Investigators were reviewing surveillance video from a gas station near the Clinton Correctional Facility on Thursday night after the escape of two convicted killers over the weekend, Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie said in an interview with CNN. 
 
 Real-time updates from reporters at the scene 
 
 Wylie said K-9 units picked up on the scents of David Sweat, 34, and Richard Matt, 48, at the gas station and followed them east toward Cadyville. 
 
 A Subway restaurant is located at the gas station, and Wylie said he believes the pair may have been trying to find food in a trash bin. 
 
 Video: Roads closed as search intensifies 
 
 The search effort intensified in Cadyville on Thursday night as officials decided to use infrared technology to help them locate the escapees. 
 
 Cringle Road was closed to traffic Wednesday night because of the search effort. Trudeau Road and Route 374 were open. 
 
 See images of suspects 
 
 Investigators said they've also found an imprint either from a shoe or boot, as well as a food wrapper in the area, one of the two sources said. They are trying to determine if this is an area where the escapees bedded down and how long ago they were there. 
 
 Residents in Cadyville and surrounding communities were urged to stay in their homes and lock their doors. Saranac Central School shut down for the day. 
 
 New York State Police closed State Route 374 east of the village of Dannemora to West Plattsburgh as they investigate what they called a "lead involving the escapees from the Clinton Correctional Facility." 
 
 Latest on search from outside prison 
 
 Matt and Sweat escaped from the prison sometime early Saturday morning. Police sources classified the tip to the Press-Republican as their best lead by far. "We are close. This could be it," police sources said. 
 
 While the focus appears to be in Dannemora and nearby Cadyville, those aren't the only places authorities are looking. 
 
 Hundreds of officers have scoured neighboring woods, looking "behind every tree, under every rock and inside every structure" for Matt and Sweat, New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico said. 
 
 "It's a bit more unnerving," homeowner near search area says 
 
 They've searched farms, fields and woods in Willsboro after a driver saw two "suspicious" men run off during a late-night driving rainstorm. Then there was a turn toward Vermont because of "information that would suggest (that state) was discussed as a possible location," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday. Vermont state police vessels and troopers looked for the fugitives on Lake Champlain, which straddles the two states, as well as in nearby campsites. 
 
 Prison escape timeline 
 
 That said, authorities don't have any hard information that Matt and Sweat have left New York. Nor can they discount the possibility they have left the area, perhaps heading to Canada -- which is just 20 miles north of the prison -- or most anywhere in the United States or beyond. To this point, 50 digital billboards with the fugitives' photos have gone up in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. 
 
 "(Authorities) are not just staying local," Lenny DePaul, a former regional task force commander for the U.S. Marshals Service, told CNN on Thursday. "(People should) not think that they're cornered somewhere in New York. So they have to keep their eyes open and be vigilant." ||||| In summer 1903, a former bank burglar serving a life sentence removed the last bit of earth from a tunnel that had taken him four years to complete and escaped with three other inmates under the walls of Clinton prison in far northern New York State. Almost three decades later, it was a diminutive prisoner that some newspapers called the “midget bandit” who fled the prison in a similar way. 
 
 Each broke out by digging into the sewer system underneath what is now called the Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, much as two convicted murderers did when they cut and shimmied their way to freedom last weekend. Over the years, other inmates have tried different methods, scaling gates, donning disguises or simply walking away when guards were not looking. 
 
 Since Clinton opened in 1845, dozens of inmates have escaped over, under or through the prison’s thick walls, their exploits detailed in breathless, often sensationalistic, newspaper reports of earlier eras. 
 
 Among the earliest escapes from Clinton occurred in 1860, when James F. Whiting, known as “The Gay Deceiver,” donned a suit of civilian clothes and walked out, according to an article in The New York Times. He was arrested a year later for defrauding a Philadelphia jeweler of $670. When he was having his police photo taken, the report said, a detective recognized him as an escaped convict. 
 
 Inmates at Clinton can be locked away for years, for decades, sometimes their whole lives in a prison that is among the oldest and most remote in the state. They are battered by extremes of heat and cold and worn down by boredom. For many, the idea of escape can offer a semblance of hope. 
 
 “Escape. Making a beat. That was all I thought of,” John Resko, an inmate at Clinton in the 1920s and ’30s, wrote in “Reprieve,” his best-selling memoir. “That was all any of the cons thought of, spoke of, dreamed of. 
 
 “Escape to the man in prison presents a soluble problem. He is interested solely in transferring his physical self from one side of the wall to its other side. He wants to escape to his home, his family, and he devotes all his time and all his energies to attaining that goal.” 
 
 Luis Garrastegue, who was incarcerated at Clinton in the 1980s and ’90s for a robbery conviction, said he had talked about escape with other inmates “all the time.” 
 
 “We talked about how tall the wall was,” he said. “Whether we could climb the wall.” He said there was a hollow noise when he banged on the walls and that he could hear officers moving through walkways behind the cells, another possible escape route. 
 
 In the end, Mr. Garrastegue, 47, decided to just do his time. He was released from another prison in 2003 and now works at the Fortune Society, an advocacy group that helps former inmates. 
 
 The escape in 1903 by Peter James, the former bank burglar, was perhaps the most meticulous in the prison’s history. Mr. James had killed a man in a robbery several years earlier. An account of the escape in New York City’s Police Gazette described him toiling for four years in a prison cellar, where he had a job maintaining an engine used by the tin shop. For a few minutes each day, the report said, he chipped away at mortar and stone with pieces of smuggled tin, wearing a pair of homemade overalls over his prison uniform to protect it from the telltale dirt. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 In the later stages, when he was digging deep underground, other inmates used a bell at the end of a piece of twine to alert him to the guards’ movements. 
 
 Mr. James eventually dug a tunnel that extended 20 feet and connected to the sewer system. On an appointed day, he and three other inmates gathered food, water and clothing that they had been collecting, crawled into the tunnel, then into the sewer and out a manhole in a field near the prison. 
 
 Doing all this undetected was no easy feat. As The Police Gazette wrote: “The discipline at Clinton is iron. It is never relaxed.” 
 
 The men, though, were not free for long. They were captured five days later, within four miles of the Canadian border. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Jeff Hall, a history professor at Queensborough Community College, said Clinton’s history of escapes was fairly ordinary among state prisons. “Escapes aren’t common, but they’re not uncommon,” said Professor Hall, whose doctoral dissertation was about prisons in the North Country region of New York, where Clinton is. He said that, typically, the prisoners were not found by police activity like helicopter flyovers, roadblocks or bloodhounds. 
 
 Instead, he said, “it’s usually the public spotting someone unfamiliar.” 
 
 Professor Hall said the first recorded escape at Clinton occurred just weeks after the prison opened. 
 
 He said two inmates, who had been convicted of burglary, ate their lunches and then jumped the stockade wall. They fled into the woods, running north toward Canada. Unfortunately for them, he said, they became disoriented and wound up back within 800 feet of the prison. Within two days they were both captured. 
 
 But the warden at the time was a reformer, and told them that if they did not misbehave, he would not punish them. 
 
 “That reform impulse didn’t last long,” Professor Hall said. 
 
 Within a decade, a new warden had dug a dungeon for putting inmates into solitary confinement. The guards would strap prisoners to a chair, and pour water over their faces to simulate drowning, Professor Hall said. “Basically, it was waterboarding,” he said. 
 
 Few escapees, it seems, eluded capture forever. An exception perhaps was John Filkins, who escaped on Sept. 15, 1874, by dressing in civilian clothes and walking out the prison’s main gate, according to The Times. 
 
 A year later, a skeleton that was found in a sewer under Clinton was rumored to be his, but the authorities dismissed the idea. Other rumors put him north of the border. The Albany Times on July 12, 1875, reported that “a certain gentleman will take his oath that he saw and conversed with Filkins in Canada.” ||||| The last man to escape from a New York prison is rooting for the two murderers who broke out of an upstate penitentiary. 
 
 "I hope they stay out of sight and don't commit any new crimes," Timothy Vail, 47, told the Daily News inside Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill. 
 
 "When you commit crimes, the cops are all over you. That's the mistake we made." 
 
 In a remarkably candid 90-minute interview, Vail described in detail his botched bid for freedom and expressed admiration for escapees Richard Matt and David Sweat. 
 
 Vail said he believes the pair can elude the police indefinitely if they remain "patient" and can "outlast all the news coverage." 
 
 EX-HUSBAND: SUSPECTED ACCOMPLICE IN PRISON BREAK IS CHEATER 
 
 But the biggest enemy is your own mind, he said. 
 
 "You're in a cell 24/7 but the minute you get out, you can't stay still," said Vail, speaking behind plexiglass and wearing a forest green uniform and black-rimmed glasses. 
 
 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Vermont Governor Peter Shumlinduring a news conference in front of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. (Seth Wenig/AP) 
 
 "The adrenaline is unbelievable." 
 
 Vail has been closely following the case on NPR and suggested Matt and Sweat used techniques they learned from him. "There are so many similarities," said Vail, who was serving 49 years to life for the 1988 rape and murder of a pregnant secretary in Binghamton. 
 
 "I wonder if they saw that show about us on Nat Geo." 
 
 Vail and fellow inmate Timothy Morgan were captured two days after their July 2003 escape from Elmira Correctional Facility. 
 
 They had spent four months chipping away at the steel-reinforced concrete ceiling using screws, a sledgehammer and other tools they smuggled out of a prison carpentry shop. 
 
 HOW IT HAPPENED: EXCLUSIVE DETAILS ON NY PRISON ESCAPE ROUTE 
 
 They concealed the hole with a piece of cardboard painted black and stuck to the ceiling with toothpaste. On the night of their escape, they left behind life-like dummies in their beds. 
 
 Timothy Vail, one of two inmates who took part in the last prison escape in New York, in 2003. Vail and Timothy Morgan busted out of Elmira Correctional Facility and were captured two days later. Vail is now incarcerated in Shawangunk Correctional Facility. One of two dummies used by Elmira prison inmates Timothy Vail and Timothy Morgan as viewed through the hole in the ceiling the two convicted murderers dug out then climbed through to escape on July 7, 2003. (HO/AP) A rope made of bed sheets tied together hangs down a wall of the Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, N.Y (JEFF RICHARDS/AP) Vail fell and fractured his shoulder while shimmying down the prison wall. (JEFF RICHARDS/AP) 
 
 An "associate" had stashed a bag full of "survival gear" in the woods a fair distance from the prison, Vail said. 
 
 But the painstakingly planned escape went awry when Vail fell while shimmying down the prison walls using sheets tied together. 
 
 He fractured his shoulder and ankle. They spent a day hiding out in the woods surrounding the prison. "We should have just stayed there," Vail said. 
 
 But with Vail injured, the pair decided to tempt fate and head into a town five miles north of the prison. 
 
 They were caught after Morgan stole a van. 
 
 Vail regrets the escape try — he was hit with an additional sentence of 3 ½ to seven years and has been stuck in solitary ever since. 
 
 But he believes it easily could have turned out differently. "If I didn't get hurt, I would've never been seen again," Vail said.
– After expanding the search to Vermont, authorities hunting escaped prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat have descended on a village just a few miles from the prison. Police have closed a stretch of State Route 374 and ordered residents of Cadyville, NY, to stay inside and keep their exterior lights on, residents tell WPTZ. In other developments: Timothy Vail was the last man to escape from a New York prison, according to the New York Daily News, and he says he hopes Matt and Sweat can avoid capture. He tells the Daily News that he hopes they "stay out of sight and don't commit any new crimes." Vail, who raped and murdered a pregnant woman in 1988, injured himself while escaping from the Elmira Correctional Facility in 2003 and was recaptured within two days after he and a fellow fugitive stole a van. Police officers who've dealt with Matt say he is the most evil criminal they've encountered, and he was trouble from a very early age, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports. The former chief of police in North Tonawanda, near where Matt grew up, says he's around the same age as the 48-year-old and that long before Matt's first arrest, he had a "fearsome" reputation and was known for terrorizing other kids on the school bus. An officer in Tonawanda tells the paper that in 1986—11 years before his arrest for a gruesome local murder—Matt broke out of a correctional facility and was recaptured a few days later. Early reports described the pair as among the first to escape in the Clinton Correctional Facility's long history, but dozens of men have made it out in various ways since the forbidding Dannemora, NY, institution opened in 1845, the New York Times reports. In 1860, a fraudster known as the "Gay Deceiver" put on civilian clothes, strolled out the gate, and wasn't recaptured for a year. A history professor tells the Times that the first escapes happened just weeks after the prison opened. The reform-minded warden decided not to punish the two men after they were recaptured, the professor says, but it wasn't long before a new warden installed a dungeon for solitary confinement, where punishments included waterboarding.