Governor Andrew Cuomo quickly made it clear that he thought other inmates must have known about the escape attempt, saying at a press conference, “I chatted with a couple of the inmates myself and said, ‘You must be a very heavy sleeper. They were heard, they had to be heard.”
The Post is careful to identify the possible female accomplice as a “worker,” not a correctional officer, adding that she’s been removed from her position. The source also speculated that she’d been “wooed,” in the Post’s words, by Matt:
“It’s an employee being questioned,’’ a high-level source said, adding that the worker, who is not a guard, had already been yanked from her post.
Sources said the worker may have been wooed by one of the escaped cons, Richard Matt, 48, an infamous lady killer.
“He has a way with the ladies,” the source said.
Another source, retired Detective David Bentley, who helped put away Matt for the 1997 murder of a North Tonawanda businessman, added, “When [Matt’s] cleaned up, he’s very handsome and, in all frankness, very well endowed. He gets girlfriends any place he goes.”
Besides being a charmer, Richard Matt is an objectively bad person; he’s doing 25 to life for torturing, killing, and dismembering a 76-year-old businessman in 1997. A pack of old stories from the Buffalo News highlight some of his other notable deeds, including raping a woman in 1989, stabbing a woman in 1991, and stealing property from both after attacking them. He went on the lam after the 1997 murder, then killed a man in Mexico during a bar fight. Sweat, meanwhile, is also serving life for the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Kevin J. Tarsia in 2002.
There are no clues as to the whereabouts of the escaped men, and they are, as should be obvious from the above, believed to be extremely dangerous. If you see them, call 911 and stay far, far away.
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David Sweat, left, and Richard Matt. Image provided by New York State Police via AP.