Three reasons cops aren’t taking any chances with escaped killer Richard Matt

Here are three things to know about escaped killer Richard Matt.

1. “He has a way with the ladies.”

During his 2008 trial for the murder of his former employer, a stripper ex-girlfriend testified that Matt killed the man by breaking his neck with his bare hands, but he claimed it was an accident. He was convicted and was serving 25 years to life when he escaped. Now, authorities are probing a possible connection between Matt and a female prisoner where he escaped, Joyce Mitchell, 51. A retired detective who also testified in his 2008 trial said: "When [Matt's] cleaned up, he's very handsome … He gets girlfriends any place he goes."

During a Monday morning television interview New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he doesn't think the men were acting alone.

“I think they had help,” he said.

2. He’s cold-blooded.

Matt once showed his half-brother a newspaper clipping about the murder of his former boss, William L. Rickerson, in which the body was described as having been dismembered. When the brother, Wayne Schimpf, asked him if he did it, Matt “grinned.” “He said they hacked him up,” Schimpf said. “I remember when he showed me the article, I just kind of looked at him like, ‘Are you for real?’” When Schimpf refused to let Matt borrow his car, Matt reportedly said, “You’re my brother, you’re my blood. I love you but I’ll kill you.”

A New York Times story on the escape quoted the lead detective from the murder case, Gabriel DiBernardo: "He is the most vicious, evil person I've ever come across in 38 years as a police officer."

3. He’s escaped and eluded law enforcement before – more than once.

Matt is known to be extremely intelligent and especially immune to physical pain. He is also known to escape. When Matt was about 14, he apparently escaped from a juvenile home, stealing a horse to do it. In 1986, he escaped from jail in Erie County, and about a decade later fled to Mexico and killed an American at a bar.

During his trial for murder in 2008, authorities took no chances, assembling more than twice the normal security forces, keeping a sniper trained on him, and removing the glass from his courtroom table for fear he’d break the glass and fashion a weapon from it.

He is now the subject of the biggest manhunt in the nation after he staged a Shawshank Redemption-like escape, using power tools, dummies and shimmying through a steam pipe to flee undetected. Jailers only realized the two were gone on Sunday morning when they noticed them missing in the morning head count.