Smith’s plan to obtain a hacksaw blade for escape

Perry Smith’s plan to obtain a hacksaw blade was an imagined escape scheme built around two young men he watched near the Square. He prepared a map and a note asking for a five-inch blade, but the men never returned; his expectation of escape gave way to doubt about whether they had ever intended to help him at all.

The imagined helpers

Perry had become convinced that two young men, one red-haired and one dark-haired, were observing him from the Square beneath a tree that touched his cell window. At times, they seemed to smile and signal to him. Their gestures were ambiguous, and the possibility that he had only imagined them was already present in the account. Nothing was said between them, but Perry interpreted their appearances as a possible offer of help, perhaps prompted by a taste for adventure.

The map and request

Acting on that belief, Perry drew a map of the Square and marked where a getaway car could most advantageously wait. He wrote that he needed a five-inch hacksaw blade, while also warning the prospective helpers to consider the consequences: a long prison term or being killed. His note registered distrust as well as urgency; he questioned whether the men could be trusted and worried that the offer might be a trap. He also insisted that any preparations include Dick, rather than treating his escape as a plan for himself alone.

Perry kept the note wadded on his desk, ready to drop it out the window the next time the men appeared. The request therefore remained conditional: it was prepared to be sent, but the exchange that might have turned it into an actual escape arrangement never occurred.

Disappearance and abandonment

The young men did not return, and Perry never saw them again. He eventually wondered whether he had invented them, a doubt linked in the narrative to a longstanding fear that he might not be normal. He recalled that, even as a child, he had liked moonlight and hiding in shadows to watch the moon, preferences his sisters had laughed at. The account does not establish whether the supposed helpers were real; their uncertain status is central to the plan’s failure.

As the possibility of help receded, Perry ceased thinking about the two men, and suicide replaced escape in his musings. The hacksaw scheme thus ends not with a confrontation or a completed attempt, but with the disappearance of its imagined allies and the collapse of the expectation on which it depended.