The real life N.Y. ‘Great Escape’

Spectacularly, we are watching a real-life “Great Escape.” Richard Matt and David Sweat, two soulless men, were on the lam from an upstate New York maximum security prison. We thought these truly evil men were safely locked away.

At the time of writing, only Joyce Mitchell, a 51-year-old wife and prison employee at the Clinton Correctional Facility, is in jail. She’s arrested for having facilitated this escape by supplying the convicts with power tools needed to cut through a wall and steel pipe.

The mind cannot fathom why someone like Ms. Mitchell, who suffered the typical struggles of lower middle class life, arrived at a fateful place where she, presumably, fell in love with a despicable convicted killer, throwing away the life she had built.

Make no mistake – Matt (now 48) and Sweat (now 34) are very bad men. They have walked amongst us in the free world for only a combined 37 plus years, since Matt turned 19 and Sweat turned 17.

Matt has been described as extremely smart and guileful. His childhood was broken, his father himself a convict and presumably dead; his brother, almost as much of a criminal as he. Matt was eventually shuttled to a foster home upstate New York with a local reputation for giving kids a second chance.

Despite being popular and having some talents, Matt started on his life of crime at 14 trying to steal a houseboat and never looked back.

In and out of prison (once for being “hired” to hit a fellow prisoner’s wife), Matt eventually concocted a scheme to rob an elderly businessman, William Rickerson, in 1997. He and an accomplice tortured the poor fellow for 27 hours, dragging him out in the middle of the night in his pajamas, bound him with duct tape, stuffed him in a trunk, and Matt bent back his fingers until they broke. All of this was done to try to get Mr. Rickerson to reveal the whereabouts of his illusory “wealth” (he was a modest man).

Eventually, Matt just twisted and broke Mr. Rickerson’s neck and killed him. He and his accomplice then grabbed a hacksaw, chopped off Mr. Rickerson’s head and threw the dismembered body and head into the Niagra River.

Matt fled to Mexico, where he spent nine years in a Mexican prison for killing an American tourist, before being brought back to the United States in 2007 to face trial of this horrific killing.

The jury swiftly convicted and the judge sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison.

Sweat’s back-story is, perhaps, even scarier. Before he even turned 10, his own mother was terrified by his sadistic behavior and sent him to Florida to live with her brother. According to her daughter, his mother suffered three nervous breakdowns because of him. Sweat eventually ran away and was carted off to youth homes.

By 2002 (at age 22), he and two accomplices stole some guns from a store in Great Bend, Penn. While transferring the contraband from one car to another, a deputy came upon them. He and an accomplice opened fire, bringing down the deputy, and while he was still living, drove over him with a car to finish him off. Sweat was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, after pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty.

In 2008, Matt arrived at the Clinton Facility, Sweat having arrived earlier in 2003. They were each “model prisoners” earning their way onto the “Honor Block,” where there were more privileges and freedoms, housed in cells next to each other. Somehow, they were able to concoct an elaborate plot to carve out a hole in a wall, burrow through a pipe, and crawl through it and up a manhole.

Hopefully, the huge dragnet will find these men, even from the time this column is written to its publication.

There is much wrong with our criminal justice system; yet, this is a cautionary tale that one is still needed.

Bad people, whether from genetics or infertile nurturing or some combination thereof, are born into our society. Prison can have a reforming role to weed out the Matts and Sweats from the redeemable, but the irredeemable need to be stored in a permanent dark place, safely away form the rest of us.

Suffice it to say, Matt’s and Sweat’s fates do not deserve our sympathy, only our condemnation.

Local attorney Jim Rockefeller owns the Rockefeller Law Center and is a former Houston Co. Chief Assistant District Attorney, and a former Miami Prosecutor. Visit www.rockefellerlawcenter.com to submit confidential legal questions, and to review former articles and Frequently Asked Questions.

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