In the early morning of June 6, 2015, two convicted murderers were found missing from the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, the first escape from the prison’s secure perimeter in its long history. Richard Matt, forty-eight, and David Sweat, thirty-four, had spent weeks cutting through the steel wall at the back of their adjoining cells, working down through a labyrinth of catwalks and tunnels, sawing through a steam pipe, and surfacing through a manhole on a Dannemora street roughly a block beyond the wall. They left a taunting note behind. The breakout triggered one of the largest manhunts in New York history.
The escape was not a feat of solitary genius; it ran on inside help. A civilian tailor-shop instructor, Joyce Mitchell, supplied the hacksaw blades, drill bits, and chisels the men used, smuggling them past unmanned screening in frozen ground beef. A corrections officer, Gene Palmer, passed contraband for Matt’s paintings. Mitchell had agreed to be the getaway driver and to bring a gun; on the night of the escape she suffered what she described as a panic attack and never appeared, leaving Matt and Sweat on foot in the densely forested Adirondack borderland just south of Canada.
For three weeks the two evaded a force the State Inspector General later put at as many as 1,300 law-enforcement personnel, costing 22.8 million dollars in state overtime alone, who chased more than 2,500 leads through rain-soaked woods and abandoned hunting cabins. The arc ended in violence. On June 26, in the wilderness near Malone, U.S. Border Patrol agents confronted Matt after he fired a shotgun at a passing camper; he was shot and killed. Two days later, on June 28, a State Police sergeant spotted Sweat walking a back road near the Canadian line, gave chase across a hayfield, and shot him twice as he ran for a tree line. Sweat survived.
David Sweat, captured wounded and later recovered, pleaded guilty to first-degree escape and received an additional three-and-a-half to seven years on top of his existing sentence of life without parole. Richard Matt, who had been serving twenty-five years to life for a 1997 murder and dismemberment, died in the field. The escape exposed a culture of complacency at Clinton so thorough that, by the Inspector General’s account, basic counts and cell inspections that would have foiled the plot many times over had not been performed for years.
On the night of July 22, 1934, federal agents shot and killed John Herbert Dillinger in the alley beside the Biograph Theater on North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago, ending a thirteen-month run that had made the Indiana bank robber the most hunted man in the United States. He had just left a screening of the gangster picture Manhattan Melodrama, flanked by two women, when agents of the Division of Investigation — the bureau that would soon be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation — moved in. As Dillinger reached toward a pistol and broke for the alley, three agents fired; three bullets struck him, the fatal round entering the back of his neck and exiting beneath the right eye. He was pronounced dead a short time later. He was thirty-one.
The trail to that alley had been laid by a paid informant. Ana Cumpănaș, a Romanian-born brothel madam known to the press as Anna Sage and miscast in legend as the “Woman in Red,” had told authorities where Dillinger would be in exchange for money and help against a pending deportation. She wore an orange dress that read as red under the marquee lights, a signal to the waiting agents. The deal bought the bureau its quarry; it did not, in the end, spare her, and she was deported to Romania later that year.
Dillinger had earned the manhunt across a frantic 1933 and 1934. Paroled in May 1933 after nearly a decade in Indiana prisons for a botched grocery robbery, he assembled a gang — among them Harry Pierpont, John Hamilton, Homer Van Meter and, for a time, the volatile Baby Face Nelson — and robbed a string of Midwestern banks. He broke out of the Lima, Ohio jail in October 1933 in an escape that left a sheriff dead, and on March 3, 1934 walked out of the supposedly escape-proof county jail at Crown Point, Indiana using, by his own later account, a pistol whittled from wood and blackened with shoe polish. Driving a stolen sheriff’s car across the state line into Illinois, he handed the federal government its jurisdictional hook.
The Bureau’s pursuit was not flawless. On April 22, 1934, a raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin ended with agents killing and wounding bystanders while Dillinger and others escaped out the back. He underwent crude plastic surgery to alter his face and had acid applied to his fingertips to obscure his prints. None of it saved him. Named Public Enemy Number One and betrayed by an informant, he was run to ground outside a neighborhood movie house and killed where he fell — a founding legend of the modern FBI, and a sober study in how a fugitive’s own associates, not his disguises, tend to end the chase.