Hickock makes a weapon and plots an escape

Dick’s apparent ease in jail concealed a determined escape plan: fearing that a Kansas trial would end in execution, he secretly made a weapon and prepared to flee. The plan joined a lethal tool to a remembered refuge in the Colorado mountains, but a search of his cell exposed the weapon before the escape could begin.

The prisoner’s outward calm

Dick’s cell had no window and faced a broad corridor lined with other cells. He was not isolated: inmates came and went, and his light-hearted patter, sexual anecdotes, and jokes made him popular with many of them. An old prisoner, however, hissed “Killer! Killer!” at him and once drenched him with dirty scrubwater.

To other inmates Dick seemed unusually untroubled. He socialized or slept, read sports magazines and paperback thrillers, chewed gum, smoked, and sometimes whistled old songs while lying on his cot. But the unshaded bulb burning day and night disturbed his sleep and, more seriously, threatened the secrecy of his private project. He did not regard himself as resigned to the outcome of the case: convinced that a trial, especially one in Kansas, would lead to execution, he resolved to break out, take a car, and flee.

Making the shiv

Before he could escape, Dick believed he needed a weapon. Over several weeks he assembled a shiv, an icepick-like blade intended to fit between the shoulder blades of Undersheriff Wendle Meier. Its materials came from a toilet brush he had confiscated and dismantled: a piece of wood and a length of hard wire, concealed beneath his mattress.

He worked late at night, when the cellblock’s snores and coughs mingled with the whistle of Santa Fe trains passing through town. Using the concrete floor to hone the wire, he gradually filed it to a fine, flexible point. The labor and the planning were intertwined: while sharpening the hidden blade, he also considered what he would do if the escape succeeded.

A remembered refuge

Dick’s intended destination came from an earlier episode in his life. During the first winter after high school, while hitchhiking across Kansas and Colorado in search of work, he argued with a truck driver, who beat him and left him high in the Rockies. In sleet, with his nose bleeding, Dick walked until he found a group of locked, empty summer cabins.

He broke into one and stayed there for more than a week. The cabins provided firewood, canned goods, whiskey, and, in others, smoked hams, a radio, and a rifle. He remembered hunting in the sun, eating beans and fried ham, and sleeping by a fire with music from the radio. That enforced solitude had become, in recollection, an unusually happy interval. If he got out of jail, he meant to return to the mountains and hide in a cabin until spring. The imagined refuge was for him alone; Perry’s fate did not enter into his plan.

Discovery and significance

On Thursday, March 10, a sheriff searched the cells and found the shiv beneath Dick’s mattress. The discovery interrupted the weapon-making scheme at its most concrete point: the concealed parts had been turned into a sharpened blade, but it had not yet served its intended purpose. A contemporary diary entry recorded the find and wondered what Dick had intended, adding a smile.

The episode exposes the difference between Dick’s sociable jailhouse manner and his private calculations. His escape design was not an abstract wish to be free: it depended on a hidden weapon, a stolen car, and a particular landscape he had once experienced as shelter. The jail search brought that carefully concealed design into view before it could become an escape.