Joyce Mitchell, the New York prison worker being questioned in the escape of two murderers, was charmed by one of the inmates and planned to be their getaway driver until she got cold feet, sources familiar with the case told NBC News. 
 
 One of the inmates, Richard Matt, established a relationship with Mitchell over a couple of months, the sources said. 
 
 “She thought it was love,” one said. 
 
 Instead of being the getaway driver, Mitchell went to the hospital and checked herself in, the sources said. As NBC News has previously reported, Mitchell checked in on Saturday, the day the inmates were reported missing, with “a case of nerves.” 
 
 Authorities in New York, Vermont and elsewhere were still searching on Thursday for Matt and David Sweat, who cut through the steel walls of their cells, crawled through a pipe and emerged from a manhole near the prison. 
 
 Richard Matt, 48, escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. Uncredited / AP 
 
 Two sources told NBC News that Mitchell will be charged, although the exact charges were not immediately known. 
 
 Mitchell works in the tailor shop at the prison, Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. On Wednesday, the superintendent of the New York state police said that she had “befriended” the inmates. 
 
 Her son, Tobey, told NBC News exclusively on Tuesday that his mother never would have helped the two escape. 
 
 “She is not the kind of person that's going to risk her life or other people's lives to let these guys escape from prison,” he said. 
 
 Asked whether his mother might have been taken advantage of, he said: “I don't know. I mean, they both are convicted murderers. I mean, you have an inmate that is in prison for life, you really don't have anything to lose.” 
 
 Former inmates at Clinton told NBC News they were shocked that such a relationship could develop. Over time, prison workers can become friendly with inmates — offering a spare cigarette, say — but most keep a cool distance, they said. 
 
 As the hunt entered its sixth day on Thursday, a state road near the prison was closed, and at least one helicopter hovered nearby. Authorities warned a day earlier that the escapees might have headed for Vermont, and Canadian authorities were expanding their search. 
 
 Matt, 48, was doing 25 years to life for killing a businessman for whom he had worked. Sweat, 34, was sentenced to life without parole for the 2002 killing of a sheriff’s deputy. 
 
 The suggestion that Mitchell might have helped the men escape calls to mind a case from Oklahoma: Bobbi Parker, a prison warden’s wife, was found guilty of helping a convicted killer escape in 1994. 
 
 Prosecutors said Parker fell in love with the killer, Randolph Franklin Dial, while they worked together in a prison pottery program. They were found living together on a Texas chicken farm in 2005. Parker served six months in prison. Dial died in prison in 2007. ||||| As they chipped away at a wall inside a tunnel of the Clinton Correctional Facility last spring, David Sweat and Richard Matt had the Hollywood movie "The Shawshank Redemption" on their minds. 
 
 The film tells the story of convicted murderer Andy Dufresne, who spends nearly two decades using a rock hammer to dig a tunnel out of his cell. The parallels were not lost on Sweat and Matt, who were trying to make their own escape. 
 
 State police are looking for 48-year-old Richard Matt, left, and 34-year-old David Sweat after troopers say they escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility. New York State Police 
 
 "We were laughing and joking about how Andy did it in 20 years. I think we might be able to do it in 10," Sweat later told investigators. 
 
 Weeks later, Sweat and Matt were on the lam in one of the nation's most brazen breakouts. They spent three weeks running in upstate New York before Matt was killed and Sweat was wounded and captured. 
 
 Now, almost a year later, New York's inspector general has released a scathing report full of new details about Matt and Sweat's plot and the systemic security failures that allowed them to succeed. 
 
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 "The escape occurred in a prison where lapses in basic security functions were longstanding," the 150-page report concludes. 
 
 "These included the failure by officers assigned to the front gate to search employees’ bags entering the prison; night counts of inmates that were conducted negligently or not at all; inadequate cell searches; and poor supervision of inmates and employees by security staff and civilian managers in the tailor shop, among others." 
 
 The Corrections Department says it has already increased security at the prison and will work with the Inspector General's Office to implement he recommendations in the report. 
 
 To compile the report, investigators obtained sworn testimony from Sweat, who spent 85 nights cutting an escape path in the system of catwalks and tunnels behind cell walls, using tools smuggled in by prison seamstress Joyce Mitchell. Matt, he said, joined him in the tunnels for two nights of work before they finally made a break for it on June 5. 
 
 Stealing into the tunnels after 11 p.m. guard checks, they left dummies in their beds — and notes for prison staff. 
 
 "You left me no choice but to grow old & die in here. I had to do something,” Matt scrawled on a notepad, according to the report. On a painting he made of fictional mob boss Tony Soprano, he wrote, “Time to Go Kid!” with the date “6-5-15.” Sweat put up messages in the tunnel, meant for their pursuers. One was an image of an extraterrestrial with the note, “Are You Trying Me Punk?” 
 
 Notes left behind by David Sweat and Richard Matt when they escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility on June 5, 2015. NY State Police 
 
 Correction officers didn't discover they were gone until after 5 a.m. Officer Ronald Blair described the moment he spotted the two darkened cells, shook the beds, and then pulled off the sheets to see the dummies instead of the prisoners. 
 
 "I almost threw up," Blair said, according to the report. 
 
 Sweat told authorities that when he and Matt clambered out of the tunnel through a manhole just after midnight, he felt a sense of triumph that once again reminded him of a certain movie. 
 
 "Shawshank ain't got s--- on me," he said. ||||| Play Facebook 
 
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 Only about 20 law enforcement officers continued to scour the small upstate New York town of Willsboro on Tuesday night after a massive search failed to turn up Richard Matt and David Sweat, the convicted murderers who busted out of a maximum-security prison over the weekend with power tools. 
 
 At the height of the search, scores of FBI agents, state troopers, forest rangers, sheriff's deputies, K-9 units and state Corrections Department agents, supported by a helicopter, responded along Middle Road in Willsboro. 
 
 Law enforcement officials told NBC News the swarm descended on the town after they got a specific tip from the Willsboro area, which is across Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont, and about 40 miles southeast of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, from which the men escaped overnight Friday. 
 
 By late Tuesday, most of them had left empty-handed. NBC station WPTZ of Plattsburgh, New York, reported Tuesday night that the focus of the search had returned to Dannemora. 
 
 Please lock house and car doors tonight. Avoid walking around town if possible. There will be increased police patrols tonight. — Town of Willsboro (@TownofWillsboro) June 9, 2015 
 
 More than 250 local, state and federal officials have pursued hundreds of leads in the search for Matt and Sweat. They busted out by cutting holes in the steel backs of their cells, seemingly with power tools, and climbing through pipes and tunnels until they reached and broke open a manhole cover a block away. 
 
 Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said all of the prison's tools were accounted for after the escape, presenting the question of where the men got the equipment they needed to cut through steel. 
 
 "They definitely had help," Cuomo said Monday. "Otherwise, they couldn't have done this on their own, even from the equipment point of view." 
 
 RELATED: Richard Matt and David Sweat, Convicted Murderers Who Escaped Prison, Have Grisly Past 
 
 Tobey Mitchell, the son of Joyce Mitchell, a Clinton Correctional Facility employee, confirmed that state police were questioning his mother in connection with the brazen escape. But he said Joyce Mitchell — who authorities said checked herself into a hospital Saturday — would have never played a part in helping the prisoners break free. 
 
 "She's not going to risk her life or other people's lives to help these guys escape," he 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.