To keep ahead of them, his challenges became more and more spectacular. At the United State Jail in Washington, D.C., for example, he got out of a locked cell on “Murderers’Row,” got dressed, opened eight other locked cells, moved the murderer to different cells, and locked them up again---all in two minutes. When he wanted to work quickly, he could.
As for his other escapes, they became more difficult and dangerous. He jumped into the Detroit River when there was ice on it. In New York, he had himself locked into a box and then thrown into the East River For some stage performances, he was locked into a giant milk can filled with water. In a new kind of trick, he was hung up by his feet high off the ground in a straitjacket (a tight jacket used on violent mentally ill people). Thousands of people would gather below him to watch this. Bess refused to watch, but these tricks kept his name in the newspapers.