

But before tonight’s guard shift was over, the inmate assured himself, that uniformed prick would finally get his. 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. 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. When eleven o’clock arrived, the cop-killer in A-6-23 laughed to himself. 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. A guy who now had more than one reason to be grateful to his neighbor.
Escape from dannemora real story tv#
The same guy that Hacksaw had presented with a TV set just that morning. Tonight’s dinner was chicken and salad, and plenty of it. Instead of eating earlier in Clinton prison’s mess hall, they waited until after recreation and prepared their own suppers in their cells. That’s when the other inmates filed past on the way back to their own cells. He had a new pair of boots, too, which he set on the floor along with his backpack.īy a quarter to ten, they were done, and the packed bags tucked out of sight. 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. 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. She received a two-to-seven-year prison sentence for her role in the escape.Don't call us 'guards:' How the Dannemora prison escape happened She admits she had agreed to off her husband on the night of the escape. She also says she became intimate with Matt out of fear and that it was Matt's idea to get rid of her husband. While the show paints a twisted love triangle between her and the two inmates, she claims she never had relations with Sweat. Mitchell's account of events diverges from the TV show's depiction. They also plotted that Mitchell would dispose of her husband and run away with the escaped prisoners. When they were planning their escape, Matt allegedly told Sweat, "She’s f*cking nuts, she’ll bring us whatever we want, just tell me what you need and I’ll get her to bring it in." The inmates convinced Mitchell to bring them hacksaws. Both Sweat and Matt flirted with Mitchell to get her help, and she eventually engaged in a physical relationship with Matt. It would take nearly a month and $23 million for authorities to catch the escaped criminals.Īs early as 2014, rumors spread around the prison that one of the guards, Joyce Mitchell, was having inappropriate relations with prisoners.

Due to Matt's claustrophobia, Sweat had to drag the other inmate through the pipe with a bedsheet. Matt and Sweat then climbed out of a manhole about two blocks away from the prison and went on the run. On June 5, 2015, the men slipped through the holes and snuck through the prison, traveling between the walls and reaching a steam pipe the pair had to crawl through.

The prisoners escaped by cutting holes through the walls of their cells with hacksaw blades that a guard smuggled into the prison. After his capture, Sweat told investigators, “ Shawshank ain’t got sh*t on me." They were so quick that they actually arrived at the end of their escape route about 10 minutes earlier than they expected. On the night of the escape, it took convicted felons Richard Matt and David Sweat under an hour to escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison also known as Dannemora because of its location in Dannemora, NY.
