Hundreds of agents scoured a remote area Tuesday, chasing more than 2,000 leads in a nearly three-week manhunt for two dangerous killers on the run from a New York jail. Richard Matt, 49, and David Sweat, 35, escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility before dawn in a spectacular prison break likened to a Hollywood movie. On Monday, police announced that they had made a breakthrough, finding traces of DNA that suggested the escaped convicts broke into a cabin in the remote Owls Head area, west of the prison.
"Evidence was developed that the suspects may have spent time in a seasonal hunting camp in this area. Law enforcement are on scene searching for more evidence," said New York state police. More than 1,000 local, state and federal officers, including police, forest rangers, US Marshals and border officials, backed by dogs and helicopters, have been searching the area around Owls Head.
Police renewed calls on those with trail cameras set up in the region to get in touch if they captured footage of any suspicious activity. "No lead is too small to investigate," police said. There is a $100,000 reward for information leading to their arrest. Matt, who dismembered his boss, and Sweat, who killed a sheriff, used power tools to cut through cell walls and crawled through pipes to emerge from a manhole in the village of Dannemora.
The husband of the prison worker charged with facilitating their escape, told NBC News that his wife enjoyed "attention" and attempted kisses from Matt as their marriage hit a rough patch. Lyle Mitchell said wife Joyce denied having sex with the inmates but said Matt gave her pills to "knock him out" so that she could escape with the two killers. "When it came down to her hurtin' me, that's when she said something was wrong. She said she was in too deep, she didn't know how to get out of it," he told the channel.
His wife backed out of the plan at the last minute and suffered a panic attack. Matt, six feet (1.83 meters) tall with multiple tattoos, was serving a sentence of 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping and dismembering of his former boss in a 27-hour ordeal. He fled to Mexico after the murder and killed another American there, before being sentenced to 20 years and extradited back to New York.