Escape from Dannemora: Richard Matt, David Sweat, and the Great Adirondack Manhunt

By Michael Benson

It was one of the biggest crime stories of the decade- two deadly killers, desperate and on the run. After months of planning, Richard Matt and David Sweat cut, chopped, coerced, and connived their way out of a maximum-security prison in the wilderness of upstate New York and managed to elude police for three weeks, sending the region into lockdown. Veteran true-crime writer Michael Benson leads us along the story's every wild path to dig out a tale of adventure, psychology, sex, and brutality. Escape from Dannemora examines the strange case of Joyce Mitchell, the long-time prison employee who had a sexual relationship with at least one of the killers, and who smuggled them tools and aided in the escape, while the cooked up a plan to kill her husband. In the end, Benson looks closely at conditions at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, a crumbling Gothic pile now under investigation for charges of drug charges and brutality. 

250 pages, paperback
ISBN: 9781611689761