchell and as an example.

You're going to be increased camera surveillance to stringently follow regulations already in place. Inspect the catwalking tunnel system more than once a year, hopefully monthly supply and oversight of the de corrections to ensure the integrity of the system. Use canines to detect contraband they'll search civilians when they come in and out. You know, keep a closer eye on tools left behind by contractors and maintenance people. You'll

better oversee the tailor shops. One key factor about the tailor shop is on the third floor of the building and if you look out the window, you can see over the wall under the streets of the village of Dana Moore. So in theory, you know, think there's did there at that window and said there's where the pipe goes, and there's the man hall. They would have a visual from outside the prison to know where to head in order to get up and above ground again, right, and

to revamp the honor system. And I think the honor system is probably going to be abolished. I mean, these guys should have been on death row if there was a death penalty, and instead they were because they had behaved themselves in the recent past. They were in the honor block, which allowed them extra privileges, civilian clothes, they

could wander around outside their cells more frequently. And the last smidation of the inspector generals was just severely disciplined and effectively council officers and civilian employees who broke the rules.

lawns holding signs saying thank you uh. And the heroes of the story were not forgotten, and everybody was very very grateful that so many of the men and women of of the law enforcement of the area were put in such long hours to and and really pulled it up against all odds. They got these guys without anybody getting hurt except for the escapees themselves, and boy, that was the best case scenario.

It was a piece of cake. The fact that she was putting herself in a situation where her her she was going to ruin her marriage and ruin her job and her career not even occurred to her. She was just, you know, she was in love with him. So yeah, I mean, of course not all prisoners are as skilled at it is these two guys, But that's what inmates do.

They have nothing but time. They could sit around and think of plans of how to accomplish things that are far more detailed and patient, far more patient than anybody on the outside would be able to handle. I mean, if you have freedom, you're not going to spend months at a time trying to figure out how to bribe somebody with cigarettes, you know, it's it's a different world.

not shoot him and he was alive. And I'm sure there was an incredible pressure that you didn't really write about and probably law enforcement didn't talk about for this guy to give as much of the real information regarding before the escape, enduring the escape, the entire escape itself. That was incredible and invaluable information for this book and for the resolution of this case, wasn't it.

that was involved other than the guy, people were already caught. Yeah, he's going to keep that momp. You're never going to say so, and so gave me power tools. I mean, there's even been a rumor that somebody else cut the holes in the pipe for him. Wow, you know, because he bribed. But we're never gonna know, because that's he knows. If we start squealing on guys, life could get hard for him.