When two men both serving life for murder broke out of the supposedly maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in New York State last Friday night, the American media reached instinctively for cinematic comparisons.
The ingenious breakout – which saw David Sweat and Richard Matt hack through the steel walls of their adjoining cells, navigate a complex series of hidden catwalks and cut into a steel pipe, through which they crawled to freedom – was reminiscent of Hollywood films The Shawshank Redemption and Escape from Alcatraz, most observers agreed.
In true cinematic style, the two men even left behind a farewell Post-it note for prison staff, bearing the message: “Have a nice day.”
On Sunday, the New York State governor Andrew Cuomo stoked the fire after touring the scene of the escape by telling the media: “If it was in a movie script, you would have said it was overdone.”
It probably didn't help matters that in his New York State Police mugshots Sweat, 34, looks like a dead ringer for the actor Edward Norton as he appeared in the 1998 film American History X.
Norton’s character in the film is a swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi who, after serving jail time for murdering two black youths, emerges from prison a changed man in search of redemption.
But redemption is probably the very last thing on the minds of Sweat and Matt.
In Escape from Alcatraz, Clint Eastwood plays a habitual but basically decent and loveable criminal whose ingenious escape is celebrated as a victory for human persistence.
In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins is a likeable banker, wrongly jailed for the murder of his wife and her lover, who spends 17 years acquiring a saintly aura while quietly tunnelling out of jail.
In both cases, freedom is our heroes’ just reward.
There are, certainly, comparisons to be made. Sweat and Matt even followed Hollywood escape-film protocol and left carefully crafted dummies in their beds to fool the guards. But there’s nothing loveable or even likeable about either of these two men, both of whom are clearly and irredeemably guilty of the most heinous acts of murder.
As the manhunt for the two men enters its second week, a few scant details of their backgrounds have begun to emerge. But perhaps the best insight into their characters can be gleaned from the terrible acts that led to them sharing adjacent cells in a prison in Dannemora, a small town in the far northern corner of New York State.
Matt weighs 95 kilograms and stands 1.83 metres tall. He has black hair, brown eyes and several tattoos, including the legend “Mexico Forever” on his back, a heart on his chest and the apparently unearned insignia of the Marine Corps on his right shoulder.
At 48, the older of the two escapees by more than a decade, Matt had a head-start over Sweat, 34, on what has become their shared road to perdition.
Matt’s first known brush with authority appears to have been in about 1981 when, as a 14-year-old, he ran away from a care home in Tonawanda, a few kilometres south-east of Niagara Falls, to which he had been sent for stealing a boat.
It isn’t clear what bad luck had befallen the young Matt, leaving him parentless and a ward of the state, but he had already developed a flair for flamboyant escapes – he stole a horse as his getaway vehicle.
Matt has been described as intelligent and charming. But it would be a mistake, say those who dealt with him in the past, to regard him as anything but ruthless.
"I'm very concerned that people are going to get hurt the longer he's out," David Bentley, a retired Tonawanda detective, told The New York Times this week.
Bentley recalled a man he had known for 30 years and whom he had used as an informant as “just totally, totally fearless, and [who] doesn’t respond to pain”. He had seen Matt “inflict wounds on himself, cut himself; break his collarbone and not seek any treatment.”
As a young man, Matt embarked on the typical life of the petty criminal and, inevitably, found himself in jail. Less inevitably, in 1986, by now 22, he escaped from a prison in Erie County, where he was serving time for assault, by climbing a fence.
That time, he was on the loose for just four days. This time, he probably won’t be making the same sort of mistake that saw him captured so swiftly.
“He jumped on a freight train, went to his brother’s house in Tonawanda, and that’s where we captured him,” Bentley told the media.
Nevertheless, Tonawanda may prove an irresistible lure for the sociopathic Matt. Bentley, who helped to jail him for murder in 2008, says he is currently living in fear for his life there.
"I stayed up pretty late last night, and I'm armed," Bentley, now 67, told the New York Post earlier this week. "I had a tough time sleeping, knowing he could come around."
Back in 2008, Bentley received a letter from Matt, accusing him of having lied in court and promising that he wouldn’t forget his part in his downfall.
Between 1987 and 1997, Matt was rarely out of the criminal-justice system, serving time for a rape in 1989 and for stabbing a nurse in 1991.
It was after his release in 1997 that he reached his criminal nadir and earned his life sentence, carrying out a shockingly brutal killing for which he would not be held accountable for a decade.
On December 4, 1997, Matt and a co-defendant abducted William Rickerson, a 76-year-old former employer against whom Matt had developed a grudge, from his home in North Tonawanda.
Rickerson was bundled into the boot of a car and repeatedly beaten during a nightmarish tour of three states. His ordeal ended the following day only when Matt grew bored and snapped his victim’s neck.
After the killing, Matt cut up the body with a hacksaw, throwing pieces into the Niagara River and tossing Rickerson’s head into a rubbish bin.
On the run, Matt fled to Mexico, where he acquired his tattoo and stabbed to death a fellow American in a row outside a bar in the town of Matamoros.
Jailed for 20 years, he was finally extradited to face American justice in 2007, and in June 2008 was sentenced to 25 years to life for the slaying of Rickerson.
By the time Matt arrived in Clinton Correctional Facility in 2008, Sweat, jailed for the brutal 2002 murder of a police officer in Broome County, New York, had already been there five years.
Sweat, 34, weighs 75kg and is 1.80 metres tall, with brown hair, green eyes and tattoos on his left bicep and right fingers.
On July 4, 2002, Sweat and two accomplices broke into a gun store in Great Bend, Pennsylvania. As they were dividing up their haul in a park they were confronted by Deputy Kevin Tarsia. Sweat and one of the other men shot the officer several times before Sweat drove over him with the pickup truck they had stolen for the raid.
This week, a local newspaper tracked down Sweat’s mother, Pamela, who told a graphic tale of a chaotic upbringing and a life that had started going downhill in childhood.
Mrs Sweat, 58, "painted a picture of a troubled childhood … riddled with behavioural problems and violent tendencies", reported the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin.
“I don’t want nothing to do with him,” she said. “He has tormented me since he was 9 years old, and now he’s 34 and I feel like he’s still doing it.”
Delving into its archives, the paper uncovered a history of petty crime, triggered, according to Mrs Sweat, when her son was bullied at school as a 9-year-old. His response had been to carry a butcher’s knife in his school backpack.
According to his mother, Sweat and his older sister had spent much of their young lives in foster care, and she didn’t even know if he had attended high school.
Her son’s first known brush with the law came when he was 16 years old. He and a friend plotted to steal computers from a care home – a plot thwarted when a passer-by spotted the pair in ski masks and called the police.
State records show Sweat first served jail time a year later, when he was sentenced to 19 months for attempted burglary. He was already well down the slippery slope that a few years later would lead to the murder of Deputy Tarsia.
A plea of guilty to first-degree murder at his trial in 2003 spared Sweat the death penalty, but earned him the life sentence without parole, from which he’s now on the run.
For all the cinematic comparisons that have been made, it’s clear the “stars” of this escape are not cast in the mould of the noble characters played by Eastwood and Robbins. Instead, they’re the grim products of childhoods that brutalised and left them with no chance of making anything of their lives other than the transitory headlines that will be their last flicker of infamy.
It remains to be seen how the final act will play out. But with a US$100,000 (Dh367,305) reward for their recapture and thousands of heavily armed police, FBI agents and US marshals hot on their trail, this is one cinematic breakout that’s guaranteed not to have a happy Hollywood ending.
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