If you were writing a movie plot, they would say that this was overdone

After a civilian prison employee, Joyce E. Mitchell, failed to meet them in her car, the two men, who displayed cunning inside the prison walls, were forced to run on foot over tough terrain. They found shelter in empty hunting cabins, but left telltale clues of their presence that helped a vast array of agencies — from the State Police to the United States Marshals to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to state Forest Rangers — home in on them over the last week.

It was not clear whether the men remained together the whole time, but they appeared to have been together recently enough that a discarded pepper shaker bearing Mr. Sweat’s DNA was found by investigators over the weekend near the spot where Mr. Matt was killed on Friday.

Mr. D’Amico, of the State Police, said the men possibly used the pepper to throw off the scent of the search dogs, a ruse employed in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke.”
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Sgt. Jay Cook

“We did have difficulty tracking, so it was fairly effective in that respect,” he said.

“If you were writing a movie plot, they would say that this was overdone,” Mr. Cuomo said, speaking at a ski resort in Malone that has doubled as a command center.
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