Cop killer David Sweat’s emotional jailhouse interview 10 years after infamous ‘Escape at Dannemora’

A decade after he broke out of Clinton state prison in the infamous “Escape at Dannemora” and led cops on a 23-day manhunt that riveted the nation, convicted killer David Sweat, in an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Post, confessed to his one regret.

He should have picked a better partner in crime.

“If I hadn’t done it with him, I’d probably still be out,” Sweat, 44, said of fellow escapee Richard Matt.

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With his wrists cuffed and a thick chain wrapped around his waist, the clean-shaven, bespectacled Sweat spoke publicly for the first time in eight years during a tearful, hour-long interview at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in upstate Marcy.

The Post reporter, there for the 10th anniversary of the infamous June 6, 2015 escape, was his first visitor in three years, Sweat claimed.

“If I’d known everything about him before, I probably would’ve done it alone,” Sweat said of the 49-year-old Matt.

Sweat said he now believes Matt was as a confidential informant for the police back in the 1990s. Matt’s 25-year to life sentence began in July 2008 after he was convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 76-year-old William Rickerson, his former employer, in Niagara County in December 1997.

“You can’t trust someone like that . . . and that’s worse than the drinking,” Sweat said.

He was referring to Matt’s heavy boozing after the duo found bottles of liquor at an uninhabited cabin following their escape.

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“I try not to live with regrets and look back, because it is what it is at this point,” Sweat continued in a soft voice.

“On the one hand, I’m glad that it helped some guys get better treatment and changed things in [Clinton Correctional Facility], because there was some bad crap going on.

“On the other hand, you know, I’m in here for the rest of my life.”

He added, “I just wanted to be free.”

Sweat now spends his days in an 18-by-5-foot cell.

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He claims he has been in solitary confinement for 10 years, shuttled between nine different prisons.

Sweat and Matt became close while serving time in adjoining cells at Clinton, where Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for the 2002 killing of a Broome County sheriff’s deputy.

They hatched their elaborate bid for freedom with the aid of a prison seamstress — the “Shawskank,” Joyce Mitchell — who was accused of having sexual relationships with both fugitives. Mitchell has repeatedly claimed she and Sweat were never intimate — though she admitted to investigators she had oral sex with Matt and gave nude photos of herself to Matt to give to Sweat.

Using tools smuggled in by a correction officer that Mitchell concealed in frozen hamburger meat, they cut through their cell’s steel walls over the span of months. The night of the escape, they crawled nearly 500 feet through a pipe before coming to the surface at a manhole cover outside the prison walls.

But Mitchell never met them with a getaway car as planned.

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The fugitives made a desperate dash toward to the Candian borden, hiking through dense woods and swamps, and squatting in abandoned cabins, as 1,500 cops hunted them.

They eventually split up because Sweat could no longer tolerate Matt’s drinking and slow pace.

Matt was killed in a standoff with cops on the 20th day of the manhunt. Sweat was captured two days later, after he was shot twice by a state trooper just south of the border.

Ben Stiller’s hit 2018 series “Escape at Dannemora,” in which Sweat is played by actor Paul Dano and Matt is portrayed by Benicio del Toro, reignited the public’s fascination in the caper.

Although he hasn’t seen it, Sweat is not impressed.

“I don’t like it because a lot of things . . . were untrue. Like, the stuff between me and Mitchell. We weren’t involved like that at all,” he insisted.

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He also refuted a scene in which corrections officer Gene Palmer — played by actor David Morse — slams his head into a toilet. 

“That never happened,” Sweat said. “I never really interacted with Palmer. That was Matt’s guy.”

Sweat does not believe he can escape again.

“They’ll never let me go to general population,” he said. “They think I’d try to do it again or I’d help someone else.”

Any future escape attempts would be impossible in his cell at Mid State, he insisted. 

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“If you cut through the walls, you’d just be in another cell. And if you cut through the basement — I mean, they use the basement in this prison.”

Asked if he was lonely, tears began to well in Sweat’s eyes before he replied, “Yes.”

Despite recent reports that he has a girlfriend, Sweat told The Post the relationship failed because she could not keep up with the constant transfers to the furthest corners of the state.

Sweat passes the days by reading books — currently, the “Wheel of Time” series — and listening to his radio. Between the prison’s routine 6 a.m. wakeup call and his 9 p.m. bedtime, he works out by putting his books into a bag, and lifting it “like a dumbbell.” 

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His favorite activity is interacting with wildlife through the two windows in a tiny room attached to his cell, which he referred to as a “pen.”

“There are birds and squirrels and stuff that come in here. I had a rabbit all winter. I tried to feed it carrots — it didn’t really like them, I guess because they were steamed — but it ate them anyways, because it was free food.

“I have a groundhog that should be coming back around as the weather warms up,” Sweat said, smiling.

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He laughed upon learning that Joyce Mitchell, 61, remains married to her husband, Lyle. Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie alleged in 2015 that she had plotted with Sweat and Matt to murder Lyle.

“Wow. She was ready to knock him off, and I guess he refused to believe it — but that’s a known fact. That’s crazy,” Sweat said, shaking his head.

Still, he has nothing but sympathy for Joyce Mitchell, who got out of prison in 2020.

“She lost her job and this affected her and her family,” he said. “Five years is a long time. It probably did a number on her.”