Police Swarm Upstate Town in Search of Escaped Killers

By The New York Times

A days-long manhunt for two escaped killers prompted a burst of police activity on Tuesday as investigators converged on an upstate town about an hour from the prison where the men had been incarcerated.

The prisoners, Richard W. Matt and David Sweat, were discovered missing from their cells at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., 25 miles from the Canadian border.

On Tuesday, law enforcement officials swarmed Willsboro, a small town about 40 miles southeast of Dannemora.

The Willsboro town supervisor, Shaun Gillilland, said there was a report of a sighting of two men on foot early Tuesday morning near Middle Road, at the southern end of the town, setting off a frenzy of law enforcement activity.

“The police reacted to it immediately,” Mr. Gillilland said, though he added that officials had not yet confirmed that the two men were the escaped prisoners.

The New York State Police and Department of Corrections were among the agencies involved in the search, he said. Driving rain during the night prevented law enforcement officials from conducting surveillance from the air, Mr. Gillilland said, but officials were fanning out on Tuesday in the farms and fields near Middle Road.

On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the evidence in the escape increasingly pointed to an inside job.

“I think they had help,” he said. “I don’t think they could have acquired the equipment they needed to do this without help.”

A woman who works at the prison, though not as a guard, was being questioned in connection with the escape and has been removed from duty, according to a person who had been briefed on the investigation.

Mr. Matt and Mr. Sweat are believed to have used power tools to cut through the walls of their adjoining cells, escaping onto an internal catwalk. They then snaked their way down through the bowels of the prison and into a two-foot pipe they had cut a hole in. They crawled under Clinton’s soaring concrete walls and emerged onto the streets of Dannemora from a manhole several hundred feet from the prison.