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high stakes ... in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest Even then he 

couldn't have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea because it was 

right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatanejo for the first time. All of a 

sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in the wall became his master - if he 

knew about the sewer-pipe at the bottom, and that it led under the outer wall, it did, 

anyway. 

He'd had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Now he had to worry 

that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his poster and expose the whole 

thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, 

suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the next seven years. All 

I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have 

gone completely nuts after a while, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on 

playing the game. 

He had to carry the possibility of discovery for another eight years - the probability of it, 

you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favour, as an 

inmate of a state prison, he just didn't have that many to stack ... and the gods had been 

kind to him for a very long time; some eighteen years. 

The most ghastly irony I can think of would have been if he had been offered a parole. 

Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is actually released, he is transferred 

into the light security wing to undergo a complete physical and a battery of vocational 

tests. While he's there, his old cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, 

Andy would have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary, followed by some more time 

upstairs ... but in a different cell. 

If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didn't escape until 1975? 

I don't know for sure - but I can advance some pretty good guesses. 

First, he would have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push ahead 

at flank speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen. He must have gone 

on widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a time. A hole as big as a teacup by 

the time he took his New Year's Eve drink that year. A hole as big as a dinner-plate by 

the time he took his birthday drink in 1968. As big as a serving-tray by the time the 1969 

baseball season opened. 

For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently did - after he 

broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having to pulverize the crap and 

take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have described, he could simply let it drop 

down the shaft. The length of time he took makes me believe that he didn't dare do that. 

He might have decided that the noise would arouse someone's suspicions. Or, if he knew 

about the sewer-pipe, as I believe he must have, he would have been afraid that a falling 

chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready, screwing up the cellblock sewage 

system and leading to an investigation. And an investigation, needless to say, would lead 

to ruin. 

Still and all, I'd guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second term, the hole 

would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through ... and probably sooner than 

that Andy was a small guy.