Hickock’s forged-check scheme in Kansas City

Dick’s forged-check scheme in Kansas City turned familiar people and businesses into a route for money and onward flight. What began with checks passed to former classmates expanded into a proposed round of hits at places where Dick was known; the same trail of checks, written in his own name, also made the fugitives easier for investigators to trace. The episode exposes both the practical improvisation of the scheme and its central weakness: Dick treated recognition as an asset until it became evidence.

The Scheme and Its Immediate Context

After leaving Perry Smith, Dick went to the Markl Buick Company, where he had once worked, hoping to find license plates to replace the Iowa plates on an abducted Chevrolet. Behind the business he found a wrecked De Soto bearing Kansas tags. He transferred those plates to the Chevrolet and dropped the Iowa plates in a municipal reservoir. The change was an effort to make the car less hazardous to use, but the escape plan quickly became entangled with a conspicuous effort to raise cash.

At a filling station, Dick approached Steve, a former high-school classmate who worked there, and persuaded him to cash a fifty-dollar check. Dick recognized that this crossed a boundary in their relationship: he described it as robbing a buddy. He then called on another former classmate, a drugstore clerk, raising the amount he had obtained to seventy-five dollars. The targets were not strangers selected at random; they were people he had known before, now drawn into the practical needs of his departure.

Planned Stops and the Promise of Florida

Dick intended to build on the seventy-five dollars that afternoon, aiming for a total of a couple hundred. He had made a list of six or seven places to hit, beginning at the Eagle Buffet, the Kansas City hash house he liked best. Its bartender and waiters knew him and liked him, and called him Pickles, a nickname tied to his favorite food. That familiarity made the restaurant a natural first stop for his plan—and an especially revealing choice for a man trying to evade notice.

The projected route was presented alongside a promise of escape and pleasure. Dick said he was leaving Kansas City for good and invoked a promised Christmas in Miami, imagining Florida as a place where he and his companion could live like millionaires. The plan therefore had two linked aims: obtain more money before leaving, then turn the proceeds into a new life elsewhere. The evidence establishes that Dick proposed the additional stops; it does not establish that he completed the planned circuit or reached Florida.

The Checks Expose the Fugitives

The scheme’s visibility supplied investigators with a lead. Dick had written checks across Kansas City using his own name, behavior that prompted an agent to report that the two men were in town. The checks did more than identify Dick: investigators understood that Perry Smith was still with him. The pair had changed cars and were driving a black-and-white, two-door 1956 Chevrolet, rather than the earlier vehicle associated with their flight.

This is the episode’s sharp reversal. Dick had changed the license plates to reduce the danger attached to the abducted Chevrolet, yet his transactions under his own name generated a trail that announced his presence. A tactic meant to support mobility and concealment instead helped narrow the search. The contrast is not simply between caution and carelessness: Dick took concrete steps to alter the car’s identifying plates, while continuing to make himself legible through the checks.

Admission and the Scale of the Check Sprees

After his arrest, Dick was questioned about his activities since parole. Investigators said they knew of at least two large check sprees in the Kansas City area. Dick acknowledged that he had passed quite a few checks, then, when asked for a list, recited the names and addresses of twenty stores, cafés, and garages. He also accurately recalled what he had “purchased” at each and the amount of each check.

The inventory gives the fraud a breadth beyond the specific transactions with Steve and the drugstore clerk. Dick’s memory enabled him to reconstruct the route and its individual purchases in detail, while his admission confirmed that the check-passing was not confined to a single stop or isolated attempt. Asked why people accepted his checks, he answered, “People are dumb.” The remark casts the spree as an exercise in exploiting other people’s trust, but the investigation had already demonstrated the cost of Dick’s own misplaced confidence: by using his name, he had made that exploitation traceable.