The sound of a cough helped investigators track down and kill the convict, and authorities believe they could soon catch his fellow escapee, David Sweat

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

New York prison break convict Richard Matt shot and killed by police Read more

A bullet hole in a camper, the smells of gunpowder and gin and a few coughs from the brush led investigators to an escaped prisoner in New York on Friday, and to a fatal confrontation that gave new urgency to the attempt to find his fellow escapee.

Richard Matt, 49, was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent. On Saturday his fellow escapee, 35-year-old David Sweat, remained at large.

Helicopters, search dogs and hundreds of state and federal law enforcement officers converged on forests, hills and fields in an area about 30 miles away from the Clinton Correctional Facility, from which Matt and Sweat escaped three weeks ago. On Saturday, for the first time in weeks, investigators expressed optimism that the remaining convict was cornered.

On Friday authorities closed in on Matt after a week of slim leads tightened the search like a noose. Last week, police found DNA matching one of the convicts in a burglarized cabin in nearby Mountain View, only a few dozen miles from the prison town of Dannemora.

Around the same time, a hunter handed police a photograph caught by a trail camera: Matt and Sweat in the woods, the former with a shotgun in hand, unnamed law enforcement sources told the Daily Beast.

On Friday morning, investigators found candy wrappers and scraps of food in a camp, state police superintendent Joseph D’Amico said.

That afternoon, a man driving his RV heard what he thought was a tire going flat as he drove near the town of Malone. He called 911 when he found a bullet hole in the back of his recreational vehicle, police said.

Searching in the densely wooded area near Route 30, police cordoned off roads and scanned the forest with dogs. Around this time they got a second tip, distinguished from the hundreds of others by its proximity to the gunshot.

Mindful of police warnings to keep an eye on cabins in the region, another local had checked in on his hunting cabin, a friend told the Associated Press.

Inside, he smelled grape-flavored gin – and saw the bottle on his kitchen table, out of place from where it had stood untouched for years. He called police, who suspected that someone had fled through the cabin’s back door. They then caught the whiff of a recently discharged weapon.

A team from Border Patrol investigated, D’Amico said, adding: “As we were doing the ground search in the area, there was movement detected by officers on the ground.”

The movement was followed by what sounded like coughs – “so they knew that they were dealing with humans as opposed to wildlife,” D’Amico said.

The officers found Matt in the woods, D’Amico said, and “verbally challenged him, told him to put up his hands”. D’Amico said Matt turned, a 20-gauge shotgun in hand, and “was shot when he didn’t comply”.

Matt said nothing and did not fire at the officers, D’Amico said, and died not long afterward. They recovered the shotgun, and found two sets of footprints in the area.

“There’s no indication that Sweat wasn’t with Matt,” D’Amico said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A corrections officer holds a gun at a roadblock in Malone, New York. Photograph: Mike Groll/AP

But Sweat remained at large, likely increasingly desperate. On Friday he was described as a “dangerous, dangerous” man by New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

D’Amico said he still hoped to capture Sweat alive, and said: “We are going to continue to use the same tactics over the past few weeks, which is to search 24 hours a day until we find him.”

He admitted that there have been no live sightings of Sweat, but the sheer concentration of officers in the area near Lake Titus and Elephant Head suggested a newfound conviction in the search.

Helicopters hovered with floodlights, police vans clustered on roads, and heavily armed teams with dogs methodically pushed into the woods. A spokesman for state police said that about 1,100 officers were involved in the hunt.

Police major Charles Guess said at a briefing that the search had shifted north after investigators found refuse left behind by Matt and Sweat, and that they suspected the pair had been trying to make it to the Canadian border some 70 miles away.

Although authorities said they would have preferred to take Matt alive, none expressed grief at his death.

“You never want to see anyone lose their life,” Cuomo said, “but I would remind people that Mr Matt was an escaped murderer from a state prison. Mr Matt killed two people who we know about.”

Matt was serving 25 years to life for the murder and dismemberment of his former employer, and had served a sentence in Mexico for the murder of a man there. Sweat was serving a life sentence for shooting a police officer dead.

Matt’s half-brother, Wayne Schimpf, said he was relieved that the relative who had once threatened to kill him over a car was dead.

“I was in a way hoping this was the outcome,” he told ABC’s Buffalo affiliate WKBW. “Thank God this can finally end for me and my family. The next thought was: ‘That’s my brother.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inmate David Sweat, 35, is seen in a picture taken in May 2015. Photograph: Reuters

The convicts executed an elaborate and unlikely escape from the maximum security prison on 6 June, drilling and sawing their way to freedom through a manhole in the town outside the prison, and leaving behind a sticky note for investigators that read: “Have a nice day!”

Two prison employees have been arrested and charged with helping the pair escape. Joyce Mitchell, a 51-year-old civilian who worked in the tailor shop, was apparently wooed by one or both men, and allegedly planned to act as their getaway driver before she panicked on the night of the escape. Mitchell is charged with smuggling them hacksaw blades and other tools to access the prison bowels behind their cells.

Mitchell’s husband, Lyle, said that she told him Matt and Sweat had planned to kill him if necessary.

Last week authorities also arrested Gene Palmer, a 57-year-old corrections officer, and charged him with promoting prison contraband for having brought tools to Matt and Sweat, and for providing them access to a catwalk at the jail. Palmer has said he did not know that Matt and Sweat were planning to escape.

Matt and Sweat lived on the “honor block” of the prison, and may have participated not only in the tailor shop but with maintenance crews that would have had access to tools and back areas of the prison.