Search for escaped murderers enters 7th day in northern NY

Squads of law enforcement officers today began a seventh day of trying to track down two murderers who escaped from a maximum-security prison in northern New York and could be hiding out in swampy terrain swarming with blood-sucking insects.
Armed officers in body armour boarded New York state prison system buses soon after dawn in the village of Dannemora, where David Sweat and Richard Matt used power tools to cut their way out of their neighboring cells last weekend.
Meanwhile, suspicions swirled around a female prison employee believed to have had a role in the escape last weekend.
The hundreds of state, federal and local officers spent Thursday searching a swampy patch of woods just east of Dannemora after investigators received tips that the convicts were in the area. Tracking dogs had picked up the scent in the morning.

Search teams slogged knee-deep through marshes and steams and endured the Adirondacks' biggest warm-weather nuisances, swarms of black flies and mosquitoes.
The main road leading into Dannemora, remained closed for a second day today, as did the local school district.

Investigators believe the prison employee had agreed to be the getaway driver, but she never showed up, a person close to the case told The Associated Press.
Sweat, 34, and Matt, 48, cut through steel and bricks and crawled through an underground steam pipe. They emerged from a manhole outside the 40-foot (12-meter) walls of the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility, about 30 kilometres south of the Canadian border, and were discovered missing early Saturday, authorities said.

The person close to the investigation said authorities believe Joyce Mitchell, an instructor at the prison tailor shop, where the two convicts worked, had befriended the men and was supposed to pick them up Saturday morning. Mitchell has not been charged.
Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt's 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river. After the killing, Matt fled to Mexico, where he killed a man outside a bar.
Sweat was doing life without parole for his part in the 2002 killing of sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia, who was shot 15 times and run over after discovering Sweat and two accomplices transferring stolen guns between vehicles.