Hicks learned the police were on his trail through newspaper reports and fled the city. Detectives had by now determined Hicks identity, and they continued to follow a chain of witnesses who remembered a large man with a wife and small child taking trains and boats northward. When police found the last witness to see him, a cabbie who took Hicks to a boarding home outside Providence, Rhode Island, they surrounded the house in the middle of the night and took him captive in bed without a fight. They found in his possession Captain Burr's watch, several money bags, and a daguerreotype belonging to Watts, among other damning evidence.