Hickock’s Homemade Shiv

Dick’s homemade shiv was a crude weapon built in secret from a dismantled toilet brush while he awaited trial in the county jail. Intended as part of an escape plan—and honed to serve against Undersheriff Wendle Meier—it turned Dick’s outwardly casual confinement into a concealed preparation for violence. Its discovery under his mattress on March 10 made that danger visible to the jail and to Perry.

Construction and Concealment

The weapon’s materials were a piece of wood and a length of hard wire, both originally parts of a toilet brush Dick had confiscated and taken apart. He hid the pieces beneath his mattress and worked on the wire over a period of weeks, sharpening it against the concrete floor of his cell. The finished weapon was described as resembling an icepick, with a point fine enough to fit between a person’s shoulder blades.

The work depended on secrecy and time. Dick honed the wire late at night, when the jail was quiet apart from prisoners’ snores and coughs and the whistle of Santa Fe trains passing through the dark town. An unshaded bulb burned continuously in his cell. Its monotonous light disturbed his sleep, but it also threatened the privacy his project required: the cell’s ordinary furnishings and routines had become conditions he had to work around.

Intended Use

The shiv was the first requirement in Dick’s plan to escape. Certain that a Kansas trial would end with his execution, he resolved to break out, take a car, and flee. The weapon was not merely a means of self-defense: Dick shaped it with Undersheriff Wendle Meier in mind, giving the escape plan a specific potential target inside the jail.

Dick’s intended destination drew on an earlier experience. During his first winter after high school, he had hitchhiked through Kansas and Colorado, been beaten and left in the Rockies, and broken into an empty summer cabin. There he found firewood, canned goods, whiskey, smoked hams, a radio, and a rifle; he later recalled the week in the cabin as one of the best times he had known. If he escaped, he planned to return to the Colorado mountains and hide in a cabin until spring. The prospect of repeating that solitary refuge lent purpose to the patient sharpening of the wire. Perry’s future was not part of the plan.

Discovery and Consequences

On Thursday, March 10, the sheriff searched the cells and found the shiv beneath Dick’s mattress. The brief account records the discovery but does not describe a confrontation or any use of the weapon. Its presence alone, however, revealed that Dick’s apparent resignation did not match his intentions: behind the sociable prisoner who smoked, chewed gum, read, and whistled, he had been preparing to escape and had made a weapon for that purpose.

The discovery mattered to Perry for a different reason. He did not treat the find as amusing, because Dick’s possession of a dangerous weapon could have affected plans Perry was forming for himself. The shiv therefore registered not only as a threat to jail personnel but also as a possible force in the changing calculations of two imprisoned men. The account does not say that Perry helped make it or that Dick shared his escape plans with him.

Narrative Significance

The shiv is an ordinary object violently redirected: a toilet brush supplies the materials, a concrete floor becomes a sharpening surface, and a mattress hides the result. Its makeshift construction gives Dick’s escape scheme a material form, while the weeks of quiet work contrast with his easygoing public manner. The jail’s constant light and nighttime sounds sharpen that contrast: the weapon is being made in plain confinement, yet kept out of sight.

For Perry, the discovery resonates with his observation of two gray tomcats searching car grilles for dead birds. He recognized their repetitive scavenging as an equivalent of what he himself had done for much of his life. In that context, Dick’s hidden weapon is another sign of how survival and escape can narrow into a repeated, hazardous routine. The narrative leaves its practical outcome at the point of discovery; its significance lies in what it exposes about Dick’s intentions and the uncertainty his secret preparation introduces into Perry’s own plans.