Matt’s legal aid lawyer, Matthew P Pynn, once told a court: “I can’t explain it. I can see him as a guy who would have a lot of friends ... Rick Matt was a fun but dangerous guy to hang around with.”
Revelations today by a Clinton Correctional supervisor that Matt was nicknamed “Hacksaw” by fellow inmates and was a highly gifted artist with a soft spot for Oprah will do nothing to diminish his cult of personality.
But as the police manhunt for Matt and convicted killer and prison escapee, David Sweat, 35, prepares to enter a fourth day, Matt’s family, ex-lovers and those who have testified against him are now living in fear that he will seek them out in a bid for either refuge or revenge.
The only person seemingly unafraid of this monster is his son Nick Harris, who shared memories of his father with New York’s Buffalo News and supplied an incredible photograph of Matt holding him as a baby during a jailhouse visit.
The 23-year-old, who has taken time out of university to look after his disabled mother Vee Harris — Matt’s childhood sweetheart and ex-wife — said he believes his fugitive father would not harm him.
“My father has always wanted to have a relationship with me,” he said.
This is despite recounting the horror that unfolded the last time Matt visited the family home.
“My father broke into my mother’s house in Tonawanda (New York) and beat her,” Harris said. “I was an infant when it happened.” The News verified that story with police.
Harris said his father, too, was subject to early trauma at the hands of a deadbeat father and ultimately ended up a ward of the state.
“He was left as an infant in a car. Everybody is born innocent, but he was raised around crime. Then he went into foster care,” he said.
An unnamed police source, who arrested Matt’s father in the Broadway-Fillmore neighbourhood on multiple occasions, remembered him as “a piece of garbage”.
Harris said he couldn’t understand why prison authorities hadn’t kept a closer eye on his father, given he had escaped jail on two previous occasions.
In 1986, Matt broke out of New York’s Erie County Correctional Facility, where he was serving time for rape. He scaled a wall and gate topped with razor wire that slashed his forearms and remained on the loose for five days before he was caught at a family apartment in Tonawanda, New York.
In 1997, Matt kidnapped and murdered his 76-year-old former boss William Rickerson before chopping his body to pieces. He then stole a van belonging to his half-brother Wayne Schimpf, dumping it in 1997. After killing Rickerson, Matt had stolen his half brother’s van, dumping it in Texas before legging it over the border to the town of Montomoros, where he was arrested after a fatal bar stabbing.
He tried to break out of a Mexican prison, making his way to the roof before being shot by a guard.
“This guy has bullet holes on his body. He’s been shot like nine times. It’s like they can’t kill him,” Harris said.
“He showed me the scars on his forearms from another time he escaped.”
It would take a decade for him to be extradited to New York to face trial for the kidnap and murder of Rickerson. A police sniper was posted outside the courthouse and Matt was forced to wear an electric stun belt. He was sentenced to 25 years to life.
During the trial, Schimpf testified that in January 1998, Matt told him he was in trouble “that he thought he might have killed Mr. Rickerson on accident”.
“He said they hacked him up. I remember when he showed me the article, I just kind of looked at him like, ‘Are you for real?’” he told the court.
“And I just says — I mean, I couldn’t believe that he did it. I says, ‘How did you do it? How did you hack him up, with a chainsaw or something?’
“He turned and looked at me, and with a grin that I won’t forget, he said, ‘With a hacksaw’.
“This whole time I’m still thinking he’s full of crap, he’s just trying to sound big. You know, I really didn’t want to believe it.
“I remember his words: ‘I can do another seven years, but I can’t do life.’”
When Schimpf refused to let Matt use his car to get out of town, Matt warned, “You’re my brother, you’re my blood. I love you but I’ll kill you.”
The Clinton escape, the first in the prison’s 170-year history, involved cutting through steel walls at the back of their adjoining cells, crawling through a steam pipe and emerging from a manhole in a residential community. They left behind a note saying, “Have a nice day”.
Two residents said they spotted the fugitives in their back yard at 12.30am on Saturday, ABC News reported. They were holding what appeared to be a guitar case, which reportedly was kept in one inmate’s cell and may have been used to hide tools used in the escape.
“We’re just lost. We don’t know where we are. We’re on the wrong street,” the resident told ABC News the men responded when confronted.
That encounter occurred about five hours before guards realised the pair was gone.
Police are investigating a female prison worker’s possible connection to their elaborate bust. Joyce Mitchell, 51, an industrial-training supervisor who has worked at Clinton Correctional since 2008 and lives an hour from the facility.
Earlier today there were reports police had cornered the pair in a town about 40km north of New York where they were believed to have stolen a gun from a local residence. They have since speculated that Matt, at least, may have fled to Mexico, where he still has many contacts.
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