WATCH: Officials provided an update on the manhunt for the two escaped killers, saying that none of their leads have been substantiated.
BELLMONT, N.Y. – More than 1,000 searchers continued to check logging roads and go door-to-door in thick woods in far northern New York in pursuit of two murderers who escaped from a maximum-security prison more than two weeks ago, while more details were emerging on how they got away.
Officials told reporters Wednesday they were “virtually 100 per cent” assured that the two men had been in the area, but four days after a man was seen running out of a local cabin, police reminded the public that the terrain being searched was rough and remote.
As the summer holiday season picks up, more people, including children, are expected to arrive in the camps and cabins spread across the region. It is thought that the escaped prisoners may have been moving between the seasonal properties, which can be abandoned for months at a time.
READ MORE: DNA miles from prison linked to escaped New York inmates
Authorities say David Sweat and Richard Matt cut through the steel wall at the back of their cell, cut their way into and out of a steam pipe and escaped through a manhole cover outside the prison on June 6.
A prison employee now in custody has told investigators she smuggled hacksaw blades, a screwdriver and other tools into the prison by placing them in frozen hamburger meat, Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wiley told reporters.
The hunt for the two men intensified this week after a hunting camp that was apparently broken into led to “good evidence, DNA data,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. Searchers swarmed remote hamlets of Owls Head and Mountain View in rugged terrain about 20 miles (32 kilometres) west of Clinton County Correctional Facility.
Investigators conducted grid searches in the thick, mosquito-infested forests and checked railroad beds, said Franklin County Sheriff Kevin Mulverhill.
“If they’re here, we’re going to find them,” Mulverhill said.
READ MORE: Items recovered from remote N.Y. cabin might be linked to escaped killer
The husband of the woman accused of helping the inmates escape said in an interview aired Tuesday on NBC that he’s “absolutely 100 per cent” certain the pair would have killed him and his wife if his wife had been their getaway driver, as initially planned.
Lyle Mitchell said his wife, Joyce Mitchell, told him Sweat and Matt offered to give her pills to knock him out so she could pick them up after they escaped, but she refused because she said she still loved her husband.
“Do I still love her? Yes. Am I mad? Yes,” Lyle Mitchell said.
Joyce Mitchell remained in custody on charges she helped the two men escape. She has pleaded not guilty.
Wiley said Mitchell put the meat with tools inside into a refrigerator in the prison tailor shop where she worked. A corrections officer brought the meat to Sweat and Matt, who were housed in a section of the prison where inmates are allowed to cook their own meals.
READ MORE: Manhunt for escaped N.Y. killers shifts after possible sighting near Pennsylvania
The guard didn’t know the tools were inside the meat, Wiley said. The guard has been placed on paid leave.
Sweat, 35, was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. Matt, 48, was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of his former boss.
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