NEWS

Richard Matt's troubles began early in life

Eric DuVall
This March 17, 2008, photo shows Richard Matt being led by officers into Niagara County Court in Lockport, where he was being tried in the grisly death of William Rickerson, his former boss. After being found guilty, he was incarcerated in Clinton Correctional Facility; he and fellow inmate David Sweat escaped the prison this past weekend.

BUFFALO – If his seemingly miraculous escape from a maximum security New York prison is drawing comparisons to the film The Shawshank Redemption, the crime that landed Richard Matt behind bars is anything but redemptive.

In fact, it goes down in Niagara County lore as one of the most gruesome murders in the history of the Niagara Frontier. Area residents who were associated with the case remember the perpetrator as a disturbed child who turned into a violent young man and eventually someone so unnerving it prompted one veteran cop to liken him to Charles Manson.

Matt's life of crime has been the stuff of local legend for nearly two decades, but his escape from Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6 with cohort David Sweat elevated him to the international level.

His story ended Friday after he was shot and killed by police near Malone, Franklin County.

Years before his name and mugshot would be seen on the front pages of newspapers across the country, sparking what could become a manhunt in at least three countries, Richard Matt was an adopted child of foster parents in the small city of Tonawanda, north of Buffalo in Erie County.

He would come to be known to Tonawanda police as Ricky Matt, arrested eight times in the late 1980s and early 1990s for crimes ranging from misdemeanor harassment to felony assault and weapons possession.

Tonawanda police Capt. Frederic Foels, who was a patrolman when Matt first became known locally as the kind of guy you didn't want to hang around with, said Matt was a small-time thug.

"One time he beat up a girl pretty bad. He got charged for assault (in the second degree), that's a felony," Foels said. "... But the things he was charged with later in life, wow.

"We always knew him as Ricky: 'Ricky Matt did this, Ricky Matt did that.' We were very well familiar with him at the time in the late '80s."

And Saturday's daring prison escape wasn't Matt's first. Foels recalled that Matt broke out of the Alden Correctional Facility in Erie County in 1986 after one of his many arrests, only to be recaptured at his brother's home in Tonawanda a few days later.

Even before he first found himself in handcuffs, Matt was a trouble-maker, said Randy Szukala, who was a lieutenant on the North Tonawanda, Niagara County, force in 1997 when Matt killed his former boss, William Rickerson.

Matt and Szukala are close in age. The two Tonawandas are close as well, separated by the Erie Canal and bound together by far more than name. Youths in what are known locally as the Twin Cities are often friends, and Szukala, who would later retire as North Tonawanda's chief of police, said that even as a child, Matt's reputation was fearsome.

"He would terrorize kids on the (school) bus," Szukala said. "Friends of mine knew him. He would just terrorize people. Even in elementary, junior high, he had issues."

But it wasn't until body parts began washing up on the shore of Tonawanda Island, a small, mostly industrial spot just off the shore of North Tonawanda in the Niagara River, that it started to become clear just how twisted Matt really was.

Blood, no body

The investigation into the incident that would eventually land Matt in prison for 25 years to life began as a missing person report, Szukala said.

Rickerson was a North Tonawanda food wholesaler who had gone missing from his home. Only after a fisherman made a grisly discovery — part of a dismembered body washed up on shore in December 1997, several days after Rickerson disappeared — did police begin to piece together the harrowing end to the 76-year-old's life.

"It was kind of a strange one," Szukala recalled of the Rickerson case. "It was a missing person at first. Then we looked through the house, found some evidence. There was blood in the house but no body."

The full scope of the horrific crime would eventually find its telling in a Niagara County courtroom in 2008, when Matt's accomplice, Lee Bates, testified against him.

Bates, who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for his testimony and who was released from state prison last year, testified that Matt coerced him into robbing Rickerson, Matt's former employer. Bates testified Matt had become convinced Rickerson was sitting on a large stash of money hidden somewhere and the two accosted him inside his home.

What started as a hold-up quickly turned into a kidnapping and Rickerson's torture for more than 24 hours as Matt and Bates drove Rickerson around, bound and gagged in the trunk of Bates' car to Ohio and back, periodically beating him and demanding to know where he'd hidden his money.

Police now believe Matt's theory about the money was unsubstantiated.

Eventually, Bates said, the pair returned to western New York when Matt said he'd had enough. He reached into the trunk and snapped Rickerson's neck. The pair dumped the body on a secluded part of Tonawanda Island in the middle of December, leaving it until Matt returned later.

When he came back, he carried a hacksaw, chopped the limbs off Rickerson's lifeless body and tossed the parts into the river.

A heavily armed law enforcement officer patrols the edge of road during a search for two escaped killers in Boquet, N.Y., Tuesday, June 9, 2015.

Mexican prison to U.S. court

Just as the police investigation began pointing toward Matt as the prime suspect, he fled western New York and traveled first to Texas, then across the Rio Grande to Mexico. That would not, however, be the end of Matt's trouble with the law.

While in Mexico, Matt got into a fight with another American outside a bar during an attempted robbery, stabbing the man to death. Matt was never tried in the Mexican court system for that case but was jailed nonetheless.

The Mexican government shipped Matt back to the United States without explanation in 2007. Veteran court reporter Rick Pfeiffer covered Matt's ensuing trial for the now-defunct Tonawanda News and recalled the shock when Matt resurfaced on U.S. soil.

"The United States had worked out a deal with the Mexican government to extradite a drug cartel kingpin. He was being flown back to Texas and … this second guy gets off the plane. It took federal marshals almost a day to figure out who the guy was," Pfeiffer said. "It was Richard Matt."

His time in a Mexican jail turned out to be the foreshadowing of what the New York state Department of Corrections is dealing with now.

"There had been no discussion with the American government about extradition," Pfeiffer said. "He had just been such a difficult prisoner — if you can imagine a guy who seemed too difficult to stay in a Mexican prison."

After Bates' damning testimony and the gruesome physical evidence processed in 1997, it took a jury just a few hours to convict Matt. Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon said at sentencing that her judgment to give Matt the maximum 25 years-to-life sentence was "frankly … not a difficult decision."

He was subsequently shuttled off to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, near Plattsburgh, where he remained until this past weekend.

When Szukala, the retired police chief, heard the news over the weekend he was shocked — but not surprised — Matt could pull off another stunning crime.

"Looking at his mugshot in the paper, he's just got that look. He's looking through the camera," Szukala said. "It's like looking at a photo of Charles Manson. Same thing? Probably."

DuVall is a Buffalo-area freelance writer. He was managing editor of the now-closed Tonawanda News in North Tonawanda, Niagara County. Follow him on Twitter at @EricRDuVall.


Richard Matt timeline

• 1985-1991: Richard Matt is arrested by Tonawanda, Erie County, police eight times for charges ranging from misdemeanor harassment to felony assault and weapons possession.

• Dec. 5, 1997: Businessman William Rickerson goes missing, police open a missing person case that quickly turns into a homicide investigation as body parts wash ashore.

• February 1998: Police officially charge Matt with second-degree murder in the death of Rickerson, Matt's former employer.

• Jan. 5, 2007: Federal authorities pick up Matt, returned to the United States from Mexico, where he had been imprisoned on suspicion of an unrelated killing.

• March 2008: Matt is convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Rickerson.

• June 2008: Matt is transferred from Niagara County Jail after sentencing to Elmira Correctional Facility. Shortly afterward, he is placed in Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, Clinton County.

• June 6, 2015: Matt and cohort David Sweat escape Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison.

• June 26, 2015: Matt is slain about 3:45 p.m in a wooded area of Malone, about 30 miles west of the Clinton Correctional Facility. He was armed with a .20-gauge shotgun and was shot by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer after he refused to put his hands up, state police said.

Video: Son of escaped killer: 'He's not coming here'