Dick and Perry’s status as fugitives

Dick and Perry’s status as fugitives is defined by movement without a viable destination: they flee Kansas, find that Mexico cannot sustain them, and return to the United States with little money and renewed plans for crime. Their escape exposes a sharp difference between them. Perry treats the departure as a clean break and clings to personal possessions; Dick leaves behind family he expects never to see again. Meanwhile, investigators have reasons to suspect them but fear that suspicion alone will not secure a conviction.

Departure and Unequal Attachments

On Saturday night, November 21, the old Chevrolet left Kansas City carrying Dick and Perry, their luggage lashed to the fenders and roof and the trunk too full to close. Two television sets were stacked in the back seat. Perry held his Gibson guitar, while the crowded interior also contained a cardboard suitcase, a portable radio, root-beer syrup, and two heavy boxes of books, manuscripts, and keepsakes. The load was not merely practical baggage: Perry had insisted on taking a private collection of things that Dick regarded as burdensome, and their disagreement accompanied them on the road.

Around midnight they crossed into Oklahoma. Perry felt relief at leaving Kansas and imagined that he was going away for good, without anyone left behind who would wonder where he had gone. Dick’s departure was different. He had not told or said goodbye to the three sons, mother, father, and brother he claimed to love; he did not expect to see them again. The contrast made the escape more than a shared journey. Perry understood it as severance, while Dick carried the unspoken cost of abandoned ties.

Mexico and the Failure of the Escape

In Mexico City, the fugitives’ prospects contracted around money and lodging. Dick sold the car, and within three days the proceeds, slightly less than two hundred dollars, had largely disappeared. His attempt to find legitimate work brought no workable alternative: the pay offered for an expert mechanic was only two dollars a day. Dick concluded that they had to return to the United States, dismissing the buried-treasure hopes that Perry had entertained. The room’s posted checkout warning, that the day ended at two in the afternoon, became an immediate practical pressure: they were unsure they could pay what they already owed.

Perry could have stayed in Mexico after Dick decided to leave, but the prospect of separating from him made him feel ill. He believed that as long as the two remained together, whatever was meant to happen would not happen. Dick’s blunt rejection of Perry’s dreams also affected him in a contradictory way: it wounded and shocked him, yet revived his trust in the decisive, practical partner he had once allowed to take charge. He followed Dick’s choice rather than making an independent escape.

The return required help from one of Dick’s two fiancées, a banker’s widow, whose borrowed money paid for bus tickets through San Diego to Barstow. Dick said that after that they would walk. By then Perry had begun sorting what could travel and what had to be left behind. A thief had stolen his much-loved Gibson guitar from a waterfront café in Acapulco, a loss he took hard. He packed clothing, including two pairs of boots with different soles, into a parcel addressed to himself at General Delivery in Las Vegas, Nevada. His larger boxes held books, maps, letters, poems, and unusual souvenirs. He entrusted them to a café bartender called Jesus, intending to reclaim them once he had a fixed address, and selected a smaller group of letters, photographs, and clippings to keep with him. Among these was his father’s account of Perry’s childhood, a document he had reread many times. Even in flight, Perry tried to preserve a past that Dick’s practical calculations could not accommodate.

Return to the United States

After a fifty-hour bus ride from Mexico City to Barstow and a trek across the Mojave Desert, the two men were again on the road. On Route 66, they waited for a lone driver in a suitable car whom they could rob and kill. A truck driver offered them a ride, but Dick declined because it was not the kind of opportunity they wanted. When a blue Dodge sedan approached with a single driver, Dick waved and smiled; the man slowed, looked them over, and drove on. Their bearded, dusty appearance had alarmed him. Dick called after the departing car and laughed, still glad to be back in the United States and expecting another chance to appear.

The flight’s material circumstances continued to narrow. Perry carried a straw suitcase containing souvenirs, a few shirts and socks, and basic personal items; the rest had been pawned, left with the Mexican bartender, or sent to Las Vegas. Later, the two returned to Kansas City in a stolen car. They had driven through heavy rain overnight and siphoned gasoline from vehicles parked on quiet streets, a task Perry considered himself particularly good at. At sunrise they washed, shaved, and brushed their teeth in the airport men’s lavatory, rested in the lounge, and then went back into the city. Perry spent the morning at a self-service laundry, washing clothes belonging to both men with a lead slug bought in Mexico. The ordinary chore took place against the knowledge that they were broke, using a stolen car, and once again in the region from which they had fled.

Suspicion Without Proof

Their movements were not yet matched by evidence strong enough to support a conviction. Floyd Wells knew that Dick had described a plan to rob the Clutters and kill witnesses, but he delayed telling authorities. He feared retaliation from other prisoners and worried that investigators might accuse him of complicity because he had directed Dick toward the Clutter home. After the murders, a newspaper announced a one-thousand-dollar reward, but even that did not immediately overcome his fear. He eventually confided in a religious prisoner, who arranged for him to be called to the deputy warden. Wells remembered that Mr. Clutter had once given him fifty dollars at Christmas and decided to speak. His information supplied a crucial lead, but the delay meant that investigators had spent weeks without it.

Alvin Dewey, unwilling to let the suspects learn that a major investigative break had occurred, privately informed the editor of the Garden City Telegram and the manager of the local radio station. He stressed that Dick and Perry might be innocent. Wells could have fabricated his account, and the circumstances then known to investigators—the association between the men, a gun of the relevant caliber, and a false alibi—could still be interpreted as coincidence. The officers had issued an alarm across seventeen states, yet they could not be sure the fugitives remained together, were still in the country, or could be found soon. Even their few physical clues were fragile: two kinds of boot prints remained, but investigators assumed the boots might already have been discarded. Without a confession, Dewey believed, the case might not produce a conviction. Thus the fugitives’ freedom depended not only on their movement but on a gap between what investigators suspected and what they could prove.